The first thing which confronted Noah upon his return was Mr Parsons’ section of blitzed herbaceous border, planted out grid-wise with wallflowers.
‘Holy shit!’ Noah said, vehemently, swearing vengeance and blood for his desecrated clematis. ‘Al!’ he bawled from the driveway, leaning crotchily on the silver-topped walking stick. ‘What the hell’s been going on around here?’ The second thing, which confronted him a few seconds later, was a vision of the wrong wife seated like Madame Defarge at his kitchen table, prodigiously accomplishing a cream-coloured cardigan.
‘Hi!’ Shirley said. ‘How are you?’
‘Where’s Al?’ Noah demanded sharply.
‘Busy,’ Shirley said. ‘Hey, cool it, Noah. Your wife is busy.’
‘What do you mean she’s busy?’ Noah said, indulging the unusual extremity of raising his voice. ‘I just got off a goddam plane, for Chrissakes. I expected her to be here!’
‘Right now she’s busy painting,’ Shirley said. ‘Twenty-four hours a day. She’s out with her easel, chasing cows. Take a seat.’
‘Not just now thanks,’ Noah said. ‘Just now I’d like to find my wife. I’d also like to find out who’s been busy with my plants.’ He moved forward, wincing stiffly as his weight shifted.
All the while Shirley had not stopped her knitting, but now she put it down on to the table and stared hard at him.
‘Pardon me for uttering a truth so brazenly self-evident,’ she said, ‘but Noah, your back is in spasm.’
‘Sure,’ Noah said conceding the point reluctantly. ‘Right now it’s not too comfortable.’
‘My poor boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so pompous with me. You are in considerable pain.’ She got up very promptly and swept the table clear of her knitting. Then she flicked briskly at stray crumbs with a kitchen towel. ‘Can I help?’ she said. ‘You want to strip to your shorts and lie right here on the table? It’s a better height for me than any of your beds.’
‘Thanks,’ Noah said weakly. ‘Shirl, you’re a doll.’
‘Watch your language!’ Shirley said. ‘I’m no doll. I’m a chiropractor.’ She helped him to step up with the aid of a kitchen chair and arranged his limbs expertly in appropriate attitudes. Then she blew on her hands and rubbed them together removing surface chill.
‘You’ve gotten a little overweight, my friend,’ she said. ‘But I guess that darling, talented wife of yours has no objections to your girth. How is it you got so lucky?’ Noah intermittently gave out small shameless grunts as he let the marvellous, violent grinding of cartilage wash over him.
‘Other side now,’ Shirley said. ‘Right side please, with your back towards me. Relax, Noah.’
‘Shirl,’ Noah said. ‘You’re a great lady. How is it you always knew so exactly what I needed?’
‘Professional know-how of the best kind,’ Shirley said. ‘Don’t get metaphysical with me.’ She ran her fingertips searchingly up the length of his spine, uncovering his subtle misalignments. ‘On your back,’ she said. ‘Just fix your eyes on the pinboard now. Relax, Noah.’ Noah eased himself over and allowed his cranium to rest heavily in the palms of her hands. As he stared out towards the North Korean Working People on William’s postcard, he gave a moment’s passing thought to the brotherhood of man. Then Shirley wrenched with a wonderful deftness at the vertebrae of his neck.
‘Shirl,’ he said. ‘Tell me something. How are things with you these days? Like are you happy or unhappy?’
‘I’m in shape,’ Shirley said firmly. ‘Don’t you worry. I jog. I find that it channels compulsions. You maybe ought to jog, Noah? Maybe not. Maybe it would kill you. Too many people need you right now. This is tender, am I right?’ she said. ‘Just here?’
‘That’s right,’ Noah said. ‘Exactly there.’
When Noah stepped gingerly from the table he felt much better; tender but refurbished by that laying on of incomparable hands. Only the ache in his testicles still burned unabated.
‘Better?’ Shirley said. Noah was moved.
‘Much better, thank you,’ he said. ‘Shirl, you want to know something? Once I loved you deeply. I was always loyal to you. Why was it you treated me so badly?’
Shirley swiftly took up his clothes and handed them to him in a bundle, without flinching. Then she reached for her handbag and her knitting.
‘Get your shirt on, Noah,’ she said. ‘Cover all that gross, ageing flesh and don’t be absurd. Bye now and take care! Tell Alison I’ll come by tomorrow to collect my picture.’
‘Picture, my ass,’ Noah said unpleasantly as he fastened his shirt buttons. ‘What picture? What the hell have you been up to, Shirley? What are you doing here in my house? It was you that got to work out there on my garden.’ Shirley laughed. She lingered for a moment to help him with his cuff-links.
‘I gave a lecture at the orthopaedic hospital,’ she said. ‘Subsequently your adorable wife happened to sell me a painting. Her most recent painting. She’s busy finishing it.’
‘Not that painting with the oranges?’ Noah said. ‘But that’s her best painting. She’s gonna keep that painting.’
‘Wrong,’ Shirley said. ‘I just paid her three thousand dollars for it. You could try making her a higher offer, but I’d contest it. She already sold it. To me.’
‘Three thousand dollars?’ Noah said. ’Are you crazy?’
‘Like you value it so much, she must let you have it for nothing?’ Shirley said. ‘I paid her in advance. The money is already spent. She used it to buy three air tickets to Johannesburg. The picture’s mine.’
‘Shirley,’ Noah said shrewdly, ‘since when did you care so much for owning paintings? What you want is to own a part of my wife. Is that a way of getting to own a part of me, I wonder, or are you merely wishing to set the cat among the pigeons?’
Shirley laughed. ‘I guess that all my life I was a cat among pigeons,’ she said. ‘Be reasonable, Noah. You get the artist. I get the picture. Just bear in mind that Alison is busy right now. Your wife is honouring a commission. I want you to remember that. Right now her time is worth around two-fifty dollars an hour. Have a nice day.’
Twenty-Four
Ali had gone off that morning in pursuit of the cows. The farmer had moved the herd to graze in new pastures which had constituted a minor set-back for the completion of the painting, but the problem was now all resolved. Ali had set off early and had followed the herd, scarcely stopping to dress herself. She had merely drawn from the cupboard the first comfortable garment to hand, which had turned out to be the old Adidas pants in which Noah dug the garden. Finding these considerably too large in the waist, she had resorted to a sizeable fold and had fixed it with the first available pin. This had chanced to be the Men Against Sexism badge which had fallen from Mervyn Bobrow’s handbag. The painting had temporarily taken over Ali’s life. Joy in the task of completing it had produced a fervent light behind the eyes and had lent a fire to her appearance from which no unbrushed hair and outsize gardening trousers could detract.
She had sent Hattie to Brighton with Arnie that morning, in the latter’s hired Fiat, since Arnie – who had given up his flat and taken up residence for his last week in England in the Glazers’ house – had offered himself for the job of fetching Camilla. Daniel had spent the morning catching up on sleep under the eye of Shirley who had, for the third day running, come to relieve Ali from all familial obligations, and in the execution of this service she had been uniformly splendid. With her conference over and her amorous life temporarily in cold-storage, she had thrown herself single-mindedly into the task of caring for Ali’s children.
She had driven them to London the previous evening for a West End performance of Toad of Toad Hall and had brought them home still bright-eyed at midnight after a carnivorous buffet in the Piccadilly Hotel. Earlier in the week she had coerced both children into brisk country walks, heaping lively scorn upon Daniel’s aversion to nettles and mud and effectively repressing Hattie’s assertions that all properly con
ducted walks led in straight lines towards ice-cream shops. To Ali’s greater amazement Shirley had got both children to bathe without protest and to ingest a fresh green salad tossed in oil and vinegar.
It was only when Ali returned from the fields to find Noah’s hired car in the driveway and to hear the strains of Count Basie on the record player that it came to her how giddily time had raced. Noah’s return threw her into a mood of immediate joy. She raced into the house, passing her husband’s bags in the hall, and came to a stop in the sitting-room doorway. Noah, having been frustrated in his efforts first to find his wife and next to take a shower, had retreated there to the sofa with the previous day’s New York Times.
‘My dearest Noah,’ Ali said. ‘You’re back! I wasn’t there. I’m so sorry.’ Noah drank in her appearance gratefully from head to foot before he spoke.
‘I see that you have become a Man Against Sexism,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ Ali said. ‘It’s Mervyn’s. He left it here ages ago. I am using it to keep up my trousers. That is to say, I am using it to keep up your trousers. Isn’t it elegant? I ought to have got dressed for you but I have been so terribly busy.’
‘I heard,’ Noah said. ‘Shirley told me.’
‘I liked her, I must tell you,’ Ali said. ‘She’s been here for ten days at a conference.’
‘I heard,’ Noah said again. ‘She told me before she left. She’ll call back tomorrow lunchtime. She said to tell you.’
‘There’s just one thing about her I’ve been saving up to ask you,’ Ali said. ‘Between you and me, does she ever stop talking about her sex-life?’ Noah shrugged.
‘I read on a plane one time about a tribe in the Pacific,’ he said. ‘They have a “doing chief” and a “talking chief’. I guess Shirley’s just had to make the transfer from one chieftaincy to the other.’
‘Oh no!’ Ali said. ‘Not at all. She’s not been idle, I assure you. As a matter of fact, she’s been initiating William Lister.’
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Noah said. ‘Al, you’re looking good. How is it your husband’s absence so markedly improves your looks?’
‘It’s the sun,’ Ali said. ‘And the whole business of going home and finding it isn’t home after all. Home is here with you. I have found it settling, Noah. I feel better. How are you, my dearest man? Do you think that you could see your way clear to stepping forward and holding me? You see, I have missed you so terribly.’ Noah’s mouth as he kissed her tasted pleasantly of stale airline coffee. Then she laid her hand on the bulk of his groin.
‘If that’s all for me then I’m flattered,’ she said. ‘I’m also greatly relieved.’
Noah smiled. ‘For whom else do you imagine?’ he said, but Ali shrugged.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I have harboured an intermittent fear that one of those fun-loving DJFs in the personal columns of the New York Review of Books would have snapped you up – especially since Shirley told me about the great shortage of able-bodied heterosexuals in the US of A.’
‘Bullshit,’ Noah said. ‘They’re maybe no longer lining up at her door, that’s all.’ Noah spoke brutally, through an old hurt which Ali had never before suspected or understood. Meanwhile, Noah had removed the Men Against Sexism badge from the Adidas pants in the interests of easier access. ‘Get your diaphragm,’ he said. A shock-wave jolted Ali from the beginnings of pleasant erotic abandon.
‘Oh my God, Noah,’ she said. ‘I never collected the new one!’ Slowly and deliberately, Noah withdrew his hand from the exercise pants and wiped female juices irritably on his trousers.
‘So what happened to the old one?’ he said murderously. ‘Al, this better be good.’
‘The bald fact,’ Ali said, ‘is that the last time I used the thing, I forgot to take it out. It went nasty. It began to grow a kind of disgusting mustard cress up my crotch. I had one truly horrendous, scary night with contractions and hot flushes. The doctor put me on penicillin. You were asleep in your study at the time. I ought to have woken you and told you, but I didn’t like to in the circumstances.’ Noah beat his fist quietly against the door jamb, raising his eyes to heaven as he felt the elevating, airborne fantasy of the previous night decay and fall around him.
‘You screwed up,’ he said. ‘I might have known you would. Goddammit, Al. How is it that you can’t so much as practise infidelity without being grossly unhygienic along the way?’
‘It could be that I’m too chronically monogamous to “practise infidelity” without flagellation,’ Ali said. ‘As to the great “infidelity”, Noah, I’d love to know how you found out. I have tried hard not to believe that Arnie told you.’
‘William Lister is your man,’ Noah said reluctantly. ‘He wrote me a letter.’
Ali’s mouth dropped open. ‘The miserable swine,’ she said. ‘However could he have known?’
‘He guessed, maybe,’ Noah said. ‘Forget it, Al. I did tell you not to let him in.’
‘True,’ Ali said. ‘Too true. And now I’ll tell you something else about my epic indiscretion, shall I? It might at least be of interest to you to know that it never got off the ground. There wasn’t the time. What with the signal failures on the railways and the botch-up over the babysitting, the man barely had time to admire the good-size purple bruise you’d kissed on my neck before we had to jump back into our clothes and say goodbye. Neither of us was wearing a functioning watch. In short, he never came, Noah, for what that’s worth to you. He had a lunch meeting and he couldn’t linger. Mrs Gaitskell was minding Daniel and needed to be gone. Her husband was waiting for his tea.’
‘Al,’ Noah said, swallowing hard. ‘Are you in effect trying to tell me that you failed to consummate your burning life-long passion for this – this Nigger in the Woodpile; this wretched, black trouble-maker – and all because your cleaning woman’s incompetent, sexist male partner couldn’t fix his own snack?’
‘He isn’t black,’ Ali said. ‘I’ve been telling you that for years. Neither does he “make trouble”. He’s just a decent social democrat in a country which doesn’t recognise that position as a virtue.’
‘Okay,’ Noah said. ‘And then you returned home and you screwed up on the diaphragm, which – if my diary is anything to go by – you didn’t need anyway. Al, you know what you deserve right now? You deserve to get knocked up.’
‘All right,’ Ali said. Fondly and susceptibly, her thoughts flew towards childbirth; towards the midwife’s ear trumpet pressed to the full-term abdomen; towards Noah’s thoughtfully suppressed yawning, as he passed the night with her in the labour room, quietly swapping urbane, obstetric knowhow with the officiating doctors.
‘Are you kidding? Noah said. ‘You want me to be collecting toddlers from the playgroup concurrently with collecting on my Old Age Pension? Not on your sweet life, Alison.’
‘You are of course perfectly right,’ Ali said. Ever since he had taken possession of the Men Against Sexism badge, she had been obliged to hold up the exercise pants, bunched in one hand at the waist, like Jan Arnolfini’s wife. ‘You could practise premature withdrawal,’ she said helpfully. ‘Mrs Gaitskell says it’s what her husband always did, until she had her change. He used to buy himself a packet of contraceptive sheaths once a year as a Christmas treat.’
‘Is that so?’ Noah said dryly. ‘And how about the lady’s Christmas treats?’
‘I reckon she had the bath salts and the Cadbury’s Milk Tray,’ Ali said. ‘I didn’t like to ask.’
‘Well,’ Noah said, ‘unless you’ve got any more constructive suggestions –’
‘But yes,’ Ali said eagerly. ‘I have. Noah, I have! If you could possibly cross my palm with a fifty-pence piece, then I’ll get you a packet of condoms right away. Just help me to find the car keys. You need not look so horribly stuffed-shirt, you know. I don’t plan to get them down the pub from a slot-machine in the Gents.’ Noah, though he had come a long way since the day on which he had fixed a gold chain around Shirley’s waist, still fou
nd – unlike his research associate – that he balked at the idea of having a woman supply him with rubbers.
‘I heard you just earned yourself three thousand dollars,’ he said evasively. ‘How come you can’t pay?’
‘It’s a cheque,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t mind paying by cheque, you understand, but I’d prefer to deal in sterling.’ Noah moved with her into the hall and bent cautiously to take up the walking stick.
‘I’ll go myself,’ he said. He kissed her warmly on the mouth. Then he handed back to her the Men Against Sexism badge. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You’re losing your pants.’
Arnie had meanwhile driven to Brighton that same day, in order to bring home Camilla, and had taken Hattie with him for the ride. Upon his return to the Glazers’ house, he stayed no longer than it took to deliver Ali’s two daughters into the driveway. It was Friday and he meant to put in a good eight-hour stint at the hospital.
‘So long, girls,’ he said agreeably. ‘Somebody drove a truck through the Master’s plants, I see.’
‘It was Mr Parsons!’ Hattie said excitedly. ‘It was me who saw him do it and I told Mummy. I was the one who told her. Mr Parsons mowed Daddy’s plants. Arnie, he mowed the flowerbeds!’ But neither Arnie nor Camilla was listening to her. They were arranging an outing that evening to a late-night cinema show. Arnie Weinberg was offering her stepsister a double-bill of old Henry Fonda movies and at the same time entertaining himself with the idea that Camilla was too young to have seen them first time round. The offer piqued Hattie. If youthfulness was the prerequisite for an evening out with Arnie, then what about her? She was so young she hadn’t even heard of Henry Fonda. It was probably all because Camilla had pierced ears. It wasn’t fair. And to think what lengths she had gone to in the car on the way down to make herself agreeable to him! She had kept going all the way with a sheaf of entertaining anecdotes relating to her new cat Susan, whom Arnie had insisted ought really to be called ‘Fido’. She had told him all about the headmaster’s funny jerseys and the funny way he always talked in assembly, moving his mouth in and out like that, as if they were at lip-reading classes, and about what she had said to Rebecca when the vicar had smelled of whisky that had made Rebecca almost die laughing. She was sure that he was always drunk, she said. You could smell it. It had all made Arnie laugh like anything. That was until he had suggested paying her two pence for every mile that she could pass in silence. She had even gone to the lengths of honouring him with a preview of her new school uniform before they had set off, with the lovely blazer and the Panama hat and everything. But on the way back he had insisted that Camilla sit beside him in the front seat and he wouldn’t even agree to them taking turns – even after she told him the back always made her feel car sick … It was ‘safer’ for her to be in the back, he said. It was true that Daddy absolutely never let her or Daniel sit in the front seat but that was different. Daddy was much more fussed about safety than Arnie. Arnie liked to take risks. That was what made it the best treat in the world to partner him in the bumper cars at the St Giles Fair. Anyway, he had been inconsistent. If it had been all right for her to sit in the front with him on the way down, why was it suddenly not all right for her on the way back? She stamped off into the house without saying goodbye and went to find Ali. She wanted Ali to know how it was all because of Arnie and Camilla that she felt so sick. Really sick. It was the kind of sick that only proper fizzy lemonade from the shop could make better.
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