The Old Men at the Zoo Read online

  He was intent on noisily stirring sugar into his Nescafe for a few moments, then he looked up and said:

  “The last thing I mean to do is to put the blame on to Falcon. As a matter of fact I imagine he was in a very difficult position. Once Leacock’s set his mind on things, he can be very hard to move. And Falcon’s a romantic, isn’t he? If Leacock said that giraffe was essential to his Television show. Falcon would feel it was his duty to make the beast available just because he dislikes the whole thing so much.”

  I suppose that I looked as much surprised as I did disgusted, because he began to say,

  “Look here, if you didn’t know that, Carter, I don’t want to be drawn into a lot of gossip, Leacock’s never been a good zoologist, but his ideas for the display of the collections, appeals to the public and that sort of thing, seem to me a good deal better than most people here recognize . . .”

  He stopped and, when I was about to question him further, made a slight negative signal to me with his index ringer. A moment later I heard the thick suety voice of Dr Englander behind me. On one thing, at any rate, Langley-Beard and I were in agreement, we would not criticize the Director in the presence of the Curator of Reptiles.

  “No giraffe cutlets on the menu?” Dr Englander asked, “I suppose that means you’ve hogged poor old Smokey to feed your numerous progeny, eh, Beard? Well, I hope the family cooking pot is a large one.”

  The Prosector’s hand was trembling so much as he raised his coffee cup that I thought it better to take on his battle myself in order to avoid a scene.

  I said, “I doubt if even with your constitution, Englander, you’d have wanted to eat a diseased giraffe.”

  He sat down and ordered roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. He patted the waitress’s hand, as he said, “I like a nice bit of brown outside fat, my dear. See what you can do for me, will you?” Only then did he reply.

  “Nothing wrong with the beast was there? Except bad temper.” Langley-Beard was able to answer for himself now.

  “It had a tumour on the liver.”

  Dr Englander took some time in ordering his wine.

  Then he looked at the Prosector thoughtfully.

  “You should have had it shot.” he said. “An animal in pain is always a danger. It might have saved this morning’s wretched business. However, I suppose you were too interested in the pathology to put the poor beast out of its misery. All you chaps in the Dead House are the same. You’ll have us all there to cut up, but in your own good time.”

  There was something about old Englander’s comfortable, well padded, insensitive jollying which was so extreme that it made me feel a certain affection for him. However it was not directed at me, but at the Prosector; he clearly found it intolerable. His whole body was shaking and he shot his arm out convulsively. Whatever he intended, he did no more harm than to spill the contents of the bowl of granulated sugar over Dr Englander’s expensive, old fashioned tweed suit and his layers of knitted woollen waistcoats.

  Englander got up and brushed himself down.

  “Good Lord,” he said, “your family don’t keep you very well house trained, do they? It’s lucky for you it was only sugar, Beard. If you’d had to buy me a new suit of the quality of this one, it would have eaten a nasty hole in your monthly budget.”

  The Prosector had also got up. Leaning towards me, he said earnestly,

  “I hope you realize, Carter, that if I’d supposed for a moment that a p.m. on that giraffe would have revealed anything of the slightest interest to human medicine, I should have insisted on my own way at once, whatever anybody had said.”

  To old Emile Englander, he declared, “Your sense of humour can be very unpleasantly out of place, you know,” and was gone.

  Dr Englander finished flicking his suit with a napkin and sat down.

  “Jumpy sort of fellow, isn’t he?” he remarked. “Probably not on top of his work.”

  “Surely his trouble if anything is being too devoted to his job.”

  “It’s the same thing, Carter,” Dr Englander said judicially. He added butter liberally to his cabbage. “He’s not paid enough, of course. Nobody here is.”

  Since I had played so large a part in securing Government scales of pay for the Society’s staff, I was nettled.

  “We can’t all have your standards.”

  “Because I’m a rich man. What’s that got to do with it? I’m also an old man. Neither is a credential in itself. But I happen to be a first-rate herpetologist. Granted that, the fact that I’m old and experienced, and that I’ve had gumption enough to invest my money well makes me a more useful man to the Society than if I was a clever young scientist without a penny to my name. You’re like the President and Fellows of this Society, Carter, you believe a lot too much cant. They turned me down for Director because I was too near retiring age and because I had too much money. As a matter of fact if what they wanted was someone to lick their arses, they were quite right. An ambitious chap like Leacock who depends on his salary to bring up a big family is always going to please men like Godmanchester who want to be accepted at their own estimate.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite fair to Leacock. He has some excellent and courageous ideas for the future of the collections.”

  “Ideas cost money. Anybody can have ideas, but you’ve got to get them paid for. If I was in charge here, we’d have cash from every big company that thought they could make use of us. It’s the modern world. How do you think they’ve put through all these new schemes at Hamburg or in Paris?”

  “That’s an altogether larger question. But I do understand if scientists fear exploitation by industry.”

  “Do you? But then you’re not a scientist, are you? I’m sorry, but that’s all weak man’s talk. Of course you may be exploited. But so you may in any walk of life, unless you’ve got the cunning and the guts to see that you aren’t... Get me some Stilton, my dear, will you? And none of your pieces on a plate. Bring me the whole cheese . . . You think I’m not concerned with the welfare of the staff, don’t you, Carter? Let me tell you that my keepers are the best in the place. I give them market tips that add to their measly wages. And in return, I expect them to work hard and I don’t let them forget what’s being done in the reptile and snake gardens abroad.”

  “I don’t think you begin to be fair to the place. Take the Prosector, for example. Without making any show about it, his work is directly geared to all sorts of wider aspects of medicine.”

  “Government health service! Look; who are Beard’s equivalents abroad? Widmer, I suppose, in Hamburg; and Cuvé in Paris. They get three times the salary and six times the laboratory grant. But then they’re subsidized, by chemical firms, pest control producers, and patent medicine companies. If I’d been made Director, Beard would be getting a thumping great subsidy from some of these big pet food people. All right, turn up your nose. He’d have first-rate laboratories and he’d get enough food to nourish his weak nerves.”

  “It could be that his weak nerves are entirely the result of domestic troubles.”

  Dr Englander at once agreed.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure you’re quite right. His wife’s in a looney bin. And the chump won’t divorce her because of some religious scruple, though apparently he’s not an R.C. Then his son’s a cripple of some sort. It’s not the thing to say, of course, but that kind of thing doesn’t happen to first-rate people. But there you are, we can only afford the neurotics here.”

  He was about to pour himself out a second glass of burgundy, when he stopped and looked at me—the wrinkled pouches o white skin below his beady eyes made him seem like an attentive old parrot. Then he decided that the wine came first. He savoured it for a moment, then swallowed.

  “They’ve got two good burgundies here,” he said, “this and the Volnay ‘57. Of course, that sounded as though I was getting at you. You had some sort of breakdown of health before you came here, didn’t you?”

  “No nervous trouble. I got amoeb
al dysentery on a collecting expedition with Falcon in Uganda. It’s not serious except that it puts all tropical work out of the question.”

  “Pity. You’ve got enough money and you’re young enough to afford serious collecting. Anyhow, if you hadn’t been ill, we shouldn’t have you here. We can only afford first-rate men when they’re crocked up. And if they’ve got enough private means to live on the salary. You can afford to work here, Beard can’t, but he hasn’t got the initiative to move.”

  “It’s only because I married a girl with money.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. You introduced me to her at that party of Falcon’s. Very pretty girl. Now if I’d been Director, I’d have appointed you. Marrying a wealthy girl shows good sense. But marrying a woman who’s off her nut is no recommendation for anyone.”

  I protested that Langley-Beard might not have known of this at the time of his marriage.

  Dr Englander smiled and helped himself to a large hunk of Stilton.

  “Oh, that was only my little joke,” he said, “I’m sorry for the chap.”

  Then, seeing that I was about to pay my bill, he added:

  “I hope you’ve got plenty of spare funds to pay damages to this young keeper’s family. If a good journalist or a clever lawyer gets hold of them they’ll probably get a thumping great award—young man in his prime, wage earner and so on. Shocking negligence. The old story. Who can blame them? The poor devils live on twopence halfpenny. They don’t get a son killed everyday.”

  These lunch-time conversations only made me the more anxious to take action at once; to await the Director’s return from his useful Press-handling luncheon and ask him point blank if he was to blame; or to ‘have it out’ with Bobby, wine-flushed from his luncheon at the Travellers’ Club. I knew that either would probably ‘prove a fatal step. Yet my duty was clearly to prevent such an accident occurring again.

  But as I thought of the probing, the questioning, the amateur detective work required to make sense of the mysteries and muddles that posturing and incompetence presented me with, I was immediately assailed by the absurdity of the whole thing. The jealousies, ambitions, and paraded loyalties of Leacock and Falcon and Beard and Strawson appeared to me as utterly ridiculous; the whole puzzle of what really happened seemed a ludicrous brouhaha; and myself in the role of unraveller suggested an impossible figure of fun. I could see it only as material which complete with imitations of all the actors, including myself, I might later use to entertain the world at large. Yet Filson’s screams had been real. To meet such a dilemma the only course surely was to relax my emotions in proof reading and to return to a decision later.

  Of forty-two grey seals dissected by Dr Alison Armstrong of the Edinburgh Zoological Society during 1968, the stomach contents of five alone had proved to be devoid of any trace of nematoda. A footnote told us that Pattie Henderson was grateful to Dr. Armstrong for this information as yet unpublished but eventually to appear in an article on “The diet and longevity of seals commonly inhabiting the waters of the British Isles.” My own contribution to Dr Armstrong’s work was, of course, indirect; for ‘commonly inhabiting’ I substituted ‘commonly to be found inhabiting’. It was a soothing exercise, but not for long. Into it broke Pattie’s own voice on the telephone as a most unwelcome reminder of the source of human knowledge. “I say, look here,” her voice was deep and commanding, “I had got a wonderful excuse about subscriptions to learned periodicals made by me as the Society’s helminthologist and can I charge them as expenses to my personal account in tax returns? Just the sort of thing to excite a one hundred per cent bureaucrat like you. And God help the girl who tries to excite you in any other way. But I’m not going to give you the pleasure of that little problem. What are excuses between old friends? I simply rang up because of this ghastly business. Nutting and Newton have both heard that the poor chap would never have died if old Falcon hadn’t made a balls up. And what’s more that Leacock’s trying to hush the whole thing up. Are you coming clean or are you playing for the bosses?”

  I said, “I can answer your question straight away, Miss Henderson. I’m afraid that official subscriptions are not chargeable as personal expenditure for income tax purposes.”

  “I do think this is pretty bloody of you, Simon. I know you have to play in with the old boys a lot of the time, it’s your job. That’s what I’m always explaining to the research chaps like Nutting and Newton. But when a ghastly thing like this happens ... It certainly makes one wish that Fred Jackley were here. He’d give the younger crowd a lead and blow these old incompetents sky high.”

  “As far as I know the Aquarium has absolutely no connection with young Filson’s death, if that’s what you were talking about, Pattie. And if there is any, I’m sure the Director who’s deputizing as head of his old department in Jackley’s absence, will know what to do.”

  “That’s a laugh. When Leacock was head of the Aquarium, he did absolutely nothing. Fred Jackley ran the place. But then you’re a babe unborn as far as the history of this place is concerned. It simply means that those of us who are determined to make some changes have to count you out as a dead loss.”

  Before she could hang up, I said, “I’ve been correcting the proofs of your article for the Proceedings, Pattie.”

  Immediately her voice took on a note of unaggrieved concern.

  “Oh Lord! What’s the English like? I thought some passages weren’t too bad this time. But I expect you’ve got out the blue pencil.”

  I read her my deletions.

  She said, “Thank you very much. I should have looked a fool if a lot of that stuff had gone in.”

  Real humility always bowls me over. I said as I had not intended,

  “I’m not absolutely unaware of the other matter, you know. But in fairness to everyone concerned it is essential not to let it spread. Whatever action it may be possible to take, it won’t be helped by discussing it over the telephone.”

  “There you are, Simon, I knew you wouldn’t just be sitting on your backside doing nothing. But what shall I tell Nutting and Newton?”

  In Pattie’s own idiom, I said, “Nuts to the one and Newts to the other. Why do they have to go around eavesdropping like two comedians playing spies?”

  “That’s not fair. If some of the rest of us were a bit less clueless, it wouldn’t do any harm.”

  As she spoke, there was a knock at the door and, before I had thought, I had said automatically, “Come in.” Miss Chambers gave me the sort of frosty look which suggested that she knew me to be making a long private call to a criminal associate in Buenos Aires at the Society’s expense.

  I said into the mouthpiece, “The Director’s secretary is here, Pattie, so I must ring off.”

  Pattie’s gruff voice sounded ludicrously alarmed.

  “Oh, Lord! Has she heard all we’ve been saying? Well I jolly well hopes she takes it all back to him.”

  Then deciding that I was pulling her leg, she said in her loudest voice, “She can tell old Leacock that we’ve a special tumbril ready for him. And there’ll be another for you, Simon, if you play in with the bosses.”

  I rang off to prevent further harm.

  Miss Chambers showed no more recognition of Pattie’s remarks than to say, “I shouldn’t have worried you, Mr Carter, but the Director’s kindly given me permission to go off early; and as you seemed likely to be on the telephone for some time, I thought it best to deliver his message personally. He’s gone to a rather important meeting, but he did want you to know that his efforts with the Press at lunch-time had done the trick.”

  I said, “Thank you. Will you tell him how pleased I am? And say that, as for the other aspects of the affair that I raised this morning, I’m going on with my investigations.”

  I couldn’t at all see, of course, how I was to carry out this threat. I thought that it would ease my feelings to stroll about among the crowd. If the day’s events encouraged anything in me that I disliked, it was my misanthropy. Muddles that resulted in t
he screams I had heard that morning did not make me wish to be either ‘good’ or ‘easy’ with people. And yet a natural liking for people, however much alloyed by ridicule or boredom or sexual desire or physical distaste—seemed central to any meaningful life I could have—else why not the indulgence of the woods and badgers, the mountain forest and the pine martens?

  The high, hysterical barking of the sea lions took me to their pool to watch the crowd watch the keeper throwing fish to feed the beasts. Automatically I registered faces—fat men, thin women, rhomboid children, figures all from a strip cartoon. I tried to give them all lives—a drunken failed mink farmer from Essex, a psychically gifted mother of a North London hairdresser, and so on—but Lavater had so long been dead and I didn’t believe any more in physiognomy. In any case who can nowadays play such a social-categorizing parlour game? There are only three classes now—the élite with its boasted open end, the great prosperous mass, and the handicapped or handicap-prone. Age, arrogance, illness or inefficiency at mental arithmetic alone qualify for descent to this last class. Perhaps I should soon have found myself there, if Martha’s money . . .

  As soon as I realized where this game was leading me I left the crowds at the sea lion pool and made straight for the new Lemur House. A gift of the French nation, during one of our McLeod government’s pan-European phases, it had been intended as a reminder of the greatness of the Union Française —a tribute to Madagascar’s loyalty. When, later, relations had worsened again, some question had been mooted through the French Embassy of our paying for it; but, as Dr Englander liked to point out, ‘it was far beyond the range of our twopenny halfpenny budget’. It was indeed a miracle of glass beauty, domed, and wired not in cages but as a whole so that from outside the lovely slender creatures could be seen in shadow show, capering and swinging across the roof; while from inside, one looked up to a Douanier Rousseau world of tropical leaves and flowers, ringed tails, great round amber eyes, jet black velvety feet, and long black noses pointed, it seemed, in derision at the absurd human creatures below. Even Falcon conceded it worthy to stand by the Crystal Palace. Our Director used it as an illustration of a necessary step towards free ranging primates. For me it was a mysterious source of solace and of release; for the lemur’s antic play was both sensuous and ludicrous; lemurs and gibbons! It would be easy in relation to either, I think, for the sensuous to change to the sensual. They alone have given the simian world the delicate twist that might excite human desire. Why has it not done so more often? Perhaps, in the long run, sheer physical difficulty is the censor that controls our sexual range.