The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  Poor Leacock became very depressed; as June’s lovely weather continued into July he could not share in the carefree holiday mood of the country. He began like Lord God-manchester to mooch. Indeed, I only once saw him at all content during that time and that was when his mooching had brought him to luncheon with the equally mooching Lord.

  “One’s really glad to be with somebody adult,” he said. “Godmanchester agrees with me that the slackness in this country at the moment is almost pathological.”

  I suppose I ought not to have been sorry for him, but I was; or perhaps sorry for a good idea that seemed every day less likely ever to be realized. On the other hand I found him an intolerable burden; it was not so much that he put all the work onto me, but that he constantly interrupted my attention to it by his incessant grumbling. I was heartily relieved when the time approached for him to leave for the International Congress of Zoologists in Rome.

  “I’m not at all sure,” he said, “that the right way to stir up British inertia is not to get to work through some of the foreign societies.”

  It was a sentiment to appeal to Dr Englander. He, as usual, was attending the Congress at his own expense.

  “Where are they putting Leacock up?” he asked me. “At the Excelsior? I thought so. Ruggiero’s got a very good method of putting all the clowns and bores together out of harm’s way. I’m stopping with Felletrini at his house in the Urban hills. It’ll be cooler. And he’s got Scheiner from New York, old Sieffens from Amsterdam, Paladie and this brilliant young Indian Subhas Rao. It means we shall get away from the herd and have some serious talk. By the way,” he added, “I hope we’re stumping up with a proper allowance for Leacock this time, if only for the sake of British prestige. I remember in San Francisco he and his missus had to walk when everybody else took taxis. She was in bed with bunions by the end of the Congress.” I did not for a moment believe this to be true, but Englander loved to invent such occurrences and always chuckled to himself over them for some time afterwards.

  It was a good time for me, that week of the Director’s impending departure for Rome. By the time Leacock returned, I should be off on my own vacation. My full five weeks in one spell this year—time enough to reconsider my attitude to Leacock, to weigh Mrs Filson’s unhappiness against justice on behalf of her dead son. I had even promised myself that I would seriously rethink whether I really wished to stay at the Zoo although I was determined not to let Martha know of this until I had decided. We had arranged that she and I should go for a week to Janice Earl’s in Somerset, to the setts I already knew so well. Janice had reported a case of melanism among the badgers there. I should watch badgers in the evenings and early mornings, laze all day and ponder; it would be hot, Martha and I would make love. Then in the other weeks we were to take the children to the sea; but to Blakeney, where I could watch the birds and laze and ponder, and again make love to Martha. With the agenda for the last General Purposes Committee meeting of the summer complete, I seemed already to be living a little in my holiday. I took many walks in the less visited North side of the Gardens, looking at Amherst’s pheasants or Stanley’s cranes or ortolans—birds that were all dazzling colour or slender shape or sudden piercing screams, recalling nothing human. And in the evenings Martha and I read or listened or viewed, and I knew that later we should make love. Yet the tense urgency for sexual relief which had so dominated the last months seemed relaxed. We came to it surely, but we came to it easily at night and in the morning. Growing up amid the dedicated ‘trampiness’ of her mother’s progressive bohemianism, Martha, when I met her, was horribly sexually shy. It had been one of my greatest happinesses to break this down—one of my greatest happinesses and, by now my strongest self-confidence. I owed her so much; this, at least, she owed to me.

  The sun streamed into our large bedroom picking out my determined neatness and Martha’s easy disorder, waking me to some highlit angle of her sleeping face that would tease and arouse my desire. It was my free Saturday and there were hours before me in which to caress and awake her gently and slowly. Stroking her temples, her shoulders, her breasts, her buttocks, I would try to lose myself in the senses that never failed me, all my doubts would die away, and all my fussy primness leave me. I licked the glossy smoothness of her eyelids. She drew my mouth to hers, sucking in my tongue between her teeth. The telephone rang. We paid no regard. I moved my lips across her cheek to her ear; I bit the lobe. She cried with pleasure, ‘Oh!’ And then again as the telephone continued ringing, ‘Oh no!’ in American protest. Her arm leaving my shoulder, moved the telephone from its rest. But already there was a brisk knocking at the door. Martha pulled my mouth again to hers. But it was no use. Jacqueline’s voice came sharply to us.

  “Please, Mr Carter. I suppose you must answer the telephone. I have spoken on the other Une. Dr Leacock absolutely demands some conversation with you.”

  Martha held her hand over my mouth.

  She shouted, “Mr Carter absolutely can’t talk now, Jacqueline. Tell Dr Leacock he will call back in half an hour or so.”

  But even at that moment I did not feel happy to let Martha belittle the importance of my work.

  I said, “I’ll answer, Jacqueline,” and with some difficulty, still straddling Martha, I manoeuvred the telephone.

  “Carter here.”

  The voice came back vibrant with self-importance.

  “Edwin Leacock speaking. This is a pretty urgent matter, Carter, so I make no apology for my early call.”

  Above me I could hear the children’s feet pattering like a stampede of hartebeest. I knew it to be seven o’clock. It seemed unwise at that moment to let Leacock feel at any advantage.

  I said, “Oh that’s all right, I’m usually up and about by seven.”

  But he was too excited to be scored over.

  “I tried to reach you a number of times last night.”

  I knew that this was untrue. Perhaps like another old man’s his mouth was full of dough. This thought and Martha’s tickling me in the armpit made me giggle. I disguised my laughter in a fit of coughing and so lost the core of what he had to say. When I could hear him fully again, he was saying,

  “But despite the shortness of notice I’ve managed to get a quorum.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Martha whispered.

  “He’s got a quorum.”

  “Well of all the disgusting things to ring up about.”

  I put my finger to my lips and said ‘Shush!’ with mock severity. She buried her face in my shoulder to stifle her laughter.

  I said into the mouthpiece, “Is Godmanchester able to be there?”

  “Look, if you’d prefer me to ring back when you’re more able to take in what I’m saying . . .”

  “I think the line’s very bad. So Godmanchester is going to be there.”

  “He would hardly be absent from a meeting summoned to discuss his own very serious proposal. Yes, Lord Godmanchester will be there.”

  I asked, “Who forms the quorum?”

  Martha began to giggle again helplessly into my shoulder. My phrase indeed sounded to me like one of Black Rod’s or Herald Extraordinary’s traditional rhetorical cries at Coronation time. I half thought Leacock would suppose I was being facetious, but he gave me the name of the five committee members he had summoned. I noted that all were his supporters. Perhaps that was why he had not been able to contact the Secretary the night before.

  “We’re bound to come up against a lot of opposition in the next few weeks,” he said, “so I am anxious to avoid any time wasting this morning. I don’t think any of the five I’ve named are likely to listen to red herrings.”

  He gave a hard little laugh of triumph, to which, before I had thought, I had responded. But I was not going to be associated with a conspiracy before I knew its purpose, so I pretended a different cause for my laughter.

  “Listen to red herrings! Ha! Ha!” I cried.

  He was furious.

  “I’m afraid, Carter, that at
a moment so vital as this I’m not always able to command perfect English. Nor for that matter to find verbal slips very amusing. However perhaps you’ll appreciate the full seriousness of the business when I’m able to speak to you in more detail than for obvious reasons I can on the telephone.”

  That at least meant that I should not have to confess to my ignorance.

  I said, “I shall be all ears.”

  Martha pulled them both and I gave a squeal.

  Leacock said, “Yes, well clearly this telephone isn’t very satisfactory. Any way I want to go over the whole thing with you and Godmanchester before the others arrive. Shall we say nine o’clock in my office?”

  Another play to make me a conspirator, I thought.

  I said, “Well, I’m afraid at this short notice . . .”

  “Look,” said Dr Leacock, “this is not a time to consider personal matters. In view of Godmanchester’s remarks, I regard this as the amber warning. I’m afraid you must make it a must.” He rang off.

  I had not really expected to see Godmanchester in the Director’s office that Saturday morning at nine. I could imagine important events that might have brought him to Number Ten or even to Buckingham Palace; otherwise he would surely refuse to leave Stretton. However there he was looking like Kipling’s Baloo, wise custodian of The Law. His only mark of the occasion, perhaps, a light seersucker suit such an emergency might have caught him in aboard his yacht at Amibes or at his favourite Teneriffe; though he had not, I knew, left England since the beginning of the recent crisis. Leacock wore the formal clothes in which he always appeared before the General Purposes Committee.

  He said, “Both Lord Godmanchester and I felt it most important to take you into our fullest confidence, Carter. Simply because, to be perfectly straightforward with you from the start, your co-operation is going to be invaluable to us. Without you, I don’t really see how . . .”

  His voice tailed away; but I felt that I could supply the rest. Whatever the project might be, he was by now entirely dependent on someone else to do the detailed work. For the moment that person was me.

  Lord Godmanchester heaved heavily from one massive buttock to the other.

  “Don’t make the chap feel too important, Leacock. Tell him what we’re going to do.”

  “Well, the scheme is actually yours, Lord Godmanchester.”

  “Yes. But I’d like to see how well you’ve understood it.”

  Leacock’s face suddenly changed from the harassed man of affairs to the shy schoolboy.

  “Really, honestly, you know, it’s a bit embarrassing for me. But still here goes ... It seems, Carter, that my television programme had a very powerful effect on our President. He— very characteristically if I may say so and also very wisely— decided to say nothing of his enthusiasm until he’d had time to think the whole thing over very carefully. Having done that, he, also very characteristically, decided on a scheme as generous as it is bold.”

  I ought to have looked at Godmanchester while Leacock was saying all this, it might have told me much that I wanted to know; but, very characteristically, I was so embarrassed by Leacock’s manner of speaking that I could only stare at the ground.

  “He has offered the major part of the Stretton Estate including his own private menagerie to form the nucleus of a British National Zoological Park. It is difficult for me to find words to express my gratitude for an offer that is so completely magnificent. I can only say that I ... I haven’t slept since he told me last night.”

  For once Leacock’s ugliness and lack of charm were most effective. His absurd words seemed to me genuinely touching. Yet his enthusiasm was wholly reasonable. It would not have been completely disproportionate if he had prostrated himself on the floor before his benefactor; for, after all, Godmanchester had not been named ‘The Marcher Baron’ by his political opponents without malicious reason. His estates, the largest in the country, sprawled across two English and two Welsh counties. I found no easy words myself.

  I said, “I’m very pleased indeed that your efforts should have been so wonderfully rewarded, Leacock. Of course, it’s a very great moment. And I suppose our difficulty in thanking Lord Godmanchester comes from the inherent improbability of such a vast donation.”

  Godmanchester chuckled. “Are you blaming me for being a landowner on a large scale? Or are you saying that you don’t believe what Leacock’s told you? If you mean the second, to a certain extent you’re right. I told Leacock to explain the thing to you, because I wanted to see how much he’d exaggerate it. People on the receiving side of the counter always do. There are modifications to what he’s said. In the first place this is no hand-over. The suggested arrangements for the first two years will run like an ordinary lease and not an advantageous lease for the Society at that. It’ll be purely experimental on both sides, and if either side is dissatisfied, a month’s notice. Given, of course, that either side has serious ground for complaint. On the other hand if everything goes right, at the end of the two years I shall hand over something like three times the land of the old Whipsnade Park; and what’s more I shall make a very substantial financial donation towards the support of the place. Although my own belief is that what with breeding for other Zoos, increased helicopter communication and one thing and another, the thing’ll rapidly pay for itself in purely financial terms, let alone the moral or social or whatever terms Leacock made so clear in his television programme. I opposed the sale of Whipsnade on exactly those grounds but, you know what the general panic was in the ‘67 slump. I don’t imagine my wife will want to go on living at Stretton when I die. She prefers a more cosmopolitan life. So that there seems no reason why the Reserve shouldn’t expand to a very substantial size as my various tenants’ leases fall in, provided we can get really good security arrangements to satisfy the rural councils about some of the villages in the area. You’ll have at least two rivers and a lake to play about with, and a range of chalk hills with quarry workings and caves.”

  “It’s magnificent.”

  “Yes. Leacock’s already said all that. What we got you here so early for is to hear how you think the Society will receive the news.”

  “There your financial offer will help a lot. It means that if the Treasury or the Minister of Education don’t agree at first, we can afford to go ahead without them.”

  “I don’t doubt we’ll have to do that anyway.”

  Leacock nodded his head in agreement with such brave defiance.

  “I think you underestimate the flexibility of government departments,” I said.

  “I’m only happy with government departments when I’m in charge of them.”

  Leacock’s face took on an even tougher expression to keep up with Godmanchester’s attitude.

  “Whatever,” I said, “your promise of money will satisfy the main part of any would be critics on the Committee and, for that matter, it will help immensely when putting the scheme before the Society as a whole.”

  Leacock said, “There’s nothing that won’t give way before the old recipe of tact and firmness.”

  Perhaps the same immediate doubts visited Godmanchester as came to me.

  He said, “I don’t believe in old recipes, Leacock. Every new situation calls for a new way of cooking. Do you think it’ll only be a question of money, Carter?”

  “I think many people will be anxious that this should not prove a preliminary step to the abandonment of Regent’s Park.”

  Dr Leacock said, “There will be no need to suggest it. History will eventually decide that.”

  Godmanchester looked at him.

  “Until history does, I’d advise tact rather than firmness, Leacock.”

  He smiled as he spoke but hardly enough to disguise the short rein which seemed to accompany his new benevolent mastery.

  “In any case what I’m offering won’t allow for that in our life time, unless you’re scrapping the aquarium and most of the tropical exhibits.”

  I responded to the limitation of the
objective; the whole thing at once appeared to me more practical, even more genuine. I determined to clear up what remained to puzzle me.

  I said, “With careful preparation I believe that we can get past all opposition. I hope that not too much will be said even to the favourable quorum you’ve summoned for this morning. With a lot of care and the right canvassing I should have thought we could come out into the open, or rather begin to do so, by the end of the year.”

  “I have no doubt at all,” said Dr Leacock, “that the English Civil Service training has more completely corrupted the élite of this country than any other single influence.”

  “No, no, Leacock. We’ve got to hear what people have to say. And Carter’s one of them. What would you say, Carter, if we told you that my offer was dependent upon an immediate start?”

  My first thought was—not on your life, you old buggers, you’re not going to mess my holiday, I’ll leave the bloody place first.

  I said, “It wouldn’t be for me to say . . .”

  “Oh, for the Lord’s sake, man, don’t quibble.”

  Leacock, seeing that Godmanchester was again about to rebuke him for his impatience, got up and went to the window.

  “Yes, you look out of the window, Leacock. Carter’s face won’t annoy you so much then. You forget that to any man over sixty a man under forty looks self-satisfied. It’s the price we pay for having the young about us.”

  I hoped that the new proposal would not lay me open too much to Godmanchester’s wise old man of the world stuff in the coming months.

  “What do you think my reasons are for making this offer, Carter, apart from sheer generosity?”

  “Belief in Leacock’s scheme, I suppose.”

  “Excellently cautious. Now try again.”

  Young in his eyes as I may have seemed, I found this intolerable.

  I asked, “If the matter is so urgent, have we time for this guessing competition approach, Lord Godmanchester?”

  Godmanchester flushed.