‘Glazer,’ he said abruptly, not wanting the intrusion. Mervyn Bobrow, just back the previous morning, was talking fast and furious with his mouth full of news.
‘Hello stranger!’ he said. ‘It’s Mervyn. I didn’t expect to find you at home.’
‘I come home once in a while to have Al launder my shirts,’ Noah said. ‘Also to ensure that I stay on the payroll. But I understand that you’ve done some travelling yourself of late?’ Ali could hear Mervyn’s laugh, touched with a hint of obsequious malice.
‘By profession you travel in time, of course,’ Noah said. ‘But it seems that you have also travelled in space.’
Ali turned aside from the precarious idyll in the garden to consider admiringly that when it came to the cut and thrust of articulate malice, her husband was no mean slouch.
‘Thomas Adderley has had his car blown up,’ Mervyn said. ‘I ‘phoned to tell Ali. Is she there?’
‘She knows that already,’ Noah said. ‘Listen Mervyn, I’ll tell her that you called.’
‘Congratulate her for me,’ Mervyn said. ‘I’ve heard that a West End gallery is buying her paintings these days. Eva and I would also like to buy something of hers as a matter of fact. Have meant to for quite some time.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ Noah said. ‘But she ain’t cheap. She’s selling around three thousand dollars.’
‘Dollars!’ Mervyn said. ‘If she’s selling in the States, then I suppose we have missed the boat. Incidentally, we have William Lister staying with us at the moment. Eva wondered about a nice, impromptu get-together for dinner tonight. Say seven-thirty for eight?’
‘Regrettably,’ Noah said, ‘it’s out of the question for us. Al is suffering from severe burns right now. She got entangled with an unwashed grill pan. You might tell William Lister.’
‘Will do,’ Mervyn said. ‘And give her my sympathies.’ Ali was looking up at him admiringly as he replaced the receiver. ‘Severe burns?’ she said. ‘God, Noah. When you really want to you can lie like a pro.’
In the garden Ali made her peace with Arnie, holding out her hand to him self-consciously.
‘Arnie,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I think that it is true to say I have had a rather bad time of late. Things have been difficult for me.’
Arnie drew her affectionately towards him, within the shadow of the garage, and kissed the fingers of both her hands.
‘You know something, Mrs Glazer?’ he said wickedly. ‘You still got damn nice pins.’ She made a gesture with her hand. A gesture as of casting off or of sowing; as of throwing magic beans into the air. For she saw the whole of her past life firmly behind her as a riotous black comedy upon which the curtain could now fall. And were she to have woken the next morning to find a beanstalk sprung to heaven outside the window, it would have given her no surprise; no terror. Nor any need to climb.
In the bathroom Hattie had stopped shredding her poetry book. Swinging violently from anger to regret, she gathered up the telltale pieces and threw them into the lavatory bowl. Then she tried to flush the evidence away, but the pieces clogged the U-bend. In panic she watched the waters rise and rise. Then she slammed down the lid and stood on it. Fervently she counted to a hundred to make time pass before she dared to flush again and peer into the bowl. Mercifully, the water level had sunk.
‘Phew!’ she said. ‘Thank goodness!’ Daniel was thumping on the bathroom door needing urgent access. Quickly she took up the book in its reduced condition and retired with it to her bedroom, where she locked the door on intruders and settled cross-legged into a chair. Seduced by the limpid, fairytale illustrations, Hattie leafed on until she came to where, among crags and larch trees, Old Meg was gathering faggots. The poem was written by a man called John Keats whom she had heard her mother talk about and she began to read it. It reminded her of her mother’s friend who was an old lady called Margaret, and who lived all by herself and didn’t eat properly. Crying her private tears into the text and wiping her nose on her T-shirt, Hattie discovered herself in the web of its rhythms and in the mazes of its fine, stoical agonies.
THE END
A Note on the Author
Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of six novels – Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner of a Whitbread special prize for fiction), Noah’s Ark, Temples of Delight (shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award) and Frankie and Stankie. She lives in Oxford.
By the Same Author
Brother of the More Famous Jack
Temples of Delight
Juggling
The Travelling Hornplayer
Frankie and Stankie
By the Same Author
Brother of the More Famous Jack
Stylish, suburban Katherine is eighteen when she is propelled into the heart of Professor Jacob Goldman’s home and his large eccentric family. As his enchanting if sharp-tongued wife Jane gives birth to her sixth child, Katherine meets beautiful, sulky Roger and his volatile younger brother Jonathan. Inevitable heartbreak sends her fleeing to Rome, but ten years on, older and wiser, she returns to find the Goldmans again.
Brother of the More Famous Jack is the highly acclaimed classic that redefined the coming-of-age genre, featuring Trapido’s much-loved Goldman family and most enchanting heroine.
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com or call our sales team on 020 7440 2475
Praise for Noah’s Ark:
‘Full of wisecracks, efficiency, carnal delights, and love of children … warm and comic’
The Times
‘ Noah’s Ark is excellent—funny, sexy, glowing. An easy read, but in Trapido’s case easy reading is the product of hard writing … an unobtrusively artful book. There is something Nabokovian in [her] determination to enchant … Trapido casts a faery light over the materials of everyday life’
Time Out
‘Splendid … Trapido’s wit can swiftly wound, but does not alienate the reader’s delight … [She] carries along the tale with great descriptive gusto’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Noah’s Ark more than fulfils the promise that Barbara Trapido showed us in her award-winning Brother of the More Famous Jack… A witty and thoughtful book. She has a winning way with manners, with dialogue, and with the unspoken elements of relationships. Noah’s Ark is a glorious hymnal to the survival of love against all odds; funny, fast, and finally, very, very moving’
Woman’s Journal
‘Barbara Trapido’s witty and highly polished style comes into its own, and there is never a dull moment … An altogether satisfying novel’
London Standard
‘A good-humoured wit, an endearing exuberance, a sharp eye for incongruous detail and a nice judgement of character’
The Listener
‘A rare delight … This novel is written with a scintillating intelligence, expressed in exquisite phrasing and beautifully shaped sentences that finish on a perfect note’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘A family tapestry rich in good humour, sensuality and comical human imperfection. Each character’s story moves back and forth in time, shimmering with life’
New York Times Book Review
‘The plot’s interplay of flashbacks and digressions, which prompt bright dialogue and dark complications, recalls Matisse’s line and palette. Some sentences can be relished in isolation, like fine brushwork’
New Yorker
First published in 1984 by Victor Gollancz
This paperback edition published 2007
This electronic edition published in December 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1984 by Barbara Trapido
Introduction copyright © 2007 Helen Dunmore
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of
it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408829011
www.bloomsbury.com/barbaratrapido
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