Noah's Ark by Barbara Trapido

Author:Barbara Trapido
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1984-02-20T13:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Arnie weinberg had returned that morning on a flight from Washington in a mood so sanguine that not even the daunting state of his flat could sully it. During the week he had taken a plane to California where developments on the job front had accelerated considerably. He had flown to California to read a paper which had been warmly received and had stayed to be interviewed two days later by a line-up of committee men, most of whom had previously been present to hear him speak. This had afforded him an opportunity to parade his advantages twice. The committee had clearly thought well of him and had not waited for Noah’s recommendation to come by post but had telephoned Noah for reference in New York the next day. Noah had been more than emphatic and loyal in his commendations. Now Arnie was waiting to hear from California in a spirit of fair optimism.

Yet even to a man with expectations the flat that morning had looked and smelled awful. A prevailing odour of tar and damp-rot solution had assaulted his nostrils as he opened his front door and the furniture stood in huddles under large dust-sheets in the centre of the living room. Plaster dust filled the air, along with cigarette smoke and DJ prattle from workmen’s trannies. His admirable, aged landlady had appeared apologetically from the garden in her laced walking shoes to offer him sanctuary upon her ottoman for a few days. She had, in his absence, at last taken issue with the varied range of mould spores which had been growing up through the floor of his basement living room for quite some time, but the builders had come three days late. One half of Arnie was pleasantly surprised. She had always struck him as being so much endowed with upper-class calm when it came to property and decay that he had not expected any move towards reform.

‘Where you have a house you have dry-rawt, my dear Arnold,’ she would observe serenely. She spoke to him with the same cheerful detachment about her angina and her arthritis. Arnie was a great favourite with her, as she was with him. She had furnished the flat for him handsomely with a walnut-veneered grandfather clock, a set of lyre-back dining chairs and several Afghan rugs from the deceased estates of her three brothers. She had bestowed upon him a valuable roll-top desk and several canvases by Dame Laura Knight painted in the heyday of the International Artists Association. But Arnie had nonetheless begun to tire of watching rust-coloured mushrooms blooming up through the mellow chevron woodblocks of his living-room floor. The floor had been laid in the nineteen-thirties on a bed of concrete without the advantages of plastic damp-proofing membrane, and the leaking roof of the adjoining conservatory – now elegantly awash with ferns and Gothic Revival garden chairs, with their legs all in splints – had contributed a degree of seepage and surface water upon which the mushrooms thrived.

Arnie

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