by Julia Stuart
“That’s quite all right. Goodbye.”
She peered at the phone book and dialled again.
“Hello, is that Dr. Perkins?”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Mrs. Jones from London Underground Lost Property Office.”
“She’s at work. I’m the cleaner. Can I take a message?”
“Do you know whether she happened to have left a wooden box on the Tube recently? It has a brass plaque bearing the name Clementine Perkins.”
“I doubt it,” the woman replied. “There are no Clementines in Dr. Perkins’s family.”
As Hebe Jones put down the phone, Valerie Jennings arrived in her usual flat black shoes. But as she hung her navy coat on the stand next to the inflatable doll, there were none of her usual complaints about delays on the Northern Line during which she had to suffer the indignity of being tightly pressed against her fellow passengers. Nor was there a word about the bitterness of the morning and a prediction of snow on account of the twitching of her bunions. And when she opened the fridge, there wasn’t even a look of reproach when she searched in vain for the Bakewell tartlet that she had hidden behind a carton of carrot soup.
“You’re not still worried about those ears, are you?” enquired Hebe Jones, thinking of Valerie Jennings’s eventual release from the front end of the pantomime horse, which had resulted in the detachment of both appendages as she lurched backwards. “I took the horse home last night and Balthazar said he’d sew them back on and you’d never notice.”
“It’s much worse than that,” said her colleague.
“What?” asked Hebe Jones.
“Arthur Catnip asked me out to lunch while you were gone yesterday afternoon.”
“What did you say?”
“Yes … He caught me off guard.”
There was a pause.
“It gets worse,” Valerie Jennings continued.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to go.”
FOLLOWING A DAY of defeat at the office, Hebe Jones made her way up Water Lane, hunching her shoulders in the darkness. While she welcomed the fact that the tourists had been shut out of the Tower by the time she returned each evening, she dreaded the solitary walk in winter when the only light came from the fleeting appearance of the moon. As she passed Traitors’ Gate, she remembered the time when Milo dived for coins dropped by tourists into the stretch of the Thames that seeped through its wooden bars. With no regard for the visitors still touring the monument, he and Charlotte Broughton had shed their clothes and descended the forbidden steps to the water’s edge in their underpants and vests. They had retrieved several handfuls of coins by the time the alarm was raised. Running back up the steps, their underwear heavy with water, they dodged the Beefeater who had spotted them and took off down the cobbles. As they headed up Mint Lane, several off-duty Beefeaters who saw the pair from their living rooms joined the chase. They were eventually cornered against the Flint Tower, where they stood with their heads bowed, dripping with water. Not only did they endure the wrath of their parents and every Beefeater in the Tower, but they were summoned to explain themselves to the Chief Yeoman Warder. The coins were duly thrown back into the murky water, apart from a single gold sovereign that Milo slipped into the leg of his underpants and kept with his other treasures in a Harrogate Toffee tin until he presented it to Charlotte Broughton two years later in exchange for a kiss.
The Salt Tower was in darkness as Hebe Jones approached, save for a light on the top floor. Passing Milo’s door at the foot of the spiral staircase, she wondered whether her husband would remember that their son would have been fourteen the following day. As she changed into something warmer in the bedroom, she thought of the time when she used to be greeted on her return home. She went down to the kitchen, and while searching in a cupboard for a pan, she recalled the evenings when there had been so much noise, she had had to shut the door. If it wasn’t her husband playing Phil Collins hits on Milo’s kazoo, a uniquely irritating habit that had led her to hide the instrument, it was his attempts to help the boy with his homework. Unless the subject was English history, Balthazar Jones would walk around the living room suggesting answers that were wholly arbitrary. When asked a question he was unable to even guess at, he would go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the fact that he was as mystified as his young son. Leaving the room under the pretext of needing the lavatory, he would riffle through the sacred text he kept hidden by his bed that held the key to the world’s most troubling enigma: how to do fractions. He would emerge victorious through the living-room door, trying to hold the formula in his head, and the pair would wrestle with mathematics until the monster was eventually slain.
When supper was ready, she walked through the empty living room and called up the spiral staircase to the room at the top of the tower that she never entered. When they had finished their chops in front of the television, Balthazar Jones immediately got up to do the dishes, then disappeared once more to his celestial shed. And when they met each other again, several hours later in bed, Hebe Jones looked at the outline of her husband in the darkness and thought: “Please don’t forget what day it is tomorrow.”
CHAPTER NINE
BALTHAZAR JONES WOKE EARLY and turned onto his back, away from his wife muttering in her dreams next to him. As he waited for sleep to reclaim him, the question Hebe Jones asked him the previous week about what Milo would have looked like had he lived floated back to him. He tried to imagine how tall his son would have grown, and the shape of his face that had always appeared to him to be that of an angel. He had never had the pleasure of teaching him how to shave, and the razor that had belonged to the boy’s grandfather, which had travelled around India in its battered silver tin, remained in the Beefeater’s sock drawer with no one to pass it on to.
Unable to bear his thoughts any longer, he got up and dressed in the bathroom so as not to disturb his wife. He left the Salt Tower without stopping for breakfast, barely noticing the snow pirouetting down from the sky like feathers. He drifted from enclosure to enclosure, as he wondered how his son’s voice would have sounded today, on his fourteenth birthday. When he led the eleven o’clock tour of the fortress, he didn’t have the stomach to show the tourists the scaffold site, and only mentioned its location while standing at the chapel door as they were about to file out at the end. It caused such annoyance that even the Americans, whose mystification over English history the Beefeaters always forgave on account of their famous generosity, failed to press a tip into his hand. He crossed Tower Green and started to patrol Water Lane, but kept seeing his son amongst the visitors. He left to check that the Komodo dragon’s enclosure was completely secure in readiness for the opening of the menagerie to the public, scheduled in a couple of days’ time. But all he could think about as he tested the locks was how much Milo would have liked to see the mighty lizard that was strong enough to bring down a horse.
He remembered his meeting with the man from the Palace only when he spotted him striding across the fortress wrapped up against the cold. He hurried to the Rack & Ruin, cursing himself for not having come up with a credible explanation for the missing birds with yellow eyebrows, and pushed open the door.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN that the penguins are missing?” Oswin Fielding asked, leaning across the table next to the framed signature of Rudolf Hess.
“They just never turned up,” Balthazar Jones replied, lowering his voice lest someone hear.
“So where are they?”
The Beefeater scratched at his white beard. “I’m not quite certain at the moment,” he replied. “The removal man says he stopped for petrol and when he came back from paying, both the back and the passenger doors were open and they’d vanished.”
“Who was in the passenger seat?”
The Beefeater looked away. “One of the penguins,” he muttered.
“Damn,” said the equerry, running a hand through the remains of his hair. “The Argentineans are going to think we lost them on purpose. We don’t w
ant to get on the wrong side of that lot again. Listen, if anyone asks where they are, tell them that they got travel sickness or something and they’re at the vet’s. I’ll make a few discreet enquiries.”
Oswin Fielding took a sip of his orange juice while studying the Beefeater carefully. “Is there anything else I should know?” he asked. “I don’t want any cock-ups when the menagerie opens.”
“Everything else has gone according to plan,” the Beefeater insisted. “Apart from the wandering albatross, all the animals have settled in well. The giraffes are loving the moat.”
The courtier frowned. “What giraffes?” he asked.
“The ones with the long necks.”
“Her Majesty doesn’t possess any giraffes.”
Balthazar Jones looked confused. “But there are four in the moat,” he said.
“But I gave you a list,” Oswin Fielding hissed. “There were no giraffes on it.”
“Well, someone thought they belonged to the Queen. They’d been loaded into a lorry by the time I arrived. I just assumed you’d forgotten to write them down.”
There was a pause as both men glared at each other.
“So, to sum things up then, Yeoman Warder Jones,” the equerry said, “the Queen’s penguins are missing and the Tower of London has kidnapped four giraffes that belong to London Zoo.”
The Beefeater shifted in his seat. “We can just send the giraffes back, and say there was a misunderstanding,” he suggested.
Oswin Fielding leant forward. “I very much doubt that we will be able to sneak four giraffes back across London without being spotted. It’ll be all over the papers and we’ll both look like complete idiots. I’ll call the zoo and explain that we’ve borrowed them. Hopefully they won’t kick up too much of a fuss, and we’ll send them back in a couple of months when things have quietened down. If they start being difficult, I’ll remind them what they did to Jumbo the elephant.”
“What did they do to Jumbo the elephant?” the Beefeater asked.
“They sold him to Barnum, the American circus man, for two thousand pounds. It caused an absolute stink: there were letters to The Times, the nation’s children were in tears, and Queen Victoria was furious.”
Oswin Fielding sat back in his chair with a sigh that would have woken the dead. “Is that shrew still alive?” he asked.
“I saw it move this morning.”
“That’s something at least.”
ONCE THE EQUERRY AND BEEFEATER HAD LEFT, Ruby Dore collected their glasses and looked to see if it was still snowing. But as she peered through the window, on which was scratched an eighteenth-century insult concerning the landlord’s personal hygiene, she saw that there were no traces of it left. Filled with disappointment, she remembered the winters of her childhood: her father pulling her around the moat on her sledge, and the Beefeaters’ snowball fights, which were more furious than their historic battle to defend the Tower against the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.
As the canary hopped from perch to perch in its cage, she returned to her stool behind the bar and finished writing an announcement that the thirty-five-year ban on Monopoly had been lifted. It had been introduced by her father, incensed that the Tower doctor had continued playing while his wife gave birth on the kitchen floor above. The board game’s prohibition had forced it underground, and a number of Beefeaters descended to their basements to brew their own ales with which to drown the torment of defeat as they played the Tower doctor in their sitting rooms. The practice, which had continued over the years, had resulted in a drop in the tavern’s profits, and now that her life was about to change forever, Ruby Dore was determined to claw back some turnover.
After pinning the notice on the board next to the door, she reread the rules she had listed underneath the announcement. In order to avoid resurrecting historic grievances, playing with the boot would be prohibited. Anyone caught cheating would be obliged to pay a fixed levy on their pints for the next six months. And the Tower doctor was only permitted to play in the absence of a medical emergency.
Not long afterwards, when Rev. Septimus Drew pushed open the heavy door carrying his weapon of seduction, he was relieved to find that he was the only customer. But Ruby Dore was nowhere to be seen. He stood for several minutes on the worn flagstones wondering where she was, then placed the treacle cake on the bar, sat down on one of the stools, and took off his scarf. Picking up the nearest beer mat, he read the joke on the back of it. He then gazed around the bar, wondering whether it was unseemly for a man of the cloth to be looking for love armed with the fruits of his oven.
Fearing that one of the Beefeaters would come in at any moment and catch him in flagrante with his Tupperware box, he quickly got to his feet and strode out. As he stood in the cold tying his scarf, he heard a sound coming from the disused Well Tower. Unable to resist the lure of an open door, he stepped in. There, with her back to him, was Ruby Dore, instantly recognisable in the gloom by her ponytail. Just as he was about to reveal that he had left her a little something on the bar made according to his mother’s recipe, the landlady turned and greeted the chaplain with the words: “Come and have a look at the Queen’s fancy rats.”
The chaplain saw behind her a flash of villainous yellow teeth.
“The Keeper of the Royal Menagerie said I could look after them,” she continued, turning back towards them. “Aren’t they sweet? I used to have one when I was little, but it escaped. One of the Beefeaters said he spotted him by the organ in the chapel once, but we never found him. It was such a shame. We’d taught him all kinds of tricks. My dad made him a tiny barrel, and he used to push it across the bar. The Beefeaters would give him a penny each time he got to the end. He was loaded by the time he escaped. Did you know that Queen Victoria used to have one?”
But when Ruby Dore turned round, all that was left of Rev. Septimus Drew was a hint of frankincense.
BY THE TIME VALERIE JENNINGS ARRIVED at work, Hebe Jones was already entombed in the magician’s box used to saw glamorous assistants in two. Recognising instantly the horizontal position of defeat, Valerie Jennings unbuttoned her navy coat, hung it next to the inflatable doll, and sat at her desk waiting for the restoration of her colleague’s faculties. After a few moments, she glanced at her again, but her eyes were still closed and both her shoes had dropped to the floor. Eventually, she heard the telltale creak of the lid, and Hebe Jones emerged and muttered a greeting to her colleague, who watched as she returned to her desk, peered at the phone book, and picked up the receiver with renewed determination.
Valerie Jennings looked at her notebook but found herself unable to concentrate on reuniting the yellow canoe with its owner. She glanced at the cuckoo clock, dreading lunchtime. Despite the fact that Arthur Catnip was their favourite ticket inspector, she bitterly regretted having agreed to go out with him. She had never intended to enter the maze of romance again, with its hopeless dead ends. The last time she ventured inside, she had been encouraged by a neighbour unable to bear the sight of her mowing her lawn, a job she believed was decreed at birth to be that of a husband. She waited until Valerie Jennings was trimming the edge next to the fence, and seized the opportunity to rear her head. First she congratulated her on her crosscutting technique, which her own husband also swore by. She then added in a breathless non sequitur that she had a single colleague who also liked books. But despite Valerie Jennings’s insistence that single men were almost as dangerous as married ones, the woman persisted until she reluctantly agreed to meet him.
For a week she convinced herself that the man would be entirely unsuitable. But as she got ready for their evening together, a spark of hope suddenly flickered inside her, and when she closed the front door behind her a gust of loneliness fanned it into an inferno of longing. She sat in the corner of the pub with her double vodka and orange, inspecting the pattern on her new dress, looking up each time someone came in. Eventually, a man opened the door and glanced around. They held each other’s gaze long enough for her to realis
e that it was him. She offered a timorous smile, but he turned on his heels and left with as much determination as he had shown on entering. It was a considerable time before Valerie Jennings was able to stand. She then pulled down her dress over her splendid thighs and walked out, leaving the embers of her dreams scattered behind her.
When the door of the cuckoo clock burst open and the tiny wooden bird shot out to deliver a single demented cry, Hebe Jones wished her good luck. “I’ve got some lipstick you can borrow, if you like,” she added.
“It’s okay, thanks. I wouldn’t want to encourage him,” she replied. She put on her navy coat over the skirt she had worn the previous day, and reluctantly turned the corner. Arthur Catnip was already waiting at the original Victorian counter, fingering a savage new haircut. The assault had taken place that morning during his tea break. As soon as the barber heard that his customer was taking a woman out for lunch, he insisted that something more dramatic was required. But instead of the transformation he had been hoping for, when Arthur Catnip raised his eyes to the mirror after the man had finally laid down his scissors, he found that a massacre had taken place. Not even the peace dove of a waived bill could appease him. He wandered back to the staff room in defeat, hoping that Valerie Jennings would see past the carnage.
They headed out together into the cold, discussing the early morning snow that had failed to settle. As they passed the Hotel Splendid, Valerie Jennings glanced with regret at the marvellous columns and the uniformed doorman waiting on the top step, wondering where the ticket inspector was taking her.
It wasn’t long before the couple arrived at the entrance to Regent’s Park, and Valerie Jennings wished she was back in the warm, familiar office. As they passed the fountain, Arthur Catnip pointed to something in the distance and announced that they were almost there. Valerie Jennings peered through her smeared spectacles and saw what was undeniably a tea hut. “I think it’s going to rain,” she said.
