The Old Men at the Zoo Read online

  “Snowing pretty badly, Sir?”

  “Oh God, yes. But then I suppose it always is in the country.”

  As companion for a short stay on a desert island I could have thought of no one preferable to Matthew. I got up and greeted him with real enthusiasm. He seemed faintly disconcerted to see me.

  “I had no idea you were coming down here, Matthew.”

  “Oh, well, the birds, you know. After all I am responsible for them. And then I was a bit worried about the old Filsons in all this weather.”

  At the most Filson could have been two years older than Matthew; Mrs Filson certainly younger.

  I said, “But Matthew! To chose weather like this for your first visit to Stretton.”

  “Well, I haven’t come to look at it. I hate the French Renaissance anyway.”

  “I mean the country!”

  “I’m hardly going to look at that, am I?”

  “No, I mean the discomfort in this cold.”

  “I don’t know how it was at Winchester, but at Eton we soon learned never to think about the weather.”

  It was true. Even in this deep freeze he was wearing only the very lightest overcoat.

  Obsessed by the macabre events of the morning, I found myself recounting the scene to Matthew.

  His only comment was, “Yes, I can’t say I feel this poésie du lynxe as you do. But then, of course, I’m a bird man.”

  “I’m more concerned about Leacock. I know you hate psychology, Matthew.”

  “Oh, very much. Yes. All the balls our nurses told us long ago dressed up in German-English.”

  “All the same Leacock seemed worryingly round the bend this morning. After all his daughter . . .”

  “Oh, God! I’ve heard extraordinary things about her. I had a beer up at Stretton station with one or two of the younger keepers. And naturally we talked a good deal of smut.”

  “I don’t know why you say naturally. They never talk smut with me.”

  “My dear Simon, I dare say you’re not very good with the men. After all army life . . . Anyhow she seems to have been after most of them. But you know what they’re like. They don’t like a lady to use whore’s language. Anyhow she seems to go rather far if the stories are true. I must say I never thought Leacock would have a Messalina for a daughter. In fact she seems to start where the Empress left off. As I said she couldn’t be better placed than in a Zoo. But still we mustn’t gossip about our Director’s daughter, must we? Will you dine with me, Simon? I asked at my Club and there’s apparently an excellent roadhouse as they call them about five miles from Hereford.”

  Depressed at the thought of a late return to empty London, I agreed.

  “Good. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have two cockatoos to describe before I walk up to see the Filsons.”

  The car Matthew had hired was very comfortable and his roadhouse turned out to be a large country hotel with excellent food. Even he praised the burgundy, although he said, “I don’t know that I want that naval commander fussing round my table all the time.” He revealed a vast knowledge of nineteenth century explorers and talked of them in a mixture of genuine admiration and salacious Gibbonian mockery that was very entertaining for one evening. We drank a good deal, but at last Matthew said, “Well, I hate to break this up, but we have to go to the Mule’s Head.” He studied a scrap of paper. “Yes. The Mule’s Head. I took the name down when Filson was talking. That’s where he and Mrs F. go.”

  “But surely not on an evening like this.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. They’re cockneys. I imagine they’d go to the nearest town if they could. I know when we were stationed in the country, the men all traipsed miles to the nearest town in the evenings. What else could they do?”

  “It isn’t the same thing at all . . .”

  “Do allow me to know my own head keeper, Simon. After all I’m devoted to you but it was him I came down here to see.”

  I was a little too high to care much what happened, even to mind about Matthew’s driving, which usually wildly haphazard, acquired an appearance of extreme caution when he was drunk that would have normally seemed to me most sinister. I must have dozed off once or twice, for there were many gaps in the anthology of quotations about parrots or popinjays from Ovid through Skelton to Masefield to which Matthew treated me on the journey. Once he was singing, “I don’t like food for parrots, boiled beef and carrots,” and I heard myself say aloud, “You may think that driving with you and Leacock like this I have a death wish but I haven’t.”

  “Oh! You must be very drunk, Simon, Leacock isn’t here, you see,” he said.

  By the time that we arrived in the deathly quiet streets of Hereford I was quite sober. It seemed to me that Matthew himself must be very drunk to have driven to this town where nothing stirred even on a Saturday night. Even more did I feel this when we entered the Mule’s Head, a pub in a little side street near the Cathedral, where through the dense smoke I could vaguely see a man in shirt sleeves playing an old honkytonk piano, and a huge blonde singing “The St. Louis Blues”. The bar was packed with people. It was, I imagine, what my grandmother who lived in Salisbury would have called cthe seamy side of the town’, and if by that she meant that it had remained petrified from some more remote age, she was right.

  At first Matthew said, “Complete hell!”

  Now I could see through the haze that apart from a sleazy sprinkling of tarts and Irish casual labourers on the booze, most of the clientele were family parties. Among them, Barley, the sporty keeper of the wolves, and his more sporty wife. He waved a glass at me.

  “Matthew,” I said, “there’s Barley, the keeper of the wolves.”

  “Well, that’s nothing to do with me. Wolves aren’t birds.”

  “All the same we must speak to them now we’re here.”

  “I can’t see why.”

  “Well, I must, if you don’t.”

  “Oh, very well. It’s really Bobby Falcon’s job, isn’t it? But still since he’s not here.”

  Mrs Barley, all good fun and gin-and-It, in slacks, said, “Looking for something to keep you warm in this snowy weather, Mr Price?”

  And Matthew answered, “Judging by the local girls I’ve seen, I think I’d rather sleep alone. That’s unless Barley waives his claims.”

  Mrs Barley said, “Now then.”

  And Barley, “Hands off, Mr Price. I’ll tell you what, Larna, though, we’ll fix Mr Price up with old Harriet. She’s sure to be coming in.”

  Mrs Barley looked towards me, but Barley was just tight enough not to care. I went to buy a fresh round of pints and whiskies and gin-and-Its.

  When I returned Barley was saying, “The latest is Strawson. She come up to him this morning and shook him by the hand. All the boys have been on to him now, stringing him along, she wants to be in his bloody album. You know he takes these nature photos, or at least that’s what he calls them. Mostly he has to take Mrs Strawson, God help him! Mrs S. among the daffodils showing her tits.”

  Mrs Barley said, “Now, Arthur! Don’t be disgusting. Anyway she’s a fine looking woman.”

  “Well fine or not, it’s all he’s got. Then he has Mrs S. all backside among the brussel sprouts. Part of some religion of his, he says. Dirty old man, that’s what. Anyway the boys have told him Harriet wants to be in it. And he’s all set to take her. I can just see old Harriet, if she thinks he’s going to have a bash and then he takes out his bloody camera instead. She’ll hang it round his neck and all.”

  Matthew hooted -with laughter. “Oh, God! Well he’d better not show the album to the faithful dog or he’ll tear it to pieces.”

  Barley suddenly looked very prim.

  “Disgusting. They oughtn’t to let that sort live. Well, come on, Larna, we must be moving.”

  It was a frosty ending.

  Matthew said, “Oh, God! I said the wrong thing.”

  He looked so sad that I went to the bar to get him another whisky. And then I saw Harriet come in. She was rather
tight and on easy terms with everybody, and yet she seemed to me like a much younger girl who was shy but too tired to care. If it hadn’t been for Barley’s and Matthew’s talk, I should have avoided her; but, as it was, I felt impelled to show her some friendship.

  I said, “Would you let me buy you a drink?”

  “I’ll let anybody buy me a drink and I’ll take a double brandy neat.”

  When I returned from the bar, a stocky Irishman with bloodshot eyes was steadying himself by holding on to her arm.

  “What do you say, Harriet my darling? What do you say?”

  “I say, fuck off. I want to talk to my friend,” she indicated me.

  The man immediately let go of her arm, though he stood a short distance away, muttering to himself.

  Harriet said, “I hope you’re not slumming or being broad-minded or something, because that won’t be necessary.”

  I said, “Oh, for God’s sake, let up, woman. Either we’re going to talk or not.”

  She said, “I’m not very good at talking, but let’s do that.”

  She wasn’t very good.

  She said, “If I could any longer taste brandy, I should say this was filthy.”

  Then she remained silent for five minutes while I tried to be funny about people in the room. She didn’t appear to hear me, not because she was drunk, but simply because she was too abstracted.

  Then she said, “Isn’t that Pansy Price you’re with?”

  I said, “Well, I call him Matthew. And he’s not a pansy at all.”

  She said, “Don’t tell me about him. He looks like one. And I can’t bear them. It’s such a waste.”

  This seemed illiberal, but, in view of Matthew’s attitude to her, only just.

  Then she said, “Do you know much about dogs?”

  “Not a lot. No.”

  “Well you’d have to know a lot to talk to me about them, so that rules out most of what I can talk about. I could tell you about my life. How I shouldn’t be like this if my parents weren’t so bloody. No, it’s a bore. The only thing is that when you see what bloody little twerps all my good little brothers and sisters are, it does lend me a slightly rosier glow. I shine by comparison. But as nobody has to make the comparison, there’s not much point in it.”

  She stood silent for a moment, then she said, “Mummy isn’t wicked actually—she’s half-witted. But the old bastard is an absolute fake from start to finish.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true. Neither start nor finish. Only at some points along the line.”

  “That sounds clever, but I’m not going to work it out. I think he’s off his rocker. Look at this morning’s little ceremony. Anyway he’s so hideous. I’ll bet you didn’t know that he has an absolutely hairless body. Isn’t it ghastly? That’s a good enough reason for any girl being down the drain. And if you’re thinking of trying to haul me out, don’t bother, because I’m wedged as hell and mediumly happy there. But you could get me another brandy.”

  When I came back with it, she said, “This talking idea of yours hasn’t been a very good one. It’s made me feel sick.”

  I said, “Why not sit down?”

  She put her arm round the Irishman’s neck, and, turning to me, said, “Oh, fuck off. I want to be with Paddy.”

  When I returned to the other end of the bar, Matthew, red-faced and flustered, was involved with a circle of old women out on the spree who were doing ‘Knees up Mother Brown’. Matthew’s feeble lifting of his knees was exciting not derision but compassion.

  “Poor old dear,” one of the women said, “he’s doing his best.”

  I wished that Bobby Falcon could be in Matthew’s predicament, it would teach him a lesson about old-time crowds. With difficulty I rescued Matthew, and, as he seemed very drunk, I took charge of the car myself and had a most unpleasant drive back to our hotel on slippery roads through a white mist. Matthew sighed deeply as we went in.

  I said, “Thank you very much for a lovely evening, Matthew.”

  “Delighted to have entertained you.”

  “I’m afraid the last part was a bit depressing.”

  But Matthew was not prepared to receive sympathy.

  He smiled vaguely and said, “Oh, well, in the country it’s all rather hell, isn’t it?”

  On this occasion I was forced to conclude that he was right. I decided to return to London the next morning; but first I had to inform the Director. I expected to find Leacock at home on a Sunday but his wife told me that he now worked every weekend. I went to the little temporary administrative office—no more than a large wooden hut—that had been erected near the entrance to the Reserve. Godmanchester was there with the Director.

  “Did you see this grand guignol of Leacock’s yesterday morning?” he asked.

  I pretended not to understand him.

  Leacock said, “Godmanchester thinks that the destruction of the lynx had a morbid effect on the spectators.”

  “I don’t think. I know.”

  Godmanchester’s tone when he was being deliberately offensive was not a nice sound.

  “Despite the fact that you don’t believe in bothering with the opinion of the neighbourhood.”

  “I’ve got the opinion of my own men. You forget, sometimes, Leacock, that we had a sizeable collection of animals and some first rate keepers before you came down here. But it doesn’t matter where I heard it from. The fact is that you set out to kow tow to the locals, to invite every little grumble they like to make. And now on top of that you scare them out of their wits.”

  “I don’t accept that. But in any case the whole demonstration need never have taken place as I told you on Friday evening, if you hadn’t unwarrantably stepped in and overridden my delegated authority.”

  “I happen to be the President of the Society, you know.”

  “Yes. And I am the Director appointed by the Committee to run the Zoological Gardens. If you want to get me dismissed, you’re at perfect liberty to put the proposal before the Committee! Until then I’m in charge.”

  Lord Godmanchester gave his famous chuckle, but, I thought, a little ostentatiously.

  “My dear Leacock, in your obsession with your very fine scheme, you’ve rather lost a sense of reality, you know. I’m a very busy man and my time is not, strangely enough, entirely free to hatch schemes for controlling the Zoo. Even if it were, I shouldn’t be interested in trying ‘to oust you from your authority’ as you call it. Why should I? You’re a very good Director. You think I shouldn’t have countermanded the orders to shoot the lynx. I think I was right to do so. In your place even if I’d thought as you did, I’d have let it ride. But still, you felt a principle or something was at stake ... However one thing nobody in their senses would have done was to stage this ridiculous spectacle simply in order to snub me publicly. Because that’s why you did it, Leacock. And it was childish, wasn’t it, Carter?”

  “I can’t measure how a child would have acted in a situation where only adults are concerned.”

  Again he chuckled and rumbled, but I thought how little I should want him to hug me at that moment.

  “Good enough,” he said, “but you take it from me, Leacock, you won’t hear the end of this business from the local people. You’ve got them jittery and you’ll have a hard time calming them down. Can I take you up to London, Carter?”

  “Thank you. I think I’ll go by train.”

  “Ah, well, I shan’t come with you. Very picturesque and all that. But I don’t like public transport, train or plane.”

  He got up with his usual heavy slow and soft movements.

  Leacock said almost casually, “I’m afraid it isn’t enough, you know. I’ve got to ask why your newspaper this morning has given wide publicity to the escape of a dangerous lynx at Stretton.”

  Lord Godmanchester blinked and then said, “Sunday papers take a lot of filling. I don’t interfere with my editors. Two can play at being spiteful. Take your choice of reasons and welcome. In any case, wide publicity is not
the right word for a ten inch column. If you want to know what wide publicity is you ought to look at the space we’ve given to Falcon’s expedition.”

  Leacock pursed his lips and the end of his long nose twitched.

  “Yes. And now it seems it will have to be called off.”

  “Well, you can hardly blame him for a nationalist coup d’état in Brazil. However he’s gone off to the States to collect support. It’s amazing the contacts that man’s got. And, of course, he’s an adventurous personality. I blame myself for overlooking him recently. We’re going to need a sense of adventure in this country in the coming years, once we’re out of this trough we’ve fallen into.”

  He turned to go, then with difficulty he screwed his thick neck round, until his fat, surprised old face was staring at us.

  “By the way, Leacock,” he said, “Katie’s coming down here for Christmas. So I’d be obliged if you’d keep Mrs Leacock away from the house. She gets on my wife’s nerves.”

  Leacock’s Adam apple bobbed twice as he swallowed. Then as easily as he could, he said, “I’m sorry for that. I’m sure Mrs Leacock would never wish to go where she’s not wanted.”

  “No? Well, that’s all right then.”

  When he had gone, Dr Leacock swivelled from side to side in his chair.

  Then he said, “Firmness and tact, Carter, firmness and tact. I told you that’s what we should need. Well, you’ve seen me use both this morning. We’re in for a fight, I think; but this has been my great chance and I’m not going to give up easily.”

  Ten days or so before Christmas, Martha wrote as though I were desperately urging her to come home. She must have read between the lines of my letters, for, although I longed to do so, I had carefully refrained from mentioning her return.

  “I do want to come back as soon as possible, darling. But Reggie won’t settle in. And Hester spoils him. Also I’m afraid she’s not taken to Violet. And then you know how when I’m in England, I’m always wanting the children to have a good American education. Well, now I’m here, of course, I don’t feel so sure any more. It’s no good pretending that we binationals are not schizoid because we are. And there’s no good starting them here unless we’re going to leave them for a while. Anyway I thought I’d stay here at least over Christmas for them. I suppose you couldn’t possibly come out; I know you’re so busy but just for the few days. Who in the hell cares about the money if we’re all going to be blown up? Not that anyone here thinks that we are, but then they don’t know how mad the British are. Oh! Simon, even though I did write that about American education, you don’t know how good it is to be in a country that’s big. May God and my liberal ancestors forgive me for writing it. Bobby still expects the end of the world. He was at San Francisco seeing some Exploration Fund and I went over and spent the day with him. Poor old Bobby! I really believe he had snapped out of those long years of manic-depression or whatever it was. And now this lousy Brazilian government won’t let him in. But he’s being pretty tough about it. Of course he’s quite a different kind of person away from Regent’s Park. I always reckoned he would be. Why don’t you try it sometime? There’s an awful lot of mammals waiting to be watched over here. Then we could all be together without anyone feeling mean.”