1

A TALL STORY

I OPENED the large central window of my office room to its full on that fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below. The graceful flamingos, shaded from flushed white to a robust tinned salmon, humped and coiled on their long stilts; a Florida pelican picked and nuzzled comically with its orange pouched bill among its drab brownish wing feathers; the herring gulls surprised me, as they did every day, by their size and their viciously hooked beaks. To command one’s chosen view of the brute creation was one of the unexpected advantages I had secured by taking on the newly instituted post of Administrative Secretary at the London Zoo three years before. A word with the Director and with Matthew Price, the Curator of Birds, had resulted in a new waders’ enclosure opposite my window, replacing a pen for capybaras, creatures interesting perhaps as the largest of the rodents, but, with their ungainly coarse-haired bodies, hardly ornamental for everyday view. Young men with administrative experience and high recommendations from the Treasury were not to be had every day at a nominal salary. The Zoo authorities had been very indulgent to a number of ‘milord’ whims that were perhaps more in keeping with an aesthetic undergraduate than with an administrator of thirty-five.

English springtime that year had been at its loveliest. Gentle, sweet enough, to banish all bogeys, to bridge all chasms. The lilac scent came heavy with a sudden gust of wind, sensual, almost ruttish. A blackbird sang near by. Blackbirds, gentle, sweet, ruttish. I punctured the rhapsody with a little bathos. Most delicious, springtime suburbia, lush laburnum time enough to satisfy a cockney Keats. But the morning’s grace was too complete to be banished by self-mockery. I remained dreamily happy, staring out, registering only vaguely the prettiness of the early Victorian Giraffe House that lay distantly before me, beyond the intervening road.

Nevertheless the conscious checking of my thoughts set my mind free from the enchantment of my senses. I wondered how it came about that I could hear one blackbird’s notes when I had become quite deaf to the customary loud orchestra of a whole Zoo after three years. I registered the feeding times only subliminally; even the occasional chorus of panic induced by some low flying jet, a chorus starting perhaps with one high shriek and swelling into a discordant symphony, no longer disturbed me. I hardly noticed such noises more than did the animals the helicopters or hooting water buses that brought staff or visitors from the motor parks of outer London to the Zoological Gardens. But then, the blackbird’s was the voice of freedom, not perhaps the great cosmic liberty of Beethoven’s thunderous chords, but enough to sound a clarion call to an Administrative Secretary who so often longed to be with his wife rather than at his office desk.

The direction of my thoughts decided me to return to my work. The galley proofs of the forthcoming issue of The Proceedings of the Society lay draped over the desk. Despite the long column of print that ran down the middle of the sheets, they appeared as virginal white as a bride’s veil. I thought with satisfaction of getting to work on them with a corrector’s pen. The rape would be long and detailed, for zoologists, I had found, seemed to have powers of linguistic expression in inverse ratio to their scientific knowledge. Correcting other people’s texts, indeed all ordering of words, always gave me intense pleasure. It was a delightful task for a nice spring day. Not all my work at the Zoo, alas, was so congenial. The Treasury job, however glad I had been when Martha’s money released me from it, had called for a good measure of toughness; after it, Regent’s Park affairs smelt a little of the parish pump. I had difficulty sometimes in carrying back a sufficiently enthusiastic day’s report to satisfy Martha’s hopes. Grateful for the absorbing pleasure of proof reading, I turned to Pattie Henderson’s informed but childishly constructed article on ‘Nematoda in the digestive tracts of certain Pinnipedia’.

Suddenly the screaming began. I knew that they were human cries, yet the noise was further from what is usually meant by a human scream than many animal or bird calls. As the first deep groans, there must have been eight or nine of them, rose each in turn to a high sound somewhere between a monkey’s shriek and a sudden release of air from vast balloons, Pattie Henderson’s diagram of a seal’s bowels swam on the paper in front of me and my own bowels heaved within in fright and horror. I rushed to the door. By the time I had left my room the noise was drowned in the panic orchestra of roaring lions and baying sea lions, of hyenas’ idiot schoolgirl giggles, of wolves, of bears, of howling gibbons and chattering monkeys, of trumpeting stags and the crowing lunatic shrieks of the peacocks near the window. It sounded as though every creature was rushing, as I had done, to leave its cage. In the corridor I collided with both my secretaries. The big one, who liked to mother me, was announcing her views.

‘Oh, I knew at once what had happened. It was just the same that time I was walking along Holborn. It took the ambulance a quarter of an hour to get there and this chap went on screaming all the time. You wouldn’t believe they’d have the strength.’

At that moment the bell of the Society’s private ambulance could be heard clanging above the bestial pandemonium.

‘There, what did I tell you?’ Mrs Purrett said proudly.

‘Well, I never heard anything so horrible in all my life and I hope I never shall again.’ The new little pretty secretary seemed as proud of her innocence as the big one of her unpleasant experience.

‘I don’t think we can help,’ I said. ‘With the ambulance people there, we should only swell an unnecessary crowd. But find out at once from Exchange, Mrs Purrett, what has happened.’

I followed them into their room. The little dainty touches Mrs Purrett had added of artcraft and home from home seemed more revolting than usual to me as I waited for her explanation of her horrified exclamations into the telephone. At last she laid down the receiver.

‘Don’t worry, Marian dear,’ she said to the little typist, ‘it’s no one we know very well. But we do know him, Mr Carter. And the news is rather bad.’

Clearly she had long practice in breaking bad news; it was as though she was delicately washing our corpses before burying us.

‘It’s young Mr Filson. Perhaps you don’t remember him, Mr Carter. In the Giraffe and Zebra house. The son of old Mr Filson in Parrots. He was in the office a week ago about special leave for some concert he was singing in.’

‘Yes, of course I do. Don’t be so dramatic, Mrs Purrett.’ I hate to see people that I like ‘putting on an act’. But it was too late to tease Mrs Purrett out of it.

She moved a bowl of yellow tulips on her desk so that she could look straight into the little typist’s eyes. I wondered if she imagined that she could ‘hold someone’s nerve’ by staring at them.

She said gravely, ‘He may never come into the office again, Mr Carter. There’s been a terrible accident …’ She was a kind woman, as I knew, but she had already begun to enjoy her story. Before she had really got going, however, Rackham, the ex-serviceman messenger, rushed in banging the door noisily against the wall.

‘Got ’im away to ’ospital,’ he shouted, then, noticing me, he stopped and drew himself to attention. ‘Oh, beg pardon, Sir, I didn’t know you was in ’ere.’

‘That’s all right, Rackham,’ I could not avoid irritation, for I guessed that the old man always knew how uncomfortable this N.C.O. to officer stuff made me. ‘What’s happened to the boy?’

‘Oh, they reckon ’e’s copped it, Sir. ’E was alive when they moved ’im from the ground. But Walters, that’s the First Aid man, ’e’s a pal of mine, ’e tells me ’e was dead before they moved off. Mind you, they’ll say ’e was dead before they picked ’im up. They ’ave to clear theirselves in law. Multiple injuries to the shoulder, chest and …’ he took rather conscious notice of the typists’ presence, ‘and general injuries. Some old chap in the crowd started bellyaching about they shouldn’t ’ave moved ’im so soon, but as Walters says to me, it wouldn’t ’ave made no difference what they done.’ He paused as though expecting applause for having established this point. I turned to Mrs Purrett.

‘Ring the hospital. And check exactly what has happened, will you?’

Rackham’s sharp little foxy face took on an old soldier’s sentimental expression.

‘They’re waiting for Sir Robert’s word now whether old Smokey’s got to go. If it’d been any of the ’ippos or rhinos, Strawson would ’ave taken action ’isself straightway. There’s only one thing to be done when they turn nasty. But a giraffe! Its unheard of. Strawson says ’e’s never known a case in all ’is years and ’e’s been looking after giraffes from before any of you was born. ’E reckons young Filson come on ’im sudden with crepe rubber soles or somethin’ of that sort. Then Smokey took fright and Filson ’ad ’ad it. Strawson wants to save old Smokey but ’e reckons ’e’ll ’ave to go. Pretty near in tears ’e was. “There’s never been a gentler beast than that giraffe, Rackham, that I’ll swear.” And you could tell ’e meant it. I told ’im shooting Smokey won’t bring young Filson back. If I was Sir Robert I’d take it right up to the Director before I gave the word for the high jump.’

To avoid losing my temper I said coldly, ‘Sir Robert as Curator of Mammals is Deputy Director of the Gardens, Rackham. So I don’t think that “right up” is quite the correct phrase.’

I heard the words come out like those of a bad-tempered schoolmaster talking to a boy of ten. Their results were in keeping with their tone; as I walked out of the room I could sense that Rackham was winking at the typists.

Neither the scent of lilacs coming in at the window nor Pattie Henderson’s clumsily formed sentences that lay on my desk begging to be put straight, could bridge the chasm when I returned to my room. I stood by my desk feeling furious with the shapeless, purposeless emotions that so meaningless an accident could bring. As so often at conventionally grave moments I was overcome by a general randiness that finally settled to a persistent delicious image of the supple inward curve of Martha’s thighs. Living bodies to banish the dead; such comfortable reflexes could no doubt be made respectable by talk about the life force. But even so I could not entirely banish a feeling of shame at being even so remotely associated with such a stupid, cruel death.

Mrs Purrett came in and placed a file of papers before me.

‘The draft reports from Dr Beard’s people for the Nuffield Foundation,’ she said. Then she added very softly, ‘The hospital news is bad, I’m afraid, Mr Carter. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.’

I said, ‘I see. Thank you.’

She obviously expected more thanks for her careful breaking of bad news, for she lingered by me, enveloping me in a sense of unwanted bosoms, of starved affection ready to be hurt.

‘Old Rackham upset you with his crude talk, didn’t he, Mr Carter? I saw it. I know exactly what you felt. We’d not seen much of the boy in the office here. But he was young and ordinary and nice. And so happy. Engaged to be married to a nice, pretty, ordinary girl. A Butlin’s hostess, I remember he told me. It doesn’t seem fair of death does it to pick on someone so ordinary? It’s the difficulty of making any sense of it. You’re not a religious man, are you, Mr Carter?’

To answer, I felt as though I had physically to heave myself up in my seat. Even then I could only muster up enough human warmth to say, ‘No.’

‘Well, I’m not a clever woman at all, as you know. But I have had a lot of sorrow. Not tragedy, nothing important, everyday sorrow. But that sort of thing gives one conviction. For me and lots of ordinary people there’s a measure of certainty. Nothing to do with church going. Well I don’t have to tell you that. But the certainty that there is a sense to it all somewhere. After all one and one make two, don’t they? Does that help you at all?’

I knew that human charity demanded more than merely foregoing the satisfaction of repeating my negative, yet I could not keep a certain note of sarcasm out of my voice as I said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Purrett.’

I realized the full meaning of ‘touchiness’ as she edged her heavy breasts away from me.

‘For goodness’ sake! Don’t worry about me,’ I said, ‘we can’t do anything about it and that’s that. Mr Price’ll be taking care of old Filson. And that’s the most that can be done.’

She smiled, but I could see that she was still offended. I turned over the leaves of the reports in the folders.

‘These things are in a muddle, Mrs Purrett,’ I said sharply.

‘That’s how they came through to us, Mr Carter.’

‘Well, I’m sorry they’re still in a muddle.’ I added savagely, ‘Like most things in this place.’ I handed her the file. ‘Let me have them back after lunch, will you?’

She had not been gone more than a minute or two, before Rackham brought in the morning cup of coffee, slopping it as usual in the saucer.

‘I couldn’t tell you all of it, Sir, in front of the ladies. But it was a nasty business all right. As I said before, what it seems like young Filson comes up behind Smokey. Strawson reckons the pad of them crepe rubbers was enough to bring back memories of lions to ’im. That’s what them giraffes fear most – lions! He wheels his fucking great neck round …’

I could tell from the old man’s sidelong glances that to his pleasure in telling the story was added the enjoyment of discomforting his listener. Yet to cut him short by an order however jovially given would be interpreted as surrender. Old sadist, I thought, and there’s not even a loud bassoon to excuse me.

‘Of course,’ Rackham was saying, with an added tone of moral righteousness, ‘them railings ought never to have been there. Little low spiked railings like that. Strawson says ’e’s spoken to Sir Robert about them time and time again. But nothing done. ’E reckons the Director’ll ’ear about them this time. Sir Robert or no Sir Robert.’

‘Strawson should keep his criticism to himself.’

‘Ah! That’s right,’ Rackham said vaguely.

I could have kicked myself. My strictures would no doubt be reported to Strawson in some general form, when in all likelihood the man had never made the remark. These ‘old characters’ like Rackham with their ‘racy’ reported speech were an archaic menace in any decent modern organization.

‘Pierced right through ’is shoulder it done, and pinned ’im there. ’E starts screaming! That frightens Smokey more and ’e panics. Gallops off across the yard. Ever seen them giraffes runnin’? Funniest sight you ever seen. Like nothin’ else. Back and front by one side then back and front the other. Pacin’, they call it. But then you probably know that, Sir.’

‘Yes, I do.’ I tried to keep up my testy tone but it was no good. Whenever anyone persists successfully in a course that annoys me, instead of getting angry I simply find that I want to laugh. I had now to give all my energies to keeping a straight face before Rackham’s calculated impudence.

‘Well, they can move all right. First move Smokey made, ’e brought ’is great hoof down on young Filson’s chest. Broke a couple of ribs. And the second one – well, it’s lucky the ladies are gone – ’e smashed ’is balls to bits. You probably didn’t ’ear the awful noise the poor bastard made – up in your room ’ere. Ghastly it was. On account of the pressure on the lung one of these ambulance chaps tells me. More like a hissing of the breath. Only loud. ’Course they soon gave him morphine.’ He paused at the word and gave a look that implied long years of medical understanding of analgesics.

I said, ‘I think we can all help best, Rackham, by not panicking and by getting on with our ordinary work.’

He glanced at me contemptuously and said obsequiously, ‘That’s right, Sir. Not that there’ll be much work done ’ere today, I can tell you that.’ Then, as though reproving me for my morbidity, ‘Well, the dead’s dead, Sir. And that’s about the long and short of it. It’s the livin’ we’ve got to think of. Old Filson’s only son!’

‘Have you seen the old man?’

‘No, Sir. Mr Price took ’im straight ’ome in a taxi when the news come through. So as Mrs Filson shouldn’t ’ear from anyone else.’

‘That’s exactly what I imagined. Mr Price has the whole thing under control.’

‘Ah,’ said Rackham noncommittally, ‘I’d better get along, Sir. There may be some news about old Smokey. ’E won’t make no noise if they shoot ’im. Got no vocal chords—giraffes. That was the uncanny thing about it, Strawson tells me—the young chap screamin’ ’is lungs out and the bloody great animal in a muck panic not makin’ a sound.’

‘Yes, Rackham. I can imagine it all too easily, thank you.’

I had little hope that my reproof would get through so easily; and it did not.

Rackham said with satisfaction, ‘I knew you’d want to ’ear it straightaway, Sir. I said to Strawson, “Mr Carter’ll want to ’ear this straightaway.” That’s why I come along so quick.’

I could think of nothing more repulsive at that moment than the loving old spaniel’s look that came into Rackham’s amber flecked brown eyes.

‘I shall be very busy now dealing with the Director about it all, Rackham. So I shan’t require any more instalments of the story.’

The spaniel’s eyes changed from ‘loving’ to ‘hurt’. Immediately I found myself grinning boyishly, almost winking at Rackham – the young officer appealing to the old sweat’s capacity to take a joke against himself. Rackham responded with an equally boyish grin.

‘Well, I’ll make myself scarce before I really put myself in wrong with you, Sir.’ He went out chuckling.

Death, I suppose, always calls for action, however irrelevant. I rang Dr Leacock. But when I heard Miss Chambers’s voice announcing rather grandly, ‘The Director’s in conference with Sir Robert now about this horrible accident. I should prefer to ask him to ring you back,’ I felt an immediate revulsion from the official pomposity which I could feel already forming in a heavy blanket of comfortable fog around the wretched dead youth.

‘As long as you keep me out of all conferences, you can do just what you like, Miss Chambers,’ I said.

As I heard her click of disapproval, I knew that I must either do nothing, or grin and bear the pomposity without the indulgence of levity. I could all too easily imagine the scene in the Director’s room. Young Filson’s death like everything else at Regent’s Park would have been made to serve in the endless struggle between Leacock and Bobby Falcon for their opposing views on the Zoo’s future. That I was entirely on the side of the Director in this debate, despite all his phoniness and his slipshod work, didn’t seem really to matter in this case. I agreed with Leacock that the Society’s worst mistake had been the closing of Whipsnade in some cheeseparing retrenchment; I wanted, as he did, a much larger National Wild Life Park somewhere to replace what we had lost; I did not want Bobby’s romantic, childish revived Victorian Zoo. But at this moment I wanted above all to talk only of what could be done to prevent such a tragedy happening again, to bring home the charge to the culpable, yes, to avenge young Filson. Certainly not to hear his death used as a talking point in debate. And yet these old men – Leacock and Falcon – had succeeded all unconsciously in turning some of the most serious of the many war scares of the last year into debates on their pet schemes. Why should the death of an unimportant young keeper escape the same treatment? I went to the window but the long-legged grace of the flamingos seemed grace no longer, only stilted absurdity; and the pelicans’ comicality, mere swollen folly. The whole walled, barred and caged Gardens seemed intolerable.

What was my senseless pride in my administrative capacity that had made me come to this place? To put the Zoo’s administration in order! When I could have given myself up to long years of watching and studying English wild life far away from all the incompetence and humbug that seemed inseparable from dealing with human beings. And then to have tried to convey that pleasure to a million others on television. ‘Tried’ – why had I to play the thing down, when I knew so well that my television programmes had been a smashing success? Why did I have to run away from them as an indulgence? Was a solo turn so impossible a luxury? In indulging myself I should after all have been doing what Martha wanted me to do. I felt choked with impatience at my own pigheaded addiction to self-denial. Only the sudden flickering yet sharp memory of a white and black muzzle showing for a moment against the yellowish clayey soil and the knotted elder roots, of a snout upturned to savour the freshness of the July evening air brought me relief from a total, all including claustrophobia. For a few seconds I was back among the lush willowherb and the scent of trodden wild garlic, peering through the oakleaves at entrance D to the sett. Not once in all my many badger watching expeditions, had I found the need for these anthropomorphic adjectives – noble, stately, stupid, comic – that seemed to crowd upon me whenever I considered the animals around me at the Zoo.

I decided to ‘invade’ the Director’s conference before distaste for the diplomacy and, even worse, the high-toned plain speaking ahead of me made me retreat from the business altogether. But a knock on the door was followed almost immediately by the rosy cheeked, gold rimmed spectacled, bland features of Mr Sanderson.

I said firmly, ‘I’m just going to see the Director, Sanderson. Can you make it later?’

The little, hollow, oboe like notes that came from Sanderson’s large, potbellied body seemed an additional outrage.

‘The Director’s with Falcon. I was along there just now. They’re not letting us small chaps in for the moment.’

I wondered why Sanderson supposed that a watery glint behind his spectacles and a twist of his lips made a condescending remark of that kind any more palatable. Summoning up all the matiness I could, I said,

‘Well, I suppose there’s no point in being Head if you can’t refuse to see the prefects. Since I can’t see Leacock, what can I do for you?’

Sanderson looked down to where his toes must have been just visible to him beyond his little potbelly.

He said solemnly, ‘What was that chap’s name, Carter, who declared that God was dead?’

To check my desire to laugh and to ward off Sanderson’s intimacy, I could find only a vigorously facetious note.

‘Nietzsche,’ I replied, ‘but you have to remember that he died off his nut.’ It did not avail.

‘In a way that makes it all the more moving, doesn’t it? I wish I had more time for general culture. Things like today’s damnable accident make one feel that he was right.’

‘Not believing in God, I can’t pay much attention to rumours of his death.’ This more brutal line of defence proved equally unavailing. Sanderson looked up with a sort of shy reverence.

‘I’ve always wanted to tell you, Carter, how much I admire the deeply felt quality of your agnosticism.’

Then he looked down again as though I, not he, had been embarrassingly emotional. He was a very provoking man indeed.

Now he said, ‘The names of young chaps who die in the Zoo’s services like this might be inscribed on the war memorial.’

‘It’s hardly in the country’s service. In any case, appalling though the whole thing is, we can’t even say for certain that it wasn’t the boy’s fault.’

Sanderson looked at me with a sweet smile.

‘I think we’ve got to be careful not to run away from our feelings at a time like this, Carter. Of course, you’re still comparatively new here. You wouldn’t realize what the death of a Filson means. His great grandfather entered the Society’s service as a lad of fifteen in 1880. He worked under Bartlett.’

Sanderson was always at his most mawkish when speaking of the Zoo’s past and especially about the tough old Superintendent of the Victorian era, of whom he was said to be writing a life.

‘I must say even that young reporter seemed to be impressed when I told him that. Tradition has more importance for these young chaps than we’re inclined to think. He was very grateful for what I told him. They’re fine fellows these journalists really. People blacken them, but theirs is a great trust. And I like to think that they fulfil it.’

I said, ‘Ah!’ Then I did a quick double-take, and added, ‘What reporter?’

‘Quite a young chap by his voice. On one of the morning papers, the Daily Telegraph, I think. He’d tried to get the Director or Falcon; but, of course, as I told him, they’re the men of the hour. Then it seems he knew my name because he’d sent in a specimen of some dictynidae for identification some years ago. He didn’t give a very clear description. It sounded like ciniflo similis. Not very interesting; but still it’s splendid to think that these chaps keep up their hobbies at all in that rather cynical world.’ I picked up the receiver.

‘Mr Carter speaking. I want to talk to the Supervisor. Mrs Jamieson? It seems that the newspapers are making inquiries about this accident. It is understood of course that all Press inquiries are to be put straight through to my office. I see. Well, they’ll be on the alert now won’t they?’

To Sanderson I said, ‘I’m sorry they should have worried you. It seems that this reporter didn’t say who he was. All the same it was not very competent of them.’

‘I saw that Mrs Jamieson out the other day pushing an invalid chair. They tell me she looks after a paralysed uncle. That sort of thing’s rather fine.’

I made no comment, but I asked, ‘It would be a help if you’d give me some outline of your conversation with the Press. Just for the record.’

He said, ‘It’s a wonderful thing for the Zoo, you know, Carter, to have got in a professional administrator like you.’

Again I made no comment, and, after looking down at the floor for a minute or so, he said, ‘They seem to have an idea that there was some negligence. I told the young chap, “that’s a damnable thing to suggest at a time like this.” He apologized. I must say that after all one hears about the Press, I thought that was rather fine of him. Apparently it was only something they’d been told. About some low spiked railings that ought not to have been there.’

I thought of Rackham, that loyal old servant of the Society, earning his extra ten bob as a newspaper’s nark.

I said only, ‘They appear to have got on to the story very quickly.’

Sanderson said, ‘Yes, this young chap is clearly as keen as mustard about his job. I told him, of course, that there couldn’t have been any negligence with Falcon in charge. I had to explain that Falcon was the discoverer of gorilla himalayensis. One forgets that the expedition was as far back as 1963. I don’t think this young chap had heard of the Abominable Snowman.’

‘It’s always as well to be polite but brief with the Press,’ I said. A watery but hopeful gleam came into Sanderson’s eyes.

‘I don’t want to flatter you, Carter,’ he said, ‘but you’ve no idea what a help it is having a man of affairs like you about here. I’m glad to say that I think I acted just as you suggest. I said there could be no question of negligence. The trouble probably was that poor young Filson hadn’t been here long enough to deal with an emergency. I don’t know exactly how long he’s been on the staff, but only a matter of a month or so. And as I told this young chap you really can’t leave full responsibility to anybody who’s had less than a year. At any rate where there is any possibility of danger.’

I said, ‘Giraffes are notoriously very safe animals.’

‘Yes, yes. I said that. He had rather an amusing wit this young chap. I think he must have been a cockney. He said, “Giraffes must be changing their nature then.” It’s always a good sign when an interview of that sort ends on a little joke.’

I ignored this and told him, ‘It’s still possible that we may be able to undo any harm. With the Director’s agreement I’ll get out a general statement for the Press.’

I guessed that this reassurance was what he had come for, but he still had to waste my time with the pretext that he had previously decided upon.

‘What I wanted to see you about, Carter,’ he said, ‘was to ask the name of that clever girl who did the plates for the last guide. Bond who carried out all the illustrating work for my lycosidae book is getting rather old. He’s over eighty. A splendid old fellow. He lives at Ongar.’

‘Surely it would be rather a fine thing to let him illustrate your new book, wouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘It would make him feel wanted. It must be a little lonely out at Ongar.’

For the first time Sanderson showed some anger. His cheeks became rosier and his oboe voice trembled a little.

He said, ‘This new book of mine’s a very important thing, Carter. The whole field of wolf spiders has needed a survey for a long time. It would have interested your predecessor. But then he was an extraordinary chap. Very few professional administrators would have taken the trouble to familiarize themselves with the various expert fields here as he did.’

In the end he forced me to waste a precious quarter of an hour discussing his pretext, when I might have been busy saving his bacon by getting out the report for the Press.

When he left he said, ‘Don’t forget to recommend me to the Director for the post of Press Officer, will you?’

I should have let him feel then the full seriousness of his interfering incompetence, but I had made him angry once already.

I said, ‘Now look. You’re not to worry. You shouldn’t have been fussed with this in the first place. And you did your best.’

‘You’re a very nice chap you know, Carter,’ he said.

Miss Chambers’s voice came to save me from further praise.

‘Dr Leacock can see you now, Mr Carter.’

On my way to the Director’s office, I looked in on Mrs Purrett.

‘Look, I’m sorry for snapping at you like that.’

‘Oh, that’s quite all right. I know how deeply you feel things, Mr Carter.’

‘Don’t mark me too highly for sensitivity. It’s more that I feel there’s been some muddle or incompetence somewhere in this business. And it seems too appalling if it is so.’

Mrs Purrett began to mouth silently at me, to point her fingers towards the little secretary’s back.

‘Little pitchers,’ she said in a loud whisper.

To be put in my place in however motherly a way annoyed me.

‘Oh, there’s nothing confidential about it,’ I said loudly. And then felt even more annoyed, because, of course, there was.

I never looked forward to meetings with the Director and Bobby Falcon together. When Bobby Falcon, as an old friend of Martha’s family, had sponsored my appointment at the Zoo, Edwin Leacock, with the natural cynicism of the highminded, had taken it for granted that I had been brought in to swell the opposition to his policy. Bobby, on his side, had presumed that since he and I ‘spoke the same language’, I should naturally dislike the Director as much as he did. When I later showed Leacock that in their dispute over Zoo policy I agreed with him, he had immediately presumed that I was, as he told me, ‘one of those rare people, Carter, who can put their intellectual loyalties before their personal ones’. I was, so to speak, put on my honour to show my disinterest by always opposing Bobby simply because he was an old friend. Bobby, too, had accepted my ‘defection’ as part of the general collapse of the old order of things, and maintained towards me at meetings a sort of hurt friendliness that was intended to show how little he allowed public matters to affect his private feelings. Neither seemed to realize how tedious I found the whole of their public ‘carry-on’ – it was exactly the sort of display of ‘personality’ that I had disliked among my more politically ambitious colleagues at the Treasury; and I had naïvely expected that I should not meet it among more dedicated scientific men.

Strangely, I did not meet it that morning. The shock perhaps had brought them together. I cannot say that the thought that young Filson might have died in order to bang a little sense into the heads of Edwin Leacock and Robert Falcon made his death any more palatable to me; it only served to increase my dislike for their unusual touchy, prima donna-ish relationship.

As he waved me to a seat, Leacock’s bonhomie and grin had a nervous flavour, it is true; but then, in his apparently most confident moods – and these were all but permanent – he seemed forever to be looking over his shoulder at what might be creeping up behind him. He liked best to meet his fellow men full on, face to face even, for he had a habit of drawing very close to one, knees to knees. That morning emotion caused him to go further. He got up from his seat and closed my hand in the soft, padded but tough grip of his own.

‘Look, Carter,’ he said, ‘I am very glad you’ve come. You’re an old friend of Falcon’s. You must persuade him not to blame himself for this horrible business.’

I did not know whether that could or ought to be my office, but luckily I had to say nothing. Bobby broke in. He was, as so often, twisting a strand of his thick grey curly hair around in his long fingers. Standing in tall silhouette against the sunlit window, he seemed with his ruffled crest more than ever like a secretary bird.

‘It’s good of you to say so, my dear chap. But I may have to.’

His ravaged handsome Apollo’s head with its flushed, sunburnt skin, seemed to snap at the air as he jerked out his words with his savage-seeming stutter. With one leg he jabbed at the ground, as though he were impaling a snake on his claws. The Director, round toucan’s eye fixed stolidly ahead, long tapir’s nose pointing us ever on, stood full square on his magnanimity.

‘No, no, Falcon. If anyone’s to blame, it’s Beard. If he considered that there was a need for shooting the beast, he should have said so. It’s a question of function. He tends to forget that he’s Veterinary Adviser as well as Prosector. Of course, it’s part of his extraordinary devotion to humanity. Any part of his work, like surgery, that serves human medicine comes first with him. But that isn’t the point.’

‘I must be fair, Director, and make it clear that Beard did strongly indicate his view that Smokey’s tumour was probably inoperable and that he ought to be put down. For the rest the proper care of the mammals in the Society’s collection is my concern. And the blame is, therefore, mine.’

Edwin Leacock gave his most matey grin.

‘Your friend Falcon’s impossible, isn’t he, Carter? He will punish himself. Look,’ he went on, addressing Bobby in the tone of a helpful scoutmaster in a pep talk on personal problems, ‘this is a matter of function. Not of battle order. If we’re going to consider that, then the whip’s got to come down pretty hard on me. I’m Director. I knew the giraffe was sick. You had reported it to me. And if you’re going to say I’d got a lot of other things to deal with, I should remind you of what our President always says: “The man at the top is never too busy.” And to give Godmanchester his due he never is. I suppose it’s a great part of the secret of his political success.’

I said, ‘During the last two years he hasn’t in fact been too busy.’

Edwin Leacock frowned. For a number of reasons, in particular those of prestige, he preferred not to remember that our President was out of political office.

‘If all I hear is true that may not be for much longer,’ he said.

He knew that I doubted whether he had heard a thing more than any of the rest of us. I said ‘Ah!’ in a tone parodying his solemnity. As a rule Bobby Falcon relaxed with delight when I mocked the Director’s pomposity. That morning he seemed not to hear.

He said savagely, ‘You’d much better let me carry the can, Director. I’m like Smokey, an anachronism. I belong to the old order of things.’ Edwin Leacock faced this with four square honesty.

‘My dear Falcon,’ he said, ‘don’t let’s clutter up this perfectly simple discussion of right and wrong in a particular affair with the conflict of our general views about the future of the collections. I don’t mind saying that an accident of this kind is in some degree grist to my mill. It would probably never have happened if it hadn’t been for those out of date cramped paddocks. I shall, of course, say so.’

‘And I shall, of course, fight you. In defence of the exquisite beauty of Decimus Burton’s designs.’

As always, when praising Victorian taste, Bobby’s usual spluttering changed to an arrogant drawl – the dandy within the famous soldier-explorer. But if his voice was arrogant, there was none of the anger he usually showed when Leacock attacked his beloved Victorian Zoo. The Director’s smile at Falcon’s taste, too, was not as patronizing as usual; indeed there was a sentimental note in his voice as he said;

‘Of course you will. I hope at least that we shall always pay each others’ views the compliment of opposing them strongly. But just because we’ve fought so often and will do so again, I should like you to listen to me this time. It would be absolutely shocking if some imaginary blame were to attach to the reputation of the greatest zoological collector of our time. I mean that, Falcon, I have it in mind,’ he added earnestly, ‘quite as much as any effect this unfortunate business may have on my television address at the end of the month.’

So Leacock’s current King Charles’s head had popped up. He was shortly to present a television programme on the need for a National Reserve. He surrounded the whole scheme with secrecy, and as a result the rest of us were sceptical of it being more than a piece of self-advertisement. But there was no doubt that in his mind it had become the key to the success of his hopes for the Zoo.

I coughed to avoid laughing; but Bobby Falcon seemed quite content. Blushing, he looked down at the ground like a flirtatious schoolboy.

‘You’re being much too kind to me, Director, you know.’

Suddenly I could bear their cooing no longer.

I said, ‘I’m afraid I can think of nothing except that wretched boy dying a painful and unnecessary death.’

Bobby blushed even more for what no doubt he felt to be a hysterical outburst.

‘Unnecessary? If you’re suggesting that we’re inhuman, Simon, you ought to think that Leacock and I have been up to our necks in the bloody business the whole morning.’

Edwin Leacock was more bland.

‘There’s a technique for dealing with this sort of ghastly event as with everything else, you know, Carter. I believe one must deliberately lower the emotional temperature. If we’re not to lose our heads, that is.’

‘We’ve none of us known the excruciating agony of losing our balls.’

Bobby shouted, ‘That’s a perfectly filthy thing to say, Simon. Do you mind taking it back?’

The real fury of his voice surprised me. It seemed to surprise Leacock also.

He said, ‘I don’t think Carter intended any offence. Violent death affects people in very different ways. You must remember that the war can hardly be more than a memory to him.’

Then to demonstrate a more rational form of reproof, he asked rather abruptly, ‘Well, Carter, what was it you wanted to see me about?’

I told them the story of Sanderson’s indiscretion to the Press. I like mimicking and I can imitate Sanderson particularly well. I suppose that I was anxious to dissipate Bobby’s anger. My imitation as I had anticipated put him in a good mood. He filled the room with his deep belly laughter.

‘Good God! The bloody cheek of it. Doesn’t he know that a giraffe’s the most harmless animal living. Just let him wait until one of his black widow spiders gets loose among a party of schoolgirls. I’ll have him in the News of the World as a sex murderer.’

Imitations and laughter were less to Dr Leacock’s taste.

He said, ‘I’m glad you told me, Carter. ‘Though I think it’s more serious than you quite realize. We all know that Sanderson besides being a first-rate entomologist is unfortunately a complete ass. But this goes a bit too far. Its particularly irresponsible at this time because I explained to him only the other day the very great importance I place upon this television programme of mine.’

Bobby was now relaxed enough to give me an amused look.

I said, ‘What I had in mind was the unfortunate effect any adverse publicity might have upon the Ministry of Education grants. The scheme’s only been going a year and there’s still quite a lot of opposition to it at the Ministry. They have a hearty contempt for incompetence in dealing with the Press. And quite rightly.’

Bobby Falcon said, ‘What a civil servant you are, Simon. We haven’t changed you. As far as I’m concerned if this beastly business restored us to our private status, it’d be a blessing in disguise.’

The Director was now returned enough to his normal competent, active self to brush Bobby’s nostalgia for the past aside with a joke.

‘That’s sentimental nonsense, Falcon. You simply refuse to remember what things had come to in ’68 before Godmanchester got us the Government grant. You used to come in here begging for a loan. “I’m down to my last hippo,” you said.’

Then he turned to me. ‘This needs dealing with at once, Carter, as you say. I hope I’m not an alarmist man, but if the wrong sort of publicity got into tomorrow’s papers, it could just mean that the television authorities would cancel the whole programme.’

I felt that his concern was less pettily selfish than his words made it appear, so I clicked my tongue in sympathy.

He said suddenly, ‘You know, it’s all right. If it had been any paper but the Telegraph or Times, it might have been impossible to stop it. Not that a lot of the Zoo chaps on the popular dailies aren’t most cooperative,’ he added hastily. The tightrope he walked between Establishment and servant of the Common Man was one of my favourite aspects of our Director’s character.

‘I shall be seeing Fitelson of the Telegraph at the Athenaeum at lunch. I’ll have a word with him then. The best thing I can do is to give him a small piece covering the incident for their Zoo chap, Howard Dudley, to write up. Something that puts it into perspective, and without inhumanity makes reasonably light of the whole thing.’

He sat back in his swivel chair and swung from side to side with such obvious relief that I could not help saying: ‘You mean a short paragraph headed “A Tall Story”.’

He seemed not to hear. Getting up from his chair, he went to the window. He picked up a hideous mauve watering-can with a long spout and began to water the tulips in the window boxes.

‘A present from the twins,’ he said. ‘They’ve got it into their heads that Grandad does nothing at the office. So they try to keep him busy.’

I waited for a few moments, but neither of them spoke. Like the Director, Bobby Falcon seemed to have returned to his normal behaviour. His heavy face showed the sort of brooding distaste that he usually evidenced in Leacock’s presence.

I said, ‘Well that seems to put the Zoo in clear with the public.’ As neither of them took this up, I added sharply, ‘Though we still have the coroner, of course, to deal with.’

Edwin Leacock replenished the little arty watering-can from a large serviceable one.

‘Your wife’s promised me some Lefebvre tulip bulbs for next year, Falcon. I shall keep her up to it.’

‘Oh you must, Leacock. Jane promises the entire garden to at least a dozen people every year. I suppose,’ he turned towards me, ‘that coroners are sensible enough to know the limits of their knowledge.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Dr Leacock said. ‘They follow what the experts tell them.’

‘I see.’ I let them have it, ‘Then really we can say that all this has worked out very satisfactorily.’

They seemed simply not to take it.

Bobby said, ‘Satisfactory? It’s been one of the most ghastly days of my life.’

Edwin Leacock was more definite.

‘In the very limited official sense in which you’re speaking, Carter, yes.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look here, I shall have to push you fellows off. I am meeting Mrs Leacock before lunch for some shopping for the twins.’

Bobby gave his automatic glance of amusement at ‘Mrs Leacock’, but I felt too annoyed to return it.

In the corridor Bobby slapped his hand on the glass case of the large model of Dr Leacock’s proposed National Zoological Park.

‘Well, today’s events have decreased the chances of this sort of absurdity. No hippos in their natural lovely setting of the Severn or beavers buggering up the Broads or whatever it is Leacock has in mind to instruct us all with. The public always panics at any gory accident. It’s the nature of the beast.’

Every phrase was chosen to annoy me; to upset in turn my respect for education, my egalitarianism, and my genuine support for Leacock’s schemes. I said sharply, ‘I doubt if Filson’s death is going to encourage the preservation of gems of Victorian architecture like the Giraffe House.’

‘Oh, no doubt they’ll pull it all down. Burton’s stuff as well as everything else of dignity. What do you expect under a government that’s let everything English go in order to kowtow to the commercialism of France and Germany? Modern Europeanism! Well, I have to be at the Travellers’ at one.’

‘That’s not good enough, Bobby. You know exactly what I’m thinking. Was Filson’s accident the result of some muddle?’

As I said it, I thought that I did not really know him well enough to speak so directly. He was Martha’s godfather who had helped the young man she had married to change his job. That was all our relationship. Yet if there was an intimate, Christian name tone, it had been his doing; he had clearly wanted to reduce the twenty-five years between us. Now however his large, too brightly blue eyes blazed rather insanely at me.

‘I’m perfectly aware of what you’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘but I don’t feel any obligation to satisfy your morbid scruples. Nor is it any of your business.’

I was committed now.

I said, ‘That’s nonsense. If Strawson or someone was negligent and young Filson died as a result, then it’s your job or Leacock’s to see that it doesn’t happen again. Should he have been in sole charge of a sick giraffe? After all he had only been here a month.’

‘If I may say so, Simon,’ his tone now was easier, ‘this only shows your complete ignorance. That sort of work is instinctive and the young fellow had the instinct. He was a particular favourite with Smokey. That’s why Strawson, who is a first-rate keeper, left him in charge.’

‘And a spiked railing for him to fall on.’

‘That sort of piffling thing could happen with anyone. The boy should have moved it. In any case Strawson’s my head keeper. Any wrong action or failure to act on his part is my responsibility.’

‘Oh, come off it, Bobby. Strawson isn’t your head Sikh guide, or for that matter your senior N.C.O. at Dunkirk or wherever you won your spurs.’ It worked. He laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Not that I have a monopoly of high mindedness at the moment. You appear to have constituted yourself the conscience of the Zoo.’

He stopped for a moment and stared towards the Monkey House where Yeti, the great orange gorilla he had discovered, crouched forward on its powerful arms and scowled beneath its shiny black forehead at the assembled visitors.

‘He draws the crowd all right,’ he observed. ‘I like to see them in front of the great apes or any of the big cats. Wretched weedy cits and the noble beasts. All right. No more high flown talk. But good God! Simon, you claim to know people. Surely you can understand what I’m feeling. If I’d had that giraffe shot, that boy would be alive now. What does A do about that?’

‘I don’t understand, Bobby, why you harp on that. If that is the only negligence, Beard’s to blame, not you. Leacock was right about that. The Veterinary Adviser has a final say in the disposal of animals rendered dangerous by disease of any kind. I don’t understand why you insist on taking the blame.’

‘Charles Langley-Beard has had a hell of a life. He’s the best “Dead Prof” we’ve ever had. You ask some of the older keepers. The chap’s got ulcers with family worries as it is. It would be a disgrace to start bawling him out over a thing like this.’

‘Well if he’s to blame …’

‘Look, Simon, I’m too old to travel hard now. That means my serious expeditionary work’s over. In any case anything that’s any good is being blown sky high these days. Why not go with it?’

The exhibitionistic quality of his defiantly asserted archaism was thrown into highlight as he stood near the exit. His small, curly brimmed bowler hat, his broadly checked tweeds, his umbrella, gloves and vivid chestnut suede shoes seemed such a ridiculous challenge to the open necked shirts and billowing trousers of the ordinary summer visitors around him.

I said sharply, ‘You’re not going to the guillotine, Bobby.’

Then suddenly as I looked at his lined, sensual soldier-clubman’s face, it seemed like that of an old, sick puma that I had watched each morning last winter on my walk to the office, dying out its last days in the uncongenial snow and sleet.

I said, ‘I’m much more on your side than you think, Bobby, and that goes for a lot of the younger people.’

In so far as the statement had any meaning at all, I was doubtful of its truth. As a result I was conscious of sounding hesitant. But Bobby obviously mistook the note for sincerity. He smiled.

‘Thank you, Simon. But I don’t want you to think I’m grousing. I seemed just now to be putting the blame on window dressers like Leacock or on this ghastly government. Who’s responsible for letting people like that get there? Me and my kind. We shall get it in the neck and we deserve it.’

This time his jeremiad had no sad overtones. His voice was jaunty as he asked the commissionaire at the exit to get him a cab. The prospect of Götterdämmerung clearly invigorated him. As I walked towards the Staff Restaurant past the melancholy adjutant stork, standing one legged and gloomy in its paddock, I felt that the profit, if any, of our conversation had been Bobby’s, not mine, nor that of future young Filsons, nor yet the Zoo’s. However the misery in the puma’s eye had haunted me all the winter, and now for a moment I had been able to banish it by proxy.

A moment later the Director caught up with me, all redolent with lavender soap to greet his lady wife, as he was apt to call her. He walked beside me with his curious self-assured roll – part jockey, part sailor – neither walks of life that could have played much part in his scheme of things as an ambitious scientist administrator. His walk always suggested to me – it was part of my constant sense of his clownishness – that he was avoiding what my mother would have called ‘an accident in his trousers’. Yet neither snobbish nor comic devices could really successfully eliminate the strong liking that I often felt for him. He had the unfair appeal to one’s protective instincts of all those who are totally without charm.

He said, ‘I’ve drafted something for the Press. The whole thing shows, of course, how unwise it was of my predecessor to abolish the post of Public Relations Officer. I know there had to be economies, but the last thing to economize on is anything that shows. As it is I can’t do anything about restoring the post, because everything’s got to be subordinated now to getting a real National Park going.’ He sucked irritably at his pipe. Then, perhaps charmed for a moment, as I was, by the sun playing on the beds of tulips, he said cheerfully,

‘On the whole though, apart from its tragic human aspect, I think today’s events may do a great deal of good. I didn’t want to harp on it too much in front of Falcon, but an accident of this kind in that cramped old paddock is exactly the thing we need in order to win over a lot of the Fellows who are still doubtful about a change of policy. The more we can carry the dissidents with us the better. There’s no harm in pleasing people, ever.’ As though to illustrate this, he said, ‘Your support has been one of the most encouraging things for me, you know, Carter. The younger generation for one thing. And then Godmanchester thinks highly of you. And you’ve got two important strings to your bow. You alone can challenge this nonsense about the administrative difficulties of the thing. But almost more important is your field work on British mammals. It could be a very useful reputation to me at this time. You’ve been off those “Wild Life” programmes for far too long. You’re the television chap, not me, you know. For you it’s a form of expression. For me it’s only a means to an end.’

I said, ‘We can’t say that until after Friday week, can we? Television stars are born overnight.’

To my delight, he took this in his stride.

‘We shall see. You and Mrs Carter will be at Mrs Leacock’s buffet supper that evening, won’t you? I shall rely on you for a sincere opinion of my performance purely from the point of view of the medium. This chap Maskell who’s producing me seems a good man.’

He left so strong an interrogative note floating in the air, that I was forced to reply.

‘Yes, he’s very competent, I believe.’

If I was to be made as important as this, I felt that now was the moment to insist upon my anxiety. I found it difficult to speak convincingly to Leacock; his concept of sincerity was to my ear so patently theatrical that with him I found my own natural tendency to understatement doubled. However I tried. My voice sounded to me like a bad movie version of someone speaking in the confessional.

I said, ‘Leacock, I must confess that I’m not happy about the very possible negligence that may have led to this morning’s accident. If there has been any carelessness, it surely must be brought home to the offender.’

‘My dear Carter, Falcon’s taken on the blame, although, as I pointed out, it’s really not his. I don’t think we can ask more of him than that.’

‘I don’t think we should ask anyone to take blame that isn’t theirs.’

‘I hope you don’t feel that I’ve been hard on Falcon. That’s the last impression I want to give.’

‘No, of course not. You misunderstand me. If Beard’s to blame, then he should get the rocket. Whoever’s responsible …’

‘I think Langley-Beard’s been naughty, if you like. But he’s worked off his feet. And he’s the best Prosector the Society’s had for thirty years or more. Ask any of the older keepers.’

The reiteration of the cliché I had already heard from Bobby Falcon irritated me.

I said, ‘I’d prefer the opinion of a first-rate anatomist.’

Leacock stopped and stared into the distance through the antics with which the giant panda on its swing was entertaining the crowd.

‘You’ll make a great mistake, Carter,’ he said, ‘if you treat sheer experience lightly in our work here.’

‘I’ve no doubt at all that Beard’s excellent. But if he has made so serious a mistake surely something must be said. For the sake of the staff in the future.’

‘Langley-Beard hasn’t lived in a glass case, I can assure you. He’s had a very hard life. He’s a brilliant and highly strung man. I should be very sorry if a sound of this rumour got to him before I’ve had a chance to talk to him myself. People think of him as a specialist, a dedicated man. And so he is. But he’s more than that. He’s surprised me lately. If anyone might suffer in the early days of a National Park, it’s him. Only in the early stages, of course. Eventually, as I’ve told him, the laboratory work will be on a scale that will make this place look like a school stinks room. But quite frankly I had expected to have some opposition from him. Not at all, he’s been most loyal. And I value loyalty very much, Carter, when I need it. Very few people here know him. He’s an extraordinarily shy chap. Your wit would probably frighten him.’

As a matter of fact failure to break down Beard’s reserve was a very sore point with me. I like to think I make contact with people easily. After all, if a non-specialist can’t do that, what can he do? However I’d failed with Beard. But I knew that Leacock had pretty certainly made even less contact with him, so I decided not to admit my failure.

I said, ‘As a matter of fact I am one of the few people he talks easily to.’

‘Oh! Well, I’d very much appreciate it, if you’d say nothing about this to him. I’d like to get it over to him in my own way.’ He stopped and, facing me, announced the end of the conversation.

‘I value these chats of ours, you know, more than you realize. And probably take a good deal more notice of what you say than you think.’

It wasn’t good enough.

I said, ‘In that case I should like to say a little more.’

He did not respond to the laugh with which I had hoped to soften the edge of my demand. He looked at his watch.

‘You mustn’t keep Mrs Leacock waiting,’ I said, ‘I’ll walk with you to your car park.’

Any reminder that he alone on the staff had the privilege of a private licence to drive in London always gratified him.

He said, ‘It’s a great pleasure to see you so deeply concerned with things that affect the Society. When you first came people said you were aloof. But I always said, “Give him time.”’

‘I am deeply concerned about the question of Strawson. I can’t help thinking that it may well be his incompetence and laziness that were the cause of this accident. At the very least, a serious failure in supervision. As you know, I have no use for the man. Bobby Falcon talks of him as an “institution”; but I think that simply means that he’s dug himself into a position where he claims all sorts of rights that the other head keepers – old Filson, for example – never would. He maybe “Elephant Joe” to the popular Press, but to me he’s a conceited windbag, who if he ever was useful to the place, has long eaten up his fat. I don’t think this officer-N.C.O. attitude of Bobby’s is good enough. All right, he is responsible for Strawson; but in that case he should keep him in order.’

‘Look,’ said Edwin Leacock, ‘aren’t we a bit in danger of letting a lot of small issues crowd out the essential point?’

‘I can’t regard the loss of life as a small issue.’

‘No. Of course you can’t. But I’ll shock you to the extent of saying that there are bigger issues. I honestly believe, Carter, that for the first time we have a real chance of creating a National Zoological Park in Great Britain. But the majority of the Fellows are still not convinced. If we could win over Godmanchester for example … but there’s a pretty heavy battery of expert artillery on the other side … and Falcon’s one of their biggest guns. It isn’t only that he’s a celebrity and a one-time national hero, it must also be said straightaway that he really knows wild life conditions. What is never understood, of course, is that he speaks from a great knowledge of animals at liberty. I’m concerned with limited liberty. But never mind that. He’s got great charm and he’s very popular. I cannot afford the slightest appearance of vindictiveness against a man like that. I’m considered insensitive enough as it is. And I cannot appear to interfere with the day to day management of the mammal houses. But, in my belief it just wants some incident, some effective showdown, to clinch our argument with the doubters. I don’t say this morning’s affair is it. Probably not. But properly handled it could strengthen my case enormously. But we must stick to the point that antiquated enclosures mean danger to life.’

He waved his hand towards the Decimus Burton raven cage. Its beauty was always to my feeling the one vindication of Bobby’s passion for the Victorian Zoo.

‘This sort of thing,’ he said, ‘is a serious danger to both staff and public. We’ve got to use this giraffe incident so that it brings that home without making it a personal issue.’

The ravens croaked, as well they might at such a naïve lack of scruple.

I said, ‘I had always thought of ravens as a Gothic horror rather than as a serious menace to human life.’

I’m afraid my disgust came all too clearly to Leacock through my sarcasm. When he spoke I knew that I had angered him too much to get any satisfaction from him over the issue of Filson’s death.

‘The trouble with your generation is that you’re simply not capable of real seriousness. No, I won’t say your generation, I’ll say the younger intellectuals. The ordinary man is less prejudiced and has more common sense. If a system or a building or a cage is antiquated and dangerous he will see it. And no amount of talk will blind him to the fact.’

I felt angry now.

‘You say that ordinary people are unprejudiced. I think you mean they are more suggestible. Perhaps they are. But I’m pretty sure that once their emotions are touched, their commonsense as you call it will not distinguish between fine shades. An accident like Filson’s won’t make them say, “Let’s have an open Zoo where the animals are free.” Far from it. They’ll simply say, “Do away with Zoos altogether.”’

Edwin Leacock stood quite still in front of a small flowering cherry. Set before an object of such fragile prettiness, his ugliness was quite grotesque. With his long nose and round eyes he was like a proboscis monkey that had wandered – as bears and monkeys seem frequently to do – into the setting of a Japanese print.

‘I wonder if you realize how utterly irresponsible that sort of talk is, Carter?’ he said. ‘I’m trying to do something big. The least I could expect from my colleagues surely is encouragement, not a lot of carping criticism.’

I told myself that the most important thing was to get him to pursue some inquiry about Filson’s death. I put on what I always hope is a boyish rueful grin.

I said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s the way I’m made. The more I’m impressed by anything, the more I feel I must criticize it. It must be infuriating, I know.’

The Director said, ‘That’s quite all right, Carter. I understand perfectly well. Criticizing their elders is the proper activity of the young. Now, look. Don’t bother to come to my car with me. Cut along to lunch. I know what an appetite I used to have at your age after a hard morning’s work.’

I looked to see if he was being sarcastic; but it was not so. My boyish grin had been all too successful. From a difficult colleague of thirty-five I had reduced myself to a nice, typical argumentative lad of eighteen.

I faced staff luncheon without any comforting conviction of achievement.

*

At the staff luncheon table there was seated the Zoo’s Prosector, Charles Langley-Beard, and he was eating a vast plate of ravioli that reeked of Parmesan cheese. Shyness and stink! I imagined my arrival home and Martha crying, ‘Well, for heaven’s sake, what storm’s driven you into harbour so early?’; my replying, ‘Shyness and stink’ and our bursting into laughter, which the bewildered nurse would try to share, making us only giggle the more. The picture made me laugh aloud as I sat down opposite to Langley-Beard.

A pink flush ran through his waxen cheeks and up to the roots of his very sparse hair. He obviously felt himself forced to smile in concord—a glistening somewhere behind his thick-lensed glasses, a faint stretching of his thin lips—then, fearing that he’d done the wrong thing, he gave a dry, little cough.

‘I haven’t seen Tallis lately,’ he said.

Tallis had been at school with me some twenty years before; later he had studied anatomy under the Prosector. We had discovered this link in a long series of halting, excavatory conversations. I had not seen the man for fifteen years; the Prosector, I believe, not for ten. It was unlikely that either of us would ever see him again. I should have had the courage to snap the absurd link, instead I said,

‘I believe that when I last heard of him, he’d got an appointment at the University of Sydney.’

‘Yes, that’s what I heard.’

I then remembered that it was Beard who had told me.

I determined to make an effort to clear away the undergrowth of small talk in which as usual we had become entangled. The Prosector’s other colleagues, no doubt, through timidity, had respected his shyness; I had not; it was up to me then to relieve it. But with what? Our Zoological interests were set such poles apart: mine, in so far as they deserved the name, ecological, derived from a life-long hobby of observing British mammals; his so brilliantly yet narrowly physiological and anatomical. More daunting was the extreme yet mysterious misery of his private life that somehow barred every approach to intimacy with a signpost of ‘Private. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ Most of his colleagues, knowing the private load of sorrow he carried and not wishing to know too exactly its contents, had placed him apart, conveniently haloed for his self-sacrifice to his family and his devotion to his work. To Sanderson, of course, his unhappiness nobly borne was a source of peculiar satisfaction. Early on in my service at the Zoo he had, so to speak, warned me off holy ground. ‘That was very fine of you, Carter,’ he had said, ‘bringing out our Langley-Beard at tea today. But you’ll forgive me if I say that perhaps it would be better not to intrude on his shyness. You couldn’t know that, of course, and what you did was very fine. But he’s rather set apart, you know, in a life of dedication. To his work, and to his family. Tragedy had set its mark on him before he came here. I don’t think it would be blasphemous to call him “a man acquainted with grief”. His wife’s in Broadmoor. She killed two of the children. He lives for his son, a brilliant young chap but early crippled by polio. And then there are other family sorrows, I believe. It’s all taken him out of the ken of ordinary chaps like you and me. I suppose its only his passion for his anatomical work here that’s kept him sane. That and the heroism that grief brings out. Great tragedy of that kind, Carter, is a very beautiful thing, you know.’

After the failure of Tallis, I thought a little savagely that if tragedy was so much in his line, what could be a better topic of conversation than Filson’s death.

I said, ‘The details of this morning’s accident hardly bear consideration.’

He remained silent, making little pyramids of the bread he had crumbled in his nervousness. Then to my surprise, he said, ‘Let’s not consider them then.’

I thought that my overture had worked miraculously: the Prosector had made, however inopportunely, a kind of joke which was certainly none the worse for being a little waspish.

Laughing, I said, ‘You have a sharp ear for ghoulishness. I hadn’t even realized that my interest was so morbid. But you’re right of course. Nobody ever says that details are too horrible or too ghastly without wanting to go into them!’

He said, ‘Oh, I suppose the details are much the same as in any violent accident. You forget that I served my time in an emergency ward. No, I only mean that the whole thing is Falcon’s affair, not ours.’ He blushed, ‘I’m so sorry. Of course, it may be yours. I can’t tell that. But it’s no business of mine.’

I should dearly have loved to retort, but it was difficult to disregard Leacock’s emphatic request.

I said simply, ‘I think the responsibilities of the various departments here are very clear. It’s one of the best aspects of the place from my point of view as an administrator.’

I left it to sink in.

‘I suppose you think I’m to blame for not having that animal shot,’ he said.

I felt that silence would be a sufficient reply. It was.

‘I know perfectly well that my say is the decisive one. I also know that it’s not my business to interfere beyond a certain point in the running of another man’s department. I told Falcon that the giraffe had an inoperable tumour on the liver and I said it would have to be killed. He asked me if it was in pain or merely discomfort. It sometimes seems to me that people like Falcon don’t think. As if a thing like pain can be measured with a slide rule. However since there was no external evidence that the beast was suffering particularly, I had to agree that it might be no more than discomfort. He seized on that opinion to say that it was particularly important that no action should be taken for a fortnight, until Leacock’s television show was over. Of course, as you’re thinking, I had the power to insist, but it hardly seemed to me sufficient grounds for a major row with one of my colleagues.’

‘Unfortunately a young keeper was left to look after the animal and lost his life as a result.’

He looked surprised. ‘That really isn’t anything to do with me, you know. That was Falcon’s affair. Of course, you may well feel that you have to criticize him, since it’s a matter of use of staff, but …’

I asked, ‘Isn’t it a question of humanity?’

‘Humanity would be all right if things were run properly. This young keeper’s death is a very good example of that.’

I said, ‘All the same you tell me that on this occasion things were not run properly and as a result somebody died in a very horrible way.’

He did not answer immediately. He was trying to balance an over-large piece of Cheddar on a small biscuit. He could sense I was watching him and he blushed; but he did not leave off until he had got the whole top-heavy structure into his mouth.

‘Lots of people will die messily. That’s in the order of things I should have thought. Competence can prevent some of the disasters. The others aren’t meant to be prevented; they’re meant to be accepted. But, of course, if you don’t believe that …’

He was intent on noisily stirring sugar into his Nescafé for a few moments, then he looked up and said:

‘The last thing I mean to do is to put the blame on to Falcon. As a matter of fact I imagine he was in a very difficult position. Once Leacock’s set his mind on things, he can be very hard to move. And Falcon’s a romantic, isn’t he? If Leacock said that giraffe was essential to his television show, Falcon would feel it was his duty to make the beast available just because he dislikes the whole thing so much.’

I suppose that I looked as much surprised as I did disgusted, because he began to say,

‘Look here, if you didn’t know that, Carter, I don’t want to be drawn into a lot of gossip, Leacock’s never been a good zoologist, but his ideas for the display of the collections, appeals to the public and that sort of thing, seem to me a good deal better than most people here recognize …’

He stopped and, when I was about to question him further, made a slight negative signal to me with his index finger. A moment later I heard the thick suety voice of Dr Englander behind me. On one thing, at any rate, Langley-Beard and I were in agreement, we would not criticize the Director in the presence of the Curator of Reptiles.

‘No giraffe cutlets on the menu?’ Dr Englander asked, ‘I suppose that means you’ve hogged poor old Smokey to feed your numerous progeny, eh, Beard? Well, I hope the family cooking pot is a large one.’

The Prosector’s hand was trembling so much as he raised his coffee cup that I thought it better to take on his battle myself in order to avoid a scene.

I said, ‘I doubt if even with your constitution, Englander, you’d have wanted to eat a diseased giraffe.’

He sat down and ordered roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. He patted the waitress’s hand, as he said, ‘I like a nice bit of brown outside fat, my dear. See what you can do for me, will you?’ Only then did he reply.

‘Nothing wrong with the beast was there? Except bad temper.’ Langley-Beard was able to answer for himself now.

‘It had a tumour on the liver.’

Dr Englander took some time in ordering his wine.

Then he looked at the Prosector thoughtfully.

‘You should have had it shot,’ he said. ‘An animal in pain is always a danger. It might have saved this morning’s wretched business. However, I suppose you were too interested in the pathology to put the poor beast out of its misery. All you chaps in the Dead House are the same. You’ll have us all there to cut up, but in your own good time.’

There was something about old Englander’s comfortable, well padded, insensitive jollying which was so extreme that it made me feel a certain affection for him. However it was not directed at me, but at the Prosector; he clearly found it intolerable. His whole body was shaking and he shot his arm out convulsively. Whatever he intended, he did no more harm than to spill the contents of the bowl of granulated sugar over Dr Englander’s expensive, old-fashioned tweed suit and his layers of knitted woollen waistcoats.

Englander got up and brushed himself down.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘your family don’t keep you very well house trained, do they? It’s lucky for you it was only sugar, Beard. If you’d had to buy me a new suit of the quality of this one, it would have eaten a nasty hole in your monthly budget.’

The Prosector had also got up. Leaning towards me, he said earnestly,

‘I hope you realize, Carter, that if I’d supposed for a moment that a P.M. on that giraffe would have revealed anything of the slightest interest to human medicine, I should have insisted on my own way at once, whatever anybody had said.’

To old Emile Englander, he declared, ‘Your sense of humour can be very unpleasantly out of place, you know,’ and was gone.

Dr Englander finished flicking his suit with a napkin and sat down.

‘Jumpy sort of fellow, isn’t he?’ he remarked. ‘Probably not on top of his work.’

‘Surely his trouble if anything is being too devoted to his job.’

‘It’s the same thing, Carter,’ Dr Englander said judicially. He added butter liberally to his cabbage. ‘He’s not paid enough, of course. Nobody here is.’

Since I had played so large a part in securing Government scales of pay for the Society’s staff, I was nettled.

‘We can’t all have your standards.’

‘Because I’m a rich man. What’s that got to do with it? I’m also an old man. Neither is a credential in itself. But I happen to be a first-rate herpetologist. Granted that, the fact that I’m old and experienced, and that I’ve had gumption enough to invest my money well makes me a more useful man to the Society than if I was a clever young scientist without a penny to my name. You’re like the President and Fellows of this Society, Carter, you believe a lot too much cant. They turned me down for Director because I was too near retiring age and because I had too much money. As a matter of fact if what they wanted was someone to lick their arses, they were quite right. An ambitious chap like Leacock who depends on his salary to bring up a big family is always going to please men like Godmanchester who want to be accepted at their own estimate.’

‘I don’t think you’re quite fair to Leacock. He has some excellent and courageous ideas for the future of the collections.’

‘Ideas cost money. Anybody can have ideas, but you’ve got to get them paid for. If I was in charge here, we’d have cash from every big company that thought they could make use of us. It’s the modern world. How do you think they’ve put through all these new schemes in Hamburg or in Paris?’

‘That’s an altogether larger question. But I do understand if scientists fear exploitation by industry.’

‘Do you? But then you’re not a scientist, are you? I’m sorry, but that’s all weak man’s talk. Of course you may be exploited. But so you may in any walk of life, unless you’ve got the cunning and the guts to see that you aren’t … Get me some Stilton, my dear, will you? And none of your pieces on a plate. Bring me the whole cheese … You think I’m not concerned with the welfare of the staff, don’t you, Carter? Let me tell you that my keepers are the best in the place. I give them market tips that add to their measly wages. And in return, I expect them to work hard and I don’t let them forget what’s being done in the reptile and snake gardens abroad.’

‘I don’t think you begin to be fair to the place. Take the Prosector, for example. Without making any show about it, his work is directly geared to all sorts of wider aspects of medicine.’

‘Government health service! Look; who are Beard’s equivalents abroad? Widmer, I suppose, in Hamburg; and Cuvé in Paris. They get three times the salary and six times the laboratory grant. But then they’re subsidized, by chemical firms, pest control producers, and patent medicine companies. If I’d been made Director, Beard would be getting a thumping great subsidy from some of these big pet food people. All right, turn up your nose. He’d have first-rate laboratories and he’d get enough food to nourish his weak nerves.’

‘It could be that his weak nerves are entirely the result of domestic troubles.’

Dr Englander at once agreed.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you’re quite right. His wife’s in a looney bin. And the chump won’t divorce her because of some religious scruple, though apparently he’s not an R.C. Then his son’s a cripple of some sort. It’s not the thing to say, of course, but that kind of thing doesn’t happen to first-rate people. But there you are, we can only afford the neurotics here.’

He was about to pour himself out a second glass of burgundy, when he stopped and looked at me – the wrinkled pouches of white skin below his beady eyes made him seem like an attentive old parrot. Then he decided that the wine came first. He savoured it for a moment, then swallowed.

‘They’ve got two good burgundies here,’ he said, ‘this and the Volnay ’57. Of course, that sounded as though I was getting at you. You had some sort of breakdown of health before you came here, didn’t you?’

‘No nervous trouble. I got amoebal dysentery on a collecting expedition with Falcon in Uganda. It’s not serious except that it puts all tropical work out of the question.’

‘Pity. You’ve got enough money and you’re young enough to afford serious collecting. Anyhow, if you hadn’t been ill, we shouldn’t have you here. We can only afford first-rate men when they’re crocked up. And if they’ve got enough private means to live on the salary. You can afford to work here, Beard can’t, but he hasn’t got the initiative to move.’

‘It’s only because I married a girl with money.’

‘Yes, yes, I know. You introduced me to her at that party of Falcon’s. Very pretty girl. Now if I’d been Director, I’d have appointed you. Marrying a wealthy girl shows good sense. But marrying a woman who’s off her nut is no recommendation for anyone.’

I protested that Langley-Beard might not have known of this at the time of his marriage.

Dr Englander smiled and helped himself to a large hunk of Stilton.

‘Oh, that was only my little joke,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry for the chap.’

Then, seeing that I was about to pay my bill, he added:

‘I hope you’ve got plenty of spare funds to pay damages to this young keeper’s family. If a good journalist or a clever lawyer gets hold of them they’ll probably get a thumping great award – young man in his prime, wage earner and so on. Shocking negligence. The old story. Who can blame them? The poor devils live on twopence halfpenny. They don’t get a son killed every day.’

These lunch-time conversations only made me the more anxious to take action at once; to await the Director’s return from his useful Press-handling luncheon and ask him point blank if he was to blame; or to ‘have it out’ with Bobby, wine-flushed from his luncheon at the Travellers’ Club. I knew that either would probably prove a fatal step. Yet my duty was clearly to prevent such an accident occurring again.

But as I thought of the probing, the questioning, the amateur detective work required to make sense of the mysteries and muddles that posturing and incompetence presented me with, I was immediately assailed by the absurdity of the whole thing. The jealousies, ambitions, and paraded loyalties of Leacock and Falcon and Beard and Strawson appeared to me as utterly ridiculous; the whole puzzle of what really happened seemed a ludicrous brouhaha; and myself in the role of unraveller suggested an impossible figure of fun. I could see it only as material which complete with imitations of all the actors, including myself, I might later use to entertain the world at large. Yet Filson’s screams had been real. To meet such a dilemma the only course surely was to relax my emotions in proof reading and to return to a decision later.

Of forty-two grey seals dissected by Dr Alison Armstrong of the Edinburgh Zoological Society during 1968, the stomach contents of five alone had proved to be devoid of any trace of nematoda. A footnote told us that Pattie Henderson was grateful to Dr Armstrong for this information as yet unpublished but eventually to appear in an article on ‘The diet and longevity of seals commonly inhabiting the waters of the British Isles’. My own contribution to Dr Armstrong’s work was, of course, indirect; for ‘commonly inhabiting’ I substituted ‘commonly to be found inhabiting’. It was a soothing exercise, but not for long. Into it broke Pattie’s own voice on the telephone as a most unwelcome reminder of the source of human knowledge. ‘I say, look here,’ her voice was deep and commanding, ‘I had got a wonderful excuse about subscriptions to learned periodicals made by me as the Society’s helminthologist and can I charge them as expenses to my personal account in tax returns? Just the sort of thing to excite a one hundred per cent bureaucrat like you. And God help the girl who tries to excite you in any other way. But I’m not going to give you the pleasure of that little problem. What are excuses between old friends? I simply rang up because of this ghastly business. Nutting and Newton have both heard that the poor chap would never have died if old Falcon hadn’t made a balls up. And what’s more that Leacock’s trying to hush the whole thing up. Are you coming clean or are you playing for the bosses?’

I said, ‘I can answer your question straight away, Miss Henderson. I’m afraid that official subscriptions are not chargeable as personal expenditure for income tax purposes.’

‘I do think this is pretty bloody of you, Simon. I know you have to play in with the old boys a lot of the time, it’s your job. That’s what I’m always explaining to the research chaps like Nutting and Newton. But when a ghastly thing like this happens … It certainly makes one wish that Fred Jackley were here. He’d give the younger crowd a lead and blow these old incompetents sky high.’

‘As far as I know the Aquarium has absolutely no connexion with young Filson’s death, if that’s what you were talking about, Pattie. And if there is any, I’m sure the Director who’s deputizing as head of his old department in Jackley’s absence, will know what to do.’

‘That’s a laugh. When Leacock was head of the Aquarium, he did absolutely nothing. Fred Jackley ran the place. But then you’re a babe unborn as far as the history of this place is concerned. It simply means that those of us who are determined to make some changes have to count you out as a dead loss.’

Before she could hang up, I said, ‘I’ve been correcting the proofs of your article for the Proceedings, Pattie.’

Immediately her voice took on a note of unaggrieved concern.

‘Oh Lord! What’s the English like? I thought some passages weren’t too bad this time. But I expect you’ve got out the blue pencil.’

I read her my deletions.

She said, ‘Thank you very much. I should have looked a fool if a lot of that stuff had gone in.’

Real humility always bowls me over. I said as I had not intended,

‘I’m not absolutely unaware of the other matter, you know. But in fairness to everyone concerned it is essential not to let it spread. Whatever action it may be possible to take, it won’t be helped by discussing it over the telephone.’

‘There you are, Simon, I knew you wouldn’t just be sitting on your backside doing nothing. But what shall I tell Nutting and Newton?’

In Pattie’s own idiom, I said, ‘Nuts to the one and Newts to the other. Why do they have to go around eavesdropping like two comedians playing spies?’

‘That’s not fair. If some of the rest of us were a bit less clueless, it wouldn’t do any harm.’

As she spoke, there was a knock at the door and, before I had thought, I had said automatically, ‘Come in.’ Miss Chambers gave me the sort of frosty look which suggested that she knew me to be making a long private call to a criminal associate in Buenos Aires at the Society’s expense.

I said into the mouthpiece, ‘The Director’s secretary is here, Pattie, so I must ring off.’

Pattie’s gruff voice sounded ludicrously alarmed.

‘Oh, Lord! Has she heard all we’ve been saying? Well I jolly well hope she takes it all back to him.’

Then deciding that I was pulling her leg, she said in her loudest voice, ‘She can tell old Leacock that we’ve a special tumbril ready for him. And there’ll be another for you, Simon, if you play in with the bosses.’

I rang off to prevent further harm.

Miss Chambers showed no more recognition of Pattie’s remarks than to say, ‘I shouldn’t have worried you, Mr Carter, but the Director’s kindly given me permission to go off early; and as you seemed likely to be on the telephone for some time, I thought it best to deliver his message personally. He’s gone to a rather important meeting, but he did want you to know that his efforts with the Press at lunch-time had done the trick.’

I said, ‘Thank you. Will you tell him how pleased I am? And say that, as for the other aspects of the affair that I raised this morning, I’m going on with my investigations.’

I couldn’t at all see, of course, how I was to carry out this threat. I thought that it would ease my feelings to stroll about among the crowd. If the day’s events encouraged anything in me that I disliked, it was my misanthropy. Muddles that resulted in the screams I had heard that morning did not make me wish to be either ‘good’ or ‘easy’ with people. And yet a natural liking for people, however much alloyed by ridicule or boredom or sexual desire or physical distaste – seemed central to any meaningful life I could have – else why not the indulgence of the woods and badgers, the mountain forest and the pine martens?

The high, hysterical barking of the sea lions took me to their pool to watch the crowd watch the keeper throwing fish to feed the beasts. Automatically I registered faces – fat men, thin women, rhomboid children, figures all from a strip cartoon. I tried to give them all lives – a drunken failed mink farmer from Essex, a psychically gifted mother of a North London hairdresser, and so on – but Lavater had so long been dead and I didn’t believe any more in physiognomy. In any case who can nowadays play such a social-categorizing parlour game? There are only three classes now – the élite with its boasted open end, the great prosperous mass, and the handicapped or handicap-prone. Age, arrogance, illness or inefficiency at mental arithmetic alone qualify for descent to this last class. Perhaps I should soon have found myself there, if Martha’s money …

As soon as I realized where this game was leading me I left the crowds at the sea lion pool and made straight for the new Lemur House. A gift of the French nation, during one of our McLeod Government’s pan-European phases, it had been intended as a reminder of the greatness of the Union Franchise – a tribute to Madagascar’s loyalty. When, later, relations had worsened again, some question had been mooted through the French Embassy of our paying for it; but, as Dr Englander liked to point out, ‘it was far beyond the range of our twopenny halfpenny budget’. It was indeed a miracle of glass beauty, domed, and wired not in cages but as a whole so that from outside the lovely slender creatures could be seen in shadow show, capering and swinging across the roof; while from inside, one looked up to a Douanier Rousseau world of tropical leaves and flowers, ringed tails, great round amber eyes, jet black velvety feet, and long black noses pointed, it seemed, in derision at the absurd human creatures below. Even Falcon conceded it worthy to stand by the Crystal Palace. Our Director used it as an illustration of a necessary step towards free ranging primates. For me it was a mysterious source of solace and of release; for the lemur’s antic play was both sensuous and ludicrous; lemurs and gibbons! It would be easy in relation to either, I think, for the sensuous to change to the sensual. They alone have given the simian world the delicate twist that might excite human desire. Why has it not done so more often? Perhaps, in the long run, sheer physical difficulty is the censor that controls our sexual range.

I was puzzling on this that afternoon in the Lemur House, when Matthew Price’s voice broke into or rather shattered my abstraction. Curator of Birds, Matthew combined the macaw, the guinea fowl, the peacock and the seagull in his voice. It was a discord that in my years at the Zoo I had come to love.

‘How very nice to see you looking so happy, Simon my dear,’ he shrieked, alarming the visitors, setting at defiance the lemurs. The nice thing was that he meant it.

‘I was wondering why more people haven’t been guilty of sinful relations with monkeys,’ I said.

Matthew has an old-fashioned aesthete’s love of recondite smut. Nevertheless I’d forgotten the scholar in him, which was always most in evidence when sex was in question.

‘Oh, I’m not entirely sure they haven’t,’ he said with great seriousness. ‘I expect there was a lot of it with Julia and Messalina and all those Roman ladies, don’t you? There’s nothing in Juvenal or Suetonius certainly. But I’m not at all sure about the Empress Theodora. I fancy she was rogered by an ape more than once in her circus acts. I’ve rather forgotten my Procopius, you see. But I’ll look it up tonight.’

He gazed up at the lemurs for a second.

‘Anyway they’re not for me,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a new lory from Brazil. Now there’s a beauty for you. Come and look at it.’

We set off for his beloved Parrot House. Whether his ‘lory’ would turn out to be a macaw, parrot, parrakeet, or budgerigar. I had no means of knowing. He mocked his own renown as the author of the definitive classification of Psittacidae, and incidentally the scientific pedantry of his colleagues, by the deliberate use of a vague or an out-dated naming of his birds: – ‘a lory’ – ‘a splendid bird of the toucan type, I won’t trouble you with its full name’ – ‘something new to go with our owls and eagles’ – or even, on occasion, ‘a magnificent addition to our seafowl’.

The bird was a large and very beautiful parrot – golden yellow with a bill of pinkish horn.

‘The Queen of Bavaria’s Conure,’ Matthew announced proudly, ‘Aratinga Guarouba. But you needn’t bother about that.

‘Completely new to our collections,’ he said with pride. His approach to his work was simple – a schoolboy’s love of ‘completing the series’, an aesthete’s passion for the decorative qualities of the birds, a scholar’s passion for classification. For ecology, anatomy, evolution, demography, indeed for any aspect of zoology that had wider implications he had a great distaste and allowed himself proficiency in them only to the extent that was absolutely essential to his practical purpose.

I said, ‘It’s a very elegant bird, Matthew. What does it feed upon?’

‘Oh, grapes and things,’ he said vaguely. ‘Filson has its diet card. The collecting man drew it up. He was the most ghastly bore. He would tell me all about the bird’s nesting habits in Brazil. Well, it isn’t going to nest in Brazil. Are you, my love? It’s going to live here.’

He paused and produced some nuts from his waistcoat pocket. He pushed his long beaky-nosed face towards the bird. Growing short sight was the only physical sign that he showed of being a contemporary of the other curators. This myopia was not helped by his greying fair hair that flopped over his eyes. As to mental senescence, he was so completely outside contemporary life that it hardly applied. His nose seemed within range of the bird’s beak before his fingers had offered the nut; I always feared that he would be badly bitten one of these days, but the mystique which he asserted almost in parody – ‘The birds know me, you see’ – seemed strangely to hold true.

‘Thank God! The ghastly collecting bore came yesterday and not today. Filson’s so good with them, you see. And the poor old thing could hardly have been expected to cope today.’

‘You must have had an awful day, Matthew.’

‘Well, it has been rather hell. Still it would have been worse if the old man had seen the accident. He might have died from shock or something. I shall never get anyone so useful again. Luckily a young keeper of the eagles was near that tiresome Giraffe House when it happened and he let me know at once. I whisked old Filson home immediately. I broke the news to him in the taxi and then hung about, you see, while he told Mrs F. Then I sat with them a bit while they talked about the boy. That part was real hell. They were waiting for a summons from the hospital. Actually I knew that he’d died before they’d got him into the ambulance. But it’s a good thing to remember with the Filsons of this world that they have to be told about death gradually.’

I went through my egalitarian hoops. ‘Don’t most of us prefer that?’

Matthew’s willowy form swayed slightly–his usual gesture of surprise. ‘Well, only children, I suppose. Or people like children – the Filsons and so on. I’m rather fond of my sister Diana, you know, but I should hardly want someone keeping the news of her death from me as though I were still in the nursery.’

The golden parrot, bored with our company or disgusted with our inattention, let out a sudden and cruelly shrill scream that made me jump. Matthew leaned forward to me confidentially, and, as though explaining a point of peculiar scientific difficulty, said,

‘That’s the noise they make, you see.’

We moved out of this little back room, reserved for new specimens before their exhibition, into the main Parrot House. The combined shrieks of the birds and of two parties of schoolchildren deafened me but seemed only to inspire Matthew to greater feats of crescendo. At intervals he said,

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up,’ either to the nearest parrot or to the nearest child at random.

Shouting, I asked, ‘Did they take the news really badly?’

‘My dear Simon, it’s hardly the sort of time when I presume to judge people’s conduct – especially my head keeper’s.’

‘I meant were they very upset?’

‘Well, I suppose so. They’re very ordinary people. Not Arnold Wesker characters. Or whatever that man is called, who wrote about all those brutalized peasants. Mrs F. said a lot of very embarrassing things. But then she does that anyway.’

‘You’d met her already?’

‘Well, of course. He is my head keeper. And then they had this son very late. Mrs F. was only just in time. Naturally he was the great thing of their life. So one must do everything one can for the poor old things.’

‘Not every curator would bother so much, Matthew.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Matthew dismissed the actions of his socially inferior colleagues. ‘Anyhow, the main thing now is the funeral. They’re R.C.s, so at least there won’t be any of that awful cremation with nondenominational prayers and things. Diana and I will go, of course. But there ought to be someone from the Society as a whole. I don’t think quite the Director, do you? Because after all young Filson was only an assistant to the head keeper. I suppose Bobby Falcon will go since he was the young man’s Curator; although, God knows, it can’t be said he took much care of him. You’d better go, Simon, for the Society. I don’t know that normally the Secretary need go to a new keeper’s funeral. But old Filson’s been here a long time. And the compliment will be to him.’

From my first arrival at the Zoo, Matthew had taken over the superintendence of the etiquette of my post.

‘I rather liked what I saw of the boy.’

‘Did you? Perhaps I didn’t see as much as you saw. Anyway he was engaged to a night club hostess.’

‘A Butlin’s hostess, Matthew.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t go to night clubs, you see. He was a ghastly bore about his singing. Old Filson brought him along some years back, before he came to work here. He tried to show off in front of his father by talking terrible balls about the Verdi Requiem. So I simply said that of course I adored Verdi but that Gounod was so much better.’

‘I was surprised that he should have come here to work at all.’

‘Oh, but the Filsons have always worked at the Zoo.’

‘But he was rather highly educated for this sort of job.’

‘Yes? I don’t know about that. They’re all rather educated nowadays, aren’t they? Anyway Mrs F. was a school-mistress or something. Even this morning when the poor thing was in such a state, she felt she had to talk to me about all this tedious business of war with France and Germany. I didn’t like to snub the poor creature at such a time, but it’s really hardly her affair. I simply said, “Well, we can’t do anything about it, can we?”’

I felt it useless to contest this. I said, ‘I can’t imagine your conversing with a school-mistress anyway, Matthew. She must have something rather special.’

Matthew swayed again in surprise. ‘Oh, no. I think she’s a ghastly bitch. But what I think is hardly to the point, is it? The only thing, that matters now is seeing that the proper wreaths are sent. Mrs F. said something about wanting cheerful flowers. I can’t think what she meant. But then I think all flowers are hell.’

‘I suppose she meant coloured flowers and not white ones.’

‘But you can’t have coloured flowers at funerals, can you?’

I said acidly, ‘I think a lot of middle-class people do.’

‘Oh? How very extraordinary! Well, I suppose the flower people that Diana goes to will know about it. You’d better warn Falcon. He’s got rather an odd background, but I should imagine his family had the ordinary white flowers at funerals.’

‘Has anyone said anything to you about the accident being due to the negligence of old Strawson, Matthew?’

Matthew looked very grand.

‘I really haven’t much time to listen to gossip,’ he said; ‘in any case I should hardly interfere in Bobby Falcon’s department, should I?’

‘Englander says that some journalist or crooked lawyer will get hold of the Filsons and persuade them to sue the Society for vast sums.’

Matthew stood for a moment, scratching the head feathers of a blue and yellow macaw. He was oblivious of the crowd that had gathered to watch him.

‘Englander’s mother was a Belgian Jewess,’ he said suddenly.

‘I haven’t time to listen to anti-semitism, Matthew dear.’

Matthew was very surprised. ‘I can’t imagine why you should have to do so,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘if there is any question of legal action or that sort of thing, I shall introduce old Filson to my lawyers. They’ll see that his claim is a suitable one.’

He seemed to tire of the subject, for he led the way to the exit door.

He peered towards the flamingo pool past which were riding children mounted on camels.

‘I can’t think why they want to have giraffes and camels and all these clumsy mammals anyway,’ he said. ‘The whole place should be one vast aviary. With orangeries and gazebos. Sanderson could breed insects for the birds,’ he conceded, ‘and we could retain the llamas to draw the carriages for the public. And perhaps yaks for the winter months.’

He paused for a moment. Then as though a new largeness of vision had come to him,

‘There could be gazelles. They’re very graceful. Isn’t there a Thomson’s gazelle? I seem to have heard Falcon talk of some such creature.’

He, too, had his ideal vision, but it strayed too far into fantasy for me to share it.

I said, ‘You’ll think me sentimental but I can’t get the horror of that boy’s death out of my mind.’

‘I don’t know about sentimental.’ He placed the word in inverted commas as though it was a person or a place of which he was ignorant. ‘But after all you were only a child in the war. If you’d been in Crete or at Tobruk, you couldn’t possibly get into a state about things like this. Most of one’s friends, you see, were either killed or taken prisoner.’

With Matthew the aesthete MC I simply could not deal.

I only said, ‘Any injury to the balls horrifies me, I suppose.’

‘I suppose so. But who said anything about balls?’

‘Rackham told me. The giraffe trod on young Filson’s testicles and crushed them.’

Matthew went into hoots of laughter that turned into hiccoughs. Recovering his breath, he screamed,

‘Kicked in the balls by a giraffe! Oh God! I can’t think why it’s so wildly funny, can you? But it is.’

He repeated the phrase and a passing clergyman looked round in horror.

I said, ‘Ssh! Matthew. Everyone’s listening.’

‘Everyone? Oh, you mean that clergyman. He probably hasn’t got any. They often haven’t.’

Although I was already infected by the hysteria of his laughter, I said, ‘An appalling injury like that isn’t really funny, Matthew.’

‘Nonsense. Of course it is. Even if it had happened, it would be. And in any case it didn’t. My eagle man told me exactly what occurred. You know how even the nicest of those people adore the gory details. The wretched man was wounded by some spike. I can’t think what they have spikes lying about for. I shouldn’t dream of leaving anything lying about in my paddocks – not even with those beastly cassowaries. And then the giraffe trampled on his chest and broke his ribs.’

‘But Rackham told me.’

‘Oh, all those old things like Rackham have minds like sewers.’

He began to roar with laughter again.

‘Oh, God! What a bore,’ he said, ‘I can’t possibly tell old Filson, can I? Although he does adore a good dirty joke.’

He began to make his way back to his office above the Parrot House, then he returned for a moment and said very earnestly,

‘Oh, by the way, Simon, I shouldn’t repeat that to anybody else, if I were you. You see it might get back to the Filsons. And if we can do no more when bloody things like this happen, we can at least see that nothing is made worse.’

He seemed to be rebuking me.

Fortified a little by this meeting I returned to my office, and reducing the submitted statements of work from our six research students to précis, produced our annual progress report for the Nuffield Foundation in less than an hour.

*

At the North Gate stood Sanderson, holding the evening paper. He said, ‘This picture of Princess Anne at the South Pole is so charming. I shall have to save this copy or else Mrs Blessington will be quarrelling with Miss Delaney over theirs. They’ve both got collections of royal cuttings, but strictly between ourselves dear old Miss Delaney’s is the best. And yet she’ll never see it.’

I was not in the mood for confidences about Sanderson’s two old retired housekeepers; the main thing was that Sanderson had scanned the evening paper and found nothing of his indiscretion to alarm him. For all the Director’s successful luncheon, I had not myself felt sure – journalists after all talk to one another.

I said, ‘Well so far, so good then.’

Sanderson was evidently bewildered, but he took my words for some generally benevolent sentiment.

He smiled, ‘She’s doing splendid things for us all in these tours of hers, Princess Anne.’

‘I was talking about Filson’s death.’

A look of vexation came over Sanderson’s face.

‘I’ve decided not to say anything about it to the old ladies, Carter. Mrs Blessington would take it in her stride. She’s got extraordinary guts for an eighty-year-old. But it’s Miss Delaney I worry for. The blind live in such a world of mystery that we can’t be too careful. I only hope there’s nothing in the evening paper. The old ladies’ copy gets delivered before I’m home, and Mrs B. always reads it aloud to Miss D.’

I think he was afraid lest I should pursue what he had now decided was an ‘unpleasant topic’, for his eye wandered around the crowd at the gates and settled ‘soupily’ upon an old mad-man who visited the Zoo each day with Bible texts and bags of unsuitable foods for the animals. The Zoo like all public places had its regular plague of cranks, spongers, beggars, con. men and plain lunatics; it was Sanderson’s habit to attach himself to all of them.

Now he said sentimentally, ‘Paper Bag Peter! I’m very fond of him, you know, Carter. He’s been coming here so many years. I believe things are not easy for him now. He used to live with his old mother but she died … I wonder if we could find him some little job about the place. For all his tricks, he’s got a strangely childlike quality about him somewhere. He was asking me the other day, and I said you were the man to provide jobs.’

It was also Sanderson’s habit to take up absurd philanthropic enterprises and then hand them on to me when they proved difficult.

I turned away. I was too disgusted to say anything to him. I left him to go to his bus stop, and buying copies of all the papers, set off for a seat on Primrose Hill in order to read them before I made my short walk home. Two of the papers, it seemed, had ignored the incident; the other two carried very minor paragraphs about it.

My fears had been groundless, but it was not hard to see why: even Princess Anne, the first royal visitor to Antarctic territories so recently reclaimed from the ice blocks, had been driven from the front page by the newest note sent to our Government from the European Alliance.

The most liberal of our evening papers begged in its editorial that no word like ‘threat’ should be used to describe this document; judging by its own headlines it preferred the word ‘ultimatum’. The other three had less qualms and were unanimous in describing it as a threat. It must be said that if any words have a definable meaning they were right. The European Alliance complained of the increase of smuggling that had followed their embargo on British goods. From now on any smuggler, they declared, who was caught in possession of contraband would be summarily executed. The President of the Board of Trade, while not permitting herself to reveal the nature of our official answer to the note, had spoken of Britain’s absolute duty to trade with such uncommitted European countries as Switzerland and Austria. Two of the newspapers saw German arrogance in this new move; the other two divined French intransigence. Our President, Lord Godmanchester’s paper declared that our Coalition Government had neither the breadth nor the strength to make the dignified but firm reply that would maintain peace with honour. ‘Peace with honour’ indeed was its editorial headline and it was clear that the editor felt that he had discovered a new and telling phrase. As this was no time for false modesty, the editorial continued, there could be no hesitation in declaring that in the return of Lord Godmanchester to high office lay our only hope. It added ominously that even then the nation might have woken up too late.

My first reaction, I’m afraid a thoroughly petty one, was a certain annoyance that, however unfortunate the consequences might have been to the status of the Zoo, Sanderson’s folly had not pursued him further. This malicious and frivolous reflection was followed by another hardly less so: I was delighted that Leacock would not be able to claim, or at any rate claim with any reason, that his influence had saved the day.

Then the print swam in front of me, the letters diving and blurring and fading only to shape themselves into the one word – War. The stab of terror was sharp. It was also familiar. It carried memories of similar apprehensions right back into my childhood. Yet, just because I had so often seen these stale feeble phrases in print before, I could never be sure that here at last might not be the genuine herald, the true devil’s emissary come to warn us of God knew what horror and agony that would precede the annihilation of Martha, of the children, and of me. One day, after all, the real wolf would come to give meaning to all the false cries that had lulled us.

For a few seconds the sharp terror tightened my breathing and constricted my scrotum. But it had happened now so often and so pointlessly that it quickly vanished into the sea of anxious doubts in which like everyone else I had learned to swim my life. It was followed by a more selfless yet no less genuine sorrow for the obliteration of human creation – conventional thoughts of human struggle and human hope and human happiness gave me for a moment a no less conventional choke in my throat. Yet this also was too customary a sadness to last for more than a minute or two. To such quickly effaced emotions had years of war alarms brought so many of us. In the end I could only really feel anxious as to how Martha would take this latest scare. As if, from previous experience I did not know! She would hide her fear for the children bravely from me; we would once again delay and then give way to the familiar debate we had so often held about sending them to their American aunt – would it be right? Would it in any case be to any purpose? Could the holocaust be limited? And so on, and so on. And then at last as I considered how impatient Martha would be with any other news, how little the Zoo authorities or anyone else would have time for investigating the causes of Filson’s death, I knew an access of determination to pursue my inquiries, not to let the fear of Armageddon obliterate this smaller wrong. I walked back down the hill to the large late Regency stuccoed house facing the Zoo, with which Martha’s money had so pleasantly provided us. Telling myself that to do so would keep Martha’s mind off her fears, I went in determined to give an account of my day’s events.

I did; but not quite in the way I had intended. Perhaps it was because Jane Falcon was there. I got along very well with Jane. Not as she would have wished me to do, although that, despite the fact that she was ten years older than me, might well have been possible had I met her before I married Martha. In fact I was all the more fond of her because I had managed to vault the tricky hurdle of refusing sex and still land on the other side as a favourite.

Anyway there was Jane, large and smart and radiating plenty of good reasonably well-intentioned spiteful fun. Her first remark set me off on a track I had not intended.

‘You are wonderful, Simon,’ she said in her elaborate high comedy sophisticated drawl. ‘You’ve been at that place three years now and you still don’t come home smelling of monkeys or fish or lions’ pee. You’re awfully lucky, Martha.’

Martha said, ‘I wish he did smell a bit more of animals, Jane. It would mean that his work was a little nearer to what we’d hoped for. As it is I feel that all this changing of trains might just as well have never taken place. It’s not Simon’s fault. We’re terribly grateful to Bobby for getting him in – but of course, he’s the only practical person they’ve got there and old Leacock uses him. But he went there because he’s a born naturalist and I wish he wouldn’t let them use him as an underpaid civil servant.’

Jane smiled at me. ‘I don’t believe you’re really as taken in by that “little boy lost” act as you pretend, Martha. Simon’s my favourite ruthless person. I should love to see someone trying to use him. Anyhow Simon would come home clean from the place if he’d spent all day in the skunk’s cage – partly because he’s Simon and partly because he’s young. All the rest of them are old men, even poor darling Bobby. To give him his due, he knows and hates it. But it means they’d probably be beginning to smell wherever they spent their days. That’s what I can’t understand, Simon, how you can bear to work all the time with old things like Englander or Sanderson. Doesn’t it give you a feeling of being surrounded by hardening of the arteries?’

In fact, of course, it was just the sort of flattery I wanted to hear at the end of that day, as Martha’s anxieties were those that I wished to forget. But if Jane had to be there preventing me from making love to Martha which was the restorative I had hoped for, then at least I felt a right to her flattering balm to soothe the day’s lacerations. Also, quite suddenly, her words placed a pattern upon the day’s events that was exactly what I required – ridiculous without detracting from the tragedy or for that matter from the need for redress. I saw the muddle as an old men’s muddle, the obstinacy, shiftiness, laziness and weariness of a lot of old men faced with an emergency of violence and suffering. And so I presented it to Martha and Jane.

Filson’s death called forth protests of horror. Jane cried, ‘No, stop it, Simon. You’re just being sadistic. I can perfectly well imagine for myself.’ And Martha, American as always when upset, said, ‘Oh, no! Isn’t that the most awful thing?’ But as I really let myself go and gave them Leacock and Sanderson, Beard and Englander all in full mimicry, but hobbling with sciatica, deaf as posts, peering blindly with the vain, failing eyesight of old age, Jane and Martha began to feel relief in laughter until Martha cried,

‘No, for Heaven’s sake, it’s too horrible to laugh at. Something’s got to be done about them, Simon.’

Then Jane, fearing the serious direction into which that remark might have led us, said, ‘I notice you very carefully avoid giving us Bobby’s part in all this. In fact now I come to think of it I’ve never heard you “do” Bobby. It’s slightly insulting to me, you know, this suggestion that I insist on people keeping up appearances about Bobby and me. I know I’m thought to be tremendously brave but surely it isn’t quite such an act as all that.’

She looked at Martha as she said it, and it is a tribute to Martha’s genuine passion for sincerity that she could not disguise her disgust. To cover up I did give them Bobby, but a little haltingly and feebly because I could see that Martha so much disapproved.

In the end Jane said impatiently, ‘Yes. Well let’s stop it, shall we? Your Bobby is rather an anti-climax, Simon darling.’

Martha said, ‘The awful thing is that Simon makes one think that people really are like that. But of course they aren’t. They’re much nicer and much less funny.’

‘You mean they’re all bores,’ Jane said. ‘Well, in that case how nice to be Simon.’

The entry of Jacqueline with Reggie and Violet came most opportunely. It sometimes worried Martha that the children so enjoyed the histrionic ritual of good night, especially if there were visitors present. But it always seemed to me that childhood was the only time in life when showing off was permitted; and so long as their act did not get out of hand and embarrass both themselves and us I encouraged them to put on a bit of a show.

The children, underlining as always their boredom with Jacqueline and their daily round, made a rush for Jane, the visitor.

Jane said, ‘The Hippopotamus Family have gone abroad so we shan’t be seeing any more of them.’

Violet said, ‘I know.’

Jane said, ‘You couldn’t have done. I’ve only just invented it.’

The children looked nonplussed, but pleased. They were always delighted when grownups paid them the compliment of puncturing illusions.

Reggie remarked casually, ‘We don’t care very much anyway, because this evening we’re giraffes.’

Martha cried, ‘Oh, no!’

The children were immediately alarmed, for they knew that their mother was not friendly to these evening games with visitors. Violet gave her a propitiatory side-glance and Reggie rushed up and hugged her violently. They then turned to Jane and me again.

‘If we put our tongues out you can put locust beans on the ends and we’ll roll them in.’ Feeding Smokey was one of their favourite pursuits.

Jane, glancing at Martha as though to reassure a hysteric, said,

‘I don’t really care for the sight of two tongues. Anyway it’s not very imaginative just both to be giraffes. You ought to be something else from Africa, Reggie.’

Annoyed, Reggie blushed and said fiercely, ‘What?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. An aardvark. What a mercy it is I’m the wife of a mammalogist.’

‘What is an aardvark?’

‘Oh, God! Ask your father. He’s probably observed them in their natural haunts.’

Violet said, ‘Daddy can’t go to Africa because it makes him ill.’

I began rapidly to describe aardvarks.

‘They have very long tongues,’ I said, ‘to collect ants.’

‘Oh, God!’ Jane cried again, ‘more tongues.’

The children put their tongues out at her three or four times.

‘Do you hate that?’ they asked.

‘Yes, I do rather.’

They squealed with delight and did it again.

I said, ‘Also they have very long claws to tear the termites’ nests to pieces.’

Violet and Reggie immediately began clawing at two cushions. Then Violet bumped her head and began to cry. While Martha was soothing her, Jane said to me,

‘Isn’t it awful that children can’t tell that one doesn’t really like them? A little attention and they’re all over one. No wonder they’re so easy to kidnap. Do you feel as ashamed as I do about being good with them, Simon?’

I felt suddenly very angry.

‘You may remain detached from my children because you don’t like them. I really don’t know or care. But let me tell you that my detachment is simply because I’m frightened by the depth of my affection for them.’

I don’t know which was the more horrified by my remark, Jane or I. However it couldn’t be unsaid, and I reflected that after the tension of that day I had been bound to burst out against someone; better the unlikely Jane than the likely Martha. I did not try to repair my outburst. I turned to Jacqueline.

‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez boire?’ I asked, ‘De Dubonnet? Ou même nous avons de la grenadine.’

Later when Jane was leaving I said, ‘I was terribly rude, Jane, I’m afraid. But I should have thought you would have known how strongly I feel about my children.’

She answered, ‘You are extraordinary, Simon. You will persist in thinking that people can “know” about each other. Especially that you know about everybody else. Martha was quite right, my dear, you “get” people awfully well but you get them all wrong.’

Later still that evening Martha looked so wonderful that I became impatient to take her to bed.

She said, ‘Please, Simon, I do want to come. But I must see the late news. I know it is silly to be so frightened but please be patient with me. After all I haven’t said a word about this ghastly news all evening.’

Her restraint in having said nothing the whole evening added such overwhelming tenderness to my desire for her that I had to control a sentimental impulse to cry.

The news, as it turned out, was as familiarly ‘comforting’ as the earlier news had been ‘alarming’. Everybody, it seemed, was saying that they hadn’t quite meant what they said. Our Prime Minister, in particular, went out of his way to give a pacific twist to the earlier remarks of the President of the Board of Trade. The whole pattern was so familiar that it aroused no feeling in me at all. Martha, however, was reassured and that was all that mattered. Later still, as, content and relaxed, we were both drowsing off into sleep, Martha murmured,

‘You were terribly funny about all those old things this evening, darling. But you are going to do something about that boy’s death aren’t you?’

I said, ‘I mean to.’

It was as much as truth would allow me.