The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  Matthew decided on the ‘correct’ means of dealing with the gathering. In ordinary circumstances it would have been a good one. He pursued memories of Zoo ‘characters’ both human and avine, or rather he encouraged Filson, who had a fund of stories, to tell them, confining his own part to comments that seemed like the responses in some litany—”Oh God! The woman with the eagle owl. Yes, do go on about her”, “the Amherst’s pheasant that killed the tragopan. Have I forgotten? My dear Filson, the sheer beauty of that fight. Yes, do tell.” “Oh, Lord! Hastings, you see, the worst keeper we ever had. I’m sure he killed that condor.”

  Matthew’s idea of a common topic indeed might well have succeeded. Strangers—the Filson relatives, the parish priest, Father Hansford—were like most of the public fascinated by Zoo talk; this public interest is something that those of us who work there find hard to remember. All Zoo womenfolk— Martha, Jane, Matthew’s sister Diana—have been conditioned over years to make the right faces at the birth of the tigon, the death of the okapi or the kiwi, and the unsatisfactory reactions of walruses or sea elephants to captivity.

  All, it seemed, save Mrs Filson. Like many a Zoo wife— like Martha, God help me—she held the purse strings. The large nineteen fifties house with its lounge and model kitchen in which we were met was hers, a legacy from her well-to-do builder father. From her unsure domination, Filson it became obvious, took refuge in the Zoo, a world that he kept apart. And so apart that she was clearly not just bored, but angrily ignorant. Would I, would Martha fight such battles in thirty years? The thought did not lessen my dislike of Mrs Filson.

  “Is it true,” asked Father Hansford, “that the snakes are still fed on live rabbits?”

  “Now, Father,” Mrs Filson protested, “I’m surprised at you. Encouraging him to talk about the nasty things that happen at that place.”

  She looked around the room with a certain triumph—to demonstrate, I think, that devout Catholic though she was, or rather perhaps since she was, she was no particular respecter of Father Hansford apart from his office.

  Father Hansford was also the jolly sort, but altogether more agreeable.

  He said, “Oh come, it ill behoves us to criticize the brute creation, Mrs Filson.” In mock horror, he turned to the old man. “Come on now, Mr Filson, come straight as they say, do you feed poor live creatures to those horrible beasts?”

  It was obvious that old Filson was a favourite of the priest’s, and that in turn he loved to be teased in this way.

  “I’m sorry I can’t oblige you Father. That was all put an end to in my own father’s time. That was the work of Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, I believe, wasn’t it, Mr Price?”

  “Oh,” said Matthew, “Chalmers-Mitchell!” His voice had a note of deep veneration. “I don’t know anything about him, do you?” he added.

  “I can’t see Dr Englander allowing anything of that kind. Not him,” old Filson chuckled.

  I wondered at his image of Englander, who I could easily imagine reviving ‘live’ feeding if he felt it was in accord with up-to-date continental methods.

  “We’ll have to put on an exhibition for you with live rattlesnakes and Percy, Father.” Percy was a secretary bird and clearly a great favourite of Filson’s. “Now that would be something to see.”

  “Charlie, you’ve talked enough. Make yourself useful with the wine.” Mrs Filson’s tone was not playful.

  Old Filson’s little head on its scraggy wrinkled neck seemed to slip back into his slumped old body like a tortoise.

  Matthew, ignoring his hostess, plunged on with Zoo reminiscence, while Diana Price tried to distract Mrs Filson with admiration for the lounge. Mrs Filson was momentarily pleased, but her misery combined with her unease would not allow her to leave her husband unbridled.

  “I’ll never forgive that man. ‘Neither grapes nor carrots,’ he said to me. ^Neither grapes nor carrots, Mr Filson. There’s a war on.’ “ The old man was in full spate.

  “Oh, God!” Matthew cried. “Men from ministries. Like Mr Carter.”

  “I’m sure Mr Carter would never have been so awkward. There was you away at the war, Mr Price. And what could I do? “Neither grapes nor carrots,’ the man said. And twelve of the toucans died. I’ll never forgive him.”

  “Toucans!” his wife cried, “It’s shameful of you, Charlie. Twelve toucans dead! Is that all you can find to mourn at the present time?”

  He must have thought, as I did, that she was about to burst out in grief for their son, for he murmured, “I was only talking, Dot, to help.”

  But she had turned to Matthew now, as though he were responsible for the whole affair—as indeed in some ways he was.

  “You may not see, Mr Price, what it means, but it’s all too clear to many of us. Those devils have got what they want. A Declaration to stop war. The cunning of it! Well the Yanks’ll soon see what they’ve done. It’s not so clever to sit down to a table with the Devil. He has a long spoon. The Church has always told them what would happen.”

  Father Hansford moved uneasily; and perhaps one felt that she had been carried away to speak out of turn, for she asked, “Has the Holy Father made any pronouncement yet?”

  It was clear to me that she was addressing her priest, but Matthew chose to take the question to himself.

  He said, “Oh, Lord! I’m afraid I don’t know. My allegiance is to Canterbury, you see.”

  I think it unlikely that he had attended any religious service since his schooldays, but there were echoing overtones of historic and social rebuke in his answer. He went straight on. “Did you ever hear how I nearly procured a moa for the Gardens? Well, that’s what the dealer claimed it was.”

  We all laughed. But we had reckoned without Martha. She came across from the other side of the lounge and sat down beside Mrs Filson.

  Very quietly but with intense urgency, she said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t speak to you like this on today of all days, but how can you talk like that?”

  Some deadness in the old woman’s face seemed suddenly to anger her, for she cried, “All right you and your generation don’t care. But I do. I’ve got children.” Then, as suddenly, she seized the old woman’s hands and held them tight in her own. “Oh, please forgive me. I had no right. No right at all.”

  Whatever Mrs Filson’s reaction may have been, my attention was entirely distracted by Diana Price. She got up from her seat and spoke in that loud, clear voice which people ‘in the body of the hall’ are always urged to use.

  “I sometimes wonder,” she said, “what these extraordinary people think we are. Or what they think Europe is, for that matter. If we do this or that, they will annihilate us with their combined strength. Like a lot of self-appointed nannies! As though countries that have had centuries of diplomatic experience couldn’t settle their differences without outside interference.”

  Matthew said, “Oh God! Diana darling, please.”

  I felt I could not leave Martha to answer so ridiculous a challenge.

  I said, “You say ‘if we do this or that’, but the Declaration is quite clear, Diana. It says that if, in European quarrels, we, the French or the Germans resort to nuclear weapons of any kind, then the Great Powers will retaliate upon the culprits. If they can’t stop us from the madness of fighting, they are determined to limit our mischief. For myself, I must say that I agree with Martha—that West and East should together make this clear may force us to think twice. And, if so, it may have saved the world.”

  To my surprise I did silence Diana; but to my even greater surprise I found that my words had loosed the tongues of everyone else. Filson relatives—and there seemed suddenly to be a host of them—were clucking and quacking, gobbling and hissing like some great poultry market or Goose Fair. It was only then that I realized how, in my absorption with Leacock’s programme, I had been cut off from the general noise. This was not Matthew Price’s echo of the official voice, or Martha’s human cry of hope, but a noise of panic. I have written poultry, but it was the
terror of ostriches whose heads have been rudely pulled out of the sand.

  “I think it’s shameful to talk like that. They’ll drop a nuclear bomb on us if we don’t—”

  “I didn’t know what to do when little Gwenda came home and said the teacher had told them the Americans and Russians were going to drop the bomb on us. She was shivering all over.”

  “Poor little mite. Some of them teachers forget what it was like to be a child.”

  “A child! I think it’s bad enough for us. I was under the drier when this girl started on about it. And I said don’t tell me . . .”

  “Mind you, there’s no agreement between these scientists that it would do the harm they say it would. They’re all at sixes and sevens.”

  “Don’t talk to me about sixes and sevens! That’s been half the trouble.”

  “A chap I know was saying that the trouble is that as soon as these technical blokes try to put things into the plain man’s language, they’re up against it. As a result we get a very distorted picture.”

  “Of course, mind you, half the trouble has come from calling it ‘the bomb’ like that . . .”

  “Well, of course, the sensationalism’s appalling. But then some people just get a kick out of making other people’s flesh creep.”

  “I must say that I think this is a very unsuitable occasion to raise the subject.”

  “It’s not as if it’s not in all our minds, but what can we do?”

  “That’s one of the troubles, people have become bomb-conditioned.”

  The buzz around me grew until it seemed to come from everybody in the room. Everybody except a rather pretty blond girl who was sitting on the edge of a chair in the corner of the room. She stood out from the rest of the company, for her deep black mourning had a sort of chic, but she looked so haggard and tired and washed-out that her smartness seemed somehow disreputable. Perhaps it was the black suit she wore, against which her white face, pale lips and green eye shade stared out so macabrely. She, at any rate, was free from the general chattering, commonplace panic, but she gave me little comfort—shut off so far away in her little universe, she might, I thought, be mad. Bobby Falcon was staring down at a dumpy, middle-aged woman who was saying to him, ‘I may be unimaginative, but the road deaths seem far more real to me’. He looked down as her with undisguised contempt, but he was not, I felt sure, free from the general distress. Only Jane, sitting so unusually silent and unsociable, was really aloof and calm, yet her expression suddenly irritated me—she seemed complacent.

  I went across to her and said, “I suppose the state of the nation hasn’t percolated to the green rooms of England yet. After all, the show must go on.”

  “Not up to your best form, Simon,” she said smiling, “You’re rattled. Anyhow everyone knows that theatre people will respond down to the last and oldest trouper if the country calls.”

  She followed my still questing gaze round the room. Near to us a stout man said, “Of course, a lot of the experts says the nuclear threat is very exaggerated. I’m perfectly convinced myself that if the newspapers talked less about it . . .”

  This so relieved the woman to whom he spoke that she cut him short.

  “Oh, I do so agree with that,” she said and sighed with relief.

  Jane smiled, “Dear Simon, always so good with people. This afternoon is a triumph.” Then almost angrily, she added, “Go on. Do something about it. I challenge you.”

  I felt obscurely that to ignore the challenge would somehow endanger my future, ‘spoil my luck’; the superstition annoyed me, yet it was too strong to resist. I had no other opiate to offer the company but the one that had drugged me all the week. Seeing Filson and Diana silent for a moment, I went over to them and spoke loudly to gather if possible the attention of the whole party.

  “The cameramen were delighted with your waders, Filson. The Director was as pleased as Punch. After all a large scale waders’ sanctuary will be one of the foundations of his Reserve when he gets it. I must say I was a bit reluctant to involve myself in this T.V. thing of his, but the more I work on it.. .”

  I sounded to myself a little like an encouraging hearty parson.

  “Do you think you could get me another glass of wine, Mr Filson?” Diana said. “The rosé, as I’m driving.”

  Then when he had moved away, she turned to me and spoke in a markedly quiet voice to emphasize that there was no return of her hysteria.

  “I don’t want to criticize Dr Leacock in front of Filson, but I’ll tell you now that in my opinion he ought to be put on trial. I think it’s appalling, at this moment in oui history, that he should be devoting all his efforts to a self-advertisement campaign of this kind. Talk of fiddling while Rome burns. We deserve to be annihilated!”

  Her determination had broken down and her voice had risen. Bobby Falcon smiled at her across the room and drawled loudly, “Annihilated, Miss Price? Of course we do. Any society that tolerates houses as ugly as this, for example . . .”

  Even Jane’s composure was broken.

  She said, “Bobby darling, you’re drunk.”

  But it was Martha who went over to him and took his arm. She seemed to be smiling.

  She said, “Dear Bobby, just because your travelling days are over, or you like to think they are, you’re quite happy to have everybody blown up to comfort you, aren’t you? Or rather it makes you feel a devil to think that you are. You are a dreadful old poseur.” She squeezed his arm and he smiled down at her.

  “And you’re almost as ghastly a prig as your husband, my beautiful Martha,” he said.

  Martha’s behaviour astonished me: she was usually either respectful or impatient of her distinguished godfather, now she seemed lovingly patient and entirely disrespectful. And he, in his turn, showed a happy acceptance of her manner. What perhaps was more mysterious to me was that all the tension of the gathering seemed to vanish with the spectacle. The dirty word ‘nuclear’ might never have been spoken—family gossip, eating, drinking, commonplace discussion soon made the scene all that Matthew might have expected, all that I dared not hope for. I embarked upon one of my best Zoo stories, that of the French lady who erupted into my office one afternoon: ‘I ‘ate the ‘ippo that ‘as eaten my ‘at.’ A small group were enjoying my imitation. Mrs Filson was having a last confidential word with Father Hansford who announced that he must leave. Soon the whole thing would be over. The explosions had been disconcerting but not devastating. We should have performed Matthew’s idea of our duty without too disastrous a result.

  Then into the gentle, decorous chattering there crept another sound, also gentle at first, but frightening—a little stifled moaning that grew higher and higher until it broke into a hysterical, hiccoughing sobbing. There, more isolated than before as people seemed to draw away from her uncontrolled grief, sat the blond girl, screwing her handkerchief desperately in her fingers, tears pouring down her cheeks. She was not I saw now, a girl, but a ravaged looking thirty year old woman. Filson walked over and, putting an arm round her shoulders, helped her from her seat.

  “Come along with Dad, Kay. There’s been too much of it all, hasn’t there?”

  The eyelids came down over his little tortoise eyes as though to shut us all out; and yet, I think, he was quite unconscious of the emotional scene he was involved in.

  The girl began, “I’m so sorry, Mrs Filson. I tried. I did really.” Then she started to sob again. “I thought you’d all forgotten Derek. And I want him. I want Derek. I want him.”

  Mrs Filson got up from the sofa with surprising speed. Her eyes were quite wild. I thought she was going to hit the girl.

  She cried, “You want him! What do you think I felt when you’d taken him away from me? A woman old enough to be his mother! And where did he find you? You were never our sort of person!” Father Hansford came up and touched her arm. She seemed at once to soften. She cried, “Father, I can’t like her. It’s no good.”

  The girl said, “You were jealous. You couldn’t l
et him go. But you’ve never thought of him today.”

  “We have some sense of how to behave.”

  “Silly snobs! What do I care for this lot?” She looked round at us disgustedly, “I want Derek. That’s all.”

  Old Filson led her away out of the room; Father Hansford took Mrs Filson back to the sofa, where she sat, red-faced, trying not to burst into tears.

  Matthew came over to me. “Oh, God! The fiancée you see,” he said.

  But I think most people were as overcome as I was with misery and guilt, for they began almost silently to make their departures.

  Just as I was leaving, old Filson reappeared and, speaking in an embarrassed whisper, asked me if he could have a word with me. He took me into the large back garden and we paced the lawn between the vegetable plots and the flowerbeds. Moments of moral decision play a ludicrously large role in my life. Each has left its associated images superimposed upon one another like a Victorian scrapwork screen. Now for some time there have loomed over all other objects, fleshy leaves of onion, minute lettuces, like specks of mampan upon a rich chocolate earth, and a peculiarly hideous khaki and purple early lupin.

  “Mr Price tells me you’re not happy about the coroner’s inquest, Sir,” he said. We were clearly back on an official level.

  “I thought it was perfunctory.”

  “Ah! Mrs Filson and I were very satisfied. We wanted to thank you for the way in which publicity has been avoided.”

  “You have the Director to thank for that.”

  “Derek hadn’t been there long, Sir, but he’d already got a great feeling for the old place. Of course, it was in bis blood. But you’ve no idea how proud he was to be working at the London Zoo. It brought him near to quarrels with his mother, I’m afraid. He wouldn’t hear a word said against it.”