Noah's Ark Read online

  There was a seductive shaft of spring sunlight which fell, not from Thomas Adderley’s sunlit, redwood glade, but from the window whence it fell upon the bowl of oranges on Ali’s kitchen table, stippled by shadows from the bay tree and from the buds of Noah’s climbing plants beyond the casement. The oranges were very orange, she thought. Much too orange, really, even for oranges. In the place where she had grown up, oranges hadn’t come that orange. They had usually been greenish yellow. She had once told this to her son Daniel, but he hadn’t believed her ‘They must have been lemons,’ he said, with his powerful four-year-old certainties.

  Ali’s son had foreign parents – as Ali had had before him, so she understood. She could remember from her own childhood the oddity of looking out from a subtropical veranda on to flamboyant bougainvillaea and listening to her mother’s tales of the wine cellar at Lindenstrasse vier und achtzig and of the laundry in the loft gone stiff in the night with frost. ‘White sheets standing like ghosts,’ her mother had used to say. But Ali hadn’t known what cellars and lofts were, because all the houses she had ever seen had been single-storeyed and built on shallow eighteen-inch stilts to keep the termites from gnawing at the floorboards. And there was the Berlin Zoo, her mother would say, where the ice bear had paced at the railings and where Ali’s uncle, Karl Heinrich, had once got his head stuck as a child. ‘And muffs,’ Ali’s mother had said with feeling, remembering nights at the Berlin Opera House, ‘Ach Gott, I had countless muffs. Aber countless muffs!’ Ali’s mother had watched Gotterdammerung once in a box at the Opera House in buttoned boots and a muff. Like in Tolstoy. How life had uprooted them all, leaving one generation after another sighing always for that land where lemon trees flowered and golden oranges shone out in the dark. Having Thomas’s photograph on the wall had suddenly made Ali feel like an exile.

  ‘Oranges aren’t ever not orange, Mummy,’ Daniel had said reproachfully, on the occasion of this conversation.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Ali had said, laughing, patting the backs of his inviting solid little legs. ‘They get sprayed with chemicals to make them so orange.’

  ‘They don’t,’ Daniel had said.

  ‘They do,’ she said, ‘ask Noah.’ The children loved her more, but Noah was the one they believed, because he had the resources of science to back his utterance. Instead of running for the encyclopaedia when somebody asked a question relating to tear ducts or the ozone layer, Ali would say to ask Noah. This was a great convenience she found, but odd since answering her little ones’ questions was precisely the role for which she had been reared.

  ‘You gels,’ her headmistress had been wont to say, in order to egg her pupils on to greater application, ‘You gels are the mothers of the future.’ That’s what it had all been for. All that knowledge which one had assimilated with such enthusiasm and skill. It had been for somebody else. Never for oneself. Noah, in his admittedly patriarchal way, was the only person who had ever made her feel that she could use it in her own interest. Anyway, children never asked questions in the tradition of girls’ high schools. They always asked you what was a laser and which whale had the most teeth and why did smoking give you lung disease. Only occasionally a question or two requiring a little speculation. Like whether or not God had servants or was he a black man or a white man. Never, was he a man? Of course he was a man! All that rash and bold enterprise required in creating the universe; it had to be male. Daniel, if questioned, would have been quite as clear about it as he was resolute about Lassie on the television. Lassie was a boy dog, Daniel said, while Hattie crowed and jeered. He was a boy. He was. By the time children were at all interested in the things one knew about – like Dadaism for instance – they no longer wanted one’s opinion on anything. Take Camilla. Beautiful grown-up Camilla, with Mervyn Bobrow’s crazy yellow eyes. Whenever she thought about Camilla, Ali’s heart beat faster with an entrenched habit of maternal anxiety.

  All the while her fingers worked at the trouser hems. Ali was a practised needlewoman and Noah was pressed for time. He had, as he had said, to ‘shift his ass’. Ali had always cherished this particular expression as her husband’s most forceful idiomatic peculiarity.

  The oranges on Ali’s kitchen table were in a high glazed white china fruit bowl, latticed like basket weave. She had bought the bowl once in an auction sale and loved it dearly, as she loved a lot of the old things she had painstakingly accumulated about her in twenty years of keeping house. ‘Spinster’s junk,’ Noah had called it some ten years before on the day he had first taken her to bed. Some of it had promptly given him asthma. All the old pillows, the dried flowers harbouring house-dust mites, and the old embroideries. Noah had steadily cut the clutter down to size. Some of the stuff had outlasted Ali’s previous two husbands and he meant to make damn sure it didn’t outlast him too. But he had no objection to the fruit bowl. He had called it a ‘beautiful piece’ when they met. ‘You have some beautiful pieces,’ he had said to her. The phrase had embarrassed her slightly, as some of his phrases still did. A whiff of alien cliche.

  ‘Oh that,’ she had said. ‘Yes, well, I only like it I suppose, because I wasn’t ever allowed to like anything that was got up to look like something else when I was a child. I wasn’t allowed to like plastic tablecloths that were made to look like lace, you see, or salt cellars that looked like tortoises – not unless they were Benvenuto Cellini of course. I grew up in a dictatorship of tasteful Bauhaus prudery –’

  ‘You’re an artist,’ Noah had said promptly, who had never heard of Benvenuto Cellini and had not much idea of what Bauhaus prudery meant, but he could see that she hung her curtains from brass rings on broom handles and kept calligrapher’s pens in a marmalade jar.

  ‘I’m just a person who likes pressed flowers and old lace,’ she had said, fearing that she had sounded pretentious. And then, though she had hardly known him, but had observed that his shoulders were reassuringly wide, she had suddenly told him how much she had loved the Zulu housemaid’s cottage jampot as a child and had often begged her mother to buy one the same. A multi-coloured cube it was, with china roses climbing in a basrelief around the front door and the lid made into a thatched roof and the knob on top made into a chimney. She had naturally had no foreknowledge then that Noah was soon to become the roof and cornerstone. Nor that he would bestir himself to grow flowering plants to clamber over the portals. Thanks to Noah, the jampot house had become all hers. She had not known this as a child when her mother had so adamantly refused to buy her one. Ali’s mother wouldn’t have been seen dead with such a tasteless hybrid in her house full of streamlined birchwood and steel. Her own father had been a Bauhaus architect, and she had always had standards to protect. Ali’s mother had once sat on the knee of Walter Gropius as a small child, and had also once – this much, much more exciting – shaken the hand of Roald Amundsen on a boat in the North Sea. He was a nice old man, Ali’s mother had said, but Ali knew he was really a wicked hun explorer who had beaten our own dear Captain Scott to the South Pole by the unscrupulous and un-English use of dogs. The history teacher had said so with all the zeal of an Englishwoman abroad.

  Noah used animals occasionally in medical experiments, so the sacrifice of huskies was a smaller thing to him. So did his friend and protege Arnie Weinberg. Charming Arnie who turned up to supper some Friday nights if his nocturnal experiments in the lab got truncated by an animal’s death. He would stride amiably into the Glazers’ kitchen spreading general joy and using code to disguise his doings from Ali’s children. ‘Croak,’ he would say shamelessly, to denote the unredeemable condition of his research subject. And he would kiss Ali’s cheek and lay his murderer’s hands all over her two younger children, who would climb upon him in delight, plait ribbons into his hair and borrow his glasses. Arnie was wonderfully attractive to Ali’s children, being that much younger than their father and gratifyingly willing always to collapse on all fours, or to charge to the topmost rung of the climbing frame yelling, ‘Man the controls, you idiots!
We’re approaching the target area!’ Arnie came from Connecticut. But he would occasionally treat the children to Woody Guthrie infant songs while plucking at Hattie’s guitar. Their favourite was a song about skipping down to the pretzel man even though neither of them really knew what pretzels were. It was enough that Arnie sang about them. Arnie was thirty-nine like Ali but he seemed to her so much younger, being unattached and childless. He was also refreshingly unmedical in his style. He had recently had one of his ears pierced by a ward sister who was sweet on him and who had done it using a hypodermic needle and wearing sterile gloves. She had left Arnie complaining loudly in a chair with the syringe hanging in his lobe while she had removed her own left sleeper and placed it in the steriliser with tongs.

  Arnie’s pierced ear had caused Noah much wasted time of late, since he had been required to spend an afternoon assuring an appointments committee that a man with a pierced ear could, nonetheless, be the most able man for a job. Loyal Noah, legitimacy shining, somehow, out of his every utterance, grumbled afterwards to his wife that Arnie Weinberg could have waited to pierce his goddam ear until after the goddam committee had met, couldn’t he? But perhaps it was in the nature of proteges to let one down just a little?

  Noah splashed shaving soap off his jaw and pulled on a large towelling bathrobe before returning to his wife in the kitchen.

  ‘Noah,’ Ali said, biting off thread, ‘shall I have my ears pierced while you’re away?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Noah said. He liked Ali the way she was. Tall, thin and unadorned. Her white body; her white unpainted face; the blue eyes fringed with pale gingery lashes. It had come initially as a great surprise to him to find himself so strongly attracted to her, but since that first departure from type he had never wavered. He liked her long bony feet and her cracked untended fingernails, which had smelled slightly of turps ever since he had sent her to the art school. It provoked in him an excess of tenderness to watch her bundle up her pale red hair, already now streaked with grey, and fix it with a single giant kirby grip. He dearly loved her long white neck.

  ‘The point is, I could be finished with those nasty little gold stud things within days,’ she said. ‘Then I could wear luscious pendant rubies in my ears for you – that is, if you could brook the expense, of course.’

  ‘AI,’ Noah said firmly, ‘ear piercing is mutilation, for Chrissake. It has to do with the status of women as chattels. It mutilates not only the body. It mutilates the female character.’ Ali thought only how splendidly patriarchal men could be in defence of one’s female rights.

  ‘Rubbish, Noah,’ she said. ‘What you mean is you think it’s common. What you mean is you like classy-looking, dowdy, goy women, like me.’

  ‘Not like you,’ Noah said. ‘You. I like you, Al.’

  ‘What you mean is you think pierced ears are for low-status ethnic minorities – and for the lower class,’ Ali said, ‘and not for upmarket, Quakerish women like me. You’re out of date, Noah.’

  Noah laughed complacently. ‘Oh my. Is that what I mean?’

  ‘Arnie has a pierced ear,’ Ali said. ‘He isn’t a mutilated female.’

  ‘I’m not married to him,’ Noah said. ‘Leave your ears alone, Al.’

  ‘You mean Arnie can do as he likes because he’s a man,’ she said.

  ‘Because he’s not married,’ Noah said. ‘He can do what he likes because he’s not married.’ Noah’s standards with regard to mutual conduct in marriage had always been uncompromisingly high. He blamed this tiresome ear business not only on Arnie but on his twenty-year-old stepdaughter, Camilla. When Noah had met Ali, Camilla had been an extremely worried eleven-year-old with nervous tics, who peed in her bed and showed all the signs of her parents’ terminal marriage. Now, deliciously full ofjoie de vivre, she had hennaed her hair, pierced her ears and won an open scholarship to Cambridge. All that appeared to remain of her former insecurity was an aura of helplessness, which caused male undergraduates to capitulate to her in large numbers.

  Noah had always been terribly good for Camilla and Camilla was devoted to him, though she was given to complaining good-naturedly of late that he lectured her too much, which was true. He did. Lecturing was a form of communication, which sat well on him. He accused her most latterly of promiscuity and lectured her on venereal diseases. He reminded her pressingly that while her oral contraceptive pills would protect her from conception, they would not protect her from VD.

  ‘Abstinence is a more dependable strategy,’ Noah said. ‘Or restraint. Try restraint, Camilla.’ But it only made her smile. ‘There’s a kind of VD you can’t cure,’ Noah said.

  ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. Then she asked him to renew the licence on her motorcycle.

  ‘You’ve overspent on your allowance,’ Noah said, doing his fatherly act which had always been so deeply gratifying to them both. To Noah because she had replaced the children he had long before left behind when he divorced his first wife, and to Camilla because her own father had never learned to handle the role.

  ‘That’s right,’ Camilla said and she waited brazenly for him to pull out his cheque book and sign. Recently Camilla had led him by the arm into a claustrophobic boutique to buy her a birthday present. She had chosen two pairs of silver earrings. One pair of sparkling three-inch drop earrings and another pair of small floral clusters. Now she wore both drop earrings in her right ear and one of the clusters in her left.

  ‘The fashion is clearly against symmetry,’ Noah said. He smiled at her because she was so much like Ali under the plumage and paint, and because she wore such absurd secondhand clothes, with padded shoulders, which reminded him of women on the subway during the last war.

  ‘What do you plan to do with the fourth earring?’ he asked her. ‘You mean to save it till you pierce one of your nipples?’

  ‘I’ll give it to my boyfriend,’ Camilla said. Noah’s instinct was not to care too much for personal adornment in men since he himself had no feeling for it. He was the kind of man who, having been coaxed out of turn-ups just in time for the fashion to revert, could not be coaxed back again.

  ‘Mummy wants to pierce her ears, too, you know,’ Camilla said.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Noah said. ‘I will not allow it.’

  Ali now poured coffee.

  ‘What about Camilla then?’ she said. ‘Camilla looks gorgeous with her pierced ears.’

  ‘Camilla looks like she ought to be selling violets in Drury Lane,’ Noah said. ‘Or telling fortunes. Gorgeous she may be. I don’t deny it.’

  ‘How about your secretary then?’ Ali said, because Noah’s research unit boasted a dark-eyed Cypriot typist, who wore silver filigree earrings halfway to her shoulders, and whose looks Ali greatly admired. All that wonderful gloss in the hospital canteen was a great antidote to disease and pestilence, she thought.

  ‘AI,’ Noah said, ‘what the hell is this that I am drinking? Gravy mix?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. It had crossed her mind suddenly that she would like to paint the vulgar, bright oranges there in the precarious fluctuating sunlight, in their funny bowl. Oil paint simulating china, simulating basket weave. And then the view from the window beyond the kitchen was so inviting, with Noah’s tangled climbers all beginning to bud and the field, beyond the out-houses, with cows. The cows so black and white that they stood on the green field as though appliqued upon an emerald banner, carried in a church procession.

  Ali had begun to paint with the advent of Noah and the paintings recorded, appropriately, a certain hard-won domestic contentment. She liked to paint food, flowers and children. A stone jug with poppies on a striped seersucker cloth; her eight-year-old daughter Hattie arranging narcissi in a jam jar or back from a party with ribbons in her curly dark hair. Like the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century glorying in hung rabbits and bundles of asparagus, in scrubbed forecourts and in dew on vine leaves, Ali liked to celebrate through these things the ending of lean times. No
ah had put an end to her lean times.

  ‘The coffee shop is right alongside where you buy your artist’s materials,’ Noah said. ‘For Chrissake AI, why can’t you go there to buy coffee? Freeze the beans. No problem.’

  ‘Eva Bobrow sends Mervyn there,’ Ali said with apparent irrationality, but wishing to register a strongly felt reaction both against Eva’s managerial style and against the parade of food connoisseurs. ‘She insists on the Colombian, she says. She does the insisting and he does the shopping. Oh my God, it’s all so disgustingly advanced it makes me want to puke. Why am I so backward in these domestic matters? It’s no wonder he ran out on me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Noah said. ‘How about if I take over the buying of coffee? I see no reason why Mrs Bobrow should determine what coffee I drink.’

  ‘My dear Noah,’ Ali said. ‘As if you were ever in one place for long enough to buy anything except in Duty Free shops. I’m sorry it’s such foul coffee. I wasn’t thinking when I made it, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with the beans, but I’ll go to that poncy shop from now on – only because it’s for you. Oh Jesus, Noah, wouldn’t it be nice if you weren’t going today?’

  Noah’s expertise in the matter of human respiratory pathology had always caused him to board aeroplanes far too often – unlike Ali, who resolutely never went anywhere, except to the same place on the Cornish coast once a year. Noah went to conferences in Sardinia and in Tokyo. He had been to conferences in Czechoslovakia and in Peking, and in the northernmost part of Norway where there was nothing but fish and fishermen. Nothing to eat but fish. Fish rolled into balls and stewed. Smoked fish cold on crackerbread. And even the museum full of fish, he told Ali. Embalmed fish with eyes that lit up at the flick of a switch. Most of the time, however, he went to New York to ‘liaise’, as he said, with colleagues.