The Old Men at the Zoo Read online

  I was puzzling on this that afternoon in the Lemur House, when Matthew Price’s voice broke into or rather shattered my abstraction. Curator of Birds, Matthew combined the macaw, the guinea fowl, the peacock and the seagull in his voice. It was a discord that in my years at the Zoo I had come to love.

  “How very nice to see you looking so happy, Simon my dear,” he shrieked, alarming the visitors, setting at defiance the lemurs. The nice thing was that he meant it.

  “I was wondering why more people haven’t been guilty of sinful relations with monkeys,” I said.

  Matthew has an old fashioned aesthete’s love of recondite smut. Nevertheless I’d forgotten the scholar in him, which was always most in evidence when sex was in question.

  “Oh, I’m not entirely sure they haven’t,” he said with great seriousness. “I expect there was a lot of it with Julia and Messalina and all those Roman ladies, don’t you? There’s nothing in Juvenal or Suetonius certainly. But I’m not at all sure about the Empress Theodora. I fancy she was rogered by an ape more than once in her circus acts. I’ve rather forgotten my Procopius, you see. But I’ll look it up tonight.”

  He gazed up at the lemurs for a second.

  “Anyway they’re not for me,” he said, “I’ve got a new lory from Brazil. Now there’s a beauty for you. Come and look at it.”

  We set off for his beloved Parrot House. Whether his ‘lory’ would turn out to be a macaw, parrot, parrakeet, or budgerigar, I had no means of knowing. He mocked his own renown as the author of the definitive classification of Psittacidae, and incidentally the scientific pedantry of his colleagues, by the deliberate use of a vague or an out-dated naming of his birds: —’a lory’—’a splendid bird of the toucan type, I won’t trouble you with its full name’—’something new to go with our owls and eagles’—or even, on occasion, ‘a magnificent addition to our seafowl’.

  The bird was a large and very beautiful parrot—golden yellow with a bill of pinkish horn.

  “The Queen of Bavaria’s Conure,” Matthew announced proudly, “Aratinga Guarouba. But you needn’t bother about that.

  “Completely new to our collections,” he said with pride. His approach to his work was simple—-a schoolboy’s love of ‘completing the series’, an aesthete’s passion for the decorative qualities of the birds, a scholar’s passion for classification. For ecology, anatomy, evolution, demography, indeed for any aspect of zoology that had wider implications he had a great distaste and allowed himself proficiency in them only to the extent that was absolutely essential to his practical purpose.

  I said, “It’s a very elegant bird, Matthew. What does it feed upon?”

  “Oh, grapes and things,” he said vaguely. “Filson has its diet card. The collecting man drew it up. He was the most ghastly bore. He would tell me all about the bird’s nesting habits in Brazil. Well, it isn’t going to nest in Brazil. Are you, my love? It’s going to live here.”

  He paused and produced some nuts from his waistcoat pocket. He pushed his long beakey-nosed face towards the bird. Growing short sight was the only physical sign that he showed of being a contemporary of the other curators. This myopia was not helped by his greying fair hair that flopped over his eyes. As to mental senescence, he was so completely outside contemporary life that it hardly applied. His nose seemed within range of the bird’s beak before his fingers had offered the nut; I always feared that he would be badly bitten one of these days, but the mystique which he asserted almost in parody—’The birds know me, you see’—seemed strangely to hold true.

  “Thank God! The ghastly collecting bore came yesterday and not today. Filson’s so good with them, you see. And the poor old thing could hardly have been expected to cope today.”

  “You must have had an awful day, Matthew.”

  “Well, it has been rather hell. Still it would have been worse if the old man had seen the accident. He might have died from shock or something. I shall never get anyone so useful again. Luckily a young keeper of the eagles was near that tiresome Giraffe House when it happened and he let me know at once. I whisked old Filson home immediately. I broke the news to him in the taxi and then hung about, you see, while he told Mrs F. Then I sat with them a bit while they talked about the boy. That part was real hell. They were waiting .for a summons from the hospital. Actually I knew that he’d died before they’d got him into the ambulance. But it’s a good thing to remember with the Filsons of this world that they have to be told about death gradually.”

  I went through my egalitarian hoops. “Don’t most of us prefer that?”

  Matthew’s willowy form swayed slightly—his usual gesture of surprise. “Well, only children, I suppose. Or people like children—the Filsons and so on. I’m rather fond of my sister Diana, you know, but I should hardly want someone keeping the news of her death from me as though I were still in the nursery.”

  The golden parrot, bored with our company or disgusted with our inattention, let out a sudden and cruelly shrill scream that made me jump. Matthew leaned forwards to me confidentially, and, as though explaining a point of peculiar scientific difficulty, said,

  “That’s the noise they make, you see.”

  We moved out of this little back room, reserved for new specimens before their exhibition, into the main Parrot House. The combined shrieks of the birds and of two parties of schoolchildren deafened me but seemed only to inspire Matthew to greater feats of crescendo. At intervals he said,

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up,” either to the nearest parrot or to the nearest child at random.

  Shouting, I asked, “Did they take the news really badly?”

  “My dear Simon, it’s hardly the sort of time when I presume to judge people’s conduct—especially my head keeper’s.”

  “I meant were they very upset?”

  “Well, I suppose so. They’re very ordinary people. Not Arnold Wesker characters. Or whatever that man is called, who wrote about all those brutalized peasants. Mrs F. said a lot of very embarrassing things. But then she does that anyway.”

  “You’d met her already?”

  “Well, of course. He is my head keeper. And then they had this son very late. Mrs F. was only just in time. Naturally he was the great thing of their life. So one must do everything one can for the poor old things.”

  “Not every curator would bother so much, Matthew.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Matthew dismissed the actions of his socially inferior colleagues. “Anyhow, the main thing now is the funeral. They’re R.C.s, so at least there won’t be any of that awful cremation with nondenominational prayers and things. Diana and I will go, of course. But there ought to be someone from the Society as a whole. I don’t think quite the Director, do you? Because after all young Filson was only an assistant to the head keeper. I suppose Bobby Falcon will go since he was the young man’s curator; although, God knows, it can’t be said he took much care of him. “You’d better go, Simon, for the Society. I don’t know that normally the Secretary need go to a new keeper’s funeral. But old Filson’s been here a long time. And the compliment will be to him.”

  From my first arrival at the Zoo, Matthew had taken over the superintendence of the etiquette of my post.

  “I rather liked what I saw of the boy.”

  “Did you? Perhaps I didn’t see as much as you saw. Any-way he was engaged to a night club hostess.”

  “A Butlin’s hostess, Matthew.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t go to night clubs, you see. He was a ghastly bore about his singing. Old Filson brought him along some years back, before he came to work here. He tried to show off in front of his father by talking terrible balls about the Verdi Requiem. So I simply said that of course I adored Verdi but that Gounod was so much better.”

  “I was surprised that he should have come here to work at all.”

  “Oh, but the Filsons have always worked at the Zoo.”

  “But he was rather highly educated for this sort o
f job.”

  “Yes? I don’t know about that. They’re all rather educated nowadays, aren’t they? Anyway Mrs F. was a school-mistress or something. Even this morning when the poor thing was in such a state, she felt she had to talk to me about all this tedious business of war with France and Germany. I didn’t like to snub the poor creature at such a time, but it’s really hardly her affair. I simply said, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it, can we?’ “

  I felt it useless to contest this. I said, “I can’t imagine your conversing with a school-mistress anyway, Matthew. She must have something rather special.”

  Matthew swayed again in surprise. “Oh, no. I think she’s a ghastly bitch. But what I think is hardly to the point, is it? The only thing that matters now is seeing that the proper wreaths are sent. Mrs F. said something about wanting cheerful flowers. I can’t think what she meant. But then I think all flowers are hell.”

  “I suppose she meant coloured flowers and not white ones.”

  “But you can’t have coloured flowers at funerals, can you?”

  I said acidly, “I think a lot of middle-class people do.”

  “Oh? How very extraordinary! Well, I suppose the flower people that Diana goes to will know about it. You’d better warn Falcon. He’s got rather an odd background, but I should imagine his family had the ordinary white flowers at funerals.”

  “Has anyone said anything to you about the accident being due to the negligence of old Strawson, Matthew?”

  Matthew looked very grand.

  “I really haven’t much time to listen to gossip,” he said; “in any case I should hardly interfere in Bobby Falcon’s department, should I?”

  “Englander says that some journalist or crooked lawyer will get hold of the Filsons and persuade them to sue the Society for vast sums.”

  Matthew stood for a moment, scratching the head feathers of a blue and yellow macaw. He was oblivious of the crowd that had gathered to watch him.

  “Englander’s mother was a Belgian Jewess,” he said suddenly.

  “I haven’t time to listen to anti-semitism, Matthew dear.”

  Matthew was very surprised. “I can’t imagine why you should have to do so,” he said. “Of course,” he went on, “if there is any question of legal action or that sort of thing, I shall introduce old Filson to my lawyers. They’ll see that his claim is a suitable one.”

  He seemed to tire of the subject, for he led the way to the exit door.

  He peered towards the flamingo pool past which were riding children mounted on camels.

  “I can’t think why they want to have giraffes and camels and all these clumsy mammals anyway,” he said. “The whole place should be one vast aviary. With orangeries and gazebos. Sanderson could breed insects for the birds,” he conceded, “and we could retain the llamas to draw the carriages for the public. And perhaps yaks for the winter months.”

  He paused for a moment. Then as though a new largeness of vision had come to him.

  “There could be gazelles. They’re very graceful. Isn’t there a Thomson’s gazelle? I seem to have heard Falcon talk of some such creature.”

  He, too, had his ideal vision, but it strayed too far into fantasy for me to share it.

  I said, “You’ll think me sentimental but I can’t get the horror of that boy’s death out of my mind.”

  “I don’t know about sentimental.” He placed the word in inverted commas as though it was a person or a place of which he was ignorant. “But after all you were only a child in the war. If you’d been in Crete or at Tobruk, you couldn’t possibly get into a state about things like this. Most of one’s friends, you see, were either killed or taken prisoner.”

  With Matthew, the aesthete MC I simply could not deal.

  I only said, “Any injury to the balls horrifies me, I suppose.”

  “I suppose so. But who said anything about balls?”

  “Rackham told me. The giraffe trod on young Filson’s testicles and crushed them.”

  Matthews went into hoots of laughter that turned into hiccoughs. Recovering his breath, he screamed,

  “Kicked in the balls by a giraffe! Oh God! I can’t think why it’s so wildly funny, can you? But it is.”

  He repeated the phrase and a passing clergyman looked round in horror.

  I said, “Ssh! Matthew. Everyone’s listening.”

  “Everyone? Oh, you mean that clergyman. He probably hasn’t got any. They often haven’t.”

  Although I was already infected by the hysteria of his laughter, I said, “An appalling injury like that isn’t really funny, Matthew.”

  “Nonsense. Of course it is. Even if it had happened, it would be. And in any case it didn’t. My eagle man told me exactly what occurred. You know how even the nicest of those people adore the gory details. The wretched man was wounded by some spike. I can’t think what they have spikes lying about for. I shouldn’t dream of leaving anything lying about in my paddocks—not even with those beastly cassowaries. And then the giraffe trampled on his chest and broke his ribs.”

  “But Rackham told me.”

  “Oh, all those old things like Rackham have minds like sewers.”

  He began to roar with laughter again.

  “Oh, God! What a bore,” he said, “I can’t possibly tell old Filson, can I? Although he does adore a good dirty joke.”

  He began to make his way back to his office above the Parrot House, then he returned for a moment and said very earnestly,

  “Oh, by the way, Simon, I shouldn’t repeat that to anybody else, if I were you. You see it might get back to the Filsons. And if we can do no more when bloody things like this happen, we can at least see that nothing is made worse.”

  He seemed to be rebuking me.

  Fortified a little by this meeting I returned to my office, and reducing the submitted statements of work from our six research students to precis, produced our annual progress report for the Nuffield Foundation in less than an hour.

  At the North Gate stood Sanderson, holding the evening paper. He said, “This picture of Princess Anne at the South Pole is so charming. I shall have to save this copy or else Mrs Blessington will be quarrelling with Miss Delaney over theirs. They’ve both got collections of royal cuttings, but strictly between ourselves dear old Miss Delaney’s is the best. And yet she’ll never see it.”

  I was not in the mood for confidences about Sanderson’s two old retired housekeepers, the main thing was that Sanderson had scanned the evening paper and found nothing of his indiscretion to alarm him. For all the Director’s successful luncheon, I had not myself felt sure—journalists after all talk to one another.

  I said, “Well so far, so good then.”

  Sanderson was evidently bewildered, but he took my words for some generally benevolent sentiment.

  He smiled, “She’s doing splendid things for us all in these tours of hers, Princess Anne.”

  “I was talking about Filson’s death.”

  A look of vexation came over Sanderson’s face.

  “I’ve decided not to say anything about it to the old ladies, Carter. Mrs Blessington would take it in her stride. She’s got extraordinary guts for an eighty year old. But it’s Miss Delaney I worry for. The blind live in such a world of mystery that we can’t be too careful. I only hope there’s nothing in the evening paper. The old ladies’ copy gets delivered before I’m home and Mrs B. always reads it aloud to Miss D.”

  I think he was afraid lest I should pursue what he had now decided was an ‘unpleasant topic’, for his eye wandered around the crowd at the gates and settled ‘soupily’ upon an old madman who visited the Zoo each day with Bible texts and bags of unsuitable foods for the animals. The Zoo like all public places had its regular plague of cranks, spongers, beggars, con. men and plain lunatics; it was Sanderson’s habit to attach himself to all of them.

  Now he said sentimentally, “Paper Bag Peter! I’m very fond of him, you know, Carter. He’s been coming here so many years. I believe th
ings are not easy for him now. He used to live with his old mother but she died ... I wonder if we could find him some little job about the place. For all his tricks, he’s got a strangely childlike quality about him somewhere. He was asking me the other day, and I said you were the man to provide jobs.”

  It was also Sanderson’s habit to take up absurd philanthropic enterprises and then hand them on to me when they proved difficult.

  I turned away. I was too disgusted to say anything to him. I left him to go to his bus stop, and buying copies of all the papers, set off for a seat on Primrose Hill in order to read them before I made my short walk home. Two of the papers, it seemed, had ignored the incident; the other two carried very minor paragraphs about it.

  My fears had been groundless, but it was not hard to see why: even Princess Anne, the first royal visitor to Antarctic territories so recently reclaimed from the ice blocks, had been driven from the front page by the newest note sent to our Government from the European Alliance.

  The most liberal of our evening papers begged in its editorial that no word like ‘threat’ should be used to describe this document; judging by its own headlines it preferred the word ‘ultimatum’. The other three had less qualms and were unanimous in describing it as a threat. It must be said that if any words have a definable meaning they were right. The European Alliance complained of the increase of smuggling that had followed their embargo on British goods. From now on any smuggler, they declared, who was caught in possession of contraband would be summarily executed. The President of the Board of Trade, while not permitting herself to reveal the nature of our official answer to the note, had spoken of Britain’s absolute duty to trade with such uncommitted European countries as Switzerland and Austria. Two of the newspapers saw German arrogance in this new move; the other two divined French intransigence. Our President, Lord Godmanchester’s paper declared that our Coalition Government had neither the breadth nor the strength to make the dignified but firm reply that would maintain peace with honour. ‘Peace with honour’ indeed was its editorial headline and it was clear that the editor felt that he had discovered a new and telling phrase. As this was no time for false modesty, the editorial continued, there could be no hesitation in declaring that in the return of Lord Godmanchester to high office lay our only hope. It added ominously that even then the nation might have woken up too late.