The Old Men at the Zoo Read online

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

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

  “Don’t say you won’t cpme or I shall think you like Harriet better than me.”

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

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

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

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

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

  This hint gave no warning to his wife.

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

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

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

  “Lady Godmanchester?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Mrs Leacock—this is Dr Leacock. And this is the Secretary of the Zoo, Mr Carter.”

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

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

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

  “Just tell the housekeeper or my secretary, will you?”

  Dr. Leacock tried to help his wife out.

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

  She turned with faintly more interest.

  “Oh, when did you see them?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Mrs Leacock said, “You must have great fun picking them up.”

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

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

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Well, a nude, I suppose.”

  Dr Leacock laughed as well as he was able.

  “My wife meant who’s the artist.”

  “It was painted by Etty.” Lady Godmanchester sounded desperate.

  Dr Leacock said, “I believe you collect Turners.”

  “I have some paintings by him, yes.”

  I said feebly, “I love the late Turners.”

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

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

  She said, “Look, Daddy. One of the old Victorian pictures.”

  I caught a glimpse of a genre painting by Wilkie or someone of that kind.

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

  More confidently she said to her, “You certainly have found some amusing things.”

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

  “They are not very good paintings, but they are certainly not amusing. I don’t buy amusing paintings. And now I’m afraid this room is closed. Goodbye.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You know, I suppose, that she’s only after one thing w
ith men.”

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

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

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

  “You don’t exactly love her.”

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

  “I think she may be very hurt.”

  Dr Leacock wouldn’t listen.

  “Will you just do me this kindness, Carter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I looked for you at the other place first by the beechwood.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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