3

LIMITED LIBERTY

BACK at the office, Leacock ignored the cause of my absence.

He said, ‘Oh, there you are, Carter. They’re filming the coypus up at Oulton Broad on Thursday. I think you’d better go up with them. I’ve got to be here to check the final scenes of this place at night. I’ve set a lot of importance on showing how much wild life really comes alive at night time and what the public fail to see by having no National Reserve.’ A little later he said, ‘It’s rather a nuisance your having to go up to Norfolk on Thursday, I’m having a tremendous tussle over music and commentary. These television people are so dyed in the wool. But you seem to have a way with them.’

I said, ‘If I could be in two places at once, believe me …’

‘Yes. You don’t seem to have been able to be in one today. There have been a hundred things I have wanted to refer to you.’

‘I was at young Filson’s funeral.’

He stood still and looked straight into my eyes.

‘If we can pull this thing off, Carter, a shocking thing like that boy’s death will be an impossibility in the future. It’s worth fighting for, you know.’

I am sure that at that time I did not question this or a score of other battle slogans with which he urged us on during that week. Mrs Purrett came increasingly to resemble a fervent and highly coloured blancmange as she carried out her manifold small errands at the double; Rackham was forever bringing the last message that had got through to the beleagured fortress, and thoroughly he enjoyed the drama of his role. As we worked late each evening over our coffee and sausage rolls or sandwiches we did not care, for there was our Chief working as late, indeed later, and encouraging us now and then with a word of thanks. I describe it with irony and yet at the time I was in a strange double mood that matched the Director’s; to his egotism, his spurious self-dramatization, I presented a detached amusement that canalized my anger away from the thought that competent preparatory work could have avoided the whole ‘strafe’ as he liked to call our excessive labours; to his enthusiasm, his belief, his suddenly released imagination, I returned such powers of suspension of disbelief as I possessed. I found myself a more zealous believer than I had supposed possible; or perhaps he was a more potent spellbinder. In either case by the eve of the programme belief had driven out irony. I was already encased in his woven cocoon, although I knew it only in single threads and had no idea of its total form. I suppose I had composed it in my own ideal shape, for I responded to Leacock’s constant self assurances that it was ‘as good as he could make it’ by a belief that it was probably perfect. None of the senior staff had been asked to take part on the night; and I found myself childishly envying Rackham who was to make a brief appearance opening a gate – gates in large numbers were to heighten the prison-like image of the Regent’s Park set-up that viewers would absorb.

When I departed that evening, dispatched early by the Director on the ground that I must be fresh for his finished product, I left behind a mass of cables and cameras and microphones that seemed already to hold in their impersonal womb the foetus of Truth; outside the Zoo I crossed the road and at once knew Doubt. This Truth I was so eagerly awaiting was not the child of these careful precise machines; it had been conceived in the reckless, imprecise mind of Dr Leacock. Yet if only to justify my own weeks of zealotry I determined to hold my disbelief suspended. I deserted Martha and the children for the safe inertia of a very hot bath; to avoid the embarrassing faith of Leacock’s naïve family and the deadening scepticism of the Falcons I insisted that we should arrive at Mrs Leacock’s ‘do’ only a few seconds before the programme began. In fact the lists of technicians’ meaningless names were already slowly pursuing one another off the screen when we tiptoed to our chintz-covered seats before the telescreen in the large drawing-room of the Director’s London flat.

I tried to create around myself a desert, in the full knowledge that, on one side of me sat Martha ready to stiffen with boredom, and that, on the other, the Leacock’s eldest, most priggish of sons was already swelling with vicarious importance from the sight of his father’s name in white block capitals. Into this rather self-conscious desert loomed the face of a well-known young commentator, eyes a little too saxe blue, mouth a little disconcertingly vermilion.

He said, ‘Men have dreamed dreams, strange dreams. Dreams, some of them that have vanished into the limbo of cranky illusion, dreams, others that have changed history, have altered the patterns of what men and women – you and I – think and say and do. In this series we shall try with the aid of all that the modern telescreen can do to give life to some interesting dreams of some interesting and unusual people.’

As he talked on I felt the bitter testiness of every bureaucrat who sees for a moment the feeble policy to which his hard working accuracy has contributed. Then I heard the voice continue, ‘The first of these dreamers gives you his dream tonight – Dr Edwin Leacock, Director of the London Zoo.’

I waited for the well-known ugly mug, the strabismic beady eyes to peer at us down the long pointed nose, but instead I saw in quick succession flashes of many English cities, of the congested streets, the overcrowded buses, the lunch-hour restaurants, and then, at a slower tempo, short scenes of life on various social levels in flats, houses, factories, offices, and cafés. The scenes were familiar, the dialogue not new in its evocation of a modern strangled, frustrated existence; yet the total scene produced a most powerful effect of dismal, hopeless claustrophobia. What added to this effect was the total absence of the familiar otiose commentary or musical sequence, only the noises and voices came to us that related to what we saw. All the cloying irrelevance of so much documentary had vanished. I knew now what Leacock’s tussle had been about and I honoured him for his victory. Then came Leacock’s voice.

‘I call that, the death of man’s soul.’

There was a touch of didactic self satisfaction that inevitably jarred after the excellent pictorial statement, but it was a little palliated though not entirely erased by his adding, ‘The phrase isn’t new any more than the idea. Lots of people have used it before. I tried to think of a better, simpler one, but I couldn’t find it.’

Now suddenly we saw photographs of the Zoo – animals, birds, reptiles, fish, even insects, he had managed to direct the camera at all of them so that they were seen cornered, cramped, monotonously pacing backwards and forwards across what seemed minute spaces, flying to the tops of oppressively low cages, swimming in desperate circles, jostling one another at the corners of dwarf rockeries or midget pools. It was grossly unfair and immensely effective. Then followed a sequence of what might have been called a satire on Bobby Falcon’s dream – hideous, tired, Bank Holiday crowds moronically looking through bars at creatures they could hardly discern, creatures as listless, dragging in their steps and whining in their cries as the children that watched them. The total picture was pathetic and funny and also very off-putting; I wondered if perhaps Leacock had overreached himself here, for its caricature quality must surely strike many of the viewers who had visited the Gardens. Finally in this section came Rackham’s little moment. One after another, as the visitors departed, gates clanged to, locks were secured, keys swung from chains, a whole sense of prison house came out of the screen. And suddenly, as night came and the public was gone, animals everywhere began to wake up and cavort in delightful antics, display their intricate lines and gaudy or subtle colours, no longer to live what had seemed to be a feeble, dejected life in anthropomorphoid guise; yet even this life was subtly seen to be less than full by reason of the bars and ditches. It was a distorted picture: some of the less interesting nocturnal creatures like the viscacia were simply not shown, some of the star turns like gibbons that weaved in patterns and howled were as much to be seen by day as by night. Even so there were enough night creatures – owls, flying foxes, aardvarks, bushbabies – to make a substantial claim to truth. Leacock’s voice came, and I dreaded some underlying truism.

All he said was, ‘That is Regent’s Park. Since the closing of Whipsnade Park five years ago for reasons of economy the sole place where the truly remarkable collection of animals in the possession of the Zoological Society can be displayed to the public. Those of you who know the Zoo well may think that it is hardly a fair picture. It is not. This is my dream and that is my nightmare. However, on reflection, you may well decide that it is a more meaningful picture than that of the guide books and traditional stories.’

Now to my surprise there appeared a series of pictures of the former Green Belts around our cities. And then a delightful series of satirically chosen shots of cabinet ministers, speculative builders, estate agents, suburban householders welcoming the final legal abolition of the Green Belt zones in 1967 – a wonderful display of greed, philistinism and smug complacency. Especially pleasing was a shot of the Minister of Housing addressing the first group of building labourers to ‘march in’ as ‘our new pioneers, our men of the covered wagon’.

‘That countryside,’ said Dr Leacock, ‘was sacrificed in the name of boom and expansion. Whipsnade Park was abandoned in the name of slump and retrenchment.’

Now an air survey took us over the British Isles, highlighting its four preserves ‘Zones of Scenic Beauty’ – the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Marches across to Snowdonia, the Northern Marches, and the little Norfolk Sanctuaries.

‘Until last year,’ Leacock’s voice now had the denunciatory accents of Jeremiah or Habakkuk, ‘there was a fifth area of countryside in our land, but Exmoor and Dartmoor have now gone the way of the South Downs. I did not think it necessary to bring to your notice the miraculous housing developments, the grand factory sitings that private enterprise has provided in New Taunton, Exeter West and Plymouth Drakeville. Advertisement has already more than familiarized us with them.’

It was a momentary flash of his youthful socialism and his voice suggested to me that he had once been a fiercer man less padded with spurious bonhomie. And now we saw flashes from a variety of Brains Trusts and Face to Face interviews covering a large percentage of our better known intellectual and academic personalities. Inconclusively, feebly, despairingly, they discussed or answered questions upon either of the two themes of our deadened soul and our lost countryside. And then Dr Leacock’s voice came through theirs suggesting that perhaps the two subjects were not so separate as they supposed, that perhaps these intellectuals could not answer because the developed intellect had crowded out their senses and their intuition, that perhaps man’s soul could only be healed by replenishing these deeper sources of cognition. And so we came to Leacock’s dream. From the mammal life selected by me, films of marten and badger, wild cat, coypu, red deer, and mole, we passed to avocets, ptarmigans, reed buntings, bitterns and crested grebes; and on through the reptile, insect and fish worlds we surveyed British fauna. Then we saw the wolves and wild boars, the wisents, bears and rebred aurocks, the bustards and storks of historical times. Then Whipsnade and Tring and Woburn were called in to show how wallabies, elands, zebras and gnus could live among us. The diminishing game reserves of Tanganyika and the Dingaan (formerly Kruger) National Park, Tserengeti, the reserves of India and Sumatra, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Soviet Arctic Animals Park, the new Jungle Paradiso of the Amazon passed before us – their methods of security, their varying freedoms and the amenities for visitors. We took a look at some of the new vast acred aviaries controlled only by devices of lighting and at insect reserves seen from above through vast magnifiers; we went down in diving bells in the Ocean Parks of the Caribbean and of the Ionian seas.

‘In every part of the world, something is being done to keep man in touch with the life of the instinct,’ Leacock told us. ‘We can’t do all the things you have seen tonight; but we can have our own animal world here among us – smaller or greater, to include more or less. And I make a plea now, an earnest plea that, before it is too late one at least of our four “Zones of Scenic Beauty” be given over to the preservation of wild life, the gradual replacement of Regent’s Park by a free, natural reserve. It can be done now and be within the range of visitors, restricted at first to those who want to train their senses and their instincts, to cultivate the patience, the awareness, and the tranquillity of those who learn to live among wild life.’

We saw them at work then, myself among them – the naturalists, and the ecologists; and a miraculously sensitive, dedicated, yet fulfilled lot we appeared to be. I felt almost embarrassed as I sat in the darkness, for this, in my depths, was how I liked to think of myself. A warmth of affection for Leacock welled up in me, and an extra affection for the fraud in him. He was giving me a chance to help build a Reserve where people who lived for the work that I wanted to live for would have the highest respect. I could happily throw him a conspiratorial wink for this that would make me accomplice to his sketchy science and his even more sketchy administration. Or rather I was happy to work hard to supply what was deficient in his work if I could.

‘Of course,’ Leacock told us, ‘this does not mean that the intellectual workers with all that they have done and will do for humanity do not still have a central place in zoological studies.’

And there we saw the anatomists, the biologists, the bacteriologists, the biochemists and a legion of others in their labs and their lecture rooms. We saw, we admired, but after the field workers we somewhat doubted.

‘I believe that they too will only find benefit from the Foundation of a National Zoological Reserve in Great Britain.’

Then a laugh came into the voice that was reaching us through pictures of such an imaginary reserve.

‘What about the ordinary man in the street who wants to pay his half-crown and see his hippo? I think that if we’re really to get this thing going, he’s going to have one of the most exciting experiences of his life. Not straining through bars but looking down on a whole animal kingdom through the magnifying glass floors of our hovering helicopters.’

And so we saw him, the ordinary man; he looked a trifle uncomfortable because a line of vision below one is never entirely satisfactory, but still the magnified herds of reindeer and yak that were all that proved available from the Soviet Arctic Animals Park were a beautiful and impressive sight.

‘All the same,’ said Leacock, ‘I should hope that as many young people as possible’ – and young faces studious and gay were flung at us from every angle – ‘would try to profit by the naturalists’ way of life, to go in parties or singly, and come to know animal life as it should be known through the senses and the instincts. Not just those who are going to become professional zoologists, but young people destined for all walks of life. They will be the pioneers in our society carrying the developed instinctual way of life to balance the top-heavy intellectual growth of today. After all because we do not want to live in chaos’ – scenes of mobs looting, crowd panic, peccaries over-running yam plantations and elephants trampling rice fields – ‘there is no reason why in our fear we should die in captivity’ – factories, canteens, crowded transport, deadened genteel homes once more and shots of the Decimus Burton Giraffe House and Raven’s Cage – ‘Liberty we can find if we accept some limitation in its definition, liberty thus limited we may feed on’ – shots of the naturalists again in the great reserves – ‘Only so I believe can we restore the psychic balance, the soul’s health of a very sick civilization.’ And now suddenly and for the only time the ridiculously ugly features came to us in close-up; the effect somehow was to command respect.

‘That,’ said Dr Edwin Leacock, ‘is my dream. Good night.’

One of the young Leacocks got up and switched off. I could feel Mrs Leacock’s nervous movements behind me. And now I caught a glimpse of her straggly grey hair and foolish, hearty red face. She had just returned from a camping holiday with some of her grandchildren; her back and chest glowed scarlet, against an unfortunately chosen applegreen evening dress.

She said, ‘Well, did anyone think that Daddy was as good as I did?’ And then as she saw the glowing, admiring faces of the family, she said, ‘That was something we’ll always remember, wasn’t it, children?’

It was no doubt a measure of my great enthusiasm, that, despite the many reserves and embarrassments I had also felt, I answered now before any of the Leacock young.

‘It was very good indeed,’ I said, ‘I’ve absolutely no doubt at all, Mrs Leacock, that its effect will be to push the Director’s ambitions out of the sphere of dreams into the sphere of active politics.’

She was surprised at my answering her remark to her children.

She said, ‘Ambition? Politics?’ with a nervous laugh. But she had so long heard her husband’s complaint of me as ‘a jolly good man but horribly casual’ that any unexpected enthusiasm gave her real pleasure and she added, ‘Thank you, Mr Carter. I know how much Edwin counted on your appreciation.’

And now all the Leacock sons and daughters-in-law, and daughters and sons-in-law, and even one or two of the teenage grandchildren gave their rousing applause to the programme. And by the time they had finished, under Mrs Leacock’s approving eye, there seemed nothing much left for us others to say. But since they were all rising young architects, and young stockbrokers doing extraordinarily well, and young advertising agents writing brilliant copy, and young doctors and dentists with futures, and since their wives reposed on status, their acclamations lacked one thing – knowledge. Mrs Leacock in her childish way seemed aware of this. She looked at Bobby for over a minute.

Then she said, ‘I was so sorry Lady Falcon couldn’t come.’

Bobby bowed his head slightly.

‘She too,’ he said, ‘but a new play she’s interested in took her to quite another theatre.’

Martha said, ‘I was really angry with Dr Leacock for working Simon so hard in these last weeks. But now I know it’s been well worth while.’ She took my hand, ‘I see now exactly what you mean by the Zoo job, darling.’

She really meant it for me, but in the circumstances, she offered a part of it to Mrs Leacock.

‘Edwin’s appreciated it so much, my dear,’ Mrs Leacock said. She gave Martha a look that almost included her in the family. ‘I wonder what I can offer you to eat, Sir Robert?’

Bobby looked at the food laid out on the table.

‘A chicken sandwich would be delicious,’ he said, ‘but let me help in handing round.’

The young Leacock males wouldn’t hear of this. Public school manners towards older men were a hallmark of their status. I was angry enough with Bobby to point the situation.

‘Sit down,’ I said, ‘and let us young ones do the running about.’

Mrs Leacock looked at him twice in hope and then turned away in anger.

‘I think I’ll ring Daddy at the studios. He’ll be tremendously bucked by all you’ve said.’

I had hoped to escape early, but when she returned, she said, ‘Daddy thanks everybody. The viewer response so far is jolly encouraging, he says. And you’ve all got to stay. He’s having a quick whisky at the studios and they’re sending him back in a Rolls. I suppose that’s what they call V.I.P. treatment.’

She gave a little laugh. We seemed to wait hours for Leacock’s return. In the first half hour we had telephone calls of congratulation to discuss – from friends of the family, other zoologists, important Fellows of the Society, even, to my surprise, from Godmanchester’s secretary. Sanderson had telephoned his intention of coming over from Wimbledon to Finchley Road in person to congratulate his chief. Mrs Leacock had tried to dissuade him, but he was intent on the act.

She said, ‘Funny little chap! We must save him a bone for his trouble.’

Under the strain of waiting I could feel my enthusiasm ebbing, and it seemed unlikely that anyone else’s would be more enduring. Martha found a daughter-in-law, whose children went to Reggie’s kindergarten. They talked child psychology, trying to avoid any serious engagement on the subject since their views were clearly divergent. Bobby made flirtatious chat with the teenage granddaughter.

Once Mrs Leacock said, ‘Well, what shall we do children, while we’re waiting for Daddy?’

I felt, looking at her family, that it would not be long before we were involved in paper games or even a sing-song round the piano.

I said quickly, ‘How was the Garden Party this year?’

I had chosen the right topic.

She said, ‘Oh, the Queen looked so pretty and she had a word for Daddy. A lot of people,’ she went on, ‘find official social life an awful fag, but I seem to thrive like the wicked on it. Of course I was a bit shy at first, but I soon found that other people are shyer than I am, so now I just barge in and talk. Mind you, a wife can make or break a man’s career, so I always make a point of doing my homework first.’

It was only when in fact she began ‘to just barge in’, when she talked about Zoo policy, international Zoo matters and the characters of eminent zoologists, that I realized that like her husband she was incapable of doing any homework at all.

My lukewarmness at last got through to her, for she said, ‘But, of course, you’re terrifically off shop talk, aren’t you? Though I don’t mind telling you, you’ve confounded all the critics by properly putting your back into this business.’

Then she talked interminably of her grandchildren, their prowess at games, the public schools for which they’d been entered, and the extraordinary powers of improvisation they had shown during the recent family camping holidays when ‘poor old Grandad had had to stay in mouldy old London’.

At last I heard the sounds of a latchkey, but as it was immediately followed by the padding of animal’s feet on the hall parquet, I conceived the notion that the Director had followed up his plea for intuitive living by bringing home a leopard or a puma. I smiled at the thought. Mrs Leacock looked at me angrily.

When the door opened a very large Alsatian dog walked in. If like me you find cats and pumas beautiful, you will probably agree that wolves and Alsatians have the wrong shape of face. But this was a very fine specimen of its tribe. The young woman who followed it was not a fine specimen of her tribe, if by that was meant a typical member of the Leacock family, nor in their eyes was there much fine about her, for she was Harriet, the eldest girl they’d had such a lot of trouble with. I knew her because, shortly after I arrived at the Zoo, she came to see her father, and, finding him absent, had borrowed five pounds off me and tried to get me to make a pass. All in a quarter of an hour. Dr Leacock had asked me never to lend her money again; he had even mentioned her other weaknesses: ‘I’m afraid she’s rather silly where men are concerned,’ was what he said. It had struck me at the time that he had come, over the years, too readily to advertise his daughter’s weaknesses. I felt sorry for her. Also she was rather fine to look at, tall, a little square-jawed perhaps, but with large blue eyes that had a pleasantly vulgar sexy glint and a large mouth to pattern, also her legs were promising. She seemed gentle, which was a praiseworthy characteristic in such a family.

Mrs Leacock said, ‘Daddy’s had a great success, darling.’

‘Oh, good.’ Harriet’s voice was soft and deep and her tone completely casual.

One of her brothers said, ‘It seems a pity you couldn’t have stayed to see it, Harriet.’

She didn’t answer him, but seeing me, she smiled and said, ‘Television gives me claustrophobia.’

Then she turned to her mother. ‘I shan’t go to that man on Monday. You’d better cancel.’

Mrs Leacock looked horrified, ‘But of course you must. Daddy’s fixed the appointment.’

Harriet smiled, ‘Well, if he’s had such a success, he can take a little disappointment.’

One of her younger sisters said sharply, ‘But Harriet, you promised him. You can’t.’

‘Oh, I think you’ll find I can.’

There was a terrible family silence. I saw no way of breaking it, so I talked to Martha.

Then at last once again I heard the latchkey.

‘Ah, that’s Daddy,’ Mrs Leacock said.

There was a general stir among the family.

‘Well, I’ll be off to bed,’ Harriet announced. ‘Come on, Rickie,’ she commanded the huge dog.

Under the cover of the scratching and padding of its departure, I heard Martha say to Bobby, ‘I think you’ve behaved absolutely bloodily, Bobby.’

But there was none of the warm teasing with which she had rebuked him at the funeral wake. He too reacted quite differently. He merely shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

As Harriet opened the door, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, the French have sent a tremendous climbdown note or something. So we can all forget our fears.’

‘How did you know, darling?’ Mrs Leacock asked.

She spoke to Harriet in a less determinedly jolly voice than to other people, I noticed.

‘Oh, it was on the tele news in the pub I was in,’ Harriet said, and was gone.

A second later Dr Leacock appeared. He must have passed his daughter in the hall without speaking.

I did my very best, as did Martha, to communicate our enthusiasm. But beside the eulogies of his family our remarks appeared a little pale. One of his daughters, a young athletic version of Mrs Leacock, went out into the kitchen and returned with a parsley crown to put round his head. And, before we knew where we were, Mrs Leacock had formed us into a circle holding hands and around his grotesque figure we moved singing, ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Leacock seemed some hideous Easter Island god in a tribal rite. Bobby somehow avoided involvement. As soon as this embarrassment was over, Martha and I made attempts to take our leave and sweep Bobby off with us. But Edwin Leacock in his triumph was not in a mood for dissent.

‘Well, what did you think of it, Falcon? Has Saul been turned into Paul?’ he asked.

Bobby’s drawl was terrific, ‘I’m never frightfully good with pictures, you know, so I think a lot of it passed over my head. But your voice came over naturally. I used to be so infernally nervous. I don’t think your cameramen quite did justice to your material. Some of the shots of Regent’s Park were shockingly bad. But there you are, if you hand yourself over to the technicians and ad men of today you can never hope to convey the real thing.’

Martha, in her nervousness said, ‘It would make a wonderful film, Dr Leacock.’

Bobby said, ‘Oh, yes, yes. I think it would do that all right.’

We were saved by the bell.

‘That must be Mr Sanderson. He’s come all the way from Wimbledon to congratulate you, dear.’ Mrs Leacock almost skipped out to open the front door.

Sanderson immediately shook Leacock by the hand.

‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘you gave us a wonderful glimpse of your splendid spirit.’

I had never seen the Director completely nonplussed before. He simply shook Sanderson’s hand again and said, ‘You must have a whisky after coming so far.’

Sanderson was not in the mood to be content with whiskies, although he took the one that was offered.

‘I must see it again, you know. I missed a good deal, telling poor old Miss Delaney what was happening. Mrs Blessington does that as a rule but she couldn’t keep up with it. She’s got quite a bone to pick with you. She says you must think of the old people’s slow wits next time. Of course, that’s only her joke. She’s very far from slow-witted. But there you are, the great thing is that you gave us that glimpse of your splendid, almost childlike spirit.’

I propelled Martha by the elbow to the front door, leaving Mrs Leacock to find a bone for Fido.

*

May came to an end in glorious sunshine, and in Zoo crowds large and congested enough to delight even Bobby Falcon’s heart. The Innsbruck Meeting was held in hot June weather that must have been trying to the nerves in that somewhat shut-in town. However the tempers of the European heads of government were equal to it. Accord was complete; the war clouds were banished from the bright blue sky. It was almost as though there were a friend for little children above it. At any rate Martha and a million other mothers felt so. Everyone breathed again; a good number only in order to say that this merely showed how impertinent the Americans and the Russians had been to interfere in affairs that could perfectly well be settled without them. Lord Godmanchester’s papers warned against optimism for ten days and then banished Europe from the scene in favour of an all out attack on the National Trust, the lazy porters of the People’s country houses. Silly season was upon us. At first Edwin Leacock shared in the general carefree mood. Letters came pouring in from viewers of his programme, and, if there were some that did not make him feel loved, all of them made him feel interesting. The clearing of international tension augured well for governmental attention to his scheme. The Press had been friendly towards the programme; two of Lord Godmanchester’s papers had run features on it. Eminent English zoologists, like his colleagues at Regent’s Park, were enthusiastic about the programme as a model for the use of television. Pattie Henderson, who had watched in company with Newton and Nutting, told me that they had thought the old boy definitely had something as a speaker. Couldn’t he, she suggested, barge off and become one of those quizmasters. They all seemed more concerned with the presentation than with the scheme itself. However, Leacock was a happy man. I did not like to intrude a discordant note into this deserved happiness, especially as all his energies had been brought to life by success and now, if ever, he seemed likely to have the determination for the hard slow work needed to drive home his gain. I decided to defer my confrontation of him with his possible part in the Filson tragedy.

But as the days went by, it became clear to me that the Director’s picture of what he had achieved differed very much from mine. It is true that he was active day after day, to the detriment of the regular Zoo routine affairs, with seeing this and that Fellow of the Society, with wining zoologists from the Universities, dining chaps from the Natural History Museum, lunching so and so of the Treasury or so and so from the Ministry of Education, getting people on the grants committees of various scientific Foundations along for drinks. Mrs Leacock, he told me, was being absolutely splendid, doing her part in these social chores. This was disquieting, but it did not really matter, for I soon discovered that his part was in any case not what it should have been. The truth was that he had set complete store by the success of his programme. If it had not been successful, he might well have started work all over again to get his National Reserve in some other way. But it had been successful and he seemed to think that his work was done. People were either for the programme or against it; this seemed to be all that his round of contact making was concerned to discover, and if they were for it, they would no doubt set about giving their instant aid to the plan. It was childish, of course, and bit by bit, as this childishness showed, the important people he lobbied treated him as a child. He had done very well with his little play, but he mustn’t expect them to talk about it for ever – they were busy people with work to do, and if he hadn’t got any he should find some.

Poor Leacock became very depressed; as June’s lovely weather continued into July he could not share in the carefree holiday mood of the country. He began like Lord Godmanchester to mooch. Indeed, I only once saw him at all content during that time and that was when his mooching had brought him to luncheon with the equally mooching Lord.

‘One’s really glad to be with somebody adult,’ he said. ‘Godmanchester agrees with me that the slackness in this country at the moment is almost pathological.’

I suppose I ought not to have been sorry for him, but I was; or perhaps sorry for a good idea that seemed every day less likely ever to be realized. On the other hand I found him an intolerable burden; it was not so much that he put all the work on to me, but that he constantly interrupted my attention to it by his incessant grumbling. I was heartily relieved when the time approached for him to leave for the International Congress of Zoologists in Rome.

‘I’m not at all sure,’ he said, ‘that the right way to stir up British inertia is not to get to work through some of the foreign societies.’

It was a sentiment to appeal to Dr Englander. He, as usual, was attending the Congress at his own expense.

‘Where are they putting Leacock up?’ he asked me. ‘At the Excelsior? I thought so. Ruggiero’s got a very good method of putting all the clowns and bores together out of harm’s way. I’m stopping with Felletrini at his house in the Urban hills. It’ll be cooler. And he’s got Scheiner from New York, old Sieffens from Amsterdam, Paladie and this brilliant young Indian Subhas Rao. It means we shall get away from the herd and have some serious talk. By the way,’ he added, ‘I hope we’re stumping up with a proper allowance for Leacock this time, if only for the sake of British prestige. I remember in San Francisco he and his missus had to walk when everybody else took taxis. She was in bed with bunions by the end of the Congress.’ I did not for a moment believe this to be true, but Englander loved to invent such occurrences and always chuckled to himself over them for some time afterwards.

It was a good time for me, that week of the Director’s impending departure for Rome. By the time Leacock returned, I should be off on my own vacation. My full five weeks in one spell this year – time enough to reconsider my attitude to Leacock, to weigh Mrs Filson’s unhappiness against justice on behalf of her dead son. I had even promised myself that I would seriously rethink whether I really wished to stay at the Zoo although I was determined not to let Martha know of this until I had decided. We had arranged that she and I should go for a week to Janice Earl’s in Somerset, to the setts I already knew so well. Janice had reported a case of melanism among the badgers there. I should watch badgers in the evenings and early mornings, laze all day and ponder; it would be hot, Martha and I would make love. Then in the other weeks we were to take the children to the sea; but to Blakeney, where I could watch the birds and laze and ponder, and again make love to Martha. With the agenda for the last General Purposes Committee meeting of the summer complete, I seemed already to be living a little in my holiday. I took many walks in the less visited North side of the Gardens, looking at Amherst’s pheasants or Stanley’s cranes or ortolans – birds that were all dazzling colour or slender shape or sudden piercing screams, recalling nothing human. And in the evenings Martha and I read or listened or viewed, and I knew that later we should make love. Yet the tense urgency for sexual relief which had so dominated the last months seemed relaxed. We came to it surely, but we came to it easily at night and in the morning. Growing up amid the dedicated ‘trampiness’ of her mother’s progressive bohemianism, Martha, when I met her, was horribly sexually shy. It had been one of my greatest happinesses to break this down – one of my greatest happinesses and, by now, my strongest self-confidence. I owed her so much; this, at least, she owed to me.

The sun streamed into our large bedroom picking out my determined neatness and Martha’s easy disorder, waking me to some highlit angle of her sleeping face that would tease and arouse my desire. It was my free Saturday and there were hours before me in which to caress and awake her gently and slowly. Stroking her temples, her shoulders, her breasts, her buttocks, I would try to lose myself in the senses that never failed me, all my doubts would die away, and all my fussy primness leave me. I licked the glossy smoothness of her eyelids. She drew my mouth to hers, sucking in my tongue between her teeth. The telephone rang. We paid no regard. I moved my lips across her cheek to her ear; I bit the lobe. She cried with pleasure, ‘Oh!’ And then again as the telephone continued ringing, ‘Oh no!’ in American protest. Her arm leaving my shoulder, moved the telephone from its rest. But already there was a brisk knocking at the door. Martha pulled my mouth again to hers. But it was no use. Jacqueline’s voice came sharply to us.

‘Please, Mr Carter. I suppose you must answer the telephone. I have spoken on the other line. Dr Leacock absolutely demands some conversation with you.’

Martha held her hand over my mouth.

She shouted, ‘Mr Carter absolutely can’t talk now, Jacqueline. Tell Dr Leacock he will call back in half an hour or so.’

But even at that moment I did not feel happy to let Martha belittle the importance of my work.

I said, ‘I’ll answer, Jacqueline,’ and with some difficulty, still straddling Martha, I manoeuvred the telephone.

‘Carter here.’

The voice came back vibrant with self-importance.

‘Edwin Leacock speaking. This is a pretty urgent matter, Carter, so I make no apology for my early call.’

Above me I could hear the children’s feet pattering like a stampede of hartebeest. I knew it to be seven o’clock. It seemed unwise at that moment to let Leacock feel at any advantage.

I said, ‘Oh that’s all right, I’m usually up and about by seven.’

But he was too excited to be scored over.

‘I tried to reach you a number of times last night.’

I knew that this was untrue. Perhaps like another old man’s his mouth was full of dough. This thought and Martha’s tickling me in the armpit made me giggle. I disguised my laughter in a fit of coughing and so lost the core of what he had to say. When I could hear him fully again, he was saying,

‘But despite the shortness of notice I’ve managed to get a quorum.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Martha whispered.

‘He’s got a quorum.’

‘Well of all the disgusting things to ring up about.’

I put my finger to my lips and said ‘Shush!’ with mock severity. She buried her face in my shoulder to stifle her laughter.

I said into the mouthpiece, ‘Is Godmanchester able to be there?’

‘Look, if you’d prefer me to ring back when you’re more able to take in what I’m saying …’

‘I think the line’s very bad. So Godmanchester is going to be there.’

‘He would hardly be absent from a meeting summoned to discuss his own very serious proposal. Yes, Lord Godmanchester will be there.’

I asked, ‘Who forms the quorum?’

Martha began to giggle again helplessly into my shoulder. My phrase indeed sounded to me like one of Black Rod’s or Herald Extraordinary’s traditional rhetorical cries at Coronation time. I half thought Leacock would suppose I was being facetious, but he gave me the name of the five committee members he had summoned. I noted that all were his supporters. Perhaps that was why he had not been able to contact the Secretary the night before.

‘We’re bound to come up against a lot of opposition in the next few weeks,’ he said, ‘so I am anxious to avoid any time wasting this morning. I don’t think any of the five I’ve named are likely to listen to red herrings.’

He gave a hard little laugh of triumph, to which, before I had thought, I had responded. But I was not going to be associated with a conspiracy before I knew its purpose, so I pretended a different cause for my laughter.

‘Listen to red herrings! Ha! Ha!’ I cried.

He was furious.

‘I’m afraid, Carter, that at a moment so vital as this I’m not always able to command perfect English. Nor for that matter to find verbal slips very amusing. However perhaps you’ll appreciate the full seriousness of the business when I’m able to speak to you in more detail than for obvious reasons I can on the telephone.’

That at least meant that I should not have to confess to my ignorance.

I said, ‘I shall be all ears.’

Martha pulled them both and I gave a squeal.

Leacock said, ‘Yes, well clearly this telephone isn’t very satisfactory. Anyway I want to go over the whole thing with you and Godmanchester before the others arrive. Shall we say nine o’clock in my office?’

Another play to make me a conspirator, I thought.

I said, ‘Well, I’m afraid at this short notice …’

‘Look,’ said Dr Leacock, ‘this is not a time to consider personal matters. In view of Godmanchester’s remarks, I regard this as the amber warning. I’m afraid you must make it a must.’ He rang off.

*

I had not really expected to see Godmanchester in the Director’s office that Saturday morning at nine. I could imagine important events that might have brought him to Number Ten or even to Buckingham Palace; otherwise he would surely refuse to leave Stretton. However there he was looking like Kipling’s Baloo, wise custodian of The Law. His only mark of the occasion, perhaps, a light seersucker suit such an emergency might have caught him in aboard his yacht at Antibes or at his favourite Tenerife; though he had not, I knew, left England since the beginning of the recent crisis. Leacock wore the formal clothes in which he always appeared before the General Purposes Committee.

He said, ‘Both Lord Godmanchester and I felt it most important to take you into our fullest confidence, Carter. Simply because, to be perfectly straightforward with you from the start, your co-operation is going to be invaluable to us. Without you, I don’t really see how …’

His voice tailed away; but I felt that I could supply the rest. Whatever the project might be, he was by now entirely dependent on someone else to do the detailed work. For the moment that person was me.

Lord Godmanchester heaved heavily from one massive buttock to the other.

‘Don’t make the chap feel too important, Leacock. Tell him what we’re going to do.’

‘Well, the scheme is actually yours, Lord Godmanchester.’

‘Yes. But I’d like to see how well you’ve understood it.’

Leacock’s face suddenly changed from the harassed man of affairs to the shy schoolboy.

‘Really, honestly, you know, it’s a bit embarrassing for me. But still, here goes … It seems, Carter, that my television programme had a very powerful effect on our President. He – very characteristically if I may say so and also very wisely – decided to say nothing of his enthusiasm until he’d had time to think the whole thing over very carefully. Having done that, he, also very characteristically, decided on a scheme as generous as it is bold.’

I ought to have looked at Godmanchester while Leacock was saying all this, it might have told me much that I wanted to know; but, very characteristically, I was so embarrassed by Leacock’s manner of speaking that I could only stare at the ground.

‘He has offered the major part of the Stretton Estate including his own private menagerie to form the nucleus of a British National Zoological Park. It is difficult for me to find words to express my gratitude for an offer that is so completely magnificent. I can only say that I … I haven’t slept since he told me last night.’

For once Leacock’s ugliness and lack of charm were most effective. His absurd words seemed to me genuinely touching. Yet his enthusiasm was wholly reasonable. It would not have been completely disproportionate if he had prostrated himself on the floor before his benefactor; for, after all, Godmanchester had not been named ‘The Marcher Baron’ by his political opponents without malicious reason. His estates, the largest in the country, sprawled across two English and two Welsh counties. I found no easy words myself.

I said, ‘I’m very pleased indeed that your efforts should have been so wonderfully rewarded, Leacock. Of course, it’s a very great moment. And I suppose our difficulty in thanking Lord Godmanchester comes from the inherent improbability of such a vast donation.’

Godmanchester chuckled. ‘Are you blaming me for being a landowner on a large scale? Or are you saying that you don’t believe what Leacock’s told you? If you mean the second, to a certain extent you’re right. I told Leacock to explain the thing to you, because I wanted to see how much he’d exaggerate it. People on the receiving side of the counter always do. There are modifications to what he’s said. In the first place this is no hand-over. The suggested arrangements for the first two years will run like an ordinary lease and not an advantageous lease for the Society at that. It’ll be purely experimental on both sides, and if either side is dissatisfied, a month’s notice. Given, of course, that either side has serious ground for complaint. On the other hand if everything goes right, at the end of the two years I shall hand over something like three times the land of the old Whipsnade Park; and what’s more I shall make a very substantial financial donation towards the support of the place. Although my own belief is that what with breeding for other Zoos, increased helicopter communication and one thing and another, the thing’ll rapidly pay for itself in purely financial terms, let alone the moral or social or whatever terms Leacock made so clear in his television programme. I opposed the sale of Whipsnade on exactly those grounds but, you know what the general panic was in the ’67 slump. I don’t imagine my wife will want to go on living at Stretton when I die. She prefers a more cosmopolitan life. So that there seems no reason why the Reserve shouldn’t expand to a very substantial size as my various tenants’ leases fall in, provided we can get really good security arrangements to satisfy the rural councils about some of the villages in the area. You’ll have at least two rivers and a lake to play about with, and a range of chalk hills with quarry workings and caves.’

‘It’s magnificent.’

‘Yes. Leacock’s already said all that. What we got you here so early for is to hear how you think the Society will receive the news.’

‘There your financial offer will help a lot. It means that if the Treasury or the Minister of Education don’t agree at first, we can afford to go ahead without them.’

‘I don’t doubt we’ll have to do that anyway.’

Leacock nodded his head in agreement with such brave defiance.

‘I think you underestimate the flexibility of government departments,’ I said.

‘I’m only happy with government departments when I’m in charge of them.’

Leacock’s face took on an even tougher expression to keep up with Godmanchester’s attitude.

‘Whatever,’ I said, ‘your promise of money will satisfy the main part of any would-be critics on the Committee and, for that matter, it will help immensely when putting the scheme before the Society as a whole.’

Leacock said, ‘There’s nothing that won’t give way before the old recipe of tact and firmness.’

Perhaps the same immediate doubts visited Godmanchester as came to me.

He said, ‘I don’t believe in old recipes, Leacock. Every new situation calls for a new way of cooking. Do you think it’ll only be a question of money, Carter?’

‘I think many people will be anxious that this should not prove a preliminary step to the abandonment of Regent’s Park.’

Dr Leacock said, ‘There will be no need to suggest it. History will eventually decide that.’

Godmanchester looked at him.

‘Until history does, I’d advise tact rather than firmness, Leacock.’

He smiled as he spoke but hardly enough to disguise the short rein which seemed to accompany his new benevolent mastery.

‘In any case what I’m offering won’t allow for that in our life time, unless you’re scrapping the aquarium and most of the tropical exhibits.’

I responded to the limitation of the objective; the whole thing at once appeared to me more practical, even more genuine. I determined to clear up what remained to puzzle me.

I said, ‘With careful preparation I believe that we can get past all opposition. I hope that not too much will be said even to the favourable quorum you’ve summoned for this morning. With a lot of care and the right canvassing I should have thought we could come out into the open, or rather begin to do so, by the end of the year.’

‘I have no doubt at all,’ said Dr Leacock, ‘that the English Civil Service training has more completely corrupted the élite of this country than any other single influence.’

‘No, no, Leacock. We’ve got to hear what people have to say. And Carter’s one of them. What would you say, Carter, if we told you that my offer was dependent upon an immediate start?’

My first thought was – not on your life, you old buggers, you’re not going to mess my holiday, I’ll leave the bloody place first.

I said, ‘It wouldn’t be for me to say …’

‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake, man, don’t quibble.’

Leacock, seeing that Godmanchester was again about to rebuke him for his impatience, got up and went to the window.

‘Yes, you look out of the window, Leacock. Carter’s face won’t annoy you so much then. You forget that to any man over sixty a man under forty looks self-satisfied. It’s the price we pay for having the young about us.’

I hoped that the new proposal would not lay me open too much to Godmanchester’s wise old man of the world stuff in the coming months.

‘What do you think my reasons are for making this offer, Carter, apart from sheer generosity?’

‘Belief in Leacock’s scheme, I suppose.’

‘Excellently cautious. Now try again.’

Young in his eyes as I may have seemed, I found this intolerable.

I asked, ‘If the matter is so urgent, have we time for this guessing competition approach, Lord Godmanchester?’

Godmanchester flushed.

‘Yes, I think we have. In any case I always do things the way I want to, Carter.’

I laughed to ease the tension.

‘I suppose you might be going to invest in running a Zoo as an insurance against old age without political office.’

Leacock swung round from the window, his toucan eyes rounder than ever with anger. But Godmanchester was rumbling away with laughter.

‘You’re perfectly right. Everybody has a purely selfish thought on such occasions and you’ve hit on mine. Of course I shall never be idle enough to do no more than potter around with Zoo affairs. So you people don’t have to be afraid. But I’d like to increase my interest – yes … That’s not quite all though.’

He waited a moment, then he sat back, his short, stubby arms resting on those of the armchair.

‘You’re right. Enough of this “viva” stuff. I’m in a hurry with this business for the sake of the Zoo. In my opinion we shan’t have any too much time to evacuate the more valuable specimens before the country finds itself at war. Well, what about that?’

So here it was at last – not in the usual newspaper scares, but from the fount of all newspapers himself. My first thought was – well, if he says so, then here it is. I was alarmed that I should show my fears, but strangely, confronted with such a sense of certainty, no physical symptoms seized me. Too many thoughts occupied my mind at once – Martha, the children, the still beauty of the woods that could then have been my surrounding instead of Leacock’s strutting stance and Godmanchester’s flabby old face. Detestation of the old man for being perhaps my herald of annihilation made me unable to speak for a moment.

Finally, I said, ‘Do you suggest that the next war can be evaded? Or are you anxious to inspire confidence in phoney evacuation schemes? I’m not going to be party to using the Zoo for pretences of that sort.’

To my annoyance, he smiled, but as though to himself.

‘Quite the contrary,’ he said; then he looked serious. ‘You don’t really think, Carter, do you, that after the Russo-American Declaration even our Prime Minister would risk nuclear weapons. And luckily, however much he bungles, others won’t risk launching them at us. No, thank God, I feel pretty sure that we shall be spared that. But unless something happens to shake this present crowd up, we may have a terrible enough war on our hands anyway. I’m not giving anyone here my reasons for saying so. Some people would consider that I had gone too far in my position and with my knowledge in saying what I have. And after all it doesn’t matter if I’m wrong; because we shall be laying the foundations of something very fine. Will you help us to get this thing through as quickly and as easily as possible? You’ve made a good impression here with the staff and with the members of the Committee, if you throw yourself in with us, we shall make a strong team.’

I stared at Leacock. For all the solemnity he assumed at that moment, I felt he was really taking such things very lightly.

He said, ‘Yes, Carter, there is this additional grave reason. Of course I couldn’t tell you without Lord Godmanchester’s agreement.’

As I looked at them both, they seemed for a moment like two very old irresponsible boys pretending to be adults. I had a moment of panic as to where they might be leading me. I determined to remain silent, but Godmanchester heaved himself breathily out of his chair and straddled his great bulk in front of me. His thick eyebrows went up in imperious demand for an immediate reply.

‘I am thinking,’ I said, ‘of some weeks ago when I spoke to you. You described what I told you then as a tall story. There’s too much in it of “it may be this or it may not”, you said. Now we seem to be on the brink of war or we may not be. And again, we may be at the great beginnings of a British National Zoological Park, or we may not.’

Edwin Leacock said sharply, ‘Luckily the alternatives demand the same actions from us.’

‘Luckily!’

Godmanchester answered my angry scorn with a patronage even more scornful.

‘Yes. As Leacock says. In any case we’re simply concerned to know whether you’ll co-operate or not.’

I had to try once again.

I said, ‘I take it that there’ll be little or no publicity in your papers for our move if we make it.’

‘You take it wrongly. Anything to do with me automatically gets some publicity. I also intend that Leacock’s great scheme shall not go without recognition from the public.’

He looked at me very deliberately.

‘My whims, Leacock’s vision. Anything more would be a breach of my idea of security.’

Leacock began to pick up sheafs of papers from his desk.

‘If we’re going to take on the running of Lord Godmanchester’s papers as well as our duties here, we shall be very busy indeed.’

Intuitive suspicion cannot stand up long against authority’s arguments. I agreed to assist them. After all either alternative – evacuation of an old Zoo or foundation of a new – was a large enterprise. How could I be sure that my doubt was not simply a product of my general mistrust of the declaredly important?

*

We did, as Godmanchester predicted, make a very strong team. Our first committee meeting, of course, had been rigged so that I found it difficult to judge what might be coming from their enthusiasm. But when the full Executive Committee met, I was surprised how little my disquiet was echoed by anyone else. Members who were sceptical of Leacock or Godmanchester, or of both, were clearly impressed by my adherence. Nicolls, the Zoology Professor from Oxford, said afterwards to me,

‘Well, when I saw that you didn’t deflate the idea, I took it that it was administratively possible.’

Old Miss Braithwaite, the great Amazon collector, said, ‘It’s on your head, you know, Mr Carter; you’re the sound man, so I hope you haven’t let us down.’

The old men, it seemed, had been right to fuss so much about my agreement. I had anticipated expert opposition to the haste and the arbitrary legal foundations of the new settlement; but I had forgotten how much we are confounded by sheer scale today. Godmanchester was making an offer worthy of a Renaissance prince, even canny lawyers and demanding civil servants seemed to expect him to behave with an appropriate imperiousness. The arbitrary manner, it seemed, established the sincerity of the act.

There was, as I had foretold, some opposition from those who suspected that the whole thing was the beginning of the end of Regent’s Park. Old Lord Oresby, in fact, in particular, whose father had been sacked along with Asquith when Godmanchester’s father had been raised to the peerage by Lloyd George, assumed an arrogant, contemptuous stance towards what he even openly called ‘some bit of caddish sharp practice’. Yet much as he hated Godmanchester, he altered his view after talking privately with him, although he refused to say why. He quarrelled with Bobby Falcon over his change of mind: ‘I’m not quite sure that Falcon’s sane,’ he told me, ‘he seems to be preaching the millennium.’ Bobby, on his side, told me, ‘Oresby and his crowd aren’t aware that we’re on the brink of Armageddon. Their mental attitude is about appropriate to Gladstone and the Ashanti wars.’ I saw clearly then that Godmanchester’s ideas of security were flexible.

By early August the Committee had authorized our move. Leacock and I had already laboriously gone through all the records of transportation, organization and staffing in the early Whipsnade days. But life had changed since then and the tough work of organization was still before us. It was going largely to be a two-man job, for although we had secured the formal support of the Curators, they could none of them be said to show enthusiasm.

Leacock, on my advice, had discussed the motion before the Executive Committee with each Curator in turn. I truly believe that left to his own inclination he would have funked the interviews and tried to bluff his way through the opposition of his staff by presenting them with a directive. I was present by his request, at all the interviews. But let me say now that his request was prompted by my own suggestion. I had for once engaged myself; I was determined not to evade my responsibility. I invented a special mock-pompous voice which I used when office life became unbearably high motived; no one else seemed to notice when I put it on, but it gave me some release from my distaste for the grandiose.

For the first time I found myself fully on the side of action. I quite understood all the Curator’s mistrust of Leacock; after all I knew his weaknesses far better than they did. But I also knew his virtues. In any case I thought they should at least have seen a little beyond the man to the ideas he proposed. Their involved distrust and apathy irritated me. Yet, in the end, all of them for various reasons, accepted his proposition. I don’t believe that Leacock noticed these involutions; or, when he did, he called them ‘an awful tendency to fuss that men acquire who are protected from facts by specialization’. When however, in the end, he got a sort of agreement from them all, he told me confidentially,

‘Despite all Godmanchester’s grim forebodings, you know, Carter, I’m inclined to take a more hopeful view of world affairs. This experience has taught me a lot. I don’t mind saying that I anticipated some very rough passages with one or two of the Curators, but when it comes down to it, it’s amazing what a deal of horse sense there is in most human beings.’

He was, or course, under the new scheme to preside over Stretton in the inaugural years, away from the horse sense of his Curators who were all for the time being to continue in London.

I, who was to divide my time between London and the Welsh Border, saw the interviews with the Curators with a less favourable eye, for I should now be the sole representative of central administrative authority with whom they would have to deal at Regent’s Park.

I say the sole representative because the manner of Bobby Falcon’s agreement to deputize for the Director in London gave me little reason to think that he would take his job very seriously. The whole course of his response to the news was so erratic that I felt very disturbed for him. Leacock insisted on a different approach to Bobby from the simple interviews he gave to the other Curators.

‘We must be civilized with Falcon,’ he said, ‘none of this modern office formality. I shall lunch him at the club and tell him there. After all he’s a very distinguished man.’

I tried everything I could to dissuade him; I knew that Bobby would regard such behaviour as very bad form. But success with the Committee had increased Leacock’s belief in his knowledge of men. I proved to be right. As we slithered about on an American cloth sofa with our after-luncheon coffee, Leacock outlined his plans.

Bobby said, ‘I take it I’m not meant to comment now.’

Leacock was a little surprised, but he agreed.

‘My dear Falcon, you must say what you feel right when you feel right. Though I shall be anxious, you know. Between ourselves, yours is the only Curator’s opinion that counts.’

He received it the next day in the form of a note.

Dear Director,

The proposal you made yesterday seems to me as wild as it is undesirable. The haste with which you and Godmanchester are trying to force it through gives one some doubts of your motives and greater doubts of your capacity to realize such a grandiose scheme, even were it desirable. I do not know how far anything “matters” much more today. But I have the wishes of those who have stood by me in my views – Oresby, Peasegood, and others – to consider as well as my own. I shall therefore use all the influence I can to frustrate the scheme.’

Edwin Leacock was very angry.

‘I’ll tell you this, Carter, I’m not going to let that man’s arrogance and folly put the clock back.’

But he was also clearly very apprehensive. I imagine that it was then, at his request, that Godmanchester revealed his full views in conversation both with Bobby and with the Oresby group, for, shortly afterwards, the split occurred that I have already reported. Bobby wanted to resign from the staff.

‘In view of everything,’ he said, ‘I really don’t know why I shouldn’t do a last bit of exploration. It can hardly matter if it kills me.’

He seemed extraordinarily ebullient and carefree. Leacock would, I think, gladly have accepted the decision, but Godmanchester was appalled.

‘Falcon’s a name,’ he said, ‘and we don’t want names walking out on us at a time like this.’

I saw the letter that he wrote to Bobby.

‘Whatever happens we need a man in charge of Regent’s Park who cares for the traditions of the place. And you’re that man.’

I should have admired Bobby more if he had refused such cheap flattery; as it was, he accepted very perfunctorily.

‘Just as you like,’ he said, ‘but I hope Simon’s ready to do a good deal of deputizing, because I may still go on my travels again.’

I was glad at that moment that against Martha’s wishes I had insisted on receiving a salary; to have an honorary status as Bobby had, simply removed all sanctions and shape to ones actions.

Dr Englander, the only other honorary Curator, clearly felt even more free of sanctions. Leacock tried twice to summon him back from Rome, but he paid no attention to the letters. Finally when he did return, he expressed interest only in the financial extent of Godmanchester’s offer.

‘I’m surprised he’s got as much as that,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought he was a fraud. Mind you he’s not in the class of Berard or Huebsch or even old Masiello – you’d be surprised how much that old chap’s got, by the way. But by English standards he’s obviously rich.’

When Leacock said he had no intention of attempting a reptile display at Stretton as yet, he answered, ‘I suppose not.’

We left the Director’s office together and the old man laughed.

‘He’s got pretty puffed up about the whole thing, hasn’t he? I’d better send a couple of bullfrogs down there to keep him company.’

The next day, however, he came to my office and questioned me in detail about the terms of Godmanchester’s offer.

Finally he said, ‘No, it obviously won’t do. Of course I’m not concerned with all this nonsense of Leacock’s, but it did occur to me that the place could be kept in mind in case this country’s silly enough to run into war. I can’t believe even our rulers will be that crazy, but you never know. If it comes, mind you, it will be a pretty quick walk-over for our friends abroad; but though short, it may not be altogether sweet. It might be as well to have some plans, for a temporary hide-out. I don’t want all my research work upset by some idiotic English politician who’s trigger happy. But this place of Godmanchester’s won’t do. The man himself will be hanging around interfering And then look at the terms of the tenure – no security at all. Leacock must be mad! But then he is mad. No, I’ll talk to some of my friends in industry and see what they can stump up.’

I heard no more from him until the first dispatch of mammals had begun. I think that an accident which had occurred to one of the mountain goats from the Mappin Terrace when it was being rounded up must have disturbed him. Twice during our interview he swallowed a digestive tablet from the small silver box he kept in his waistcoat pocket.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I suppose Leacock isn’t going to start any of this nonsense with my collections, is he?’ And he refused to be reassured. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a list of some surplus specimens and offer it to him. It’s always as well to get in first with these maniacs. Flatter him a bit. What’s that phrase of his, “learning to live with wild life”?’ He went out chuckling to himself.

I don’t know how far Charles Langley-Beard fully took in the change. Leacock was so determined to protect him from its impact.

‘I should never forgive myself if that man’s work was disturbed for a moment, Carter. And by his work I mean the very delicately balanced genius that controls it.’

One of Beard’s assistants was to carry out the veterinary work at Stretton.

‘I’m expecting the other Curators to visit us from time to time to familiarize themselves with our progress, Beard. But I know how your work keeps you at it, and for the moment I shan’t expect you to be there at all. We can always send you any corpses you want up here. Not, of course, that we shouldn’t welcome a visit from you, if you felt like getting a little country air.’

Dr Beard considered this from afar.

‘I’ve had very little to do with the country,’ he said, ‘my life hasn’t taken me there much.’

Dr Leacock signalled to me the pathos of this.

‘I’ve often hoped that it isn’t blasphemous,’ Dr Beard went on, ‘but I find the natural scene part of God’s creation I can do without.’

Matthew, of course, was as unattracted by the countryside as Beard. It belonged, I imagine, to the time of his childhood and his public schooldays before his egoistic will had hardened. At any rate he had banished it from his carefully protected world. When, however, it became apparent that he was not expected to reside there and that his classifying work would not be interrupted, he became almost enthusiastic about the move.

‘I believe Godmanchester has some very passable landscape gardening and a very pretty formal garden too. They would make an excellent setting for aviaries.’

This was not quite Leacock’s conception of the National Park.

He said, ‘Nothing can be too elaborate at this stage, Price.’

‘Oh, I don’t think anything can ever be too elaborate at any stage, do you? We shall have space for the most intricate and curious aviaries. And then the construction of artificial islands in the lake. I see a sort of miniature Japan with beautiful wading birds instead of all those tiresome little people. Completely charming.’

Dr Leacock was always uneasy with Matthew; he thought he was ‘pulling his leg’.

He laughed and said, ‘Well, I’m only too pleased to find a loyal supporter in you, Price.’

Matthew drew his willowy form to its considerable height, and said stiffly, ‘I hope I’ve always been loyal to the work of the Society.’

Leacock was taken aback. He even mused for a moment after Matthew had gone, and said, ‘Funny chap, Price.’

‘He’s an extraordinarily honourable man,’ I said.

It was a juggling use of the word, but, after all, I had as much right to try to poise someone on a pedestal as Leacock had.

My pedestal crashed very soon after. Leacock, only too willing to leave the Curators behind, was determined to have his full share of head keepers to do the work for him. As yet only ‘Mammals’ and ‘Birds’ were much involved. It was proposed to offer their head keepers a house and an increase in salary to encourage them to leave London. When I realized that this meant the confluence of Strawson and Filson in the remote countryside, I protested vigorously to the Director; I told him of Filson’s declared hatred for Strawson. But I chose the wrong moment. Excitement, anxiety, unfamiliarity with such hard work, and doubt had already made Leacock’s temper very uncertain. Was it guilt that now toppled it over the edge?

He turned on me savagely, ‘If you have to gossip with every underling in the place,’ he shouted, ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep your findings to yourself. I’ve heard about as much as I can take of your sickening moralizing about that wretched Filson business.’

‘You’d have heard a great deal more,’ I shouted back, ‘if I hadn’t been forced to consider the feelings of the underlings you despise so much. Yes, and your own.’

We stood, our faces red, our bodies shaking, facing each other across his desk. I think that anger had loosed in each of us the clamped suspicion that the other was taking him for a ride. Then we realized that the journey had already begun, it was too late to climb out.

Leacock said, ‘My dear Carter, you don’t suppose I’m going to force either of these men to go down there. And if they do agree, I shall bear in mind what you’ve told me. Whatever my faults, I’m not an inhuman man, you know.’

It wasn’t entirely the point at issue, but it sufficed to let us out of the quarrel.

Strawson agreed to go down for a trial period. If after six months, he liked it, his wife would put a manageress into her shop and join him.

‘I wish she could give up now, Sir,’ he said to Leacock, ‘but, as Mr Carter knows, a lot of us find a little help towards the Society’s wages no bad thing.’

I truly believe that he chose to go to Stretton, when he knew that I should be mainly in London. Filson was a little more concerned – they were old, there was his wife’s house, he would like time to think it over. Later that afternoon Matthew appeared in the Director’s Room where we were busy comparing railway and air estimates for transportation of the wolves and jackals. I thought he had come to gossip with me, but he addressed Leacock in a purring drawl.

‘Oh, it’s just to say that Filson’s decided to go to Stretton. I’ve got a letter here from him confirming it. I thought that best.’

Leacock said, ‘Well, that’s excellent news, Price. He seemed very doubtful this morning.’

‘Oh, well, he’s one of the old school. He didn’t like to act without consulting me.’

‘Well, I’m very grateful to you for agreeing to let him go.’

Amazed, I said aside to Matthew, ‘How on earth will you manage without Filson?’

He looked annoyed. ‘Perfectly well, thank you, Simon. I think he could do with a change of scene after that business with his son.’ He looked at me challengingly, ‘And then quite frankly it’s a crashing bore for me to hear about it all the time.’

When Matthew had gone the Director gave me a frank apology. ‘You’re perfectly right about Price, Carter. He’s not a Langley-Beard of course. But he’s a very good chap. And he’s got a deal of horse sense under that airy fairy manner.’

With this I agreed. Sanderson, I regret to say, showed qualities the Director admired less. Since no entomological collections were as yet to be included in the National Reserve, Leacock was almost disposed to leave him out of the interviews; I persuaded him that this would be unnecessarily wounding, tedious though the old man might be. Yet when Sanderson appeared, he seemed quite uninterested in all that the Director had to say. Future hopes for carefully controlled displays of agricultural pests, for observations of insect life under magnified conditions, of butterfly gardens in summer, and for special crepuscular displays of moths, brought only the most perfunctorily characteristic comments from him.

‘Yes, that’s very fine,’ he said. ‘It’s a wonderful conception. My dear friend, you’ve got the creative gift.’

Only as he was leaving did he turn, and, his plump cheeks pink below the blank circles of his glasses, ask in a trembling voice,

‘Is it true what they say, Leacock, that you intend to desert the old place altogether in the end?’

Leacock came out of the entomological spins he had been weaving with a nasty bump.

He said, ‘We can’t predict the future, Sanderson. I think it more than probable that this sort of menagerie will become obsolete. Probably in our life time if you want my candid opinion.’

Sanderson walked back towards the Director’s desk.

‘It’s absolutely damnable,’ he said, ‘absolutely damnable. There are hundreds of old people and poor people for whom this place is a second home. And lonely people too. People who don’t find it easy to make contact with other human beings, but who have found friends among the birds and animals. And you propose to cut them off from the source of their living.’

Leacock was amazed.

He said, ‘Come, Sanderson, there are thousands of people, you know, who never get near Regent’s Park and who may find it easier, not to say more satisfying, to see the animal world in greater freedom.’

Sanderson considered for a moment, then he announced,

‘Yes, that may be so, but I don’t know them. I do know the people who come here.’

He went out of the room at a slow, sad pace. Leacock was disgusted.

‘Making every allowance, you know, Carter, there’s no doubt that he’s impossible. Thank God, he’s only got two more years to go.’

The most discouraging reaction, however, came from Harry Jackley, the Curator of the Aquarium. Godmanchester already had a small freshwater aquarium at Stretton; it was proposed to enlarge it with additional species from Regent’s Park. Leacock was all for doing this without consultation. He poohpoohed my insistence that to antagonize Jackley would be to antagonize the younger generation of the staff and to jeopardize the future of the Reserve.

‘There’ll always be a younger generation who don’t like what’s being done because they aren’t doing it. You’re too easily influenced, Carter.’

However, we wrote to Jackley in New Guinea where he was collecting, only to learn that he was on his way home – they understood he was stopping off in Bahrein to see if he could replace the two dugongs that had recently died.

‘Good God!’ Leacock cried. ‘Why on earth can’t Falcon manage his own mammals?’

It was not the time to remind him of mammalia that needed aquarium conditions. I was forced to agree that, as deputy for Jackley, Leacock should go ahead with his own schemes. It was on a very hot August 12th, I remember, that I sat, looking for a moment at Mrs Purrett’s copy of Lord Godmanchester’s chief daily. The Prime Minister, it seemed, and the paper suggested how irresponsible it was, felt happy enough with the state of world affairs to be shooting grouse. The telephone rang, it was Mrs Leacock to say that Dr Leacock would not be in until late that afternoon, he had been called away on family business. I cursed his guts, for we were desperately busy. Yet when he turned up at five o’clock, he looked so tired and old that I felt sorry for him. He began mechanically to deal with the questions I put before him, then he suddenly broke off.

He said, ‘I’m sorry to have left you to all this work today, Carter. However, perhaps what I’ve been engaged on is not so different from my aim of doing away with the old Zoos with bars. I’ve been saving my daughter Harriet from being sent to prison. Apparently her tastes now lead her exclusively to associate with the criminal classes. Only the employment of a first-rate counsel saved her from a conviction on a charge of receiving. Receiving of all things! I don’t know of any other time when she has failed to spend. But still, to be perfectly honest I’d have let her take her chance. After all there are open prisons nowadays. But Mrs Leacock felt differently. So we’ve accepted the stipulation that she should live with us down at Stretton. It should be most pleasant for all of us. Limited liberty, you know!’

He paused, and when he spoke again it was with less bitterness.

‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘is going to turn this dream of mine into a nightmare. That I’m determined on.’

As he spoke Rackham came in and handed Leacock a cablegram. Leacock read it and passed it to me.

‘REFERENCE YOUR LETTER AUGUST 6TH THE ANSWER IS NO, JACKLEY.’

I bit Pattie Henderson’s head off two days later when she telephoned to me.

‘Isn’t it splendid,’ she asked, ‘about Jackley’s cable? Simply “no”. Newton and Nutting have just told me about it. Of course it’s the only answer to give to all this time wasting nonsense.’

On August 20th Dr and Mrs Leacock and their daughter Harriet left London to take up residence at Merritt’s Farm, a large eighteenth-century red-brick house on Lord Godmanchester’s estate, only a mile from the Stretton Private Zoo.

‘From now on,’ Dr Leacock said to me as he left, ‘you’ll be my link with the past.’

*

The equinoctial winds blew fiercely that autumn. After the stuffiness of my office and more still the numbing sense of never-ending, self-renewing, detailed work, their freshness would have been welcome to me, but the railway detective and the guard obviously felt otherwise. The guard had been stoking up the small stove in the centre of the brake van ever since we left Paddington, and by now the air was stale and stifling. Yet from crevices and doors freezing draughts sped down my back and crept round my ankles. I sat on my air cushion on the minute wooden seat that was hinged to the wall of the van; I clutched the thermos of rum and coke that Martha had made up for me; and I dozed on and off as it seemed for hours. It was the third journey I had made since a fortnight earlier the escape of a skunk had led the railway authorities to insist on the presence of a senior officer with every trainload of beasts. They agreed that it was a futile precaution, but it satisfied the insurance law. Apart from my illness in Africa I had not been used to much discomfort in my life; I had never known insomnia. But now I sat shivering through the night, so sleepy that at short intervals the guard and the detective and the fug and the red glow would swim in front of me, revolve rapidly and turn to some nightmare in which a hundred voices and faces that I knew, seemed to be chivvying me, and this dream in turn would dissolve and, with a crack that seemed to tear my head apart, I should be woken again by a whistle or a sudden jolt. Through it all, through all my tired, muddled, and anxious thoughts, went the low, steady drone of the two men’s conversation, only on occasion breaking into my exhaustion with a sudden chance flow of meaningless words. I smiled at them now and again to palliate, if I could, whatever might seem snobbish or frightened or morose in my silence. But after my first two trips I had decided to give myself the luxury and them the peace of not attempting to make conversation.

That evening, however, though I felt tired and jumpy, the whole scene seemed to flow over me. Tomorrow I was to begin a five-day stay at Stretton. Five days without any office work. Five days to see what Leacock’s new-found energy and determination had created for the grand opening next spring. The Exotic Park with its prairie herds of zebra and hartebeest, eland and giraffe, I had already travelled through in one of the Society’s buses; it had promise, but would always be only a glimpse of what the richer or more leisured or more interested could see in a visit to Africa. Behind this, stretches of pine forest provided the Historic British Reserve soon to be closed to all but the guided and the armed; for here in ten years we hoped for increase of deer that would maintain carefully limited packs of wolves and in the mountains that stretched beyond into Wales, golden eagles and the brown bear. Here already in patches of brown scrub great bustards roamed, and in the forest, wild boar were finding cover. But it was in the deciduous woods and chalky downland that I hoped to find the end to the bifurcation of my life; for eventually I was not only to be Administrative Secretary of the whole Reserve but also Warden of this region of fox and badger and marten – the British Reserve. There, in company with other selected naturalists, I should pursue the pleasure of my life, but free from conscience because I should also be giving the Society my cursed administrative skill. The good and the bad fairies at my cradle had embarrassingly both provided themselves with the same gift – a power to make patterns out of muddled details; they had squabbled over this social gaffe ever since; perhaps now they would be appeased. Then Martha could see me do what she knew I wanted to do and I could know myself to be doing my duty. I now knew that the success of Leacock’s scheme was as crucial for me as for him. Yet my cautious nature still only allowed me timidly to hope and plan for a future that Leacock’s stout, absurd and scheming, egoistic dreamer’s heart already declared to be a reality.

It was easier, of course, for him than for me. He had made Stretton a Castle Faithful where treacherous voices of doubt were instantly silenced, where only Godmanchester, in his rare appearances from the London political waters in which he was still angling, talked of ‘evacuation’ rather than ‘foundation’. At Regent’s Park all was quite different. With Leacock gone, it had amazed me how quickly war had become the general topic of the day among the staff, when everywhere else in the country, save in Godmanchester’s unreliable ‘rags’ The Advertiser and The Globe, the sunny mood of Innsbruck, the Prime Minister’s slogan ‘Dover and over, not Dover and under’ reigned in happy, peaceful sloth.

I sat that evening on the little seat trying to adjust myself to the rhythm of the guard’s van, yet every so often it jolted and shook violently. I summoned up the country scene that awaited me at Stretton – underfoot the beech leaf mould, hanging above the graceful snake head buds like paint brushes dipped in water; the sudden flashes of jayblue or pigeon opal – but the idyllic vision was constantly shattered by memories of Rackham’s persistent war chatter, of Bobby’s increasingly carefree last trump laughter, of Englander’s canny estimates of this and that blast proof material. In vain I assured their haunting voices as I had their solid presences that this was a great beginning, not a melancholy, long-expected ending. As an inspirer of confidence, I was, as Jane Falcon would have said, ‘acting against the grain’. She would never have cast me for the role. Yet, just as by persevering in my vision of the Stretton countryside I was able to endure the fug of the van, so by hoping against hope that Leacock’s scheme was a reality, I had been able to support the tedium, the three men’s work, the petty squabbles and the sea of papers that nowadays filled my office. I had even found some balance on the crazy seesaw of evacuation-foundation which Godmanchester had offered us; and, believing that Godmanchester’s fears were justified, could carry out the evacuation single handed. But, as constant icy draughts made the van’s inferno almost intolerable, so the chilling winds of my doubts half-spoken in the interview with Leacock and Godmanchester returned again and again to make my work days at Regent’s Park seem meaningless. Why, whenever I heard that our President had been pottering or mooching in the Gardens, did it always seem that yet another member of the staff had become assured that the National Reserve scheme was a cover for evacuation? Why did poor Mrs Purrett, alarmed for her ageing mother in London, assure me that a secret with her was as safe as with the Bank of England? Why did Matthew become a model of soldierly discretion, assuring me that he knew how important it was that the rank and file shouldn’t panic? If Godmanchester was so gaga that he blabbed like this, then our prospects were alarming. If, as I believed, he was not, what was his motive in telling all and sundry what he had so solemnly asserted was only for Leacock and me? The answer I hazarded to this question was cynical, intuitive, and malicious; it had been met already by his almost direct negative. I could not voice it to anyone. Least of all to Martha. With her I had to hide even Godmanchester’s prediction of war, until I had decided whether I credited that enough to tear her out of her present happy calm.

Yet I almost forgot my anxieties, grievances, and discomforts when we arrived at Stretton. There on the platform stood Edwin Leacock ready to receive me. A regenerated old man is a sight to banish self-pity. He was always bouncy in his movements, springy in his gestures, of course; but, as I had known him, the vigour had been curiously wooden, the ebullience forced and impaired by a certain shiftiness. Now, with a change from the not very good formal suit which marked in his eyes the man at the top to an old man’s grey flannel trousers and sports coat, he seemed suddenly fifteen years younger, more honest, more likeable. Filson and Strawson, out of uniform until we opened to the public, were on each side of him. A group of young keepers and labourers stood by. It was the very picture of some inspiring, able colonel-archaeologist with his assistants at a dig.

With confidence and happiness Leacock had also acquired consideration.

‘I’ll take on from now, Carter,’ he said. ‘You go and have a sleep. And then you can tell me what you think of everything.’

He summoned one of Godmanchester’s chauffeurs to take me to a waiting Bentley. It was evident that his command extended over more than the Zoo staffs. As I left him he was briskly and jovially giving orders, checking railway clearance sheets, even giving a hand to move some of the crates of porcupines. Speeding across a lush countryside of rolling farmland and oak-filled parks, I saw in the distance the hills and forests of our National Park. I thought of the leisure of the next few days and moulded my aching limbs into the soft upholstery of the car. This, at last, was the holiday I had hoped for before Godmanchester’s offer; and, since it gave hope of such happiness to come, I was able to accept even the absence of Martha and the children that would otherwise have marred it. Able? Perhaps willing.

Before sleep I had breakfast in the little inn parlour that was to be mine for the week.

‘Would you care to look at the paper?’

‘No, thank you, I’m too tired. But leave it with me.’

The decision was unfortunate for my peace of mind. The paper was Godmanchester’s Advertiser – a rag I seldom saw – and a large portion was given over to rumours of war. Although the Zoo was not mentioned by name, there was a special word of praise for those London institutions which, despite the Government’s lulling words, had decided on evacuation. I lay on my bed for more than half an hour before my aching desire for sleep could swallow up my growing certainty that my suspicions of our President were well grounded.

At first I felt I could not puncture Leacock’s new-found zest in living; then I became irritated with his evasion of reality; at last, I decided that I must not again let my dislike of doing hurt absolve me from a larger duty. But not until I had slept, I thought, not until I was rested enough to be as kind and as serious as I knew how.

It was midday when I woke, refreshed and resolved. I was to meet Leacock at the old Stretton Private Zoo now used for the resting and treatment of new arrivals from Regent’s Park. Then, sauntering through the Exotic Park, we were to make our way to Merritt’s Farm for luncheon. The motor car dropped me at the entrance to a paddock which might have been the scene of rehearsal for some County Agricultural Exhibition or even the Royal Show, if it had not been for the rarity of the creatures being groomed. In the foreground Filson was superintending the feeding of some emus, a crane, and an adjutant stork that had just been released from the loose box in which I had brought them down. In the distance, half a mile away, Strawson’s fat figure was being shaken into melting jelly as he helped a young keeper to exercise a llama.

Concerned for Filson’s welfare and anxious to postpone my meeting with Leacock, I asked the old man how he found life in the country.

‘It’s a new life, Sir. I’d never have believed it. But I feel as I did in the first days when I was put in charge of the humming bird house just after the War. There seems something to do all the time and something worth doing too. Mind you, it’s not for me to say, but it’s the Director that does it. It’s an experience to work for him. Nothing’s too much trouble to help you, but nothing’s too much to ask you to do. I said to Mrs Filson last night, “I’ve never been driven like it and I’ve never felt more equal to it, though I’m turned sixty.” Of course, there’ll never be anyone like Mr Price, as you know, Sir. But … well, working with the Director is a different sort of thing. As I said to Mrs Filson it’s like a mission sermon – like the Dominicans or the Jesuits give in our church, you know, Sir – after the usual sermon by Father Hansford. I can’t do fairer by Mr Price than make the comparison.’

I wondered what either party might have made of it.

But I asked, ‘And Mrs Filson?’

‘Marvellous, Sir. She’s learning to drive the little car Lord Godmanchester’s given us, to go into Hereford for Mass and that. And though she misses her lounge, she’s got it into her head to start collecting antiques to furnish the cottage. Black and white it is. With the old beams. And she’s hoping to pick things up here and there, you know, as the fancy takes her.’ He paused. ‘And the dahlias in our cottage garden, Sir, are a picture. I hope you’ll come to see them.’

I hesitated, then I asked, ‘It doesn’t worry you working with Strawson?’

The old man looked down, then taking a handful of grapes from his pocket, he appeared to be intent on feeding the crane.

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ he said, ‘but time will do it. And everything tactful to make me feel easier the Director’s done. I’m sorry you had to tell him by the way, Sir, of what I’d said, and yet I’m not, for it’s taught me the fine cut of the man’s character.’

This information further complicated the feelings with which I saw Leacock get out of his Landrover and come towards me from the distant road. As I advanced towards him, I tried to avoid Strawson, but he bore down upon me.

‘And how may I ask is the old place, Sir? As smoggy as ever if I may judge from the London look you’ve brought with you.’

Luckily Leacock hailed me at that moment. As we walked back to the Landrover, he said, ‘Of course, I’ve been very cut off from the uniformed staff in the past, but I’m getting to know them now. That man Strawson’s a humbug, as you said, but he’s not altogether incompetent and I work him hard. Filson’s the best chap – a bit slow but utterly reliable. There’s no doubt your friend Price has done a good job of training there.’

I gazed out of the window until I no longer wanted to laugh at this judgement, then I took a gulp and said, ‘Before you talk about the wonderful progress you’ve made down here, will you forgive me if I tell you something that’s worrying me greatly.’

‘Of course. But you shouldn’t worry. You can never do the best work that way. Of course with Falcon and Sanderson round your neck, I’m not surprised.’

‘It’s not that. I am overworked but that wouldn’t upset me if I felt sure of what I was working for.’

Leacock turned on me with a hurt and puzzled look.

‘Don’t judge what we’re doing here until you’ve seen everything, Carter.’

‘Oh, please, I’ve judged it in essence already and I mean all the praise that I’ve given. No, it’s Godmanchester’s motives that I’m worried about. There’s hardly a member of the staff at Regent’s Park who hasn’t come somehow or other to think that the move to Stretton is an evacuation in the face of threat of war. And though I can’t prove it, I believe Godmanchester has told them so.’

‘Well that’s what he believes. He told us so.’

‘He also told us that his belief was not to be murmured to anyone. Now it’s more than hinted at in his newspapers. What is one to think?’

Leacock laughed. ‘That he’s trying to create a war scare, of course. I’ve never had any doubt that that was one of his motives.’ He began patiently to explain to me, ‘You know, Carter, there are more sorts of men than one. Now I’m an entirely single-minded chap. But Godmanchester’s got multiple aims. Take his attitude to this place. I think he was sincerely impressed by my ideas. But he’s an amateur and his vision is elsewhere. Then again, as you told him, he’s got it into his head that he may have to retire from the political scene and that zoo-keeping would be a nice hobby. I doubt if he thinks of it as more than a very remote insurance. We must hope he’s right. Then he truly believes that the Government’s incompetent so he’s not exactly lying when he says that he thinks we’re in for trouble. But I’ve felt from the start that he was exaggerating that. I don’t feel war in the air myself.’ He sniffed the breeze that came in through the swivel window as though to reassure himself. ‘No, far more important to him is that he should be in power. Not selfishly, you know, he genuinely thinks he’s the only competent man for the job. He may be right. That’s politics, I don’t know. Being, as I say, a single-minded chap, I don’t too much like the devious way he goes about things and the lack of concentration of effort. It looks to me too much like old age, but there you are.’

I burst out laughing. Leacock flushed red.

‘I’m sorry if you find my views ridiculous.’

‘No, no, that’s not it at all. It’s only that this has been my suspicion all along and I’ve thought it too disgraceful to mention to you.’

‘Unprincipled more than disgraceful, don’t you think? But then we know he’s not an idealist. At least not in the sense that we understand it. But in any case ours is only one of the enterprises he’s interested in. I read his rags down here, you know. I’m too tired for The Times. Business firms, factories, archaeological expeditions, sports events, everything he’s got a stake in, even the pictures his wife has lent to the Tate, are being used to point the same moral – Godmanchester for Prime Minister or else. And we must hope he gets his way. The Prime Minister for our honorary President would give the Society great prestige and it would also bring the Reserve government money. And it would keep him too busy to interfere.’

My amazement at his new-found confidence must have reached him. For a moment the old high-flown, preaching note came into his voice.

‘And he’s been generous beyond belief, Carter. If anything I’ve said suggests that I’ve forgotten that, I’m sorry for it. I shall never forget it.’

We were approaching the red-brick farm-house. One wing was covered with the grey green of wistaria, the other with the glossy green of magnolia grandiflora. With its elegant white porch and shelled cupola it seemed to me everything that was desirable. My anxieties were forgotten in contemplating it.

‘It’s a bit square and characterless, isn’t it?’ said Leacock. ‘But Mrs Leacock’s made the rooms very cosy.’

I said, ‘I simply don’t understand how you can calmly accept all you’ve said about Godmanchester and place any reliance on his word. The gentleman’s agreement you’ve accepted for the Reserve …’

He braked suddenly, jolting me against the car roof, turning the bonnet close up against a rhododendron bush, so that its rare autumn crimson blossoms were pressed ridiculously against the windscreen.

He said, ‘I’m sixty-two, Carter. I haven’t time to hang about. This is the greatest chance I’ve ever had and I assure you that I shan’t easily allow anybody to take it from me.’

I did not feel much happier, though I recognized in his new manner some basis for reassurance. As we drove up the gravel drive towards the porch, where Mrs Leacock in cinnamon jumper and purple tweed suit awaited us, I could say no more than, ‘I’ll do my best to help you.’

Inside the house my spirits were at once depressed. What Dr Leacock meant by ‘cosy’ was clearly no more than the presence of his own furniture from the London flat. Armchairs and sofas upholstered in wine-coloured rep and with wooden arms, a wine-coloured carpet flecked with almond green, and an oval mirror with beaten silver frame – they had always saddened me in their old surroundings, now they seemed to make these well proportioned rooms cheerless beyond hope. Madge Leacock, indeed, unlike her husband, did appear a little dimmed in her bright spirits by the move.

She kept patting the chairs and saying, ‘We’re not quite straight yet, Mr Carter. But Edwin’s out such a lot and I’m more used to camping when I’m in the country.’

Dr Leacock gave me the smallest glass of the driest sherry.

‘They say this is rather good Tio Pepe,’ he said, but he did not take any.

Mrs Leacock cried, ‘Oh, none for me, Daddy. It would make me tiddly at lunchtime, I’m sure.’

I had a feeling that she was not exaggerating.

It would only be pot luck she told me, she was not used to cooking.

‘Our Mrs Coppard was such a real cockney; we couldn’t persuade her to leave London. Sometimes Harriet cooks us something special, doesn’t she, Daddy?’ Dr Leacock didn’t answer.

The dining-room furniture was of a standard antique oak kind that has been machine made now for many decades; it did not even claim to be imitation Jacobean. Its very lack of pretension was depressing. Nor were the jug of water and the small squares of cut bread beside each place more cheering. The shepherd’s pie was of the very worst sort – with lumpy mashed potato and the minced meat swimming in a strongly flavoured gravy. Mrs Leacock said that the house would be nicer when they had some of the family down to stay – Elinor was coming shortly with the twins, and then Michael and his pretty little wife. She also said that, if she knew herself at all, it wouldn’t take her long to get to know everybody round about. Leacock talked of the acclimatization of agouti and hyrax. But he was less entirely happy. He was clearly waiting.

We had already begun to eat the apple crumbly when Harriet came in, preceded as she had been on the night of the programme by Rickie. Both dog and mistress looked the worse for wear. His coat was mudcaked and she had put on too much make-up too carelessly. Her eyes were great dead sapphires; at the sides of her large sensual mouth misplaced lipstick emphasized lines of discontent. She gave a scowling look at her father, a contemptuous look at her mother and the food, a hungry look at me.

Dr Leacock said, ‘Harriet, I must ask you to have some consideration for meal times.’

He would have gone on, but Mrs Leacock made absurd little signs at him to stop. Harriet sat, crumbling her piece of bread. I made a selfish resolve that the Leacock family troubles should not spoil my visit to Stretton.

Mrs Leacock said, ‘I hope they’ve made you comfortable at the Crown. I believe it’s a nice old pub.’

‘I was worried when I heard that they’d got young children, Carter. That sounded too much like home from home to me. You need a rest.’ Dr Leacock seemed really concerned.

‘I hate children,’ Harriet announced defiantly.

Mrs Leacock began nervously to scrape out the remnants of the apple crumbly from the dish.

‘Harriet lost her only one,’ she said in what I think must be termed a half-aside.

‘Mummy always thinks that will make people like me better. It’s rather odd really because the thing only lived two days. And I had a miscarriage as well in my first marriage but that’s never been expected to endear me to anyone.’

Mrs Leacock gave a little embarrassed laugh almost before Harriet spoke so that it struck me that they must have had this ghastly conversation many times before in company. The thought did not endear them to me.

‘Actually I had two abortions in my second marriage. But I suppose they would be considered downright off-putting.’

Dr Leacock said, ‘As you will see, Carter, Harriet likes to show off in front of visitors. She’s never really grown up.’

She turned to him and said very quickly and quietly, ‘That’s marvellous really, coming from someone who still calls his prick his weewee.’ Then she turned to her mother and, as though she had never made the remark, said, ‘They hadn’t the green wool, darling. They wanted to sell me something of a sort of dark sage green which I didn’t think you’d want. Horribly dingy!’

Her father was forced to accept the escape she offered him. He too said as naturally as he could manage, ‘You’re going to give Carter coffee, aren’t you, Madge dear?’

Harriet now turned to me. She gave a kind of wink. Then she asked me what I was going to do at Stretton.

‘I can’t say I like being surrounded by all these captive animals,’ she said, ‘I suppose it’s all right with a very few – the tortoises and things, though even then … But with the beautiful strong ones it horrifies me. One could forget them in London even though Father was their keeper. But here one seems surrounded by them. I think of them at night. The wolves and the pumas – all the lordly ones. They ought to be free.’

She was talking, I thought, to give her mother time to recover from her embarrassment. The old woman’s head seemed to shake involuntarily when she went out to the kitchen. She returned carrying cups of some pale brown liquid with a strangely iridescent surface. She was composed enough to make an effort.

She said, ‘For all their quarrels Harriet and Edwin are so alike. Those are just Daddy’s ideas, dear!’

‘Limited liberty!’ Harriet laughed as she said it.

To prevent a fresh outbreak of the feud, I said, ‘What about your dog?’

‘Oh, Rickie! That’s different. He’s my man. Aren’t you, old darling?’ Then smiling almost happily, she said, ‘But you really are concerned with wild animals, Mr Carter. I remember you on television some years ago with those badgers. That did seem to be a thing worth doing.’

I told her then of my excitement about the British Reserve, of how I hoped during this week to prospect and chart the whole area, of how I knew already of at least two groups of badgers’ setts, and that they seemed to be independent colonies. I wanted to talk about it and I wanted to help. I managed somehow to include all of them in the conversation, but, although she talked with her mother, she completely ignored anything her father said. As she relaxed, I thought that I liked her rather better. After all, if she was what most people would have called ‘impossible’, she was also, from another angle, in an ‘impossible’ position. I did not know to what degree she was held there, whether by indigence or laziness or by a promise or possibly by some legal control. If her weapons seemed crude and cruel I had no means of knowing what ancient feuds she was fighting. Perhaps she guessed that I was not ‘against’ her, for she smiled and said,

‘Well, I must see that Rickie doesn’t play havoc with your wild life. Not that it will be possible to lay blame on him, that’s one thing. There’s sure to be some dangerous beast escaping all the time from this prison without bars. So any shambles that Rickie creates on the local farms can be put down to the escaped hyena or what not, thank God.’

Dr Leacock said coldly, ‘I hope you’ll keep this kind of frivolous nonsensical talk to yourself, Harriet.’

‘As I don’t know anybody here to talk to I shall have to, shan’t I? In any case if they do escape, good luck to them.’

I tried to take a hand, ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t be good luck. An escaped captive animal is simply a hunted and terrified creature.’

‘Oh, I dare say it would have some fun before it was shot. Getting its own back by eating some fat, juicy little child.’ She was silent for a moment and then quite abruptly she asked, ‘Would you take me with you to watch your badgers?’ She sounded desperate.

It was the last thing I wanted, I thought it unfair, and yet at that moment I felt that I couldn’t let her down in front of her father.

I said, ‘Certainly. It’s tiring, you know, keeping still and absolutely quiet. I shall verify the setts today and if the wind’s right, we might go at dusk tomorrow.’

Mrs Leacock said, ‘You’ll have to behave yourself, Harriet dear.’

She looked at her mother for a moment and then burst out in laughter.

I said, ‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to bring Rickie though.’

‘I’ve got some sense of the convenable,’ she replied.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I tried to be interesting. I sketched the future Reserve for her on a scrap of paper, marking such fox earths, badger setts, squirrels’ dreys and so on as I had already found. She leaned over my shoulder, her dark hair tickling my neck and cheeks; she seemed completely happy and relaxed; but, attractive though I had often thought her, her physical touch somehow repelled me. However I was now committed. Mrs Leacock condemned me to a further decrease of my privacy.

‘You must join Daddy and me this evening,’ she cried, ‘we’re being shown round Stretton House by Lord Godmanchester’s private secretary. The lords and lordesses are away so we common mortals are to be let in.’

I was amazed that they had not yet been invited to the house; I expected a note of bitterness in her voice but there was none.

‘Don’t say you won’t come or I shall think you like Harriet better than me.’

I wondered how Martha and I would ever support the Leacocks if my dream came true.

I spent the whole afternoon charting the Reserve, verifying the observations of my previous visit, noting what might have been the runs of various mammals, looking out for fur caught on twigs, for dropped feathers, for spoors and for excrement. One of Godmanchester’s keepers had told me that a polecat had been shot there some months before and twice that afternoon I thought I detected their scent. In fact I returned to the pub feeling that the British Reserve had an exciting future.

I had already seen Stretton House from a distance, and, of course, in illustrations. The late Victorian architect, in choosing the French château style, had included every sort of tourelle and spiral staircase, every carved dormer or chimney; no colour was missing from the tiled roof, no possible inset medallion or carved heraldic device from the staring white stone surface of the walls. It was only admired by a very few extremist neo-Victorians – Bobby Falcon had professed some interest in it. I found it absolutely repellent.

Mrs Leacock said, ‘Isn’t it a lovely old place? A change after our terrible barracks.’

Her husband said, ‘I fancy it’s been added to.’

This hint gave no warning to his wife.

She said, ‘All the carvings and little creatures! They couldn’t do it now, of course. We haven’t the craftsmen.’

Ashamed of myself I nevertheless became taut with embarrassment, wondering how the secretary would receive Mrs Leacock’s naïveté. All was well; a young woman from the village had been deputed to deal with us. She recited the details of the house in a flat singsong voice and neither listened to nor waited for comments. She seemed mainly to be concerned with questions of size – Stretton was larger than Chambord and Chenonceaux combined; there were twelve more turns in the staircase than in that at Blois; the mansards copied from those at the Louvre were twice as high; and so on. Here and there were paintings and pieces of furniture that interested me and I soon fell into an easy enough daze. Mrs Leacock asked whether Lady Godmanchester stayed there often; no, said the girl, her ladyship didn’t care for the country, though she was now having her collection of pictures brought down there from London.

When Madge Leacock was expressing her interest in a portrait of Godmanchester’s grandmother by Jacques Emile Blanche, there was a sudden clatter and a high angry foreign voice shouting orders. The village girl looked alarmed, but, before she could move us on, the double doors at the other end of the long gallery opened and Lady Godmanchester walked in followed by footmen carrying three large pictures. I recognized her at once – she was every bit as pretty and as hard as her Press photos showed her, only whereas I had thought of her as perpetually the twenty-five-year-old penniless country girl Godmanchester had married in the sixties, she was now much nearer thirty-eight and lines of boredom rather than of bad temper showed her age in her face. At first the Leacocks didn’t recognize her and I breathed again; then Mrs Leacock suddenly made a little nervous girlish run towards her.

‘Lady Godmanchester?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Mrs Leacock – this is Dr Leacock. And this is the Secretary of the Zoo, Mr Carter.’

Lady Godmanchester said again, ‘Yes?’ and went on giving orders about the paintings.

‘We’re so grateful,’ Mrs Leacock said, ‘for all you’ve done to settle us in here.’

This time Lady Godmanchester only turned her head slightly towards us.

‘Just tell the housekeeper or my secretary, will you?’

Dr Leacock tried to help his wife out.

He said, ‘We’ve been most interested in your pictures, Lady Godmanchester.’

She turned with faintly more interest.

‘Oh, when did you see them?’

The Leacocks looked puzzled, then Mrs Leacock said bravely, ‘The hands are so finely painted. That’s the real test, isn’t it?’ She pointed to the Blanche portrait.

Lady Godmanchester didn’t laugh, it would have been better if she had.

She simply said rather angrily, ‘Oh, these are dreadful things, they’re nothing to do with me. I wondered how you could have got into our London house.’

The village girl clearly detected Lady Godmanchester’s mood for she tried to move us on; but Mrs Leacock was dauntless, she went up to a picture that the younger footman was carrying. Bending down to look at it, she said, ‘Ah, these are your famous pictures, Lady Godmanchester. May I?’

Lady Godmanchester said, ‘Nothing good is down here yet. I don’t want to move the Delacroixs and the Ingres until I have to. All this war is so infuriating.’

Mrs Leacock said, ‘You must have great fun picking them up.’

‘Picking them up?’ Lady Godmanchester seemed genuinely puzzled, then she said impatiently, ‘Oh, I buy through dealers, of course.’

Even Madge Leacock was aware that they were not getting very far. She bent her head round to look at another painting.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Well, a nude, I suppose.’

Dr Leacock laughed as well as he was able.

‘My wife meant who’s the artist.’

‘It was painted by Etty.’ Lady Godmanchester sounded desperate.

Dr Leacock said, ‘I believe you collect Turners.’

‘I have some paintings by him, yes.’

I said feebly, ‘I love the late Turners.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so. They’re very good.’

But Madge Leacock had moved on to the third painting. A light seemed to dawn in her childish eyes.

She said, ‘Look, Daddy. One of the old Victorian pictures.’ I caught a glimpse of a genre painting by Wilkie or someone of that kind.

‘Well, that is amusing, isn’t it?’ She had found the ‘smart’ word; she knew now what Lady Godmanchester was up to.

More confidently she said to her, ‘You certainly have found some amusing things.’

Lady Godmanchester’s romantic urchin boy’s face set in fury, her eyes blazed.

‘They are not very good paintings, but they are certainly not amusing. I don’t buy amusing paintings. And now I’m afraid this room is closed. Good-bye.’

Poor Mrs Leacock was near to tears on the way home.

‘Oh, dear, Edwin. I’m afraid I put my foot in it badly. I do hope I haven’t done any harm.’

Dr Leacock took one hand from the wheel and squeezed hers.

But it was Mrs Leacock who unwittingly said the right word, I believe. ‘You know I really think,’ she said, ‘that the trouble was that she wasn’t too sure of her own taste.’

After dinner I was enjoying the luxury of reading Tarka the Otter quietly in the pub parlour when Dr Leacock appeared. He accepted a brandy and then said nervously, ‘Carter, I think you saw something at lunch of what we have to put up with.’

I wasn’t having that. If Martha and I were coming to live here I had to watch what nets of intimacy I involved her in. So I answered, ‘It’s really entirely a family matter, isn’t it, Leacock?’

‘I had hoped we could keep it so. But she seems determined to drag others in. I want to ask you a favour. Don’t let her come with you tomorrow night.’

‘I’m sorry. That’s nothing to do with you, I think. May I be frank? I don’t think you’ll help your daughter by treating her like a child.’

He got up from his chair and paced up and down the room; he came to rest before a large stuffed salmon at which he stared.

‘You know, I suppose, that she’s only after one thing with men.’

‘Well, it isn’t such a bad thing as all that, is it?’

He looked so upset, that I cried, ‘Look, I’m thirty-six, and she’s not so much younger. As it happens I believe in being faithful to my wife. But on any grounds we’re adults. It’s for us to decide.’

He said, ‘You don’t understand. Wherever she’s been involved there’s been trouble. So far she’s kept away from my colleagues. But you don’t know how much I value your co-operation, Carter. And if she starts anything with you, I don’t know where it will end. She hates me, you know.’

‘You don’t exactly love her.’

‘No. I dislike her very much. Mrs Leacock thinks we’re to blame. God knows why. The others have done well enough in life. But Mrs Leacock is very fond of her and that’s that as far as I’m concerned. Though, of course, Harriet trades on it. Anyhow these are all our troubles. I’m only asking you, and asking you very seriously, to do an old man who values you very much the favour of not involving yourself.’

‘I think she may be very hurt.’

Dr Leacock wouldn’t listen.

‘Will you just do me this kindness, Carter?’

He sounded so desperate that in the end I agreed. I wrote a note there and then to Harriet Leacock telling her that I was not after all going badger watching. I made it as cold as possible – in for a penny, in for a pound. I posted it that night in the village. I had no intention, in fact, of changing my plans.

I tried the next day to give myself up to the pleasures of the place. Indeed it’s only a sort of inbred puritanism that makes me write ‘tried’. I separated myself completely from the Leacocks that day and made my tours with various members of the uniformed staff. They were enthusiastic and I was so with them. The place had enormous potentialities and not only in my field of British fauna. The reconstruction of our historic wild life seemed to present fascinating problems. Even the exotic park would do much for the preservation of foreign species that were threatened. And there was the overall excitement of design. At the end of the day I felt that my life would really make sense if I could settle down there.

As I was returning to the pub, I met Mrs Leacock.

She said, ‘I had a mouldy night, I don’t mind telling you, thinking about the way I’d dished Edwin with Lady G. But do you know what I’ve done? I thought at first of just leaving it, but problems don’t get solved by forgetting them. I’m no good at writing apologies and anyway letters often do harm. So I just popped a pot of the bramble jelly I’ve made into a bag with a little note saying that it was a poor thing, but my own. You see with someone so rich there’s nothing you can do for them. But I dare say they never think to give her anything homemade. Then I just added casually that I wanted to be friends. I hope it works, don’t you?’

I could have shaken her soundly, old innocence and all; but I could only say that I hoped so too.

She said brightly, ‘This is a place where I’ll have to watch my ps and qs, I can see,’ and set off gaily for home.

It was growing dusk already, when with a torch and field-glasses I made my way through the deep bracken towards the bank where I had located the second group of setts. They were the newer of the two, I had decided, with few entrances; the sandy surface that here covered the clay subsoil was less worn with seasons’ digging than the larger group at the edge of the beechwood. There the ground was so worn and slippery that the setts might well have become disused; a scent of fox seemed to confirm this. But here among the oaks the setts were so recent that only a few of the huge knotted tree roots had been laid bare. At the side of the clearing too there was a fresh-seeming midden. There were only three entrances to the setts. Not too many to observe. Yet the setts had been used for more than two or three seasons, I felt sure, and were likely to house more than one family of badgers. I avoided carefully the beaten tracks in the bracken that showed where they passed to their feeding grounds – one, I thought, to a small hazel copse, the other, perhaps, to a nearby field of stubble. The light was fading as I stationed myself against an oak tree, laying my torch and glasses in a gnarled hole and so scattering a colony of woodlice. A light breeze blew dead against me. The bracken’s scent brought serial memories stretching far back into my childhood. There would be a full moon up in an hour. The situation was ideal.

I had been there about twenty minutes. Occasionally the breeze stirred the leaves like waves on a distant sea shore. Otherwise the noises in the absolute stillness came harsh and exaggerated to the ear – even the movement of what might have been a rat or a stoat two hundred yards or so away from me in the bracken. Once a jet overhead scraped the nerves of the silence. Once, too, a barn owl had clattered overhead in the trees – there was still light enough to see the buff of its wings as well as the white of its breast. I thought once that I heard a slight snuffling sound at the entrance to the setts which suggested that I might not have long to wait. All the echoes of past happiness were setting up their reverberations in me; yet, and this was the anticipated glory, I was exactly in that wood opposite that sandy bank behind that oak tree at that moment only.

She made, I must admit, professionally little noise in approaching me. So little that she must have been only a few yards from me, when I caught a glimpse of a black and white snout sniffing the air at entrance B. Then suddenly I knew that someone was moving up behind me. She stood very close to me and began to whisper.

‘I looked for you at the other place first by the beechwood.’

I put my finger to my lips. She was here, that was irksome enough; but if I could possibly prevent her, she should not spoil my pleasure. It was clear that my letter had not yet reached her; I pushed out of my mind the thought of how it was at all possible now to prevent her from getting it – her mother’s aid? I would not think of it now. This was my well-earned evening. She took my hand and pulled it under her skirt; she had nothing on underneath. A moment later I felt her hand against my thigh, and then on my crutch, and now her fingers were dexterously opening my flies. My only thought was that in this place anything we did would inevitably make noise enough to scare the badgers for nights to come. Lust and anger and a sense of being made a fool of fought together in me. Then she pulled her hand away and with the other smacked my face hard. The noise echoed through the wood. She spoke in a violent intense whisper as though the wood’s silence made her afraid to raise her voice.

‘You needn’t have been so frightened,’ she said. ‘You and that old bastard! You’d have to have something much bigger than that to interest me.’

I saw her face for a moment as I turned; she was not in the slightest degree hysterical, and only wish-fulfilment could have told me that she was mad. She was just a very angry, unhappy woman who for years had fought every discipline. I put out my hands towards her shoulders. I wanted to shake her if I could not comfort her. But she was gone, crashing her way through the bracken, rousing woodpigeons and owls and jays. The setts by the sandy bank would yield nothing again for some nights. I walked slowly back to the pub, cursing all Leacocks as I went.

*

I had at that time experienced very little melodrama in my life. I had no simple prescription for banishing its after effects. For the remainder of my stay at Stretton, I soaked myself in the new organization. To my good luck, I also found that the old sett under the beech trees was, in fact, occupied by two families of badgers. I watched them regularly and was even rewarded by seeing a cub ejected by its parents from a nest it had outgrown. The autumn departure of the cubs was one of the least documented aspects of the badger life cycle. I should have been deeply satisfied. Yet the scene with Harriet hung around me in part anger, part shame; it was as though I was constantly finding by some mischance that my private parts were showing in public. I also did all my watching in great inconvenience at dawn, as though the dusk had somehow become tainted. I didn’t see Harriet again, but, not long before I left, Mrs Leacock said she hoped her daughter hadn’t been a nuisance to me.

‘Poor old Harriet,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid life’s a bit mouldy for her here. But then she shouldn’t have been such a naughty girl. She’s always been rather the odd one out. Of course, she had rotten luck both times she was married. Edwin says she’s got a natural flair for picking up duds. The thing is she’s never been as go-ahead as the rest of the family. And Daddy’s so brilliant, he gets impatient. But you mustn’t think she’s really bad. That’s just talk and showing off.’

The day before I left there was a sudden alarm. An opossum had got loose from the Exotic Reserve, climbed into a farm-house window and given an old woman a nasty scare by feigning death on her bedroom floor. It was easily recaptured and could in any case have done no harm, but Dr Leacock was nevertheless extremely angry, particularly when he discovered that the loss had been reported to Strawson three or four days before.

‘The whole foundation of a National Park in a populous country like ours must depend upon security. People will only welcome liberty when they know it means safety. The natural life can only grow up among us when all suspicions and fears have died away.’

Without identifying myself with his form of words I was in complete agreement with him. Lord Godmanchester, who had just come down from London, was less helpful. As the local landowner and a former M.F.H., he was all against coddling complaining tenants.

‘You ought to have talked to my agents first, Leacock,’ he said, ‘before apologizing too profusely. They know these people and it just doesn’t do. If we’re going to grovel every time a tame mouse gets under some old woman’s skirts, we shall lose all face. I suppose Strawson didn’t fuss about this ’possum because he knew that the most it would do would be to pinch an egg or two out of the chicken runs? You’d have taken quite a different line if it had been a kodiak bear or a wolverine, wouldn’t you, Strawson?’

‘That was exactly my meaning, Sir. I never care to raise an unnecessary alarm. Parturiunt montes I’ve never studied Latin, but certain tags stick.’

Dr Leacock cut right through all this.

‘There’s absolutely no excuse, Strawson. And I don’t want to hear any. You’re very lucky, you know, to be associated with a scheme of such revolutionary proportions, you will do well not to try to measure it by your own inevitably limited standards. Rules have been laid down, if you follow them, you will at least have an excuse.’

‘I think the chap was trying to use his initiative,’ Lord Godmanchester put in.

Dr Leacock entirely ignored this.

‘I accept your excuse, Strawson, for this time. We shall make a complete check of all boundary wiring, exits and so on. I don’t want to blame you for what may be the fault of the workmen. But I do blame you for taking the escape casually, and I shall blame you still more if it happens again.’

When Strawson had gone, I thought that Leacock would offer some excuse to Godmanchester, instead he turned sharply upon him.

‘Running an estate and running a National Reserve are two quite different things, you know. I didn’t want to put you in an embarrassing position in front of subordinates, but I must ask you to keep right out of all questions of staff discipline.’

To my surprise, Lord Godmanchester only said, ‘You and Carter both let that chap’s way of speaking prejudice you against him. But still that’s your affair.’

Before I returned to London, he took me aside and asked me how I thought the Director was coping with the situation. I replied that I was very much impressed.

‘Yes, that’s what I think. He’s nothing like such a windbag as he was, is he? That’s why I’m letting him have his head.’

I was not altogether convinced now that he could have held Dr Leacock’s head even if he had wished to do so. But I didn’t say this.

*

It had always been agreed between Martha and me that we should tell each other everything, especially anything that concerned our sexual life. As Martha said, ‘It’ll either be so important that we must talk about it; or else it’ll be so unimportant that it’ll be funny. That’s how sex is.’ Like a lot of Martha’s sayings, this was an over-simplification. But it was fundamentally what she had learned from me. With modifications, and with due allowance for the pathology that asked our compassion etc., the Harriet episode fell into the funny category. Yet I had some hesitation in telling Martha. I wasn’t altogether sure that I could not have behaved better, but still that was a poor reason for concealment. More disturbing to me was its effect upon Martha’s attitude to our moving eventually to Stretton. I was so set upon this now that I could not bear to unearth any opposition; yet Martha had a horror of the ‘crawly’, and there seemed no doubt now that there was something ‘crawly’ about the Leacock family life that in the enforced gregariousness of rural isolation might become a problem. I compromised by telling her first of my happiness and excitement about the Reserve; only when we were firmly relaxed after dinner, did I retail the Harriet story.

Martha said, ‘Oh, poor thing! What can be done for her, Simon?’ Then, ‘Ugh! It’s rather crawly, isn’t it?’ And at last, ‘Well, phooey to her, she doesn’t know what she’s missed.’ And she walked over to me and kissed me.

Yet, in a fashion, she seemed a little detached from the whole of my Stretton adventures.

She said, ‘I’m so happy for you, darling. So truly happy. This could be it, you know, the beginning of what we hoped for when you left the old Treasury!’

I felt sleepy and contented and very ready to take her to bed; but she was restless. She put on the banquet scene from Don Giovanni, but I thought she was only half listening. Then she came and sat on the floor at the foot of my chair and put her head in my lap. I stroked her hair, but I was disturbed – it was a posture that so often preceded confidences of varying discord.

‘Isn’t it awful,’ she asked, speaking as though she was very far away from me in a beautiful deep sea cavern, ‘that just when everything seems right for someone, it seems all wrong for someone else?’

I said, ‘Yes. But stop talking in that far away voice. You’re not a young actress with her first part in The Seagull. What’s wrong for who?’

She laughed, ‘All right,’ she said, ‘it’s Bobby. After what Jane said I’ve been seeing, quite a lot of him. I suppose I’ve always taken him for granted, Simon. He was the great figure of my childhood, my godfather whose pictures appeared in all the papers. At every school I went to I was the envy of all the other girls – my godfather the great TV star, the man who found the abominable snowman, the man who exploded the myth of the Nandi bear, so handsome and sexy, a sort of pin-up boy for the girls of our social class. I was even more flattered than embarrassed when he made a pass at me on a ski-ing holiday. Then I had a period of being against him. I suppose I was upset when I found out that he and Mummy had been lovers. And I used to rather like Jane. But just lately after he found you the job at the Zoo, I’ve thought he was a nice old thing, rather pathetic and absurd. Simon! I didn’t know how pathetic!’

‘My dear, I’ve told you often enough.’

‘Yes, darling, but everybody you describe is ridiculous and a bit sad. Oh, I don’t mean that nastily. You do see very funny things in people and you have got a feeling, but you paint the whole world that way. Anyhow I didn’t take it seriously. But now I’ve seen more of him, I feel miserable. Simon, one shouldn’t ever take human beings for granted, however long one’s known them. And that wretched marriage of his – I’ve just found it easier to say “that wretched marriage” and leave it at that. They don’t even hate each other, they’re just that awful thing – “good pals”. I must say I hate Jane a bit for it now. All that competence and fun out of life and so on. I thought she was a martyred brave wife, she’s just a cold bitch, I’m afraid. I can’t do anything for him really. Except that I have made him think that he’s not too old to explore again. Apparently he’s always wanted to search for some sort of armadillo in the Amazon. Anyhow I’ve got him round to the idea. Oh, it’s interfering of me, I’m sure, but if I can’t get you to do what I want. But he’s only agreed, I’m afraid, out of a sort of desperation. And I think if he could get away from that place …’

‘And leave me all the work to do.’

‘Oh! I know, darling, that’s exactly it. And that’s why he won’t go. He says it’s not fair on you. Of course, I can’t say it to him, but surely he’s more in your way than anything …’

‘You want me to urge him to go. Of course, I will, if you think I should.’

I smiled to myself and Martha cried, ‘Well, aren’t I right?’

‘Yes. I think you are. I was only remembering how you urged me to act against anyone whose muddle might have led to young Filson’s death.’

‘Oh, I know. But muddle it is, Simon. I’ve taxed Bobby and all one can get is guilt and self-accusation. I suppose it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘Remembering only Don Giovanni’s misery, let the Commendatore moulder.’

Martha flushed scarlet round her neck. ‘You speak as though Bobby had murdered the young man. If you’re sure, why don’t you face Bobby and tell him? Anyway what have you done about it?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Martha. It hasn’t been easy for me. I’ve taken what practical measures I can. But there’s the happiness of so many people to consider.’

She kissed me. ‘I know,’ she said.

I agreed to urge Bobby to go.

‘It’ll mean late homecomings and an overtired husband.’

‘I know, Simon. And that makes me feel more awful because …’ She paused and then went on, ‘or rather it would, if you’d been honest with me, but you haven’t. I don’t understand how you could have kept from me this business about old Godmanchester’s belief in a war.’

‘After all it’s there to read in his papers every day.’

‘Oh, that! Who takes notice of them? Don’t try to evade, Simon. You know that this is more serious. To evacuate the Zoo!’

‘Well, there are two or even three views about that.’ I told her of my conversations with Leacock.

She listened carefully, then she said, ‘Yes, I see. That makes it seem more remote. But it’s no good, Simon, I can’t take any risks over Reggie and Violet. We’ve been given a warning and we must act on it.’

‘Do you suppose I haven’t been thinking about that? But one must use reason.’

‘Not me. I won’t use anything except caution where the children are concerned. I shall take them to Hester in California. God knows Bobby may be right and the whole world’s going to blow up. Then they’ll simply die quickly or slowly away from us when we could have all died together. But I must take a chance on that. I shall go as soon as I can get a flight, Simon. I’ll settle them in there with Hester and then, of course, I’ll come back. But meanwhile …’

Meanwhile we eased away our miseries in bed as best we could. And very well we could do it, if there need be no tomorrow. As Martha lay back from me with a sigh of content, she said,

‘I can’t think how anyone else could give that pleasure except you.’ Then as she rolled on to her side, she added, ‘My God! That poor Harriet just wanting it from anyone, anywhere. The people she must go with! The love she must do without!’

‘Darling Martha, I could hardly have taken her out of pity. That would be the worst caddishness of all.’

Martha sighed and rubbed her face in her pillow.

‘I suppose so,’ she mumbled.

‘Well, would you have wanted me to have had her?’

‘Oh no, Simon, no, of course not. I should have hated to hear it. One just wishes that everybody could be happy, that’s all.’

*

So Bobby Falcon, with the agreement of the Committee, went off to the Amazon to hire guides and make preliminary charts for his expedition. Godmanchester was a little disturbed, at first, at the disappearance of so famous a man from the scene; but, as Bobby would have resigned had he not received permission, there was little that anyone could do. The Godmanchester Press, in fact, decided to back the inevitable heavily. They provided money for the expedition, arranged for a famous cameraman to accompany Bobby, and altogether went out for exclusive rights on the story. For weeks they carried gossip about Sir Robert and Lady Falcon. Jane was asked whether she would not have liked to have accompanied him and was reported as saying, ‘Blissful, but you know what the theatre’s like. No Amazon this year, I’m afraid, for me.’ She took the opportunity to expatiate on the brilliance of her newest playwright. Bobby was photographed looking every sort of soldier-explorer, introspective, reckless and dashingly lecherous in a presentable sort of way. He declared, ‘Now war’s off the map, thank God, I need a bit of hardship to use up my energies.’ It was unlikely that he said this; and it was extremely inconsistent of Lord Godmanchester’s papers to call it ‘An old soldier’s tip to youth’, since they were prophesying war in most of the other columns – but truth and consistency after all … I was not altogether sorry to see Bobby’s neurotic energies out of the way. It was agreed that though I should, in fact, fill the Director’s role at Regent’s Park, a more senior member must act as titular deputy for Leacock. After much debate, Langley-Beard was chosen; and, irritating though I had often found him, it seemed to me that the Prosector was the man least likely to interfere. Also I was intrigued by the idea of getting to know this saintly man a little better.

In any case the Zoo’s affairs came to me through a fog of personal distress at that time. Either the children were going away quite unnecessarily or else it might well be that I was seeing them for the last time. For Martha I had always found a way to express my deep love; but for the children never, and consequently to see them go – despite all the jealousies and irritations that their presence caused me at times – roused an agony and remorse and longing in me. It was not helped by the manner of their going. Naturally war was not mentioned to them, it was simply a holiday with Aunt Hester. We caught their imaginations with a fantasy of cacti and tumbleweeds, of cowboys and Indian Reserves, of dustbowls and canyons; but Reggie, at any rate, I think, considered the whole affair rather strange and my part in it rather callous. Only just before he passed from me beyond the passenger’s barrier at London Airport, he said,

‘I should think if we stay long at Aunt Hester’s, we shan’t even remember Daddy’s face when we get back.’

And Martha, of course, was only going to settle them in. But what might happen in that time? And how would she find the strength to leave them? In any case, I knew that to be without Martha – especially her physical presence – for even a short while, would prove intolerable.