SOPHIE ENGLANDER, whose maternal affection for me seemed to increase every week, signalled to the butler to fill up my glass again.
‘It came direct from Paris for Emile. Two cases of burgundy. In the French diplomatic bag. You see, they’re making a fuss of him in his old age. You must drink it up, Mr Carter. It’ll give you body. With the winter coming on, you need body. And you don’t wear enough. After your long illness you mustn’t take risks. You’re very pretty, my dear,’ she said to Martha, ‘but that won’t keep him warm. Or at least not altogether.’
Her heavily made-up old face creased and cracked with the sentimental chuckle that was now so familiar to my ear. Then, from laughing she began to wheeze and cough until her cheeks, usually a sort of dull orange from the peculiar colour of her make-up, turned almost as crimson as her dark hennaed hair. She signalled to the butler to fill her tumbler with water and she drank it in sips, still laughing until drops of sweat stood out from the thick powder on her rather bony bare shoulders and dripped down among the diamonds and sapphires of her neck collar. Though Martha was still guarded with them both, I was pleased to note that she liked the old woman enough to say, ‘Well, Mrs Englander, I had no idea that Simon and I were that funny as a couple.’
Mrs Englander’s dark eyes looked worriedly through a mist of blue eyeshade and mascara for a moment to see if Martha was offended, then, when she saw that it was a joke, she called down to her husband.
‘Emile, these young people are trying to make me die of laughter. You’re a naughty girl,’ she said to Martha, ‘but all the same, my dear, you must feed that husband of yours. He’s eaten nothing this evening. Juicy steaks and red wine. That’s what he should have.’
‘Well, we could kill him off that way, certainly,’ Martha said.
‘Kill him! Nonsense, don’t you listen to those doctors. Red meat never killed anyone. Emile’ll get them for you. He knows where.’
I saw Martha’s neck tauten, as it had already done at the sight of the huge saddle of mutton cooked French gigot fashion, that had appeared on the carving table.
I said, ‘Dear Mrs Englander, I don’t think I should be happy to eat porterhouse steaks, even if I were allowed to, so long as food in England is in such short supply.’
I hoped that my intervention would take the edge off Martha’s anger. And so it proved.
‘Many people who come to the Relief Office never see meat at all, Mrs Englander,’ she said.
‘Oh, my dear, I know it’s terrible.’
I liked the old woman too much to let her off lightly. ‘There’s a lot of real starvation you know.’
She cried, ‘Oh my God! Is there? That’s terrible. You see, Emile always keeps sad things from me. He’s always spoilt me terribly. You hear that, Emile? Mr Carter says there’s real starvation. No more saddles of mutton, my dear. Not even for you, Herr Kästner,’ she called down to the Second Secretary from the German Embassy, a frequent guest there. ‘No, something light – that’s what we’ll have to live on. But not eggs because they make Emile look quite yellow. You would be getting jaundice, Emile, and then we’ll have to send you to Vichy. Oh, how I hate it there. So dull, though the pastries are very good …’
Dr Englander cut into his wife’s stream. ‘Now, now, Sophie. Don’t you take any notice of their nonsense. We shan’t be going to Vichy and we shan’t be having anything light. I’ve got a hard job of work to do and I need a proper diet to do it on.’
He looked indeed plumper and more comfortable than I remembered him; like a tortoise in his thick protective covering of woollen waistcoats and a little padded satin quilt coat that he had put on over his dinner jacket because of draughts, though no one else could feel them. But central heating was not available then, even for the Englanders, so he was sure there must be some draughts.
‘Anyway all this distress, it’s bound to happen after a war. But the Government’s got it in hand, don’t you worry your head, Mrs Carter, it’s much too attractive.’
Sophie Englander whispered with delight, ‘Emile loves a pretty girl. Food and pretty girls! I don’t think he could do without them. And his old snakes.’
‘I’ll tell you why your husband’s got to put on weight and get really well. It’s because I need him back with me to put the Zoo on its feet again. There’s no use in our French friends and our German friends sending us valuable animals every day as they are doing,’ here he raised his glass to Herr Kästner, who returned the salute, ‘so long as there’s nobody but an old man like me to run the whole place. That’s my interest in Carter’s health – selfish.’
Sophie was delighted with this, her old red head on which she had put some sort of sapphire ornament, bobbed about, as she cried, ‘Oh, yes, that’s it. Selfish, nothing but selfish.’ She whispered to Martha, ‘Emile’s teasing you.’
‘As a matter of fact, staff shortage is one of our worst difficulties, Harmer.’
He turned to a short, fat little man, who said, ‘You’ll get your staff, Englander, don’t you worry. Now we’ve got a government that has foreign confidence, the whole prosperity cycle so far as businessmen are concerned, will start up again soon enough. And once that happens your technicians and scientists will start flocking back to the country. And we’ve got sensible men at the head of labour now too, chaps like our friend Tillotson here who will pool their labour with Europe, not kick against the pricks.’
And now around the whole long table there rose a familiar buzz of conversation – talk of renewed confidence, ancient European culture, international science, sound economy and civilized living that played in and out of the massed chrysanthemums and antique silver to assure us that a new era of solid, adult, wide-horizoned, big men had begun. Indeed there they were, as Martha and I had seen them at five or six dinner parties now in the Director’s ornate, heavily Empire dining-room – Harmer, who stood for half a dozen or so other businessmen with international interests; Tillotson, who stood for forward-minded, international-minded, middle of the road Trade Union leadership; a prominent zoologist or two from Italy or France or Spain; a Second Secretary from one of the European Embassies; occasionally, as this evening, a representative of the world of art, a literary critic of that older, more European-minded school who had now suddenly come once more to the fore: the cultivated, rich, cautious, go-ahead old men who had put an end to a wasteful war, substituted sense for sentiment, and were about to substitute prosperity for patriotism. All except the literary gentleman had matching wives; and he had been paired, following a stream of arch apology from Sophie, with another gentleman, unknown to us all – a Mr Hilary Blanchard-White. He was a man with an old-fashioned musician’s mane of white hair, staring, liquid eyes, and over-regular, over-white false teeth with which he smiled at everything that was said. He spoke in an old-fashioned actor’s dramatic tremolo and constantly rubbed his hands across his face as he talked.
‘A funny sort of chap,’ Englander told me before dinner, as we drank our sherry. ‘I don’t know whether you’ll like him. He seems agreeable enough, smiles all the time. He’s one of these Uni-European men. Not a man of substance at all. He’s taught languages in Hamburg, Utrecht, Geneva, Toulouse, all over the place. But he organized a lot of the underground work and Harmer tells me the Government have got to give those chaps some sort of recognition. He’s interested in zoos and museums. Though what he’s got to say about them, I can’t imagine, since he’s not a scientist or a scholar. Of course, if this country had come to its senses sooner, and made peace sooner, events would never have brought such men to the fore. They’re a product of violence. We’d never have heard of Uni-Europeans. But then if this country had had a little more sense, we shouldn’t have to build up a Zoo from a collection of reptiles that an old man like me had the sense to evacuate in time.’
This was a favourite topic of Englander’s. He was holding forth upon it even now to his dinner guests. It was his war story. In actual fact, he had spent the war itself very quietly at St Gallen; and his constant reiteration of the tale of the secret building of the reptile park was the one sign he gave of the garrulity of old age.
‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ he was saying, ‘there’d have been no Zoo. But I got in touch with our friend Harmer here and we built a full-scale reptile park up in the Hebrides, while you were fussing about losing animals down in Wales, Carter. Of course, Scotland Yard was pretty near on to us at one point, thought it was some sort of submarine base for the European fleet – and so it was, wasn’t it, Harmer? But that had nothing to do with me. Then that chap Falcon tipped me off that the Yard were inquiring about me. I don’t know why he told me, but there you are, he did. I’d have been home otherwise to take Sophie out before the big bang started.’
‘And so you left me. And they put me in prison, Herr Kästner. And gave me a carbolic bath. Imagine an old woman like me scrubbed with carbolic soap!’ She laughed until the tears ran down, ‘And Mr Carter saved my life by sending me food. Yes, you did. Everybody else had forgotten the old woman. And this handsome young man who had never seen me, sent me food and books. You didn’t know I was such an ugly old thing did you, Mr Carter? You thought Emile had a beautiful young wife. That’s it I know.’
‘We shan’t forget what you did, Carter,’ Dr Englander said. ‘And as far as the Zoo could be kept going, Carter kept it going. They put a poor chap in charge who’d gone off his rocker – a chap called Beard. That’s how Carter got stuck out in the back of beyond with this dysentery. This chap Beard panicked and rushed a lot of lemurs out into the country, Lord knows why! Just as the war collapsed. Nothing’s ever been heard of him again, has there, Carter?’
I said, ‘It’s almost certain he was killed in the fighting that followed in that area. The farm where I left him and the family living there were blown up. I shouldn’t have survived myself if it hadn’t been that a country woman took me in, and fed me and nursed me.’
‘And no doubt charged you for it afterwards. I know the ways of peasants. My grandfather came from peasant stock in the Engadine.’
Martha was indignant. ‘They wouldn’t take a penny, Dr Englander,’ she cried. ‘Not a penny! Neither she nor the boy. And they were so poor … and it was so awful.’ Martha had been appalled at the conditions of English rural slums.
‘They saved his life and she calls them awful. Oh, you’re a naughty girl,’ Mrs Englander cried.
The Director said, ‘Beard had a lot of crippled relatives and other family encumbrances, didn’t he? The Zoo will have to do something for them, Carter. After all it wasn’t his fault they put him in charge. Anyway they never paid the chap a living wage. I tell you what, you go down and see what’s happened to his family and, if they’re in real need, I can fork out until we get the Committee working on salaries and pensions.’
I could hardly refrain from doing ‘thumbs up’ to Martha. I had scored heavily in my fight to establish the Englanders as decent people.
I said, ‘I’ve been to see them. The spastic son’s clever. He does some maths coaching, but, of course, it isn’t easy to keep a sister and a grandmother on that. I don’t know that he’ll accept a pension – his relations with his father were very bad. Beard was very hard with them, or, rather, he became so. The boy seems to understand, but he can’t forgive.’
As I spoke I could see the wretched fat neurotic daughter twisting her handkerchief round her fingers, and saying, ‘You see, Dad never took any account of what happened to us, so we can’t care what’s happened to him.’ The boy had squared his huge over-developed shoulders, ‘That’s not fair, Catherine. He did the essentials for us. But with such loathing. You couldn’t help wanting him out of the way.’ His handsome face turned to me. ‘We had years to form that view. It seems that you were quick to do so weren’t you?’ But he had spoken without bitterness.
Now Englander helped himself to a large piece of omelette surprise with raspberry ice and meringue from the dish the butler offered. He shovelled it down as he talked.
‘Ah, well. All that sort of thing’s not a subject to entertain guests with. Failure and illness! But we’ll do something for them. The essence of getting a good collection together again is to have a competent well-paid staff and you won’t get them if you neglect their widows and orphans.’ He turned to Harmer. ‘You say the scientists and technicians will come back as soon as things have settled down. But you industrialists have got to spend your money freely. We’ll do your work for you at the Zoo, for example, but if you want that work well done you must pay better rates than we gave our staff before the war. I’m right, aren’t I, Carter? You see why I want you back, to help me put the Zoo’s case to these fellows.’ He indicated Harmer and Tillotson. ‘We’re already losing some good men. Jackley, that’s our ichthyologist, was interned by the Spanish at Funchal. Now he’s elected to go to the States, not to come back here. He gives some clap-trap, political reason, but that’s not it, of course. It’s because of the poor wage he used to be paid.’
Sophie Englander now claimed my attention. She said, ‘And so you say that many of these poor people are really in want. And you think we are selfish pigs with our saddles and our ice puddings, is that it, my dear?’
Martha replied, ‘That’s kind of what I meant to convey, yes, dear Mrs Englander.’
The old woman cried, ‘Of course! And so we are! But we have to entertain, my dear. Emile’s a big man now. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll come down to your relief centre and do some work. Maybe there are things that can be got for these people by bullying in the right quarters. And I’m very good at bullying, you know. I’ve always been spoilt and that makes you good at bullying. And in any case what’s the use of Emile knowing all the large pots unless we can get something out of them?’
This time I really did make the thumbs up sign to Martha; and, catching a certain glance from her, we both began to giggle. Mrs Englander looked at us doubtfully for a second, then she too began to laugh.
‘Well that is nice,’ she said, ‘to see people laugh at nothing like that. Do you know sometimes when I’m spraying in the orchid house or playing patience I begin to laugh until I can’t stop, just thinking about the time Emile fell off a sleigh at Saint Moritz. But with your husband you’re laughing all the time. Look at the way he mimics everybody. I’m sure he mimics old girl Englander behind her back.’ She roared with laughter at the idea.
But now suddenly Mr Blanchard-White’s elocutionary tones broke through our laughter. He leaned forward and compelled full silence by his gleaming smile.
‘You ask me what we shall have to do. Well I haven’t really formed an opinion yet. Not really you know. But if I may say so, this talk of recompensing or pensioning or what have you the dependants of traitors and the suggestion that we should out-bid the Americans for the services of other traitors sounds a little too like the old England, the illogical, sentimental England that has been moving for so many centuries farther and farther away from the main stream of civilization. If I may venture on a moment’s autobiography, that’s why I made my life on the continent – to escape from the lack of logic and the false sentiment here that left so little room for men of talent. You ask me,’ he gleamed in turn at all of us around the table, like an expectant alligator, ‘what I think people in England want. I take it that you mean the people who fought to save her from herself. Well – in so far as I can speak for the Uni-European Movement, I think I should say that we are hungry to see justice done. And what else?’ He rubbed his hands over his face, stretching downwards the loose flesh of his cheeks and of his long chin. ‘What else? Well, I suppose, to be rid of a little of the grey mist of puritanism. To have a little fun.’ He smiled specially at the ladies. ‘Yes. To see justice done and to have a little fun. I don’t think they’re such incompatible aims really. In fact quite the contrary, quite the contrary, particularly if, in throwing off the puritan legacy, we get closer to the rich vein of Mediterranean brutality on which our European legacy so much depends.’
No one spoke for a minute after he had done. Then Dr Englander addressed Piétaud, the curator of reptiles from Paris. ‘What did you think of the paper on Loxocemus that that Mexican chap contributed to last quarter’s “Herpetology”? The ecological data were new to me.’
‘Yes. They were remarkably interesting. But these field workers should not go beyond their province. To question the classification at this stage is absurd, but absolutely absurd.’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Englander expansively, ‘small nations!’ and he caught his wife’s eye.
In her turn, she caught the eye of Frau Kästner and with the rustling of silk and the glittering of jewels – mainly Sophie’s – the ladies rose and were gone.
We finally settled the question of my returning to the Zoo when we got home that night.
I said, ‘Well, at any rate, you can’t help liking old Sophie. She’s such an innocent old booby!’
Martha said, ‘Yes. And I’m glad to see that you like her enough to treat her as grown up.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, only that you don’t think she has to be spared the unpleasant side of life. Unlike those other poor old innocents Mrs Leacock and that boy’s mother, I hated that, Simon, it was so insulting of you.’
I swallowed this and asked, ‘But you accept the Englanders?’
Martha said, ‘She is a darling and he’s not half as awful as I thought at first, but I don’t want to go there to dinner any more, Simon. It makes me feel wretched after dealing with near starvation all day.’
I thought it wise to concede this point. I said, ‘Of course. We’ll make my digestion the excuse.’
I think she had expected more opposition from me, for, after the squalors and dreariness of the last month, the absurd splendour of the Englanders’ huge Highgate house fitted with my longing for relaxed frivolity. This set-up had been so unexpected to me and that alone made it a continual slightly ridiculous pleasure.
She said, ‘Thank you, Simon.’
‘Well?’ I asked after a pause.
‘Well?’ She quoted it back at me. ‘That might refer to two things – to the children or to you.’
‘Let’s take the children first.’
‘Simon, while things are like they are here, I don’t want to bring them back.’
‘Then let us go to see them.’
‘You do that this time. Oh, of course, I want to go more than anything, but you don’t work on that relief committee, you don’t see what I see. People – awful people, Simon, like that Stanley and his mother who saved your life! And they’re lost and bewildered. Just keeping one’s head and helping them to fill in forms seems worth while. Until I’ve done my bit of that, I can’t leave England.’
‘In that case, since the children are happy with Hester,’ I said, ‘I shall stay here with you. But do you still not want me to go back to the Zoo?’
‘The doctors say …’
‘The doctors say I can return in the New Year. Englander wants me. He’s building up something useful there from scratch. The European zoos are being most generous. And what I like about it all is that Englander is approaching the thing modestly, by degrees. I want to go back, Martha. I’ve seen it through so far, I ought not to desert now.’
‘And the British Reserve?’
‘It won’t get going again for some time. And then I think my health …’ The vile taste of roasted badger fat filled my mouth. I had to fight back memories. I said quickly, ‘Well, I couldn’t do field work again for the time being. I want to go back to the Zoo. Do you still object?’
‘No, Simon, I suppose not, if you don’t. Oh, it’s so difficult for me – I’m not entirely British as you are and if you don’t feel it … But, well, if I were wholly British I think I shouldn’t like the present set-up …’
‘My dear, the British people as a whole never objected to Federation with Europe. If they had, neither blockade nor threat of bacteriological warfare would have made them give in. No, the war came to an end because most people had never wanted it to begin. Why should we fight to keep the old crowd in power instead of Harmer and Tillotson? It’s no good being highminded and opting out like Jackley and all the top men who’ve decided to emigrate. Englander may be a low-minded, materialistic old bugger, but he’s putting sense before self-indulgent sentiment.’
‘No, I know. In some way these people seem better to me. And yet … Well, look at that awful man tonight with the teeth. There is a lot of scum about.’
‘There always has been. The war’s churned it to the top for a while, that’s all. As a matter of fact Englander referred to that Blanchard-White, when he spoke to me before dinner tonight. He asked me to help them keep those sort of people at bay. So you see.’
‘I suppose so. Very well, darling, you do as you want. But watch out that we don’t lose our way. Watch out that we don’t lose touch with the sort of people we care about.’
Of course we did a little; we were bound to. Lord Oresby, for example, couldn’t see his way to continuing as our President. This was undoubtedly the time, he said, for men to retire to their country seats, and he went down to Wiltshire; but then he was what one of my aunts would have called ‘ultra correct’. Mr Harmer was elected in his place.
‘Ultra correct’, I suppose, was also Diana Price’s position. She wrote just before Christmas to ask me to visit her at her little Regency house in Lloyd Square – ‘There are some things Matthew wanted you to have.’ I went there on a very cold afternoon. She sat in a fur coat in their pretty drawing-room.
She said, ‘I’m afraid it’s freezingly cold, but it seems to me that any sort of firing is collaboration and that’s that. How does Martha feel about it?’
I brought the conversation on to Matthew as soon as possible. ‘He was so immensely original. He made me laugh so much,’ I said.
‘Did he? I don’t think one can judge that if one’s been brought up with somebody. He liked you very much. I should be very grateful if you would tell me exactly what happened that night.’ When I hesitated, she said, ‘I have a strong stomach.’
I told her as fully as I could. ‘I still can’t understand,’ I said, ‘what made him take that hopeless risk. I’d warned him, you know. And I thought he’d accepted my warning. I said it’s not a time for suicide pilots and he agreed. You know how he joked about things, he said, “I’m not Japanese.”’
‘I don’t think Matthew was joking. After all he wasn’t Japanese, was he? But he was a man who always did his duty. If that person Beard muddled things up so that Matthew’s parrots had not been evacuated, he would have felt it was his duty to protect them.’
‘But it was risking certain death.’
She laughed, ‘Matthew risked certain death many times in the war against Hitler.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m afraid that I never knew much about that hero side of Matthew.’
‘No? Of course, you were saying that he made you laugh so much.’ She got up. ‘However,’ the word cut me sharply, ‘however, he left you this parcel.’ When I opened it later at home, it contained a first edition of Fanny Hill, a first edition of Under the Hill, and The Cyprian’s Guide to the London Bagnios for 1847, also, rather incongruously, a large illustrated folio, The Aviaries of our Great Houses published in 1871.
Martha reported throughout that winter that Sophie Englander was working like a carthorse on the Relief Committee. ‘She really can pull strings without their breaking and she’s genuinely fine with the people, if only she would arrive a little less dripping in mink …’
I, too, sometimes wished when we were interviewing the many needy people who applied for uniformed keepers’ posts, that Englander would exude a slightly less solid comfort; but otherwise he was a model of competence, good sense, and, above all, moderation. It had been agreed that the Zoo would reopen on 21 April, on what, now that the European Federation was finally established, was to be called European Day. I could not but think of Leacock’s lost opening day and Bobby’s Day of Wrath, but our new Director was determined that we should present a modest but solidly interesting collection.
‘This is not a time for show,’ he said, ‘but it is a time to give an impression of the serious future of the Society’s work and of the civilized, European essence of the Gardens as a show place for the public.’
The exhibition on opening day was to be divided into two sections, he decided. The first was to consist of a series of demonstrations showing the research work of the Society in terms comprehensible to the general public. Here our trouble was that, following the raids and the disastrous attempted evacuations by the Prosector, the material for research work had severely diminished. Only Englander’s own work could be fully set out with living experiments as well as in diagrammatic or photographic form. His investigations into the undulating propulsion of snakes was to occupy pride of place. It would not, in fact, have been difficult with the willing assistance of European zoos, to have replaced the material for most of our other research workers. And, at first, these offers had been welcomed.
‘This old chap Englander seems to be slightly more on the beam than all those duds we’ve suffered from recently,’ Pattie told me on the phone, ‘Nutting’s frightfully bucked with the new grant he’s getting and even Newton says the old boy almost understood what his work’s about.’
But shortly afterwards they all three mysteriously and abruptly announced that they would not be contributing work to the opening exhibition. At first the Director was angry and distressed; but so many excellent zoologists from Europe had asked to show their work that he could afford to neglect this defection. In explanation Pattie would only say to me, ‘It’s simply no good questioning me because your name’s not yet in the clear.’
In any case I was too busy with the other side of the ceremony which was to be, as the Director said, ‘something to give you a chance, Carter, to show what you’re good for’. It was – and this was Englander’s sensible limiting idea – to consist of an exhibition of European fauna only, but of every kind, grouped geographically, with informatory films and lectures upon migration, breeding, general demography, adaptation to human environments, relation to human economy. It was also to contain a special palaeozoological section. Englander, in fact, hoped in this part of the exhibition to assert a claim to incorporate in the future Zoological Gardens many of the former functions of the Natural History Museum which had been totally destroyed in the raid.
I found my work taxing but extraordinarily interesting. Through Englander I made contact with every West European zoo and natural history museum. Donations came in not only from the great zoos at Hamburg and Copenhagen and Rome and Paris, but from all sorts of small collections in provincial towns. Europe was on her toes to reward capitulation. Through Harmer we received lavish grants from the federated West European industries; through Tillotson we drew upon the new pooled labour resources. The Italian architect chosen by Englander to rebuild the houses was a man of striking originality and great charm. It was a winter of slush, sleet, insufficient food and sudden power cuts, but nothing could chill the warmth I generated in my cocoon of busyness. Only, indeed, the voice of Sanderson unintentionally jarred me to the realization of a changing world outside. He had entered into the new régime with zeal – I did not tell him that the Director had said, ‘We must hang on to that chap until we can get someone better to replace him’ – and we spent a lot of time together devising exhibitions of pests and demonstrations of the interdependence of European insects and European flora. He was knowledgeable, helpful, but always naïve.
One day he said to me, ‘Of course, I was very glad to see that war come to an end, Carter. I know some people thought differently. But then they probably weren’t in touch with old people as I am. Mrs Blessington, of course, is an old devil. She’d have been for going on fighting, I think, but Miss Delaney felt the horror of it terribly. The blind have a sixth sense about these things. In any case this Government seems to be doing some fine things, especially since the changes of last week.’
Looking up from a pile of papers about potato blight, I asked, ‘What changes?’
‘Oh, they’ve taken in some of the Uni-European chaps. I think they’re right. After all they did all the sabotage work. In any case they’re all unknown men, people who’ve come up from nowhere. It’s nice to see the little chaps taken notice of. And they’ll think about the other little chaps, of course. This new law about putting the vagrant and the old and so on into special government homes is a magnificent idea really. There are so many lost people wandering about since the war and it only distresses everyone to see them. Old Mrs B.’s very fierce, of course; she says it should be voluntary. But I’m not sure the Government is not being kinder by taking the decision out of the old people’s hands.’
It was typical of him that upon the very same morning, he told me with some admiration about the Jackley letter.
‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that it’s only one of many letters that these chaps from abroad are sending to the various places where they worked. Mind you, I don’t know that I agree with their hostile attitude to our Government. In fact I think they ought to come back and pull their weight. All the same, there’s something rather fine about this letter of Jackley’s. I don’t know how it got smuggled in, but it urges people not to co-operate now and sets out his plans for the future of the Zoo. It’s had a tremendous effect on Miss Henderson, I think. She’s been circulating duplicated copies. But you mustn’t say anything to Englander, of course. He might get upset about it. I don’t think it’s to be taken seriously myself, but it cheers some people up. And I admire Jackley’s simplicity of style. He begins. “Dear Colleagues, as you know I have been for over a year in prison …” I thought the simplicity of that was very moving …’
If the Uni-Europeans were going to take over, then I had no wish to hinder Pattie Henderson’s resistance work; on the other hand, if Englander could continue his wise régime, I had no wish to help make way for Jackley. In such a dilemma, I found it best to bury myself in getting a really good show put on. Until ten days before the Opening Day I forgot all else; then suddenly it was announced that Mr Blanchard-White had been appointed to advise the Government on public exhibitions – museums, parks, art galleries, zoos and so on. Englander was most distressed. He taxed Harmer and Tillotson with not preventing such an absurdity. ‘I can’t think what men of your standing could be doing letting them appoint a chap like that, a man who’s never had a proper position, a man without any scientific training. Heaven knows what cranky nonsense he may bother us with!’
Harmer said, ‘It’s a worrying time, Englander.’
Tillotson said, ‘The only thing with incompetents is to give them enough rope to hang themselves.’
Mr Blanchard-White at his first Committee meeting was all smiles and few words.
‘I just want to feel my way,’ he said. But he did ask if he might participate on European Day. ‘I know it’s late,’ he said, ‘but if I could have a little corner just to try an idea of mine and then I think the Minister wants me to say a few words. After the important speeches of the day, of course. Just a post-scriptum or perhaps we should say obiter dictum.’
April 21 was warm; the daffodils waved their golden and ivory and orange in a soft southerly breeze; the first lilacs had been tempted out and filled the air with their heavy, sensual perfume. Gates were opened at eleven in the morning. Dr Englander, old fashioned and solid in his view of entertainments, had procured the band of the Grenadier Guards to play selections and marches; the food which promised to be excellent was to come from Gunters. The first hundred or so visitors to arrive were the core of society that supported the Government – only different from those that would have come to Bobby Falcon’s opening in its preponderance of foreign embassy staff and business magnates, and in the absence of country gentry. Many of the cosmopolitan set indeed were the very same stage stars and television personalities who had helped Bobby and Jane to put up the Victoriana. The end of the war had brought its usual reaction against utility – rich women’s clothes that season trailed the ground in trains, nipped the ankles in hobbles, swayed in paniers, did everything in fact to make female movement a luxurious difficulty. Sophie Englander had not attempted such chic.
‘Emile prefers to see me in something solid, my dear,’ she told me and she indicated her emeralds and her furs, which were indeed uncomfortably hot for the day. ‘But anyhow the pretty frocks look nicer on the pretty girls,’ she added, taking Martha under her wing. ‘You come with me, dear, and look pretty. And don’t talk about hungry people and miseries because this is Emile’s big day and we girls have got to look like a bouquet of flowers. That’s what the old music master used to say at my convent school. “You girls are like a bouquet of flowers.” We hated him! Poor old thing, I don’t expect he was paid enough to keep body and soul together. Now you’ve got to be at Emile’s right hand, Mr Carter, so off you go.’
The scientific demonstrations had been arranged in a series of temporary buildings between the Mappin Terrace and the Restaurant. The crowd here seemed to grow thicker as I made my way. The same types of chic women and of prosperous, important looking men – a good number of them foreign. Here and there I saw well-known zoologists, though there were many others I looked for in vain. Many members of the Zoological Society whom I recognized there – country colonels or parsons and their wives – were, I felt sure, quite out of sympathy with the times and showed it by the careful dowdiness of their dress. The largest crowd, as I had expected, had gathered round the booth where routine experiments with the conceptual vision of two chimpanzees were taking place. It was here that I came on Sanderson with an old lady on each arm. They proved, in fact, to be tough splendid old Mrs B. and the noble blind Miss D. In the fashionable throng they looked noticeably eccentric. Miss Delaney in a rather skimpy, short sleeved black silk dress, had a mane of uncovered yellowish white hair and a cigarette in the corner of her puckered tobacco-stained old mouth. She had also the senseless, very blue eyes that I had often seen in the blind. Mrs Blessington had more pretentions to be called dressy; her short-cut hair was frizzed and over-purple in the conventional style of very old ladies of today, and her make-up was as crazy but less orange than Sophie Englander’s. She wore a battered ancient flower-pot hat. As soon as we were introduced, she said,
‘Shockin’ crowd, isn’t it? Of course, I told Mr S. when he suggested comin’, a big crowd like that always hums a bit. What with that and the stink of the animals. Anyway monkeys smell something chronic! Doin’ their business everywhere! Nasty things!’ Her voice was shaky and cracked. Her head quavered as she talked.
Sanderson beamed. ‘Mrs B.’s in fighting form,’ he said. ‘Now Miss Delaney loves the animals, don’t you?’
‘She can’t see ’em,’ Mrs Blessington said angrily.
Miss Delaney whispered into the air, although I think she intended her speech as a confidence to me.
‘I’m blind,’ she said, ‘but I do love animals. I had some guinea pigs when I was a girl. And our dog killed them. And when my father saw how upset I was, he told me that we are all God’s creatures. It’s in Genesis you know, “and every living thing that dwelleth upon the earth”.’
Mrs B. turned on me, ‘Are you a Bible readin’ man?’ she asked savagely. But before I could answer, Strawson came up to us with a number of printed leaflets in his hand.
‘Well, Sir,’ he said, ‘Jupiter Pluvius has withheld his inclement gaze from our festive day. I don’t know whether I may persuade you to purchase a copy of this small poem I’ve written upon the occasion – hardly poetry, perhaps, but the traditional rhyme the day demands. The money will go to the staff fund for retiring messengers.’
‘How very, very fine,’ Sanderson said, and he read aloud, ‘Upon European Day at the London Zoo, by Joseph Strawson, alias Elephant Joe –
Peace shall come to this house
When the hoopoe lies down with the grouse.
Yes, that’s a very fine way of looking at it. You’ve done very well, Strawson.’
The two lines read in Sanderson’s poetic voice caused me to guffaw into my handkerchief.
Mrs Blessington meanwhile had sternly demanded of Strawson, ‘Are you a poet?’ adding, ‘you don’t look like one. Poets look like this,’ she sucked in her rouged old cheeks to represent hungry, Romantic fervour, ‘you look like this,’ she blew out her cheeks in a passable imitation of Strawson’s fat, floppy face.
Sanderson said, ‘Mrs B.’s properly on the warpath today.’
Miss Delaney leaned forward, ‘I shall look forward to hearing your poem later. I’m blind, you see. But I’m very fond of poetry. I used to write little poems as a girl. My father …’
But we never knew what her father said, for suddenly with shouts and with singing a procession of people came through the main gates and, as the fashionable crowd parted to form a tightly packed bank on either side, it streamed down to the central gardens where the speeches of the opening ceremony were to be given. The newcomers marched in groups, each carrying the gay patchwork flag of Uni-Europe and the name of its district. Some, but only a few, were also gaily clothed in European peasant dresses made up in eclectic mixture of Bavarian, Piedmontese, Breton, Basque, Andalusian or any other combination that appealed to the wearer; otherwise they presented an extraordinary spectacle of defiantly sombre drabness. I knew at once instinctively who they all were – these sad-faced men and women of every age; they were the handicapped or handicap prone in all their many kinds, the ranks of those who had been our proles ever since the end of the Hitler war. Here they were – all the people who didn’t quite qualify for grants or pensions; all the people who failed to get the professional qualifications or to pass the required psychological tests; all the women who couldn’t get their alimony paid to them; all the men who’d mistakenly thought that luck was the easy road to affluence; all the people who’d emigrated and come back; all the people who’d immigrated and wanted to leave again; the ranks of those who were too obstinately individual to fit in, yet too weakly individual to make their mark. At their head, in feeble assertion of personality, strode their white-maned, sixth-rate leader, Mr Blanchard-White. The important people drawn up on either side looked amused, yet faintly apprehensive.
‘They deserve their march,’ said a woman near to me, ‘they did invaluable work.’
But her friend said, ‘I can’t think where they’ve found them all from. I hope we shan’t see them march about too often.’
And now it was announced over the loudspeaker that the speeches were to begin. I struggled to get through the crowds to the rostrum where Harmer and Englander and Tillotson, and even Sophie Englander had already taken their places, but the crowd was too tightly packed about me. The Uni-Europeans, too, had formed solid lines in front of the crowd in order to cheer Mr Blanchard-White as he took his seat; indeed they seemed to be acting as police for the occasion. Or rather as additional police, for the recently reconstituted police were also there in large numbers. Indeed this was the first time I got a distasteful impression of them, for despite all my assertions of my position as Secretary, I could not get them to let me through. I think I should have been able to see the comic side of this had they not pushed me so roughly that my shirt was torn. In any case if I was the most important, I was certainly not the only ‘notable’ kept from the centre of things that morning. A smart woman near to me kept protesting that she was a sister of Mr Harmer’s.
‘Mr Harmer’s the President,’ she cried; and a group of Dutch Embassy officials waved their invitations in vain.
The Uni-Europeans, in front, turned and hushed us, and one dreary woman dressed in an Arlesian cap and a Scots tartan waistcoat, called back,
‘This isn’t a private party. It’s for the peoples of Europe.’
It was obvious that the policemen’s sympathies were with them, for one near us ignored our demands entirely and another, turning on Miss Harmer, said,
‘I can’t help who you are, madam, we’re here to see that the people have a chance to hear their leaders.’
I could see my chair empty and conspicuous among the celebrities on the rostrum; and could see Martha looking distressed. And now the band stopped playing its potpourri from some ancient musical and Dr Englander rose to his feet.
‘Your Excellencies, my Lords, Ladies, and gentlemen, you will see here today the beginnings of a new London Zoo, a zoo that will not stand as an old landmark in a single capital city of a now vanished empire, but as one of a group of scientific institutions playing its part in the revival of European learning …’
I heard no more of his speech, for the word ‘European’ had brought deafening applause and here and there a dissenting cry of ‘The London Zoo for ever!’ Near me a jolly looking middle-aged woman in ear-rings cried in cockney,
‘Don’t you touch the London Zoo,’ and a member of the Society, who was, I knew, a wealthy Norfolk landowner, cried,
‘Quite right, Madam. A London Zoo and a free England.’
The fashionable guests began to call for order, but the Uni-European reaction to these mild interruptions was less helpful.
‘Throw them out! Traitors! Throw them out!’ they cried.
I was utterly disgusted by the sudden brutality of the police who literally dragged the ear-ringed woman along the ground in removing her and knocked the Norfolk gentleman down before they took him off. There were murmurs of disapproval, but these again were drowned by the Uni-Europeans snouting, or rather singing to some impromptu tune, Strawson’s ridiculous lines, and in turn these same lines were taken up ironically here and there by ‘patriot’ groups. ‘Till the hoopoe lies down with the grouse’ resounded on every side. The Director now sat down in despair and Harmer took his place, but he was no more successful in imposing silence. Fights and scuffles broke out in various places among the crowd. Looking round, I saw that Sanderson and his old ladies had disappeared. My own aim now was to get to Martha and take her away in case there was real violence. It was thus that I never heard Blanchard-White’s famous speech calling for the revival of the Roman Circus at the Zoo; although, as I walked round the Gardens in order to reach the rostrum from the other side, I heard the deafening cheers with which the Uni-Europeans greeted each suggestion that he made for realizing his ideal of justice combined with a little fun.
To get round to the back of the platform I had to pass by the former sea-lions’ pool and through the magnificent glass hall that the Italian architect had built to house my exhibition of European fauna. As I came into the vast structure I expected my footsteps to echo in the emptiness as they had the day before, but instead I was greeted by a medley of voices, male and female, shouting – ‘Don’t shut up the animals, let England loose!’ – and there chained to various railings were half a dozen or more energetic, fresh-faced young men and women. I knew how excellent my exhibition was, how much work and intelligence I had put into it, and I suddenly felt furious with these young ‘patriots’. Surely they could see that by demonstrating against the Government they were simply making it easier for Blanchard-White and his gang to get full control. I have never hated the vanity of doctrinaire opinions so much as at that moment. My favourite lines of Pope echoed through my head – ‘For forms of government let fools contest, What-e’er is best administered is best.’ I walked through to the door at the other end with what I intended to be an expression of contempt – I doubt if I succeeded. But my expression immediately changed, for there, being frog-marched away by two policemen, was a familiar back view – grey short-cut hair above rolls of stubbly, red neck, a baggy Cambridge-blue rough tweed coat and skirt, heavy beige stockings and low-heeled golfing shoes. All around were scattered leaflets. I picked up one and read, ‘Dear Colleagues, as you know I have been for over a year in prison …’ I threw it down again angrily, but I ran after Pattie.
‘You’re making a terrible mistake,’ I shouted to the policemen. ‘Miss Henderson’s a member of our staff.’
I think they would have arrested me but for my official Secretary’s badge.
‘We’ve orders to arrest anyone delivering these seditious leaflets, Sir,’ the elder man said.
‘I’m sure there’s a mistake. Look, Pattie,’ I cried, ‘I’ll be along and sort this out in two twos. Don’t let them upset you.’
But her round face had grown redder than ever. ‘That’s all right, Simon, the more the swine lock up, the more will come flocking to us.’ The policemen began to move her on, then she turned and shouted, ‘Anyway, you mustn’t mix up with me. You’re the Vicar of Bray.’
And now another large woman descended upon me – poor Mrs Purrett in tears.
She said, ‘Oh, Mr Carter, poor Miss Henderson! I think you don’t know how I love this place. But it’s not right to stay. They’ll change it. They’ll do something terrible with it.’
‘For God’s sake don’t you start losing your head, Mrs Purrett, I need your services.’
‘Don’t try to persuade me, Mr Carter. I’m sure you know best for yourself. But I know what’s right. Anyway you’ll find some pretty girl to work for you instead of a fat old frump like me.’
I took her hand and she pressed mine, but dropped it immediately and bustled away. I thought of James II and his deserting family. ‘So big bum’s gone too,’ I said to myself. I was very near to maudlin tears.
I walked on to the booths set aside for Mr Blanchard-White’s display, pondering what I could do for Pattie Henderson. He had asked for large circus tents and such we had provided; but I had no idea how he had used them. Near the entrance to a smaller tent I came on Sanderson’s two old ladies wandering disconsolately on their own. Mrs Blessington’s hat had been knocked sideways in the crowd: she looked tipsy.
‘Oh, hullo,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t go in there if I were you.’ She pointed her thumb towards the tent. ‘There’s an old bear there that smells to high heaven. Isn’t the noise shockin’ everywhere too? And what a nasty crowd! I lost Mr S. If you see him will you tell him that I’ve taken Miss D. back to Wimbledon by the underground? This is no place for her.’
Miss Delaney said, ‘I’m blind, you see. So I can’t manage crowds very well. When I was a girl my father took me to an exhibition that was being held at Earls Court, I think it was, and …’
But Mrs B. had taken her away before I heard the end of the story. I walked into the smaller tent. There in a pit dug seven or eight feet below the ground level was an old mangy brown Siberian bear. I don’t know where Mr Blanchard-White had procured it, certainly not from the Society’s collections. It was tethered by one foot to an iron stake and was disconsolately trying to shake away a cloud of flies. On the railings at the crown of the pit was a large notice which read: ‘The Russian Bear in Difficulties’. High above was suspended a large bird cage in which a miserable looking American brown eagle was trying impossibly to spread its wings. The notice here read: ‘The American Eagle taught a lesson’. The whole show was so pitiful, ‘cheap’, and ridiculous that elation soon overcame my disgust when I reflected that no movement that sank to such feeble idiocies could possibly last a week. I left the booth with the feeling that I must hang on, for things would soon come right. And there by the entrance to the huge water tank where a porpoise underwent behaviouristic tests of direction finding, stood Martha. She was flustered and hot, I could see, but I did not realize how angry.
‘You’ve been in there?’ she cried pointing at the bear and eagle booth. ‘How could you? How could you put up with anything so disgusting and vile?’
I shook with anger that, on this day, when it seemed that people of every sort – ‘patriots’, Uni-Europeans, police – were behaving like barbaric children, Martha should allow so feeble and tasteless a jibe against the United States to upset her. I did not then, of course, know what she had heard in Blanchard-White’s speech.
I said, ‘Really, Martha, don’t say you’re going to join all this hysterical nonsense. I feel ashamed of English people. We try to show something of what can be done in the zoological field, experiments of fascinating importance, and a lot of hooligans choose to make a political demonstration!’
She stared at me. ‘Are you going to leave this vile place now, Simon, or are you not?’
I shouted, ‘No, I am not. What do you think I am, a weathercock? …’
But I was shouting at her back. As far as her hobble skirted green and white striped silk dress would allow her, Martha strode away.
I was stubbornly angry, but even so I would probably have run after her had I not been cut off from her by a procession of the notables coming towards the Blanchard-White tents no doubt to inspect them. Mr Blanchard-White himself was at the head chattering almost maniacally; Englander looked suddenly like an old, mummified Chinese; Harmer and Tillotson were flustered and red in the face; poor Sophie Englander, her furs thrown back on her shoulders, was panting to keep up with them and smiling in a strange fixed way which suggested that she was on the point of tears. My courage failed me; I dodged into the Porpoise House and out at the other end to avoid them. Most of the invited guests seemed to be going home, though some were visiting research houses with a desperate air of assumed normality; the Uni-Europeans, exhausted by their efforts no doubt, were picnicking all over the grounds. I decided to follow Martha home. Near the main entrance I met Sanderson. We walked together down through the Tunnel towards the North Entrance. He was deeply distressed.
He said, ‘Of course, I’ve lived out of the world. But it seems terrible that people should take these views of theirs so seriously. I know I’ve been lucky in work that absorbed me here. But even if their work is dull, there’s so much to do for others everywhere, at least that’s what I’ve always found – the less fortunate, you know.’
My anger was still upon me. I said, ‘Perhaps these people are the less fortunate.’
‘There’s always love to give out, you know.’
I remembered all the worn-out old cranks whose affairs he’d managed to lose interest in and to hand on to me.
I said, ‘Even love needs charting with a little intelligence.’
‘Yes. I suppose I’ve tended to lose sight of the shape of things to come.’ He looked at me reflectively. ‘Of course, one wouldn’t think it, Carter. But we’re two of a kind really there. Otherwise we shouldn’t still be hanging around here.’ He gave me a sad little encouraging smile. ‘I’m too old to find my way now. But you’ll have to do so, I expect. I hope you’ll do it with loving kindness.’
We walked out into the Regent’s Park Road. Two policemen were holding an old man up from the ground – his body sagged like a half-filled sack. Some Uni-European or ‘patriot’ straggler no doubt.
‘I say,’ Sanderson cried, ‘that’s old Paperbag Peter they’ve got there.’
He ran forward so fast that by the time I had reached the group, he was already protesting.
‘I should advise you not to interfere,’ one of the policemen was saying, ‘this chap’s got to go to the vagrants’ camp. He’s on the list. Watched for three days, he’s been, and found habitually unoccupied.’
‘I know him very well. We’re old pals. Aren’t we, Peter?’
The old man seemed too far gone to do more than mumble.
The policemen were getting angry, ‘Will you kindly mind your own business?’ one said.
I took Sanderson aside. ‘There’s nothing you can do. You said yourself only a few days ago that this new Government measure for putting homeless people into camps was a good one.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know them. Good God, Carter, I’ve known old Peter for over thirty years. Poor old chap, he’s always been a bit of a sponger. He won’t change now.’ He rushed back to the policemen and demanded, ‘Constable, will you let that man go?’
‘You’d better be careful or you’ll get taken up yourself.’
And taken up Sanderson was, for his own answer was to hit the constable wildly on the chin. It seemed to me that I could best help by not getting arrested, so I called to him that I should go at once to the police authorities to get him released.
It was easier said than done. I telephoned to Sanderson’s old women that he would be away for the night, then I spent three hours going from one police authority to another on behalf of Pattie and Sanderson, only to learn that, following the outbreak of riots that day of which the Zoo scenes were only a part, habeas corpus had been suspended and Sanderson would, in all probability, not even be brought to trial. I had some hope of helping Sanderson, but Pattie’s crime, it seemed, put her outside all hope.
As one superintendent said to me, ‘I’m afraid your friends have been arrested on an unfortunate day. These emergency imprisonments are likely to be rather lengthy and severe. As a measure of warning, if you take my meaning, Sir. Anyone in possession of treasonable leaflets is for it. But as to this Mr Sanderson, if he holds, as you say, an important position, you might well approach any influential friends of his … Of course, that’s purely an unofficial suggestion.’ He winked at me. Like too few of the policemen that day, his heart was in the right place.
In the end I set off for Highgate to ask Englander to use his influence. It was nine o’clock by the time I reached the large Regency house across the shrubbery of which gleamed the lights of London. Only these few rich men’s houses on the heights of Highgate, I thought, were still padded and cushioned from the city, presenting so beautiful and distant a panorama, by acres of gardens and shrubbery and by miles of heathland. The butler showed me to the conservatory where the Director and his wife were taking their after-dinner liqueur. The heat was sub-tropical among the banana trees and poinsettias. Sophie Englander, almost the whole of her bony back naked above a black velvet evening gown, was festooned by the magenta and chocolate and almond green and white of the cypripedia, and cattleya and odontoglossa she was spraying. Among them her diamonds caught the light and gleamed like tiny reflections of the London lights below us. The Director in dinner jacket made no concession to the heat. He was bent over his snake pit; with one hand he held the forked instrument that forced open the jaws of a long snake, with the other he poised a minute glass scoop which he thrust once, then twice to take a sample of venom. The twists and coils of steel blue that on the underside turned now to ochre and now to orange seemed like some intricate straw plaiting.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said.
Diadophis annabilis, Englander announced, as though that explained its beauty.
He siphoned the drops of venom into a glass tube.
‘You call that old snake beautiful. Look at my orchids,’ Sophie cried coyly.
It struck me that they were just an old couple like any other – he with his game of racing demon, she with her crochet work.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you weren’t very helpful today, Carter.’
‘No, you let poor Emile down. But he’s come to apologize, Emile, I can see that.’
‘I haven’t, I’m afraid. Apology seems irrelevant to a ghastly occasion like that.’
The Director put down his apparatus. ‘We don’t want any post-mortems, Carter.’
‘It’s not a question of post-mortems, it’s the future.’
‘The future belongs to sanity, Carter. It must do. Too much is at stake. Men with vast fortunes all over Europe have invested in the new England, they’re not going to let a bunch of maniacs run the show. No, no, the thing is simply to lie low for the moment. Besides most of it is talk.’
‘That’s much too easy an attitude.’
Sophie Englander broke in, ‘You know Emile, this boy’s right. When that horrible little man made that horrible speech, I thought he was joking. And then we saw that poor bear pulled down by those hounds, and the eagle torn to pieces. Emile, please, please don’t go on there. You can say you are too old. My dear, we are too old.’
With his puffy white hand he patted her scrawny old sunlamped shoulder. ‘You said you would help me, Sophie. Please. This will be a battle for good sense. I hope you will stand by me, Carter, too. We have only to sit tight for a while, I am sure.’
But my mind was on Martha. ‘Do you mean that those animals were tortured and that Blanchard-White announced it in his speech. No wonder Martha was so upset …’
‘It was terrible,’ Sophie cried, ‘and he promises much worse things. We are too squeamish, he says.’
‘Those people’ll overreach themselves,’ Dr Englander said, ‘only we’ve got to sit tight. Are you with me, Carter?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. I’ll have to see. But that’s not what I came here about.’
I told them about Sanderson. ‘You must do something for the poor man,’ I said.
‘Poor man! The chap’s a born fool! Of course we can’t do anything. Look, Carter, I talked to Harmer and Tillotson this evening. This Uni-European scum have put a Blanchard-White in every government department, institution, and local office in the country and at the moment their capers are what the mob wants. The tragedy is, of course, that if those damned fools like Godmanchester hadn’t opposed European Federation these people would never have been heard of. However scum’s only surface stuff, it always gets blown away. Whereas money and good sense are absolutes. But the one thing I promised Harmer was that we wouldn’t on any account kick against the pricks at the moment. And we’ve got to stick to that. Sanderson’ll have to cool his heels in jail until things are better.’
He was adamant; I appealed to her. ‘You know what prison is like,’ I said.
She looked at her husband, then she said, ‘Well, if he does have a bath in carbolic – No, please forgive me,’ she cried, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Poor man! But I can’t say anything. I must help my old Emile. I can’t say anything.’
When I saw it was no good, I turned and walked out of the hothouse, all my clothes clinging to me with sweat. Sophie Englander ran after me, tottering on her high heels.
‘Give me the address of those old women. Those at least I can care for.’
I did so, and thanked her, but I could not return her smile. Later I heard that she brought Mrs B. and Miss D. to live at Highgate during all those ensuing weeks. They must have seemed a strange pair among the orchids and the pythons.
I returned home that night in a strangely mixed mood. I was ready to explain to Martha that I had not known all she did when I had responded so angrily, I was ready to apologize, to think seriously about my commitments to the future. But I was not prepared to grovel – I did not want her pity, I wanted her respect – for what I had been trying to do at the Zoo; and, for the rest, my attempts to help Pattie and Sanderson should speak for me. I was too late.
I found a note from her to say that she could not stay with me while I accepted working under such a régime. She had left the house and would join the children in California as soon as possible. She must have left in a reckless state of mind because she had taken no clothes with her. It seemed to me then as though the rift that had separated us after Bobby’s fall had only been healed because of my collapse in the Essex cottage and her consequent pity for me. I scrunched up her letter and threw it angrily against the wall. ‘You should extend your compassion a little further,’ I shouted to the empty bedroom. She had no right to judge me so easily.
The next morning before I left for work, the doorbell rang and I opened to find Jane Falcon on the doorstep with a large suitcase. She had come, she said, to collect Martha’s clothes; Martha was staying with them until she could get a plane. I tried to explain that I had not understood the cause of Martha’s hysteria when I saw her, that I knew now why she was so upset.
‘Are you going to leave Englander to stew in his own juice then?’
I had thought about this all night. I answered ‘I can’t. No, that I cannot do.’
‘Well, I don’t think you’ll find Martha very ready to listen. And I can’t say I blame her. This régime’s beginning to stink.’
‘Are the theatres closing?’ I asked angrily.
‘Well, that’s a bit different. The show must go on, you know. But even there Joan Plowright’s refused to appear. And I shouldn’t be surprised if others follow suit. No, you’ve lost Martha, Simon, and I’m not surprised.’
However, she never packed the bags, for I told her firmly that I had no intention of staying in Martha’s house; and that Martha could return without fear of molestation from me.
Before Jane left, I think that she felt sorry for me because she said, ‘My dear, it’s a ghastly time, I know. And God knows how long it’s all going on. By the time all this is finished there’ll be a completely new sort of play in the market and dozens of younger agents who will understand things better than I shall. But, there you are, Bobby had his day of importance and I hated it; and then I had mine and he was miserable. So perhaps if we’re both out of the swim, we can happily take a bookshop or something equally hopeless and go bust running it together and be reasonably happy.’
I tried after that to get in touch with Martha many times, but she refused to see me or to listen to me. I, on my side, became increasingly stubborn for, as she had predicted, while Englander had to compromise himself deeper with Blanchard-White, so my position became increasingly untenable.