Ali shivered. There were times when Julie’s abrasiveness occurred to her as a compelling form of self-torture.
‘Jesus, Ali,’ Julie said. ‘What is that child of yours wearing? Who tells you to buy her such fascist T-shirts?’ Hattie’s new T-shirt, wheedled from Ali against her better judgement, came with a matching yellow eye-shade and said, in an arc of uppercase lettering over a smiling, full frontal sun-face, ‘Sunny South Africa’. ‘Take that thing off at once, child!’ Julie said. ‘You can’t wear a thing like that in my house.’
‘I can,’ Hattie said staunchly. ‘I will. Anyway, it is sunny here.’ Behind them Thomas cleared his throat. He was blinking and smiling and raising his cup.
‘Cheers, Alison,’ he said. ‘All it wants is a little amendment; a small addition. I propose “More Power to the People in Sunny South Africa”.’ Oh Thomas!
Ali’s letter, though unsigned, had clearly come from Arnie who, upon returning to the research unit after a third weekend in Brighton with Camilla, had been moved by the sight of Noah’s imperfect typing which had thus far spent the summer sitting idly in the roller of the office machine. He had added a corollary of his own to it and had despatched it to Ali, with Camilla’s help, care of ‘The Horror Witch’ at the local department of English.
‘% asyouwillsee =¾’ ran the corollary, ‘i have) finally £ =)taught % myself to $ touch ⅝-type/6. HAPPY BRITHDAY % AL/?!’
‘Bon voyage, Ali-Pie,’ Julie said at the departure gate. ‘I can’t say that I don’t envy you. To have a nice bull-necked Yankee medical hunk waiting for me back in temperate Blauwildebeest-fontein – that would be one hundred per cent better than a slap in the face with a pickled herring. Perhaps he would like two wives?’
Ali laughed. ‘To speak frankly, I would say that you have Thomas. Or, at least, part shares in him. Julie, do you love him?’
Julie shrugged. ‘Love,’ she said. ‘You can keep it. But you, Ali, with your three marriages. You must believe in love. Do you love him? You always used to. Don’t pretend you didn’t.’
Ali scanned her emotions, not for the first time since that protracted denouement from Paddington to the poolside, and discovered that she did not. But she worried for him. Worried for his precarious safety in such an explosive and baffling place.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s yours, for all I care.’
‘To speak true,’ Julie said, ‘he’s not much of a proposition in reality. For all his size and loveliness, he is not altogether corporeal, if you know what I mean. Thomas is too good for this life. Too good and not good enough. Goodbye, my dear friend and don’t think too badly of me. Go home and enjoy your medic.’
Ali laughed and kissed her. ‘Thanks for having me, Julie,’ she said. ‘I never incidentally said that my husband was bull-necked.’
‘He sounded like a seventeen-inch collar to me over the telephone,’ Julie said. ‘I call that corporeal. Goodbye, Ali.’ She placed in Ali’s hands as a parting surprise the jam pot house, artfully and secretly glued for her by the curator of a local musuem. Ali bit her lip to fight back tears.
‘“Friendship is like china”,’ she said, ‘“Precious, frail and rare”’.
‘Are you actually quoting me this doggerel?’ Julie said. ‘Or are you making it up? What are your sources for this nauseating snippet of folk poetry?’
‘You are,’ Ali said. ‘But that was long ago.’
Ali had no idea until the plane had been airborne three hours that – zipped in among Hattie’s hand-luggage which she kept upon her knee to ensure for periodic intakes of air – was a sleeping three-week-old kitten.
Twenty-Two
Ali’s reentry into England did not prove easy on the nerves; not for a person to whom the prospect of smuggling held out no charms. Guiltily she followed the green light at Heathrow Airport, with its attendant implication that she had ‘nothing to declare’. The kitten behaved beautifully, and, as Ali had taken the further precaution of doing what Arnie Wienberg had once advised in the circumstances – namely of ‘getting in line behind a party in turbans and saris’ – the British customs officials had been too busy venting a measure of controlled, racist harassment upon her forerunners in the queue to concern themselves with Hattie’s hand-luggage. Hattie had been very naughty to bring the kitten in like that, without asking, but Ali had not the stomach to scold her for it. The child had wanted a kitten for so long, and here was that rare and wonderful thing, a female ginger, like its mother. Of all cats, ginger tabbies had always been Ali’s own favourites. She foresaw, with relative stoicism, the prospect of feeding the tiny creature at four-hourly intervals through the night with a medicinal eye-dropper until it was ready to lap and, with considerably less stoicism, the repercussions from its presence in the house where Noah was concerned. Noah would be furious at a time when appeasement seemed the better part of discretion.
In the airport car park she found that the Audi had been broken into and had had one of its front windows shattered, but worse was still to follow. Misgiving struck her heart as she saw that the house – at the mercy of Noah’s untended climbing plants since May – had already begun to take on the look of Haunted Castle and that the front door stood wide open. An unmistake-able smell of dripping and scorched chillies hung thickly on the air in the hallway above a pile of unopened mail. Ali mounted the stairs with trepidation, like Mother Bear returning from a walk in the woods. Someone had most certainly been sleeping in her bed, since several starkly prolific semen stains now graced the dark brown nether sheet. The shower leading from the room had not yet drained of its water, which floated steamily in the run-off, sporting a surface film of warm, soapy scum and sloughed particles of skin.
‘William Lister!’ Ali said, but above the bath, suspended from the clothes line, hung a black nylon brassiere in size 38D.
The kitchen, under Hattie’s prohibitive ‘NO SMOCKING’ sign, yielded up as further evidence a box of used matches lying beside a pile of wood ash in the grate. The children had already run off, oblivious, to their bedrooms, so eager to rediscover the pleasures of old toys. At the bottom of the garden William Lister was raising a mallet as he drove a wedge into a section of dead elm trunk. Beside him stood a new and impressively large woodpile. The size of the woodpile struck Ali forcefully as hideous evidence that William, together with the owner of the 38D brassiere, was planning to ride out the winter right there on her premises. Though he waved to her with a casual greeting when he saw her at the window, William did not cease from his labours until he had cleft the trunk neatly in six and had added the pieces to the woodpile. Then he laid both mallet and axe on the ground and made his way to the kitchen door. He stamped his feet heavily on the mat and wiped his forehead on one of Ali’s table napkins, which she watched him draw out of his pocket.
‘Phew!’ he said. ‘Chopping wood; it’s thirsty work I can tell you, but really – with all that diseased elm lying there unused in the woods, I don’t understand why you people ever resort to expensive fuels.’
Ali’s immediate thought was that he had let the oil storage tank run dry or that the electricity supply had been cut off. William was meanwhile displaying his calluses for her with undisguised satisfaction.
‘You are making a woodpile,’ she said unnecessarily and, discovering a sudden, desperate need for hot tea, she cast her eyes over the workboard for the kettle, which she could not see.
‘Full marks, my dear woman, for brilliant deduction,’ William said. ‘That I am, indeed.’ Something had happened to William, Ali decided morbidly. It was not merely that he had lost all sense of reality, nor that he had never used words like ‘indeed’ to her before. The nylon brassiere and the semen stains stood as ominous pointers to the awful truth that William had come of age where women were concerned, and that he was now demonstrating for her benefit how well he could handle the weaker sex. William had become a card-carrying understander of women.
‘Welcome home, beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a nice little to
uch of the sun. It makes you look younger. I’m afraid I can’t offer you any tea until I’ve got this grate of yours cleared out and the fire made up. It draws terribly I may say, this fireplace. Your kettle has been on the blink since this morning.’ Ali stared at him in a state of contained indignation which came as a prelude to rage.
‘It could just be worth mentioning that Noah’s had all the flues bricked up,’ she said. ‘Brick-dust and wood-smoke give him asthma. I hope you realise that whatever else you have been doing here, you have also been in danger of burning down my house.’ William chuckled dismissively.
‘As to your husband’s asthma,’ he said. ‘It is a well-known fact that it’s an ailment rooted in psycho-emotional problems. Noah wants to look beyond his chimneys for the cause.’ Something was happening to Ali which – for all that Mervyn Bobrow might have dismissed it as a mere rising obsession with ‘utensils and territory’ – was in truth another coming of age. Tutored in the poignant resolution of her own sex by the power of her two unlikely spinsters, Julie Horowitz and old Margaret; sustained by the uncrushable and enduring Mrs Gaitskell, Ali had at the last discovered her strengths in the knowledge that she had somehow marvellously cast off all residual yearning for Thomas Adderley. That liberation which had begun after Paddington and had reached its recent completion beside Julie Horowitz’s swimming pool had already started to celebrate itself in the painting of the oranges to which she now longed to get back. She addressed William Lister in the confident voice of one who had discovered not only that she could get on and off aeroplanes without terror, but that she could do so with an item of unscheduled livestock concealed in her children’s hand-luggage.
‘If you’ve buggered my kettle, William Lister,’ she said, ‘you will also – before you pack your bags – clean out the grate and telephone a plumber to fix my shower. Finally, you will get your fancy-woman’s underwear out of my bathroom. You have ten minutes, starting from now.’ William began to stave her off with a shot at amiable condescension.
‘I refuse to let you quarrel with me,’ he said. ‘If I allow you to quarrel with me, you will only hate yourself for it tomorrow, believe me.’
‘On the contrary, I will love myself for it,’ Ali said. ‘What I am saying to you, William Lister, is get out of my house! Take your stinking streaky rashers and your recycled matches and never darken my doorstep again.’
Further verbal sparring was aborted by the ringing of the telephone.
‘It’ll be that wrong number again,’ William said. ‘I’ve been getting it the whole week I’ve been here. Some demented crone keeps ringing up from a call-box and raving about a fire.’ Ali nonetheless made haste to answer it, as William moved for his rucksack. By the time she had come off the telephone – though the cheque for the kettle was nowhere, and the brassiere and the grate were untouched – William had mercifully gone from her house. The caller was old Margaret whose voice quavered more thinly than ever.
‘They’ve got me at last,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve joined the bloody coffin queue. I’ve been committed.’
‘Coffin queue?’ Ali said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Knees up Mother Brown,’ Margaret said. ‘Bedpans. The bloody works. The poor old hags, they all stink. I hoped you might look in. Spread a little cheer for me with a half-jack of brandy and some fags. Hide them under your coat, mind, or they’ll claw them off me sure as God made little rotten apples. They’re all thieves in this hole. Rogues and thieves.’
‘Which hole?’ Ali said.
‘There was never a bloody fire you know,’ old Margaret said. ‘Though the doctors said there was. The bloody neighbours called the fire-brigade – and the ambulance. There was nothing but a lot of smoke. A potful of singed ox-heart. One of my turns must have come on over the dog’s dinner.’
‘Oh Jesus!’ Ali said. ‘What are you saying to me?’
‘I’m geriatric,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m no longer at home.’
Several tall firemen had led her into the waiting ambulance where they had called her ‘granny’ and had given her reviving puffs of oxygen. ‘I’m not your granny. I’m a spinster,’ Margaret had said with dignity, before they had taken her to the hospital. A week later the general practitioner, whom she had acquired on Noah’s recommendation, had signed the certificate for her admission to the old people’s home. The pugs had been despatched to a dogs’ home, including the one small female in season who had been discovered behind chicken wire in an upstairs bookshelf alongside a copy of Major Barbara. A house-clearing agency, on behalf of the landlord, had made short work of the plastic bags and the carrot-top trees. A builder’s skip now stood outside the front door of what had been Margaret’s house, and a contractor’s board had been fitted to the cracked front window. The renovations, while they were naturally a minor nuisance to the Bobrows’ tenants, promised considerably to enhance the value of Mervyn’s property which had suffered over the years from its proximity to substandard housing.
‘I’ll come,’ Ali said, hating herself for having been absent in Margaret’s hour of need. ‘I’ll come today.’
Ali made her way first to Mrs Gaitskell’s flat in the hope of being able to deposit the children there for an hour while she visited old Margaret. She discovered that lady clutching her gut at the cooker as she boiled up a brick-like pudding for her husband’s tea.
‘He likes to come home to a good, solid pudding,’ Mrs Gaitskell said, ‘though I shouldn’t be on my feet. I had a scrape last week for cysts on the womb.’
‘Womb?’ Ali said. ‘Cysts!’ Mrs Gaitskell’s gynaecological usage constantly brought home to Ali how squarely and straight that person faced up to the whole hazard-prone area of the female body as a substandard piece of design. It seemed to her realistic and courageous.
Mrs Gaitskell expressed herself delighted to have the children for an hour, in spite of Ali’s concern for her. They would be ‘no trouble’ she said, and she directed them at once to the large bag of glacier mints which stood perennially upon the sideboard. Ali left them on the sofa; a contented threesome, cracking boiled sweets between their molars and coaxing the budgie to peck at his cuttlefish.
In the old people’s home, Margaret sat in the day room like a hollow-eyed boarding-school girl waiting for the dawn of an exeat weekend. The curtains and the gloss-paintwork in the room were lilac. Lilac, she had decided, was a colour to be tolerated only on lilacs. The room was overcrowded and smelled of rubber pants and urine. She missed the smell of dog and boiling pig melts. A concentration of aged persons lined the walls in walking frames. Faces from Hogarth and crowded into the workhouse.
‘Watch your handbag!’ she said hoarsely, because Ali had at that moment approached her through one of the lilac doors. ‘There’s a lot of thieves in here. They nick your clothes when you’re asleep. They’d stop at nothing.’ It was true that the inmates were between them attired in a curious predominance of purple nylon cardigans, but then the dress of Margaret herself was not unworthy of notice. She was clad in a motley layering of unfamiliar clothing, most of it bearing tweedy labels and held together with safety pins. Seeing Ali stare Margaret held forth a fine wool scarf to reveal the Jaeger label.
‘Tit for tat!’ she said and cackled briefly. ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’ve joined them, Ali, I can hardly tell myself from all the rest.’
‘I can,’ Ali said, helplessly. ‘I always will.’
In a nearby café where the two of them repaired for lunch, Ali cut up a section of rare-grilled sirloin for Margaret and watched her dribble beef ooze on to the familiar shirt-front.
‘No wonder the upper classes are so oversexed, it’s all this bloody protein,’ Margaret said. ‘You can forget about protein back in the hole. We’re always eating “slip down”. The bloody nurses are at it all day long. “Eat up dear; it’s all just slip-down.” Doesn’t it make you spit?’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. She saw that Margaret had already directed a goodly chunk of her defiant spirit into the time
-honoured, institutional channel of complaining about the rations. It depressed her. Margaret had lost weight. Her dentures appeared no longer to fit her gums and she had developed a compulsive tendency towards sucking on them for relief. Ali passed over the brandy which Margaret secreted greedily in her handbag. In a flash of clairvoyant foreknowledge, Ali saw that Margaret would shut herself in the 100 with the brandy that night and down the bottle at one sitting; for to measure it out in modest nightly doses would simply be to invite having it expropriated either by the inmates or by the staff. Brandy would be her ultimate ‘slip-down’. It seemed to Ali extraordinary that Margaret, who had survived a decade in relative plumpness on egg-white and cracker-biscuits, had now, within three weeks of joining the ‘coffin queue’, shrunk by a third of her girth. Her skin hung in wrinkled swathes at wrist and jowl. It came to Ali that a violent disorientation, coupled with a few harsh frosty nights and the odd half-jack of brandy, was probably all it would take to expunge the willing flesh. Margaret’s skin had become curiously transparent. Before the meal was over, she had fallen asleep in her chair.
The appearance of an itinerant gardener the following afternoon struck Ali not only as comic relief, but as a gift from heaven, prior to Noah’s imminent return. He wore his loam-drenched, tea-cosy hat resting on three warts which were clustered between his eyebrows and stated his terms decisively as he slurped his tea from a saucer at Ali’s kitchen table.
‘Missus,’ he said sternly. ‘Bill Parsons is the name. Mister Bill Parsons. I’m a poor man, Missus, but I’m honest. An honest man, Missus, if you get my meaning.’ Ali nodded vigorously, wishing to have it understood that she did not doubt his honesty. Not for a moment.
‘Ten pound and I do the lot,’ he said. ‘Digging over and planting out. I do an honest job, Missus, and what do you say to that? Ten pound for the benefit of an honest man’s work?’ Ali had begun to believe he had been scripted by Bottom the Weaver.
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