by Jane Gardam
Was there a mother? Dead? What had she been? Cardigans and untidy hair and no time for anything? Or well-heeled, high-heeled bishop’s daughter? Was there a sister? No, there was no sister. I knew the old man would have liked a daughter. You could tell that by the loving look he was giving the girl who was to become one to him.
Soon the fiancé fell asleep. Maybe we all fell asleep, for suddenly we were going through Peterborough and I was listening to a conversation taking shape between the girl and the priest, who, now virtually alone with her, was sounding rather shy.
‘We shan’t be in until after ten o’clock, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Of course, it’s much quicker than it used to be.’
‘Oh, much quicker.’
‘I suppose we’ll be able to find a taxi. Christmas Eve. It may be rather difficult.’
‘Oh yes, it may be frightfully difficult.’
‘Andrew is very resourceful.’
‘Oh, he’s absolutely marvellously resourceful.’
‘I’m afraid we shall miss the Midnight.’
‘The Midnight?’
‘The service. The midnight Christmas Eve service. Perhaps you don’t go?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t usually—’
‘D’you know, I don’t blame you. I don’t greatly enjoy it either, unless it’s in the country. In London, people come crashing in from parties. The smell of alcohol at the altar rail can be quite overpowering.’
She looked bewildered.
‘I should leave it till the morning if I were you,’ he said. ‘It’s quieter. More serious people.’
Her red lips smiled. She said she would ask Andrew.
‘I don’t really care for Christmas Eve at all,’ he said. He had removed his glasses to polish them. His eyes looked weak, but were clear bright blue. ‘Now, I don’t know what you think, but I believe it must have been a very dark day for Our Lady.’
She wriggled inside the fuchsia coat and slowly began to blush. She lifted the diamond-hung hand to her hair.
‘Think of it. Fully nine months pregnant on that road. Nazareth to Bethlehem. Winter weather. Well, we’re now told it was in the spring. March. But it can be diabolical in the Mediterranean in March. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Galilee?’
The shiny lips said that they had never been to Galilee.
‘Can be dreadful, I believe. And the birth beginning. Far from her mother. And the first child’s always slow. Contractions probably started on the road. On foot or on a mule of some kind. One hopes there were some women about. And the birth itself in the stable. We’re told it was an “annexe” now, but I prefer stable. Just think about it: blood in the straw . . . the afterbirth . . . ’
He was unaware of her embarrassment.
She had no notion what to say. She was the colour of her coat. At last—‘We always have a family party actually on Christmas Eve. Absolutely lots of us. Terrific fun. I’m afraid we’re not exactly churchgoers, any of us.’
‘You will be having a church wedding, though?’
‘Oh, golly, yes.’
‘I’d very much like to marry you,’ he said, lovingly, ‘if that were possible.’
She looked startled. Then slowly it dawned. ‘Oh—yes! Of course. Actually, I think Mummy has some sort of tame bishop, but I’m sure . . . ’
‘Perhaps I could assist?’
‘Assist? Oh, yes—assist. Of course.’
He hadn’t got there yet. The chasm was still just under the snow. He noticed me looking across at him and, at once and unselfconsciously, he smiled. I turned quickly away to the night, trying not to hear my mother’s voice: ‘I don’t care what you say, Esther, there is a difference. Being a Christian does show.’
‘You might just be interested in this,’ I heard the priest say to the girl. He had brought out of his pocket a leather pouch, squarish, like a double spectacle case, and he leaned towards her, elbows on knees, and opened it.
She made a little movement forwards. Her hair brushed the fiancé’s shoulder. ‘How pretty. What is it?’
Had she expected jewels? A family necklace?
‘What dear little bottles! Sweet little silver thing.’
‘It’s a pyx. A “viaticum”, the whole thing’s called. And something called an “oil stock”. It’s for taking the Sacrament to the sick in an emergency. I like to have it with me. It’s an old-fashioned thing to do nowadays. It was a present from my parishioners. Very generous.’
She touched a little flask. ‘Is it all right to touch?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are these?’
‘Those are the oils. For Holy Unction. We anoint the dying.’
She jumped back. ‘You mean—like the Egyptians? Embalming fluid?’
‘No, just oils. Very ancient idea. Long pre-Christian, I dare say.’ He knew that I was looking across again and he turned towards me and said, ‘Wouldn’t you, my dear?’
‘Yes.’
How did he know me?
‘It’s for people on their last legs,’ he said. ‘Last gasp. In extremis.’
‘Can it bring them back to life?’ she asked. ‘Is it sort of magic?’
‘Well, yes. It has been known to restore life. We don’t call it magic, but, yes—it has been known.’
He was looking at me.
When we reached King’s Cross they were quick at gathering up their luggage. I took much longer to assemble mine, which was mostly in parcels spread about the overhead racks. My two great suitcases stood outside in the corridor. I had no money for a taxi and I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to get all this to the Watford train. There might just possibly be a porter, but I had no money for the tip.
I let them go ahead of me, the girl first, still smiling, Andrew behind, touching her elbow, then the priest winding a long, soft woollen scarf round his neck. A present? From someone he loved? Someone who loved him?
I had no presents for anyone this year. Why should I? They wouldn’t care. There’d be none for me, or maybe just a token. I didn’t care, either. Home in shame. A grim time coming. ‘God help me,’ I said automatically, in my heart.
The priest turned before he stepped out of the train. He smiled at me again. He still held the leather pouch. He lifted it in his hand in blessing.
They had all three disappeared by the time I got myself together and started to shamble after them down the platform. There was a tremendous queue for taxis, so Andrew must have been at his most resourceful.
I didn’t need a taxi, though, or a train, or anything else. Both my parents and my brother were gathered at the platform gate.
THE ZOO AT CHRISTMAS
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel,
‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
‘The Oxen’, Thomas Hardy
A pale, still day, the sky hanging white and low. It is the morning of Christmas Eve. The girl on the gate locks up at noon and waits around for the cleaner over in Refreshments. They go off together through the main gates, chatting down the lane to the pub. Over the other side of the Zoo, near Birds and Reptiles, the two resident keepers finish checking things and
go off towards mince pies and a glass, the telly and the tree.
No human life stirs now within the Zoo. The toilets are locked; the kitchen of the cafeteria is washed down. Metallic, cold and colourless. The tigers look across. At it. Through it. Past it. Into the hoofstock enclosure. The tigers are fed on Tuesdays. Their weekly meal. This is Thursday. Not an urgent day. A flake or two of snow falls.
Word goes round. Electricity passes between cages without visible device. Ears can be switched on and off from within, out of boredom or pique or from the need for higher ruminations, particularly if we are talking tigers.
Tigers listen to other voices.
The feebler animals, the almost-humanoids, are always fussing to get through to the tigers. The tigers don’t notice them. They pace. They pace and pace, turning on their own tails, on their own dilemmas. Pace and pace.
Suddenly they speak. The Zoo listens. It is like Jove talking in the heavens. Whoever Jove is. The tigers stop pacing and listen to their own echo, flick the tongue. Yawn. Great sabres glisten. Then they flow lightly up the walkways kindly provided by the management, liquefy themselves along them, turn on to their long, striped, brush-stroked backs, raise their great paws, expose the loose material that hangs below the abdomen, silk and fluff, close their eyes. They ponder in their hearts the problem of the hoofstock.
The domestic hoofstock is recent. It consists of cattle, givers of milk and meat. Oxen and asses and silly great cows; farmyard creatures who have been introduced to the outskirts of the Zoo to familiarise children with the idea that all creatures are one. Ha!
The tigers drowse.
The less domestic hoofstock, the great bison, have been penned nearby, their mountainous necks like deformed oak trees. They look puzzled. Born in captivity, they have never roamed a plain, yet somehow they cannot feel that they are cows. ‘They’ll be giving kids rides on them next,’ say the tigers. ‘Look what happened to the elephants.’
Over in the sand paddock an elephant trumpets. Two Canadian wolves suddenly come trotting out of their den and stand listening. They run together up to the scrubby roof of the den and lift their noses. They start to howl, first one and then the other, like whales calling under the sea. Long, cold music. Something’s afoot. Here and there throughout the Zoo, other messages pass. Lemurs, little black faces wrapped in granny swan’s-down, let out bellows from unlikely lips. The great gibbons whoop. The strange snow leopard runs up and down its high platform on its big fur-soled bedroom slippers. It flings its wonderful misty tail around its neck like Marlene Dietrich.
‘Who brought in hoofstock to unsettle us?’ muse the tigers. ‘Farmyard domestics. Thomas Hardy!’
For it is the new hoofstock who have put about this legend of Thomas Hardy’s, that animals—particularly oxen, who are the elect—are wont to kneel before their Creator on Christmas Eve. They worship the Christ child. And sing.
‘We do it, too,’ says a Jacob’s sheep. ‘Several kinds of farm animals were present at the Nativity. We should worship.’
‘I wasn’t present at the Nativity,’ says Ackroyd, the Siberian tiger. ‘And Thomas Hardy was an agnostic.’
‘Sing?’ the other tigers say. ‘Sing?’
‘We sing. We worship,’ say the hoofstock.
‘You don’t catch me copying anything human,’ says Ackroyd. Ackroyd is bitter. Ackroyd is not himself. He has not been himself for three months, since he ate his keeper.
The golden-lion tamarins, their black leather faces tiny as a baby’s fist, scream and chatter at the idea of kneeling and singing, and worshipping their Creator, but they have been persuaded—oh, weeks ago—by the languid, pleasant cattle to give it a try. In fact, it is they who have organised the whole outing tonight, to the nearby church. They have done all the publicity. They have liaised with visiting squirrels and rabbits who know the neighbourhood. The venue is the farmer’s field outside the Zoo; the time, 23:00 hours. A local sheep will lead them.
Escape from the Zoo will of course be no problem, for there is an excellent P.O.W. network of tunnels, always has been. The serval cats and bush-dogs make use of it regularly for night-time forages down the M2. The panther is scarcely ever at home. He went off as far as Canterbury the other day (Hallowe’en, the fool) and walked round the Cathedral during evensong. It was in the papers. He was compared to some tomcat on Exmoor. Washed his face in the sacristy.
‘But that’s panthers for you,’ trembled the Zoo’s one old lion (Theodore). ‘They like humans. They feel affection.’
‘Well, so does he,’ said an elk, nodding at murderous Ackroyd. ‘He feels affection.’
Ackroyd looked baffled, but unrepentant. Tigers and penitence do not mingle.
‘It’s true,’ called an elephant. ‘Affection was what started it with that tiger. Up with his dinner-plate paws on the feller’s shoulders. Lick, lick . . . Next thing, the keeper’s in bits and Ackroyd’s getting bashed with an iron spade, and then put in Solitary. I’ve seen cats do it with kittens.’
‘Hit them with spades?’
‘Don’t be foolish. Licking. Love breeds violence; it’s better avoided.’
‘Only certain kinds of love,’ said the yearning, ugly tapir with his anal-looking snout. ‘Not worship.’
‘Worship!’ said the elephants among themselves. ‘What do any of us know about worship? We’re not lapdogs.’
‘Just what we say,’ fussed the Low-Church wallabies, the Quakerish giraffes, the pacifist bongos. ‘What do any of us really know about love? But Thomas Hardy says that once a year, on Christmas Eve, we catch a glimmer. We are enabled to express our love to God and the Christ child. The experience is said to be agreeable.’
‘God?’ thinks Wallace, the gorilla, in the distance. He is the oldest inhabitant. He sits all day in the corner of his empire, the Great Gorillarium. He takes a straw from between his toes and holds it for an hour or two in his fist, pondering. His hand is the hand of an old farmer, purple, square-knuckled, with round grey nails. His domed, grizzled head is the shape of the helmet of the Black Prince. It is set between huge humped shoulders. Carefully he inserts the straw into the syrup bottle attached to the side of his cage, and sucks. He draws it out and re-examines it. Around him silly spider monkeys swing and spring. Two fluffy black baby gorillas, born last year, roll about covered in straw, the cage their world.
But Wallace can remember the rainforest. It returns to him in dreams; horizons beyond the diamond-shaped wire, vistas clear of hairless humans patched about with cloth. Winds and great rains. Scents of a river. Here, the snow is grey. Wallace in his thirty years has seen snow before. It does not excite him. Not as it does the snow leopard, who will now be up on his tree-shelf, purring. Bad luck for the public that it’s not an open afternoon. They stand around for hours waiting to hear the snow leopard purr. Purring is his only sound.
Gorillas don’t purr.
Pleasure? Happiness? Wallace’s ancient eyes, the eyes that humans cannot face, the eyes that say, ‘I am before The Fall. I am the one that knows’—Wallace’s eyes ask: ‘God? Christ?’ Then, hours later, ‘Worship?’
Yet he goes off with the rest. He accompanies them this night.
Nobody has expected him at all, but he turns up first. Timid antelopes, afraid of being late, come second. They are astounded to see his looming shape. They flicker off into the lane and stand between the farmer’s hedge and the Canadian wolves, who, it being Christmas Eve, are uninterested in them. Next, the poor mangy lion, Theodore, comes creeping out of the escape tunnel and lies down with some local lambs. Red Kent cattle are standing about and the panther passes the time of night with them. The tamarins run about everywhere, flexing their tiny black hands, like tour guides with clipboards, and enigmatic langurs, like oriental restaurateurs on their night off, assist them. Where are the elephants?
‘The tunnel’s too small for them,’ says a gibbon. ‘They’ll
be kneeling at home.’
The giraffes?
‘Yes. A giraffe has promised to be here. Vera, a nice creature. If her structure permits it.’
And, yes, here she is. Her delicate, knobbly, anxious little head emerges from the tunnel like a birth.
Monkeys galore follow her. It is 23:45. A quarter of an hour to go. ‘Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,’ quotes an old ibex. ‘Now they are all on their knees.’
All is silent. Not a cold night. Snow settles lightly on the ground, on fur and hide. The snow leopard moves to a little distance on account of his rarity and distinction. He purrs. He sounds like a distant motorbike.
‘This looks like the lot of us,’ says the most human, the most mistrusted animal, the pied ruffed lemur, a donnish, dangly fellow once thought to be a form of Madagascan man who climbed trees in his pyjamas. ‘Orl aboard, lads.’
But then there paced from the tunnel three tigers: Hilda, Enid—and Ackroyd himself.
Now St Francis, Easingbourne, is very close to the Zoo. Like many other old English churches built on pagan sites, it stands on a knoll. It is near the turn-off for the Channel Tunnel, down a wooded lane. Well before the Danes, things of a nasty nature went on here, and although a Christian presence was established in the sixth century the atmosphere is still not altogether settled. There is a sacrificial aroma. Two strange animal heads are carved on either side of the church porch. They’re in Pevsner. Tall dark trees stand close.
For many years this church has been closed, but recent guidebooks have drawn attention to the beauty of the setting, especially in the spring when the knoll is covered with blossoming cherries, so that tonight, for the first time in ages, a celebration of the Midnight Mass is to take place, by candlelight. The approaching animals, who had banked on privacy, see the glow from coloured windows, hear the deep chords of an organ within.
