I STILL, of course, had my own future plans to decide. Leacock, when he said good-bye, urged me, despite my great distaste for doing so, to stay on.
‘But I think you’ve been abominably treated, Leacock, and in so far as it counts with the Committee, I should like to register my protest.’
‘No, no, Carter, we’ve had enough gestures. Besides you don’t owe me any loyalty. I misled and deceived you at the beginning as much as Godmanchester did. I foresaw much of this, but as I’ve told you I couldn’t afford to wait. I was determined to fight it out and, frankly, if this ghastly blow hadn’t hit me, I think that I’d have won. But you’re badly needed here. I can testify to that. The orders you were given may have been wrong but nobody could have administered them more efficiently.’
‘Thank you. But I’ve had the idea of leaving for some time. I’m so much happier when I’m simply working as a naturalist and I’m beginning to wonder why I shouldn’t indulge that happiness.’
‘I’ve never been happy, Carter, so I can’t advise you about that. Oh, of course, I’m happy at home, gloriously so. But I’ve always been an ambition-driven man and always shall be. So happiness in work isn’t quite my field. Pleasure in work at times, of course; I’ve had great pleasure down here. But I’ve always expected trouble, you know, in my life. Now I don’t think you’re ambition driven, but you are a man with a strong sense of duty. I don’t think you’ll be happy if you neglect it. And your duty’s here. As to field work, Godmanchester’ll want to keep you, and if you insist on retaining the British Reserve here, he won’t be able to say no. After all with the exceptions of the Scotch wild cats and a few red deer, all the fauna were here before anyway.’
‘I couldn’t be beholden to him.’
‘Well, that I understand. But if you’re worrying about having to deal with him, I shouldn’t. He won’t have time for Zoo affairs again in his life, I’m sure. Anyway I hope you stay. I’d like to think that you’ll be Director in time.’
Bobby Falcon gave quite other advice. He begged me not to waste my time in administration. Of course, he’d be delighted to have me work with him, but frankly he had never thought of the Secretary’s job as one for a man of real ability. He felt sure he could do it all himself with the assistance of a couple of good old-fashioned clerks, if such could be found nowadays. He must tell me honestly that he proposed to put the clock back at Regent’s Park a good deal, to a more leisurely and most especially, a more colourful age. Godmanchester was giving the world a bit of a respite, God knew for how long, and the least he, Falcon, could do was to try to bring back the good old days while it lasted.
I was strengthened in my impression that since his return from America, he had been ill at ease with me, no doubt because he knew me to be a Leacock man.
I was angered by his low estimation of administrative work; I was horrified by what might happen to the administration if he were in sole charge; I did not really see why he should get rid of me so easily. On the other hand it might well be as unpleasant as he predicted, and why should I go on seeking discomfort. I told him that I should not decide until I had consulted by letter with Martha.
‘Well that’s all right then,’ he said. ‘You’ve as good as gone. I know what she thinks.’
I wrote a full account of my dilemma to her that night. Three days later I received a cable which read, ‘AIR PASSAGE BOOKED RETURNING WEDNESDAY DO NOTHING UNTIL I ARRIVE CHILDREN STAY ALL MY LOVE MARTHA’. That morning one of Godmanchester’s secretaries phoned me, requesting that I should visit the Lord Privy Seal’s office the next day at 11.15 a.m. precisely.
Godmanchester’s personal office was sumptuous in the most old-fashioned, late Victorian sense of that word: good leather everywhere and an array of inkstands and cigar boxes on his desk that looked as though they had been the gifts of Indian Rajahs to the Queen Empress Victoria. I was reminded of a story of some Foreign Secretary – was it Curzon? – whose first act in office was to have the silver inkstand replaced by one of gold. Waiting for Godmanchester, I wondered whether, in fact, he was the saviour that England needed. Or whether senile megalomania had imposed itself upon a desperate people. However politics were not – I had never allowed them to be – my concern. In any case my reflections were interrupted by the flushing of a cistern and, a moment later, Godmanchester ambled out from behind a concealed door, doing up his fly-buttons. It was clear that his manner of enhancing grandeur was by treating it with contempt.
‘You’re a very lucky man, Carter,’ he said, ‘I’ve no time for business like yours at the moment. But I’ve heard you’re thinking of resigning from the Zoo service and I don’t want you to do it. Now I’ve got exactly ten minutes I can spare for you. Do you think you can come to your senses in that time?’
‘I’m waiting for my wife to come back from the States before I decide what I do. She’ll be back here next week.’
‘I take it that you’re not such a fool as to be ruled by your wife’s decision so we’ll regard that as an evasive ruse. Now I’ve told you before that I think you’re very good at your job and that I hope you’ll be Director later on. I think you’ve been a fool in fighting Leacock’s battles for him, however loyalty’s a fault I’ve no objection to so long as it’s not persisted in ridiculously. You tried to help Leacock, so did I. We failed. Forget it. It’s over. He could have kept his Historic Reserve but he wouldn’t play ball. Now you can have your British Reserve, more easily in fact than his historical one. Badgers and polecats are one things, wolves and wild boars quite another. I know you’ve imported those Scotch wild cats, but I don’t see why the people of Hertfordshire shouldn’t face the same remote dangers as the people of Argyll. You want the British Reserve. We want you at Regent’s Park. All right. Will you stay?’
‘I’ve told you, Lord Godmanchester, I shall consult my wife.’
‘Look! Is it my treatment of Leacock that’s sticking in your gullet? Or is it that you think I made my own uses of an important zoological venture? I don’t know why I should have to argue with you about it. I’d like to tell you where to put your moral scruples and kick you out of the room. But I can only say to you that I wouldn’t have done a lot of the things I’ve done in the last year if I’d seen any other way of campaigning myself into office. And if you say – who cares whether you’re in office? – I can only answer that no one in this country will ever know how much they ought to care, because they’ll never know the ghastly things I shall save them from. But, if you can waive your glorious disbelief for a moment, I’ll tell you what is true – that I’m particularly upset about the Zoo. In point of fact there are many other places, yes, and people, some of them old friends, who have as much reason to complain of my treatment of them as the Zoological Society has, but I happen to feel more about the Zoo. And that’s why I want you to stay on and give the place the administration it needs.’
‘I don’t think I can order my life to help settle your conscience.’
Godmanchester rolled back in his padded leather armchair in disgust.
‘Go on. Get out,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe that anyone as priggish as you can be indispensable. I just can’t believe it.’
‘I’m sure I’m not. Sir Robert Falcon will tell you that the work can be done by a couple of clerks.’
‘Yes, yes. Falcon’s just the man that’s needed there at the moment, thank God! But he doesn’t understand the first thing about how any organization works. Why should he? His métier is being a colourful personality.’ He paused, then leaning his short stubby arms on the huge desk, he loomed towards me, a blubbery shapeless old mass. ‘Will you stay on for this year, Carter? After that we can train somebody else. Particularly for this spring. I want to have the biggest show put on in London this spring that we can mount – tradition, art, sport, enterprise, everything we’ve got – to show the confidence we feel. Economically we need it, politically it may save us. There isn’t a famous building or a celebrity that I don’t intend to rope in. But my name’s particularly associated with the London Zoo and for that reason I want to stage a fine show there. Falcon’s got ideas. Will you stay at least until the British Day, as we’re going to call it, in the first week of June, and help him to put his ideas into practice?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve given me some reason for thinking that I may be very useful, if that gratifies you. But I still intend to talk to my wife before I make a decision. I’ll let you know next week.’
Godmanchester began to study a memorandum. He said in an offhand way,
‘Tell one of my secretaries. I shan’t be on tap for this sort of thing in the future. Anyway you’ve had more than your ten minutes. Good-bye.’
*
When from the balcony overlooking London Airport, I saw Martha stepping briskly across the tarmac from the aeroplane gangway, outpacing in her eagerness even the commanding air hostess, I felt such an upsurge of love and lust and reproach and remorse for my reproach that in dizziness I had to steady myself by holding on to the railings. In her turn, when she came out of the customs room and saw me standing, as she said, like a puppy ready to bound forward at a look of love or backward at the raise of a correcting arm, Martha felt, she afterwards told me, exactly the same turbulent swell of emotions. We silently concurred, too, in letting our remorse and reproach lie unspoken in the hope that a few days’ happiness together would make them seem too paltry even to be thought of. I had taken a week off and we gave it up to trivial talk and happy reminiscence. We wanted nothing more than a flat, brightly painted backcloth against which we could express unimpeded our pent-up love and desire. It was a sunny, gusty March week, where even from Primrose Hill or Regent’s Park the stiff puffy white clouds could be seen scudding across the pale blue sky, pursuing one another at irregular speeds and intervals like tableaux trying to catch up with the main procession in a splendid but ill-rehearsed pageant. Just to walk out in the parks or on the Heath under such skies banished the sense of London’s confinement and gave the illusion of open plains or mid ocean. I felt more than ever at such a time that my hope of blending town and country, the Zoo’s office life of human contact and the Reserve’s peace of heightened sight and sound was not an absurdity. On the last evening of that week we sat on a seat near the Open Air Theatre, sheltered from the wind by a magnolia tree already coming into flower. The dying sun was almost fierce on our faces for a while. I looked in turn at the strolling crowds, the scudding clouds or the white crocuses frosting the bank beneath the magnolia; and, wherever I looked for those few minutes, the world seemed to have some secret unity. Pleasure and duty need not, I thought, tear me apart.
Martha said, ‘I haven’t said anything yet, darling, about the job. I believe you want to stay at the Zoo. And that’s all that matters to me. I felt sick when I read your letters about the end of Stretton and I only wanted you to get away from the whole lot of them. But something I learned from seeing Hester again, I think, is that one can live with the past and disregard it. She was just the same – all the small things that maddened me and seem to spoil a very nice person – and yet I could manage to think of her simply as someone I was visiting with a view to leaving the children in her care. The truth is, Simon, that I’ve come back feeling exactly about her as I did before, but quite sure that the children will be happy and safe with her. She’s two people – an infuriating sister from the past and a decent guardian for Reggie and Violet if war comes here.’
I spoke through a haze of happiness, as though I knew everything would be all right from now on.
I said, ‘I trust you know best, Martha. And about my work too.’
But she cried, ‘No, no, Simon. That’s just it. You must do what you want. I only told you about all that because I thought maybe you were anxious lest the past, all that horrible business at Stretton, might dog your life at the Zoo in the future. And from my visit to Hester, I could say to you that it would always be there but that you could go ahead and get what you wanted out of the place all the same. Yes, I know, darling, and give what you wanted too.’
‘I want to keep the place running properly and I should like, too, to make a first-rate Reserve available to British naturalists. But at Stretton, Martha, and by Godmanchester’s courtesy! It’s not easy to swallow.’
‘Oh, phooey to Lord Godmanchester! He’s made use of you. You try to make use of him. But I’m not going to give advice, Simon. I’ve gone on far too much wanting this and that for you. You know best. What I know is that I want to be with you, and, as soon as we feel able, to have the children with us too. I’ve been too goddamned pleased with myself, fussing about whether you’re fulfilling yourself. You are you and that’s that.’
‘I like you to approve of me.’
‘Approve! Simon. Approve, pity, admire, despise, revere – I suppose I shall come around to the lot of them in the years ahead.’ She touched the bench on which we sat, ‘Given any years that is. But let’s call it love and not start sorting out the bits. Whatever my immediate emotions I shall love you as … as, well, as Jane doesn’t love Bobby.’
I took her hand in mine and stroked it.
‘Thank you.’
What she had said seemed part of this sudden sense of unity, of allrightness that had settled upon me. I did not need to sort out her words. Stroking her hand, watching a lion shaped beast hurrying across the sky to join (as it never could) a grey white map of Australia, I made casual conversation – or was it casual?
‘Bobby seems thriving at the moment anyway. Heaven knows what jubilation he’s concocting for the Zoo. I can’t get as enthusiastic about it as I was about Leacock’s Stretton scheme. But I think I can help him, even if I’m only an amused observer, because whatever he intends will presumably need organizing and I doubt if he could organize a church bazaar.’
‘He’s organized some important expeditions in his time.’
‘Yes, God knows how. I may be wrong. In any case the Society’s affairs have to be looked after, jubilee or no jubilee; and I’m quite sure that he’ll never attend to day to day work. The only trouble is that he doesn’t want me there. He says it’s a waste of my time. But in fact I think he really does believe he can do it all himself. He’s quite wrong of course …’
Martha broke in fiercely, ‘Bobby’s a stupid coward. You must not take any notice of him. If he looks like being a nuisance I’ll deal with him.’
I laughed. ‘First steps in the policy of non-interference. As a matter of fact I hadn’t intended to take any notice of him now that I know you agree with my decision to stay.’
Australia had blotted out the sun, the wind came fiercely through the shiny magnolia leaves, whipping up dust and a discarded cigarette packet around our feet, the crocuses still seemed like snowfall, but cold and dead now without the reflected light. Martha got up.
‘Well, that’s all right then. We must move on, darling, I’m getting cold.’
And so I telephoned to Godmanchester’s secretary to say that I was remaining.
*
Bobby Falcon was absolutely charming, once he had gulped down the news.
‘My dear Simon,’ he said, ‘if you and Martha are happy about it, nothing could be better than to have you holding my hand at this critical moment.’
It was a strange régime that we entered upon, ironically as like as two peas to the days before Leacock’s television programme. Bobby transformed the Director’s room into a symbol of all we stood for. He moved in furniture of the eighteen fifties and decorated the walls with his collection of Victorian genre paintings of the Zoo, including the vast canvas of Frith’s ‘A Ride on Jumbo’, and the series of sketches of mountain goats on the Mappin Terrace made by Holman Hunt before he left for the Dead Sea. Deposited around the room were a model of Steller’s sea cow, some authentic dodo feathers, a Victorian card case covered in quagga skin, the thigh bone of a moa, and a genuine stuffed Great Auk surveying the world with great surprise from its viewpoint of extinction. There was also a case containing broad-sheets and comic songs that referred to the Zoo. Against this background he carried on his remarkable manic-depressive Directorship – elated, lively, charming, competent, and above all imaginative when preparations for the British Day were under discussion; morose, rude, inattentive and sometimes surprisingly obtuse when other business had to be done. He only became really angry, however, when Stretton was mentioned; and once the animals, including Godmanchester’s so generously given own private collection, had arrived safely in London, Leacock and the Exotic Reserve were banished from all tongues.
Pattie Henderson, once, at the Staff Restaurant, pouring down her usual lunch-time two pints, did say to me, ‘Is all that business down in Wales wound up now?’
And when I said that it was, except for my own proposed Naturalists’ Reserve, she said, ‘Do you mean the creatures that were there anyway? The whole thing seems to have been rather a sweat for nothing, I must say. But of course you admin boys have to think up these bright ideas to keep yourselves busy, I suppose.’
Then she told me that she was only chaffing.
The only person who confronted Bobby with criticism of the move was Sanderson. He came into the Director’s office one morning when I was there.
Gravely looking down at the ground, he asked, ‘Is all this moving of the poor animals over yet, Falcon?’
Bobby, whose mind was on a scheme for rehousing the species most popular with the public in special replicas of the Victorian cages, said,
‘No. We’ve hardly begun, Sanderson. But I don’t think we shall trouble you much. I’ve got one or two ideas for showing the ants and the butterflies with moral texts, but I’ll let you know about that later.’
Sanderson grew red in the face.
‘I don’t only think of my own exhibits, you know,’ he said. ‘It seems to me completely damnable the way these poor beasts have been moved down to Wales and back again. And you say it’s not even completed.’
I intervened. ‘The Director misunderstood you. All the exhibits were back from Stretton a week ago.’
I said it with a certain fervour, since the operation had fallen almost entirely on me.
‘Well, I only hope they won’t be moved again. After all, they’re in our care and we ought to consider that. By making them captive we take their welfare on our shoulders for good and all. Otherwise we’ve no right to deprive them of freedom.’
Bobby leaned back against his chair and gave a sort of jaunty twist to his moustache that always indicated an attempt to mask rising anger under jocularity.
‘My dear Sanderson,’ he drawled, ‘have you ever thought how damned lucky the animals are that fall into the hands of the Society? By and large, that is, unless climate’s against them. No ghastly search for scarce food or water in times of drought! No relentless native huntsmen! No jungle rivalry! No old age, tracked down, feeble and desperate! I know the jungle and I can tell you this, that if our beasts here were shunted back between Wales and London for a year they’d be better off than the old lion or the sick rhino in their natural state or the giraffe separated from the herd. Think of them, Sanderson, before you bleat about our chaps’ cushy little troubles.’
Sanderson said, ‘I’m concerned for the animals here because they’re the ones I know.’
Afterwards Bobby reacted much as had his predecessor.
He said, ‘I haven’t seen much of Sanderson in the last few years. He appears to have become gaga.’
But I reserved my opinion. And Bobby sulked on and off for the rest of the day.
But as the British Day drew nearer, he was transformed. The old sick puma became visibly a sleek, handsome young leopard. The downward curving lines, the flabby bags and pouches, the grey that suffused his tanned skin had seemed less striking when he returned from America; now they were suddenly gone. Mrs Purrett said he looked every inch the soldier; Rackham said he’d like to see some of these young chaps today under Sir Robert’s command, they wouldn’t know whether they were going or coming; Jane said that she’d forgotten that she’d married such an old charmer; Sanderson announced that there was a strange, spiritual strength about our new Director that perhaps came from his knowledge of the East; Englander asked me if Falcon had come into money; Lord Oresby wondered if Falcon had been cutting down on wine and women, he looked so well; Strawson said there was something about the leadership of a gentleman; and Matthew, when I drew attention to Bobby’s dandyish military appearance, said,
‘Yes. He’s a terrible bounder, isn’t he? Like an advertisement for whisky.’
It was a unanimous verdict. With his refreshed appearance came a new and extraordinarily lighthearted energy that bowled over even those of us who were amusedly scornful of his schemes. He laughed at himself all the time for being such an anachronism in this earnest age, yet he laughed at us even more for taking the age so earnestly. I saw in those weeks the secret of the success of his expeditions, that he made it all a game and, in so doing, assured everyone how tremendously serious it all was, for, after all, games were the only things worth doing well. It was an arrogant charm and I watched fascinatedly to see how he got away with it. For instance, there was an electrical engineer, the principal representative of the firm concerned with the lighting ‘on the great night’ whose pomposity soon became a bait of Bobby’s. He was, funnily enough, a heavy, handsome matinée idol sort of man like Bobby himself but several social or sophisiticated rungs (you could call it which you like) lower in the charm ladder. Perhaps that was what riled Bobby. This man whose name was Johnson-White became ‘that charming fellow Bronson-Sprite’ or ‘that invaluable man Monson-Tight’. All this was as childish as it was snobbish, but it was done with such an air of enjoyment of what was known to be a cad’s trick that one couldn’t help joining in. Johnson-White, too, let himself in for it by suggesting, ‘if I may venture, a pastel shade for the Humming Birds’ House to tone down their somewhat strident tropical colouring’; now he could never set foot in the office without Bobby asking ‘what was that frightfully good phrase about the humming birds, my dear fellow?’ Or, again, Johnson-White, after much hesitation and archness, recommended an old rose lighting for the Ladies’ Rooms on the night – ‘the ladies like a kind lighting, Sir Robert. That’s not my opinion, let me hasten to say, but Mrs Johnson-White’s. The age-old wisdom of women about their own sex.’ After that hardly a day passed that Bobby did not call upon Mrs Purrett for a spot of age-old wisdom, and he even insisted on a tray marked ‘For Mrs Bronson-Sprite’ into which problems of entertainment or colour scheme were placed. Yet when Johnson-White might have expected to smell a rat and become offended, Bobby was to be found with him in real earnest, down on his hands and knees examining an angle of the tortoise house or a recess behind the pheasantry which opposed problems to effective wiring. His consumption of detail was alarmingly impressive and endeared him to all the technicians; so also indeed was his inventiveness and power to make do and mend.
‘Look,’ he would say to the works foreman concerned with the hydraulic problems of the ‘Seashore of Britain’ exhibit, ‘we had a nonsense like this to sort out when I was pursuing the non-existent Nandi bear in Uganda …’
Or to the carpenters concerned with the trapdoors through which young otters were to disappear when amusing the public with their antics, ‘I had a problem a bit like this with a little racoon once, a lively little fellow. I constructed a box, a frightfully amateurish thing, but if I could just show you …’
It was not only his mental agility, however, that captivated; he was up and down ladders and across planks with the youngest workmen in the place. That he enjoyed all this exhibitionism he never for a moment hid. I have seen him leap from one scaffolding above the seals’ pond to another; and, when the workmen half-ironically clapped, he bowed to them with an equal half-irony. Sometimes my annoyance or disgust was stronger than the charm he exerted and I tried to puncture his performance with sharp remarks. But to no avail.
‘My dear fellow,’ he would say, ‘how frightfully good you are for me.’
Then a day later before a crowd of colleagues or visitors, he would say, ‘Simon, for goodness sake say something good for me. I’m in need of it,’ and, when, from laughing at the absurdity of the face he pulled, I could say nothing, he would cry, ‘Nothing good for me! You’re not fulfilling your function! You’ve run out of moralities. Shame! Shame!’
I have written ‘visitors’ and that was another matter for marvel. I had known that Bobby ‘knew everybody’, but not how devoted ‘everybody’ was to him. For the staff and the workmen every day was a field day, for Bobby brought television stars, Victoriana experts, stage designers, peers who were expert showmen of their gracious homes, actresses, ballet dancers, top journalists, explorers, gossip column financiers, Brains Trust scientists – anybody whose face adorned the popular dailies and the telescreen. He enrolled them somehow in his happy absurd antics and mixed them in with the staff and the contractors’ men. Debs got tied up in tartan ribbon that was to grace the Highland cattle; an important and doubtful financier was persuaded into being photographed with a wart-hog that horribly resembled him; a veteran revue star did her famous imitation of a seal from the sea-lions’ pool. Masons laying tiles for the Great Hall of Beasts found themselves cheek to cheek with beautiful starlets as they pondered over the William Morris patterns that Bobby had presented for their choice. As the Day grew nearer Jane, attracted by the theatrical atmosphere, became more and more involved. Indeed she and Bobby were photographed again and again as ‘London’s smartest Darby and Joan’ – an irony that made me at times desperately sad for the Leacocks, whose dowdy devotion had never drawn the notice of even a passing camera. But it must be said that the Falcons did look extraordinarily elegant. And elegance was the keynote of the whole thing – elegance with a touch of chichi. Matthew thought it horribly vulgar. Lord Godmanchester, who appeared only once, looking tired and strangely purple in the face, hoped that Falcon wasn’t forgetting the Commonwealth aspect; but Bobby reassured him.
‘Good Lord! I should think not. We’ve got oodles of kangaroos and kiwis laid on.’
I ventured once to hint that the wonderful stink of the mob might be lost in all his wealth of stylized Victoriana, witty parody, Romantic charm and music hall pastiche, but Bobby took me quite literally.
‘My dear fellow, you don’t know the crush I’ve asked for the opening, half London, and in this boiling weather!’
Of course, in a sense he was right, so long as there was enough sweat, it didn’t matter whether it came from the cockney crowd or the top people at play, the stink would be much the same.
And the weather that May was exceptionally hot. As the celebrities and the art students and the workmen took off more and more clothes, and Bobby improvised a bathing pool in the canal, where Jane’s actresses served out chicken sandwiches and iced beer and even iced champagne, the whole place assumed more the air of a free for all fête-champêtre. Not that it was an idle one, enormous quantities of hay were made. And in the evenings a small knot of us would gather in Bobby’s office – Jane, sometimes Martha strangely mute, a keeper or two, Mrs Purrett – and, eating a cold supper, we would work hard at the plans for the next day. Bobby, imitating the particular celebrated visitors of the past day, would draw me in to assist him, until all the work was carried on in a frenzy of mimicry and farce. On the whole I enjoyed myself very much, even when it all seemed to me most frivolous.
Bobby’s frivolity, indeed, seemed to know no limits. One afternoon Inspector Martin appeared upon the scene again; and this time he was not prepared to be fobbed off with the Secretary. His manner with Bobby was grave and a little servile; Bobby’s with him a schoolboy’s acting in an Agatha Christie.
‘I imagine Mr Carter has already given you some account of my earlier visit here, Sir Robert, with reference to a member of your staff, Dr Emile Englander.’
Bobby assumed an absuredly conspiratorial manner, his moustaches hunched up under his nose.
‘I should think so! It gave us a pretty good shock, I can tell you.’
Inspector Martin gazed at me as at one he had always known to be unreliable.
I said, ‘You told me to say nothing to anyone about Dr Englander’s foreign associations, Inspector, and I have not done so.’
Bobby leaned back as though immensely relieved.
‘Trouble abroad! Oh, I know nothing of that. I thought you were referring to the sinister affair of the two schoolgirls and the bar of chocolate. But if you don’t know about that, Inspector, I’d prefer to say no more. It is after all entirely a Zoo affair. Perhaps you’d tell me something of the Doctor’s clandestine activities overseas.’
The Detective-Inspector, looking puzzled, outlined what he had said to me.
Then he added, ‘Since that time we have reason to think that Dr Englander may have associations with the Uni-Europe Movement.’
Bobby’s manner changed to his most arrogant.
‘Oh, I hardly think that’s likely, Inspector. Surely they’re all corner boys and anti-semitic loafers and scum, aren’t they? Englander has a lot of connexions with Europe certainly – he’s a scientist with a world-wide reputation, but his friends are very distinguished people – European scientists, and businessmen and financiers. He comes of a big business family. He’s a very rich man, you know.’
The real reverence with which Bobby said this gave me a sudden insight into the strange foundations of his ‘patrician’ snobberies. I understood more than ever why Matthew found him vulgar. The Inspector seemed more impressed by Bobby’s naïveté.
He said, ‘The two things are not necessarily contradictory, Sir Robert. The Movement has considerable funds, you know, although its membership is mainly confined to what you rightly describe as scum. I see,’ he added suddenly, ‘that two of Dr Englander’s keepers are away on leave at the same time as he is.’
I said, ‘Yes, I believe that is so. The summer leaves are often difficult to fit in and we like to get as much leave taken n spring as possible.’
The Inspector said, ‘I was asking you, Mr Carter, whether Englander’s principal assistants were away on official leave.’
‘I imagine so, Inspector. I haven’t the staff lists here …’
Bobby’s voice interrupted me.
‘Doctor Englander, Inspector, naturally runs the staff side of his department as he thinks best. We’re concerned here, you know, with eminent people working in a world famous institution, not with the managers of branches of Woolworth’s.’
‘I have my inquiries to make, Sir Robert. It would help if you could understand that.’
‘My dear fellow, go ahead.’
‘Has the Zoological Society any particular interest in the Western Islands of Scotland at the present time?’
‘We have interests everywhere, Inspector. And for the moment particularly everywhere British.’
‘Is it possible that the Zoological Society might be concerned with certain building activities there?’
‘Where?’
‘In the Western Islands, Sir Robert.’
‘Yes, yes, my dear fellow. But the Islands are numerous. Mull, Staffa, Iona, which?’
‘I see that any such activities were not licensed by yourself, Sir Robert. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.’
‘You see no such thing, Inspector. As I’ve already said the senior staff here are internationally famed zoologists, not schoolboys. If Dr Englander is constructing some building for his work in the Western Islands then he’s doing it for some very good scientific reason which I have no doubt that the Committee will approve. As a matter of fact, I expect he’s making a hideout to watch these snake-worship ceremonies. There’s a particularly bad outbreak of them in Scotland. I’m surprised that the Yard is not investigating that instead of the ridiculous antics of the Uni-Europe Movement.’
‘Not everyone takes your view, Sir Robert.’
‘Oh, Good Lord! Inspector! I have no view. But if the whole thing’s going out with a bang, it seems rather a waste of time running around fussing about who’s trying to put Roman Candles under the Houses of Parliament. But you don’t want my views on all that, my dear chap. As I say Dr Englander’s not a child, why don’t you ask him what it’s all about?’
‘We should like to, Sir. But he left the country two days ago. I imagine on official leave.’
Bobby started angrily at the Inspector’s sarcastic tone.
‘As you say, Inspector. Well, you have work to do, as you reminded us. And I must remind you that we’re very busy too. So if you’ve no more questions …’
As the Inspector went out, Bobby said, ‘By the way do take my advice about this Scotch snake-worship seriously, Inspector. Now there is something pretty sinister going on, I’m sure.’
The whole interview seemed to fill him with delight.
‘That chap didn’t like me at all, you know,’ he repeated again and again that afternoon.
Once he asked me what I thought old Englander was up to; and with a certain hesitation I suggested that from what he had once said to me, he might be engaged on some private scheme for the evacuation of the reptiles. Bobby seemed amazed.
‘I say, that’s pretty bad, when our President’s promised us an era of peace.’ He roared with laughter. ‘I thought Englander was such a wise old bird. But what an optimistic chump he must be. The Western Isles of Scotland!’
It seemed a good moment for me to confess my own clandestine actions over the Aquarium. Bobby again laughed.
‘Biscay water, eh? That must have cost us a pretty penny. But I’m not surprised at you being an optimist, Simon, you’re such an innocent.’
‘I’m a bit concerned about Jackley’s reaction when he hears what I’ve done.’
‘Are you? I don’t care a damn. Just look at this letter of his.’
He took out a letter from his files and tossed it across to me.
Dear Falcon,
It is kind of you to inquire about my health. I am glad to say that I am now convalescent. You ask whether I shall be with you for the British Day: having been away from England for so long I am not quite sure of the nature of this celebration; events at home seem to move so rapidly and yet, to an outside observer, the crises appear without significance. However I take it to be some social occasion unconnected with the scientific work of the Society. I seldom distinguish myself socially, and therefore, with yours and the Society’s permission, I shall absent myself from the junketing. Since I am unlikely to leave England again for some time after my return home, I should like, again with the Society’s permission, to visit our Marine Research Station at Funchal before returning to my duties …
‘Junketing,’ Bobby said. ‘He has the Society’s permission to go and … And so I’ve said in my letter. If he doesn’t want to be in on the Great Day, who the hell cares?’
A couple of days later Bobby told me casually that he’d looked into the Reptile House affairs.
‘I suspect there are some of the most valuable specimens missing. But the chaps there are frightfully loyal to the old boy. They won’t say anything. Anyhow that head keeper Kennedy is a very good man and he’s co-operating nicely with my ideas for Reptiles on the big night. And the last thing we want is that sort of scandal now. We can give the old chap a rocket afterwards.’
I suggested that the Committee should be told of so serious a matter; it was after all a grave misuse of the Society’s property.
Bobby said, ‘What about your Biscay water? No, all right. I know it’s not the same thing. As a matter of fact, I’ve discussed it with Godmanchester. It’s frightfully difficult to get hold of him these days. He seems to be in a perpetual political flap. But he agreed. No scandal at any price, he said.’
The same afternoon he told me that Englander had telephoned from Zürich.
‘I blew him up a bit about pinching our pythons. But you know what he is, he just chuckled. The main thing of course was to tell him that this inspector chap had been asking about him.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit irresponsible?’
‘My dear Simon, my responsibility is to my senior colleagues.’
He was so fierce that I drew back.
‘I was only suggesting. After all Englander might conceivably be mixed up with this Uni-Europe Movement and, although it hasn’t been declared illegal, it could obviously be a danger to the State in certain circumstances.’
‘I doubt if scum like that will play a large part in Armageddon.’
‘They might bring it closer.’
He laughed, ‘We’ve only got a fortnight to the British Day. Surely Godmanchester can hold off the last trump for that short time.’
‘I’m not going to ask you to be serious, Bobby. It’s no use these days.’
‘Good. Good. You’re the serious man, not me. Though mind you, I doubt if you have the faintest idea of what really ranks as serious.’
‘Tell me then.’
‘Good Lord no! It’s not my job to spout metaphysics. We must leave that to the saintly Beard.’
Beard alone of the senior staff, as a matter of fact, incurred Bobby’s real hostility at that time. He showed almost no interest in the preparations for ‘the day’. That, as Bobby said, would hardly have mattered since there was no idea of having a post-mortem tableau; but he was still intent upon checking the statistical data from the office records. Since the row over the typists’ pool, he had given up asking for assistance, but he stayed after hours to do the work himself. Many of our jolly evening sessions with cold duck and white wine, or pâté and claret, were marred by the presence of the Prosector inexpertly climbing ladders and dangerously balancing boxes of files one upon another. He seemed ostentatiously unaware of our presence, or perhaps he genuinely was so.
One evening when Bobby could bear it no longer, he shouted, ‘For God’s sake, Beard, pay some attention to what’s going on, or get out.’
Beard looked down over his glasses from the ladder’s height, blushed, and said, ‘Oh, Lor’!’ and fled.
Yet the next evening he was back again. From then on Bobby tried angrily to ignore him.
It was all the more infuriating then, when a few nights before the Great Day, Jumbo, our largest elephant, fell ill with some skin trouble. He had been re-christened from his more modern name ‘Trunk Call’ to prepare him for the tableau representing Frith’s famous painting. Neither Strawson, Bobby himself, nor Beard’s assistant hastily summoned from his home in Highbury seemed able to diagnose the trouble. It was nine o’clock at night and for once the Prosector had not stayed late. I rang his home number again and again, but it was always engaged. The operator, urged to test, reported that it was not out of order. There remaining nothing for it but to fetch him. His assistant was very unwilling to do this.
‘Dr Beard’s absolutely forbidden anybody to intrude into his home life.’
Should we send a messenger? Perhaps he would ignore the summons. Bobby clearly felt that he would lose caste by going to Beard’s house. I set off myself in a sanctioned taxi for the gloomy reaches of Cromwell Road – since the rebuilding of North Kensington, West London’s chief remaining slum. I had not before known where Beard lived and it came as a shock to me to think that my last visit to this area had been with European tourists who wanted to see how English people ‘used to live’. The old Edwardian block of flats at which the taxi drew up was almost an exhibit of decay – I thought how Bobby had missed a ripe example of old England by not undertaking the mission himself. Yet Beard’s salary, if not princely in Englander’s terms, established him many economic rungs above the ‘handicapped’, that flotsam class which inhabited such areas as this. Perhaps, I thought, his living here was a mortification, or, perhaps, he was too dedicated to notice. I told the taximan to wait and going through the open front door, made my way up the uncarpeted stone stairs. The door of the first floor flat was opened by a fat, thirtyish woman with mottled bare legs and plimsolls. The crocheted jumper that covered her large, low-slung breasts seemed home made, as did the ridiculously short crimson silk skirt that was drawn tightly over her large hips and belly. Her dark hair looked as though it had been cut under a pudding basin. Her wrists were tightly bandaged.
She asked, ‘Are you the nurse?’
When I explained, she said, ‘Oh, well, you’d better come in then, Father’s with Granny. She’s had an attack and we’re waiting for the nurse.’
I began to apologize for my unseasonable arrival, but she took no notice.
‘Father,’ she shouted, ‘a man from the Zoo.’
There was no answer from the long, dark corridor down which she called, and she set off to fetch him. The large hall in which she left me was filled with the bric-à-brac of a middle-class household of half a century ago, a proliferation of cheap Asian objects suggested the sort of ex-Indian home which I seemed vaguely to remember from my youth (or was it from some novels? After the age of thirty fiction gets inextricably mixed into fact). The room was dark, dirty, airless, and infinitely depressing. Apart from its general gloom, however, I could see no object that connected with Beard the scientist or Beard the Christian. Two or three doors were banged very loudly. Miss Langley-Beard (if she was as fatly virginal as she looked) returned. She said, ‘He’ll be in in a sec.’
I began to explain my errand, and to suggest that if old Mrs Langley-Beard’s attack was so serious, I should withdraw. She commented on this only by giggling each time I used the word ‘elephant’.
Then she asked, ‘Do you want coffee?’
Before I could reply, a door in the passage was flung open and from the room came a cracked contralto voice. It spoke with difficulty and with long pauses for breath.
‘My dear Charles, you’d much better let them put me into hospital. I shall be less trouble to you all there.’
I began to speak again to cover what seemed a very private conversation, but Miss Langley-Beard said rather irritably, ‘Ssh!’ Then, repeating her giggle, she announced, ‘They’re rowing.’
They were indeed, for Beard’s voice now came to us, loud and far more assured than it ever sounded at the Gardens. ‘It’s not help to make useless suggestions, Mother. They won’t take chronic cases as you’ve been told again and again.’
‘I’m sure they won’t have me there for long, dear, anyway.’
‘I’m afraid your assurance of that isn’t worth very much. You’ve recovered from other attacks.’
A young man’s voice, much deeper than Beard’s, now said, or rather shouted, ‘And we hope you do from this, Grannie. We know you will.’
Beard said, ‘It can hardly help your grandmother to tell her what is not true, Alan.’
Then he appeared from the doorway and came out to me in the hall.
‘I had hoped,’ he said, ‘to be left in peace in my home.’
I apologized and explained the nature of my errand. As I was talking a very handsome young man in his late twenties came twisting into the room on crutches. As with most spastics, the enormous breadth of his chest and shoulders were somehow more distressing than the twisted, puny shape of his legs. He swung himself with practised complication into an armchair. Striking out with one crutch, he tapped Beard on the ankle.
‘That was disgusting,’ he said, breaking through my speech, ‘talking to Grannie like that. You know she’s frightened out of her wits.’
‘Pretence isn’t going to help her.’
‘Pretence! A little human sympathy!’
‘Since you can do very little at a time like this, I would suggest that you at least spare us hysteria, Alan. If you want to help your Grandmother, you can pray for her.’
‘If I had any prayers, I should offer them for you.’
The young man got up again, but as he twisted and writhed, Beard turned his back and spoke to me.
‘I’ll come straight away. Not that I was aware that we had an elephant called Jumbo.’
‘It used to be called Trunk Call but Falcon’s renamed it.’
Beard laughed scornfully.
‘A most useful occupation for the Director.’
‘Are you sure that you can leave here?’
‘I suppose so. Why not?’
‘Your mother …’
‘Oh, she’s been dying of cardiac trouble for some time.’
Alan Langley-Beard with difficulty twisted round in his walk and put his face close to his father’s.
‘If Gran dies while you’re away, I hope you’ll never forget it.’
‘I asked you not to be hysterical, Alan.’
Now Miss Langley-Beard, who had been sitting, trying hopelessly to mend the broken strap of her sandal by knotting together two very tough pieces of leather, looked up and said, ‘Don’t keep on at Alan, Daddy. He’s only trying to help. You shouldn’t call him hysterical.’
Beard looked at his daughter’s bandaged wrists.
‘I really don’t think, Catherine, that hysteria is a thing that you’re qualified to discuss.’
Her plain, fat face flushed and she bent down quickly again to her sandals. Beard spoke to his children in a firm tone but without bitterness, yet his remarks clearly evoked a fierce response.
‘You have the doctor’s telephone number, Catherine, if the nurse isn’t here in the next half hour ring him up. Come along, Carter, if you’ve got that taxi waiting.’ Going downstairs he said, ‘Now you see why I prefer to keep my home life to myself.’
Once again he spoke without bitterness – as an observation. I made no comment.
In the taxi Beard expressed particular interest in Jumbo’s symptoms.
‘You were quite right to come for me. It may well be some inflammation of the hair follicles. What you’d probably call acne and no doubt suffered from as an adolescent,’ he laughed delightedly. ‘I shall be glad to have an opportunity of watching the course of the disease.’
I said that surely if it was only such an infection he should on no account have left his family.
‘No, no, the doctor’s coming. They must learn to manage. I’m not surprised that you thought to let me know.’
I emphasized that our anxiety had been to make sure of Jumbo’s presence on the British Day.
Beard said, ‘I don’t make much of all that really, do you? We should be getting on with the plans for evacuation in the event of war. I’ve not been idle you know there. I’ve been listing specimens of particular anatomical interest.’
‘Well, of course, we have always had perfectly clear plans for the evacuation to Woburn Park of the most valuable animals. Long before Stretton was ever mentioned. But the war scare has receded.’
‘That wasn’t the view at the time of all that move to Stretton. And I suppose we’d still be there if old Leacock hadn’t upset Godmanchester or something. Not that that’s my concern.’
‘It was mainly our confidence that war was now far less likely that led to the return.’
‘Was it? I don’t understand that sort of thing, I’m afraid. Once I get working on an idea I very seldom go into reverse.’
We sat in silence. I looked out of the window, trying to decide what kind of a man he really was. Then suddenly in the light of Piccadilly Circus, I glimpsed a late night paper placard. It said, ‘Godmanchester: Grave anxiety’. It seemed, I discovered, that the Great Reaper was working overtime. Not only Jumbo and Langley-Beard’s mother, but Godmanchester too. He had had a stroke in his office. He was alive, but unconscious and paralysed. So we all moved into a new age.
For the next two days, however, Godmanchester rallied, and Bobby spurred us feverishly on to further preparations for the Day. The weather was still gloriously hot, and the nights were pleasantly cool. I remember well on the second evening walking round the Gardens with Bobby. He was in a peculiarly elated mood, for, to Beard’s disappointment, Jumbo was much recovered and would now figure in the Frith tableau. On that clear, moonlit night, the extraordinary theatricality of the Zoo’s new décor merged happily into the starry background. We wandered round looking at the great massed beds of auriculas and tulips and wallflowers that spelt ‘God Save the Queen’, and ‘Norman, and Saxon and Dane are We’, and the fountains playing in coloured jets. Here at the entrance to what was being shown as the Old Victorian Zoo were to be the recitations and the tableaux and later a show of fireworks with two set pieces – a British lion and an Indian elephant. The Old Zoo looked peculiarly charming with all the Decimus Burton Houses picked out with very subtle lighting (Jane’s work), with a chalet for the old woman who was to sell fresh cows’ milk and bags of buns, and booths for the peanut men and coconut shies, with goat chaises, and a wondrous bear pit. Beyond the Old Zoo, the Lemur House, its modern lines disguised with ferns and hothouse plants, had been converted into a chef-d’œuvre à la Paxton; and in this great glass palace, to Matthew’s delight, were to be housed birds from every corner of the earth that was now or ever had been British. For, of course, it was only by cheating and taking in history, that a British Day could cast its net wide enough. From this show centre of the Old Zoo, the aviaries and the gardens, five separate roads led off each to a separate continent – to Stanley’s Africa, to Botany Bay, to a Hudson Bay fur station, to the jungle of the British Raj, and, a little incommensurately (but by a determined whim of Bobby’s) to the Apes of the Rock. Strictly European animals or those creatures such as lemurs, armadillos, Brazilian tapirs, sloths and manatees whose species had never known the glories of British rule, were temporarily banished to a remote corner of the North Side of the Gardens. Had Beard so wished, I think, he could have slaughtered them all with an easy nod of assent from our President or our Director. Their mere presence was in some sense a counter-demonstration.
‘Well?’ Bobby asked.
‘It’s all very enchanting.’
‘We’ve made something beautiful,’ he said. ‘Never mind too much about all this British business of Godmanchester’s. Commonwealth, Empires, all that stuff – it’s always needed by men like him, whose memories have no deep roots. But once get the crowds in here, and it’ll be English! A real night out, a lark, a spree, wakes week! Think of it, Simon, Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday, Henley, Epsom Downs and the Colonial Garden Party all rolled into one. What fun it’ll be, what beautiful, high old fun!’
It occurred to me that between Godmanchester’s Wembley Empire stuff and Bobby’s elegant Crystal Palace, and the cockney crowds, and Jane’s chichi, the whole thing might somewhere have missed its mark; but I was too disturbed by Bobby’s dissociated elation to give much thought to this.
I said hesitantly, ‘Bobby! With Godmanchester so ill, you have considered that the whole thing may have to be postponed?’
My voice sounded over loud and dramatic as it carried away on the evening air.
‘Oh, Good Lord! We shan’t postpone. If the old boy’s too ill, we’ll have all the other old boys along.’
I was frightened and angry.
I said fiercely, ‘What if war comes, Bobby? Remember how we all rely on Godmanchester for our peace. What if war comes?’
‘Then we’ll die merrily, like first-class passengers and not rats. Your cataracts and hurricanes, spout! And then, all shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s moulds …’
Before he had finished he had left parody behind. If I could have met him somewhere on his own dramatic level, I might still have found some way to ease him; but such histrionics made me shrink into myself with disgust.
I said in what I could hear to be my prissiest voice,
‘Neither the Titanic nor Lear, Bobby, seem sufficient for the occasion.’
He looked down at me, his eyes puzzled as to what I was doing there beside him. Then he frowned impatiently.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake go and boil your head,’ he shouted and strode off into the darkness.
*
On the next day Godmanchester died. Whether he was a great man or not, I don’t know. I’m not qualified to make judgements on public events. Some say now that he might, as he believed, have prevented war. Again I’m no expert. Certainly his death had an immediate depressive effect in England. But we soon had more to think about than ‘the passing of a great symbol’, as The Advertiser described it. I do not believe that any honest man who remembers that week can say that anything but terror – terror, to be fair, in varying degrees – possessed everybody. The reiteration of the Russo-American Declaration, which once had seemed to me to banish war, now seemed to imply that the Great Powers feared its certainty. And once war really stared us in the face, who could stay reasonable enough to take comfort from the Declaration’s restraining threat? We had so long associated war with annihilation that no reasoning could now banish that image. There were a few, who for different reasons, like Matthew or Bobby, behaved as though nothing had happened; but fewer than is now said, I suspect. I don’t think I behaved more wildly than most. I was not involved in the various panic scenes that, as the current phrase goes, ‘marred those vital days’.
For once I had returned home in time for tea on the day that we heard of the invasion of our ally Portugal. I took Martha in my arms, and for a long time we lay holding each other tightly, tightly enough to prevent the shivering fits of fear that seized us both. Every minute of that time, I think we expected intense agony and final extinction. Yet all the while, I could hear outside the ordinary street noises of the day. I now know that our moment of terror came to us earlier than to the greater mass of people – even death’s terrors seem obstinately to deny my egalitarian feelings. For most people the overrunning of Portugal, even the fall of Gibraltar and the capture of Malta by the Italo-Greek forces soon after, meant no personal threat – meant indeed only an end of anachronisms, loved or despised. Strangely enough it was the news an hour later from the North of the invasion of Sweden by the Benelux-German troops that really struck alarm into the majority of people and caused the various panic scenes that so aided the Uni-Europeans.
By that time Martha and I had recovered from our terror – if annihilation were coming, we had decided, it would already have come. I see now that this was no more ‘sensible’ a view than any other taken then, but where could sense be when all was confusion, when the bogey had become real, when we had rubbed our eyes and woken up and found that the nightmare had come in through the bedroom window? Many people at that time ran away from London, but only the foolish thought that there was anywhere to run to. We decided to go about our business. I pulled my top lip down stiffly and said, ‘If I keep a stiff upper lip, darling, will you hold your head high?’
And Martha said, ‘Don’t do it, Simon. You look exactly like a camel.’
I said, ‘I’ll just go across to the Zoo and see if the Home Office has anything to say about safety precautions.’
And Martha, turning off the television on which some ‘splendid’ woman was appealing for civil defence volunteers, said, ‘I’ll go up the High Street and see if I can get some asparagus before the shops close. It may be our last asparagus. And then I’ll look in at the Town Hall and see if there’s really anything one can do.’
Then she began to cry. By the time we’d gone out into the street, she had recovered. It was as I reached the Staff entrance that I suddenly thought we were mad: these were our last moments and we were wasting them in triviality. I turned round, almost knocking over a white-faced Sanderson who had arrived at that moment; I could see Martha walking away from me down the deserted street. I ran after her. Coming down Primrose Hill I saw a strange, broken down, slightly mad old man who was well known to the neighbourhood as a character. I reached Martha, held her tight in my arms and kissed her.
The old man called out, ‘That’s right. Bloody kiss. You’ll be bloody dead tonight.’
It was my last moment of wild panic. We left one another and I walked into the Zoo.
Bobby Falcon sat at his desk making notes.
He said, ‘Oh, Simon! What do you think of this? It’s a little idea of mine for an addition to the children’s exhibition. I thought, this afternoon, what about all the animals in children’s fiction? You know – Black Beauty, Alice and the White Rabbit, Tarka, the Banda Log, Jemima Puddleduck, Badger and Mole, Wol and Pooh. Only, adapted like one of those Victorian screens so that the scenes fade into each other. To give a sort of fairyland pantomime effect. I think it could be done if one arranged the caging at various levels like this and then filled in with some sort of greenery, rather feathery and whispy, almost like a cloud, to give that strange dreamy feeling of Victorian childhood.’
I sat down opposite him and said as quietly as I could manage, ‘Too literary, I think.’ Then, trying to maintain the same tone of voice, I went on, ‘Have any precautionary measures come from the Home Office, Bobby? I imagine that, short of a miracle, we are already at war and there must be immediate measures to be taken for public safety.’
He said shortly, ‘Nothing’s come through to me. The best thing we can do is to get on with our job. I’ve always hated all that theatrical cant of Jane’s, but it has its points. “The show must go on”, Simon; and again, “it’ll be all right on the night”.’
I asked, again trying to sound casual, ‘Are you sure there’s nothing from the Home Office? If there’s not we’d better go ahead with the destruction of the dangerous species as we listed them two years ago.’
At last I forced his attention. He said, ‘If you think you can identify the species that will be dangerous in an atomized world, you go ahead.’
He strode out of the room. I followed him to the typists’ room where Mrs Purrett was taking off her hat.
She said, ‘I didn’t know what to do for the best, Sir Robert. The evacuation people have fetched my mother and I thought I should come straight round here.’
He said, ‘Splendid. I want you to take a letter to the Victoria and Albert Museum. We’d better write to the Director. He’ll know where to apply. What I’m interested in are these Victorian children’s keepsakes. But with animal figures.’
I saw an expression of real terror on poor Mrs Purrett’s fat face. I motioned to her behind Bobby’s back to take the letter. I went off to my own room and rang Lascelles at the Home Office.
He said, ‘We’ve been waiting for your confirmation that your safety measures have been carried out. I told Falcon an hour ago that if the European powers hadn’t responded to the Russo-American appeal …’
I said, ‘They’re under way,’ and rang off.
Before I could implement this, the telephone rang. It was Beard.
He said, ‘I suppose the evacuation’s started. I can’t get any sense from Falcon. But I have a preliminary list of specimens vital for research work. Shall I bring it round?’
‘Please. I would like to get all the Curators to my room within a quarter of an hour.’
Mrs Purrett met me in the corridor.
She said, ‘I don’t think Sir Robert should be in charge, Mr Carter. He doesn’t seem to grasp …’
‘I know. I’m going to try to bring the situation home to him now. Will you get Mr Price and Mr Sanderson round here as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, Mr Carter. Oh! And Mrs Englander rang up. She was in a terrible state. The police have been round to arrest Dr Englander.’
‘Well, as he’s abroad, she needn’t worry. But tell her as soon as everything’s clearer, I’ll find out what it’s all about.’
‘She sounded very foreign, Mr Carter.’
‘That’s not a crime yet. Now please get those Curators as soon as possible. And then contact Lord Oresby.’
She patted my arm. ‘That’s right, Mr Carter. We must all find plenty to do.’
I said sharply, ‘I don’t suppose that’s going to be difficult.’ But I put my hand on her shoulder. I liked Mrs Purrett.
I walked into Bobby’s room. He was still scribbling drawings of cages.
I said, ‘Bobby, you withheld from me the Home Office orders. I don’t know whether you’ve gone out of your mind or what. But I must tell you now that unless you’re prepared to take control, I shall act with the other keepers to give effect to what has to be done.’
His flushed face as he looked up at me was not at all wild, only contemptuous.
He said, ‘Do whatever you like. But don’t touch any of the show pieces, do you understand? If we can’t open, we’ll at least go out in a blaze of glory.’
I meant to say no more, but irritation drove me on.
‘I shall take whatever safety measures are required for the public and for the animals in our care.’
He got up, ‘If you touch my work …’
In my nervousness, I made a little smirking sound. He gave a roar like a lion and came for me. Youth tells and I had sprung aside before he reached me. I put out my foot, and, tripping, his heavy body crashed over a chair on to the floor. I saw that his nose was bleeding. He lay on the floor and groaned. So the age of violence had arrived, I thought; it seemed as ridiculous as any other. I wondered whether it was my duty to hand him over to the police or to the asylum authorities; but they were no less busy, I felt sure, than I was. Looking at him lying groaning there, I felt a strange and unfriendly sense of power. I think I could have shot him, if someone had told me that circumstances had called for it. Instead I put a cushion under his head and walked out of the room, locking the door behind me.
Matthew and Sanderson were in my room. I told them briefly about Bobby. Matthew was very evidently shocked. He was the complete officer now.
He said, ‘Oh, God! Well, there you are, you see, it’s what one would expect. But he is the Director. I should think he’d better report sick.’
Sanderson said, ‘We must try never to mention it when the real Falcon comes back to us.’
Beard came in with his list. It took me nearly a quarter of an hour to convince him that the destruction of the dangerous species must precede the evacuation of the anatomically interesting ones.
‘My dear Beard, poisonous snakes and pythons to say nothing of spiders could survive quite a while in this hot weather and the number of people they could kill is considerable.’
‘But I suppose those people will be killed anyway.’
At last it was Matthew who said, ‘Oh, God! Well they might kill you, you see, Beard. And then all the creatures we’d evacuated for you to cut up would be wasted.’
After that Beard agreed.
Before we separated to take up our tasks, I said, ‘In any case if war is declared, we’ll all be atomized in a moment. So I don’t know what’s the use, but still.’
Sanderson said, ‘Oh! I’m glad to say, Carter, that they’re not going to use those dreadful weapons. I heard it on my little radio set just before I came over here. There’s been a Franco-German statement promising not to. It does mean we’re fighting sportsmen anyway.’
Matthew said, ‘Oh, God! It’s always balls about the enemy being sportsmen.’
‘I don’t think you should say that, Price. Anyhow our Prime Minister’s taking them at their word. We’ve promised to stick to conventional weapons ourselves.’
It seemed difficult to place all one’s relief on a report of Sanderson’s. However, the constriction went from my chest. I felt able to let in a new, less paralysing fear.
‘God help us!’ I said, ‘we haven’t got any.’
Matthew was in a transport of delight, ‘Conventional? Oh, it’ll be like the last war.’
Beard rustled the papers he held.
‘Has everyone got a copy of my list?’ he asked.
‘Beard’s the man of the hour,’ Sanderson announced.
Before the Prosector left, he asked irritably, ‘Why is the Director’s room locked, Carter? I may want some papers from there.’
I explained the situation. ‘He might do himself an injury if he wanders about in the state he’s in.’
Beard said, ‘Oh Lor’!’ and went out of the room.
I had taken upon myself to superintend the Reptiles and the Aquarium. As I passed Mrs Purrett’s room, I asked her to telephone all the keepers ordering them, transport permitting, to come to the Gardens.
When I reached the Reptile House, it seemed that only a very young keeper, a cockney boy of no more than seventeen, had reported for duty.
‘I didn’t know what to do, Sir, what with Mr Kennedy away and all. So I come along.’
He seemed either too frightened or too foolish to answer my questions. I had relied on one of the head keepers to destroy the snakes, but now it seemed that I should have for once to take an active part, for the boy told me that he’d never used a revolver. I told him to conduct me round the upstairs inner gallery that, running behind the show cases, is used for observation and feeding of the most deadly species. The boy was to operate the feeding shutters, I to fire through them. The priority on my list was the bushmaster. I stared through the aperture to see nothing but a small artificial tree trunk and some soiled grass and straw; the smell coming through the peephole was sweetish and quite sickening.
‘I don’t see the snake.’
‘Ah! No. Mr Kennedy took him away Thursday when he come.’
‘Took it away?’
‘Yus. In a van he’d got with him.’
Fascinated to see how far Englander had taken things into his own hands, I went on to the black mambas – with the same result, but this time I was told that Mr Granger, the second keeper, ‘had taken them away Wednesday’. Questioned further, the boy told me that they ‘took away all the poisonous ones’. I went downstairs and walked round the fronts of the show cases. It was quite true – three quarters of the snakes had gone: rattlesnakes, puffadders, cobras, mambas, the bushmaster, the taipan, king snakes, whip snakes, and a dozen other species had simply vanished; so, too, had the great constrictors. Once the boy saw that I knew the worst, he became more communicative.
‘The Doctor ’phoned Monday night from Germany, I think, and give instructions they was to be taken away to safety. I think ’e knew trouble was coming. Mr Kennedy and Mr Granger was waiting for the orders so they had all the vans ready. But they don’t tell me where they took ’em. They said if Sir Robert or you was to ask, to say Dr Englander left two of them British adders for Sir Robert’s show. And frogs and toads, of course.’
And sure enough there the adders were. I had not the heart to destroy them. Compared with innumerable mammals and even birds that we must leave alive, their power to harm was negligible. My pent-up tension escaped in a wild burst of laughter. The boy was clearly much relieved.
‘There’s some alligators still here if you want to take a pot shot, sir. They’re a sitting target, that’s one thing.’ He giggled nervously.
But neither friendliness nor show of authority could get him to say where the snakes had been taken; I doubt, in fact, whether he knew.
‘I know they’ve gone North, sir. That I do know.’ He repeated it again and again.
My work at the Aquarium was more easily done. Jackley’s keepers were all in attendance. I gave orders for the destruction of the marine species and the siphoning of the ocean water into the additional subterranean tanks I had provided. Now, with the Biscay water I had imported, there would be enough sea water for Jackley to double his marine collection when the war was over, if the sea of destruction had not engulfed us all by then. It was nice to feel one’s conscience clear towards at least one person. The fresh water fishes I ordered to be placed in Dr Englander’s empty water snake pools. I remembered his telling me that some similar action in 1939 had been one of the greatest absurdities he’d had to endure in his whole Zoo career. It seemed reasonable that he should know that the administration could hit back, however feebly.
I was now free to see how the twin tasks of blast defence and of evacuation were proceeding. Yet first I thought that I should let Jane Falcon know of Bobby’s condition. It was very difficult to make a telephone call at all at that time; even more difficult to track down Jane. I almost gave it up, for it seemed so monstrous a waste of precious time. Then Mrs Purrett came in.
‘I’ve been to see the telescreen in the canteen,’ she said. ‘They’re still talking. It’s all a question now of our agreeing to some European control of our industries. I didn’t quite understand it. But while there’s life there’s hope, isn’t there?’
The reprieve seemed to justify my calling Jane. I got her at last at a rehearsal at a West End theatre; the box office people were very unwilling to disturb her.
She said, ‘Isn’t it all too sickening? This piece of Ronnie Stapledon’s is to open on Tuesday. I’m quite certain it’s the best thing he’s done. But who’s going to come with all this panic on? I don’t think people realize what this kind of thing means to the live theatre.’
I said, ‘Jane, I’m very concerned about Bobby.’ I told her what had happened.
‘My dear, whatever do you suppose I can do? After all, poor sweet, this thing couldn’t have come at a worse moment for him.’
‘Jane, I’m sorry. That sort of line may be all right for the theatre until the moment when you all start putting on shows for the forces, but the Director of this place has very serious commitments. We can’t have Bobby here in his present condition. Something will have to be done with him until he comes to his senses.’
‘Bobby come to his senses! My God, your conceit, Simon! Poor old Bobby, whatever he’s not been, he’s been more in one day than you’ll ever be in your whole life. You leave him alone, do you understand? You Carters have done quite enough to hurt him. Don’t bloody well interfere with anything until I come over. Ronnie Stapledon thought it was incredible that I should be called out of a rehearsal like this; but then ordinary people don’t have to deal with maniacs who are trying to shut their husbands away. If nobody else cares what happens to one of England’s greatest explorers then his wife does!’
I had stung her into action and that was the main thing.
I realized that I had longed for him to be taken away. The spectacle of his collapse filled me with repugnance, where I should have liked to feel compassion. I steeled myself to see at least that his injuries were not serious. When I turned the key of the lock in his door, I found that it was open.
I went across to Mrs Purrett.
‘Have you unlocked the door of the Director’s room?’ I was angry.
‘Oh, no, Mr Carter. It was Dr Beard. He said he wanted to get some papers. I told him of the orders you’d given. But he was quite determined. He made me give him the duplicate key. I am so sorry.’ The poor woman was very distressed.
‘But Sir Robert isn’t there.’
‘Oh, Mr Carter. Oh dear! I haven’t seen him. Dr Beard said he was asleep.’
When I reached the centre of the Gardens by the tunnel entrance to the Old Zoo it was already getting dark. I could see no sign of Bobby. I went across towards the Parrot House. Matthew was busy there with a group of keepers. He had removed his coat, and his elegant willowy figure seemed more exotic than ever in a white silk shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, and tight black evening trousers. He seemed to be everywhere at once, now consigning cages of colourful parrots to their lorries, now urging me over to see the netting of the wading birds and the luring of the graceful flamingos into pens on wheels. As he leapt, pirouetted, and generally danced his way from one spot to another he seemed like an eighteenth-century duellist; and yet from his constant screaming chatter, he might have been a gigantic magpie. As I followed him across to where the humming birds were being netted like butterflies and packed away into strange lobster-pot shaped glass and wire containers, we passed Beard. He was helping to head off the nervous okapi into a waiting loose box. With his extreme short sight I felt sure that at any minute he would be seriously injured by a kick from the beast.
But as Matthew said, ‘Beard’s got surprising guts for a man who looks as though he has worms.’
It was when Matthew and I stood surveying the emerald, ruby, topaz and gold shimmering flight of the humming birds as they flew wildly here and there among the thunbergia and the giant frangipani trees vainly seeking to evade the butterfly nets, that suddenly the whole Gardens seemed to be flooded with light of every colour – blue, rose, green, amber, purple.
‘What bloody fool has turned on the illuminations?’
It was a rhetorical question and I waited for no answer, but ran full tilt to the power house down by the sea-lion pool. As I ran the whole place seemed to turn to a fairyland somewhere between a child’s dream and a pantomime transformation scene. There was no doubt that Bobby and Jane had done just what they hoped with the lighting.
Near the power house, I came on Strawson’s stout figure.
‘It looks very fine, doesn’t it, Sir?’
I thought he seemed to be laughing at me.
‘What the hell are you doing? Turn those lights off, you fool.’
‘Sir Robert’s orders, Sir.’
I tried to push him aside, but his bulk was more than I could dislodge. Reason, I thought, before violence – in any case I was not sure of my strength against his.
‘Look, Strawson. Surely you see that the Director’s not in his right mind. This display of lights is madness when at any moment …’
‘I doubt if the enemy would need lights to guide their missiles. You’re living a little in the past, Sir.’
I realized then that it was the mood rather than the action that had appalled me.
‘We’re on the brink of a war, man.’ This time Strawson really did smile.
‘We may be on the brink of eternity, Mr Carter. But no siren has sounded yet. Meanwhile a little colour …’
The rest of his words were lost in music swelling out from amplifiers in every part of the Gardens. At the same moment floodlights were played on all the houses, tableaux, and pools. Woken by the unnatural day, lions and tigers began to roar, birds to scream, sea lions and monkeys to howl. The fountains sent up their coloured showers. And now suddenly, to crown all, with a hissing and a crackling, the great firework set-pieces began to give out their showers of coloured lights – God Save Our Gracious Queen, the British Lion, and the Indian Elephant came alive in glorious sulphurous blue, and demon red and palest amber white. And through it all the music sounded – now it was ‘Villikins and his Dinah’ on what seemed a hundred barrel organs, then brass bands blared a selection from The Gondoliers, and now through a sudden stage stillness came a sweet soprano voice – ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ Everything that was absurd about Victorian England seemed to come from that genteel, sugary, drawing-room-parlour voice, and yet it filled me with a deep nostalgia, a willingness to surrender myself to the prettiness and to die. As the last ‘Home, Sweet Home’ died away, I saw Bobby Falcon mounting the high platform erected in front of the Lion House.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he cried into the microphone, and his voice echoed far away across the park, ‘we are not as many as I could have wished.’
I heard someone running behind me. Bobby stopped speaking. I looked round. It was Jane, in sweating, dishevelled chic, toppling and teetering so precariously on her high heels that I thought she must never have run since she was a girl. Gazing round me, I saw that Bobby had spoken truly. We were not many – a dozen or so of staff, including a horrified Matthew, an angry Beard, a vaguely smiling Sanderson, and a weeping Mrs Purrett; Pattie Henderson stood red faced and foursquare flanked by Newton and Nutting. Suddenly from the Tunnel’s gloom another young woman came running into the floodlit square. It was Martha.
‘Simon! Bobby! What is all this noise? Are you all out of your minds? This isn’t a time for music. Why! You can be heard way over in our house!’
She sounded as she so often did when she scolded Reggie or Violet.
Then, maternal still, she cried, ‘Bobby, you’re sick! Simon, he mustn’t be up there. Come down, Bobby! Come down!’
But if Jane’s arrival had silenced Bobby, Martha’s cries woke him into speech.
‘We’re only a few,’ he cried, ‘but we’re the lucky buggers. They’ll all go out in their grey dreariness. We’ll go out as a high old, rare old, bloody beautiful joke.’
Immediately his words were drowned in the belly-churning wails of a hundred sirens. Then there was an absolute silence, followed by cries of panic and some shouts of anger. One or two of the staff began to run towards the Tunnel as to the nearest shelter, others picked up stones and threw them at Bobby. Beard was on his knees in prayer. I saw Barley and the young keeper of the bears advancing towards the platform.
‘We’ll get you, you fucker!’ Barley was shouting.
And then came the crackling, whistling thudding sound of an explosion that filled the universe. I pushed Martha face down on the grass and threw myself on top of her. There followed in quick succession four more such dreadful sounds but farther away from us; and then a vast whistling, rushing wind. We lay still on the ground, waiting as it seemed to me for hours. I held Martha to me stroking her arms. Against the shrieking and howling of all the captive beasts and birds, I could hear Mrs Purrett quietly crying behind me. At last here and there people were getting to their feet. In the distance ambulance and fire bells were clanging, and there were shouts and cries in the streets. I got up slowly as though I must take the world by surprise if I were to survive. Martha lay on the ground bruised and shocked. Whatever had fallen, must have been far off, yet blast had wrecked and twisted Zoo buildings; the Old Zoo was in flames and from it came the agonizing screams and roars of hippos, rhinos, zebras, apes and trumpeting elephants. The roof had gone from the eagle house and high above it great condors, vultures and golden eagles were circling and spiralling up into the sky. The trees were filled with chattering parakeets, and among the beds of broken, bruised flowers lay the little bodies of a hundred multi-coloured tropical birds; for the aviary had been shattered into a thousand pieces. Here and there men were writhing on the turf. In the floodlight the pools of blood stared in technicolour red against an emerald grass. A hundred yards from me lay the body of the boy from the snake house, his head nearly severed by a great sliver of glass. There above us on the top of the bronze lion that crowned the Lion House was Sir Robert Falcon, doubled up with pain, but still wildly shouting, blown on high by some freak of blast, whole though bruised and shaken.
In that next half hour, like all the rest of London, we worked like beavers to repair our dam against a tide that any minute would engulf us and all our works forever. Firemen, staff, wives, all worked like navvies. The wounded were taken in ambulances. Injured animals were destroyed. Fire had spread too far to save any part of the Old Victorian Zoo and in it died most of the giraffes, rhinos, zebras, deer and elephants crammed in by Bobby to make his Roman holiday. Two wounded hippos broke their way down into the canal and we could see them, lashing the bloodied water for a while, until Strawson’s assistant picked them off with a gun and they sank to send a great tide of mud spilling over the banks. The Insect House was a hopeless wreck. Sanderson, tears in his eyes, came to assure me that we need not fear the poisonous spiders or any other venomous insects among those that were now crawling or flying in the ruins.
‘I had them destroyed when you told me,’ he said. ‘In a way I’m glad I did it if only because they were dead before this awful thing happened.’
The Area Air Wardens appeared from outside and ordered us all to shelters. But Beard appealed to volunteers to carry on loading for evacuation. A good number of the keepers responded at once. And Matthew rallied the rest to Beard’s cause by making them laugh.
‘I can’t imagine anyone will go to the shelters, can you? Unless they want to be gassed by each others’ farts,’ he said.
All this while Bobby hung over the bronze lion, his sick old puma face staring out into the distance, as though he were already dead. Jane and Martha and even Mrs Purrett formed a knot in front of the tiger’s cage, shouting, and imploring him to come down, above the roaring of the beasts. At last, when all else had been attended to, I gave orders to the firemen that he should be fetched down by ladder, but when they reached him, he clung wildly to the bronze lion’s neck and resisted all attempts to move him. At last they were forced to play a hose on him. He was carried struggling and shouting to an ambulance, like a half-drowned old cat to the gas van.
Up to this moment, although they had been standing side by side, Martha and Jane had not exchanged a word.
Now Jane suddenly turned and shouted, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. You’ve randied him into the looney bin now. I hope that’s satisfied you.’
‘Yοu’νe no right to speak,’ Martha cried, ‘you never gave him anything. At least I tried. I wanted to help.’
Jane stood squarely in front of Martha, looking at her with fierce contempt.
‘Aren’t you just a lovely person,’ she said in a phoney American accent, ‘the highest-minded little whore that ever almost gave herself out of charity. You make me sick.’
I said, ‘Shut up, Jane.’
‘Don’t you start,’ she turned on me, ‘you’re worse than her. You’re too frightened even almost to give. A lovely pair of lovely people! Get radiant sex health the Carter way! She’ll brush you up and he’ll brush you off.’
I held her shoulders and began to shake her, but she was stronger than I had thought, she pushed me away.
Martha said, ‘You gave him no life at all and you know it.’
Jane laughed. ‘Oh you silly little bitch! Why, you don’t even know what’s twat.’
She ran from us, and a moment later, despite her tightest of chic skirts and her broadest of smart broadbrimmed hats, she had hoisted herself up the steps of the ambulance and was driven off, holding Bobby’s hand.
Martha was trembling. I looked round apprehensively but everyone was working too busily to have noticed the scene, I think. I gave Martha into Mrs Purrett’s hands and she took her off to the office cellars and gave her hot tea.