Noah's Ark Read Online Free PDF Page A

that she had not owned a watch; that she would lean out of the bathroom window far enough to catch sight of the local church clock – which was itself often far from accurate. Now he had learned to accept it more or less. The diaphragm had been introduced by himself to replace Ali’s hazard-prone alternatives, but it had to be admitted that the taste of spermicidal cream on the tongue could inhibit one’s pleasure in oral exploration.
    ‘You’re not fertile from tomorrow,’ he said wistfully. After ten years in England he still pronounced ‘fertile’ to rhyme with ‘myrtle’. Ali did not hear him because she had her mind once again on the oranges. If one could paint wood like Holman Hunt, she thought. And why did one like pictures through windows so much? Did they imply advance or retreat? Could one ever go forward by looking back or did it always hamper? To go backwards – did one regress or move forward? And did pictures through windows merely imply a blinkered vision; a fear of life itself? Here again the picture of Thomas’s double impinged and Ali resolved at once to remove it when Noah had gone. The man was advertising cigarettes! That was surely in itself a heresy in Noah’s house, when Noah had always been so uncompromisingin his rules against cigarette smoking. Had one always wanted reality in easy, measured doses, she wondered; boxed in and bounded in nutshells? Probably. And had that been the real reason why one had let Thomas Adderley slip like water from one’s emotional grasp and had gone on to embroil oneself in two hopelessly unsuitable marriages – first with a philistine and next with an ego-maniac? Thank God for Noah!
    In the National Gallery there was a small Dutch box, by Samuel van Hoochstraaten, which revealed, through a spy hole, room upon room. An illusion. A mirror trick, but Ali loved that box; wanted to get inside it. Let sea discoverers to new worlds have gone; that box would be an everywhere. Noah had always made her feel safe; had built her an ark of gopher wood and pitched it within and without.
    ‘Sorry,’ Ali said, starting out of private thoughts, ‘I wasn’t listening to you. I was thinking.’ She laughed slightly, because he was staring at her. ‘I was engaging in some “tremulous quim introspection”.’ The phrase was an old joke between them since Noah had used it on her once a long time ago with greater dramatic effect than he had anticipated. ‘You may be full of tremulous quim introspection,’ he had said to her, ‘but baby, you fuck like the emperor’s whore.’
    ‘What I was thinking was, shall I paint those oranges?’ she said.
    ‘Why not?’ Noah said. ‘Do you know something, AI? I’m gonna lie awake in that goddamned hotel room tonight wishing I could get my hands on your ass.’
    He pushed back his chair to accommodate her on his knee and swallowed hard, gulping down intensity. ‘Come here sweetheart,’ he said. Ali put down her sewing and went to him chewing her index finger to hold down an impractical rush of sexual desire. She could see her little Daniel through the doorway, stumbling dozily towards the downstairs 100, pulling out his infant prick in readiness for the day’s first pee. He always slept late because he went to bed late. He played on the living-roomfloor with his toy soldiers every evening while his parents watched the ten o’clock news. It didn’t matter, because he went to the afternoon session of the local nursery school.
    Noah kissed her sexily on the right of the neck, near the collar bone. He was invariably so good at finding the right spot, Ali thought admiringly, almost as if one had taken the trouble to draw rings in marker pen around one’s erogenous zones.
    ‘If I were twenty years younger, I’d have you up against the wall, AI,’ he said, ‘right now, my baby. I guess I wouldn’t make it to stagger on to that plane if I were to try it now.’
    Ali smiled. ‘It would be very bad for jet lag, Noah,’ she