The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  I wanted very much to join her; yet I replied almost at once that I couldn’t. The British Reserve really did seem worth fighting for, to offer the useful happiness I’d never quite dared to believe in; and I surely could not desert Leacock at this moment. All the same I could have flown over for Christmas. Pique stopped me, I’m afraid. I’d written so much in my letters to Martha about Stretton, about our future happiness there and the genuine value of the work—and yet she could so easily ask me to give it all up. But pique wasn’t all. As I read what she wrote of Bobby Falcon, jealous waves rolled over me and knocked me silly. I couldn’t go out to her with this suspicious motive hidden in my visit. Without Martha and the children, however, approaching Christmas seemed a phoney time of commercialized goodwill. I had occupied myself a lot with choosing presents for them, but these had to be posted so early that the weeks before the holiday were an anti-climax. It was among Mrs Purrett’s stock of commonplaces to repeat over and over again that ‘Christmas is a time for children really’. This year, to my embarrassment, her words threatened to bring tears to my eyes.

  I was not helped by Beard’s treatment of the typists in the pool. Mrs Purrett first drew my attention to the fact that four out of our seven girls had reported sick. She was certain, she said, that Beard’s lack of consideration, niggling and constant demands upon their time had made the feebler girls ill and the stronger ones rebellious. I put this down to her animosity, and accounted for the spate of illness by the claims of Christmas shopping.

  Then one evening I heard him at it bullying them.

  “Oh dear, Miss Dargie, I’m sure you’re missing things. Do please remember that every dead animal counts. The death of a liver fluke is every bit as important as that of the most advanced primate. And a great deal more important than either of ours.”

  I could not tell if he was joking; I doubt if he was. Certainly to the girl he seemed like a monster.

  Then to another, he said, “I do hope you haven’t raced through this box, Mrs Dunbar. We need toothcombs. I’d rather take them home at night myself than risk missing a recorded death.”

  It was true, of course; he would undertake unlimited work. He never neglected an autopsy, never failed to treat a sick animal, supervised the research work of five or six students, worked away on the loris’s eyesight and, I believe, the histology of the gorilla’s testes as well. But all that was no comfort to the typists. Nor to Mrs Purrett or me in organizing the office work.

  Two days before Christmas he drove one of the remaining girls too hard. He was quite oblivious of the unwritten law that the days before Christmas should be slack. I passed through the pool room to see him standing erect, a little red in the face, before the desk of a girl who was crying.

  “This really isn’t good at all, Miss Bates,” he was saying, “you’ve typed moose for mouse. It would be ludicrous if it wasn’t so serious.”

  The girl banged her fist on the table. “Oh, go to hell,” she shouted.

  Beard said, “Oh! Lor!” and fled.

  But later he returned to me and announced that we couldn’t keep on a woman who was insubordinate.

  I said, “She’s not. She’s ill. And I’m not surprised. We shall lose all our typists if you go on overworking them.”

  We received a doctor’s certificate after Christmas giving her leave for nervous debility; and shortly after this she resigned.

  These tedious office problems only added to my depression over the Christmas season. I tried work and a little dinner in Soho and the theatre; I tried work and a delicious partridge cooked by myself followed by an evening’s L.P., “La Sonnambula” and “Manon”; I tried work and dinner at the pub round the corner followed by the local cinema. All were evenings such as periodic fits of misanthropy extending even to my family had often painted in golden colours. Now they were drab and seemingly endless. Ridiculous jealousies of Bobby Falcon rushed around my head and kept me awake at night. Under their influence I rang up Jane, half possessed by some incoherent plan that by involving myself with her I would rouse Martha’s jealousy in turn, half hoping that in conversation she would betray similar fears to my own. To get her on the telephone proved a formidable task: she was always at rehearsal. But each time that I failed it seemed more vitally important to succeed, as though Martha’s innocence depended upon Jane’s answering the telephone. When I finally contacted her, she was off to Liverpool for over-Christmas rehearsals.

  She said, “Poor old Bobby! I can’t say I shall be pleased to have him back a failed hero. I love Bobby discovering things up the Amazon, but I loathe him hanging around the house. Damn the Brazilians and their revolutions!”

  “Martha’s been holding his hand in California.”

  “Yes, I know. He wrote to me about it. I’d write and thank her, but with two authors’ new plays coming on, I haven’t a moment. Why did you ring me?”

  “Oh, I was at a loose end. I wondered if you’d care to come to the theatre with me.”

  “Darling Simon! How enchanting of you! Young men never ask me out as a rule unless they have some stinking plays to get rid of. I’d love a busman’s holiday too, but unfortunately Liverpool calls in all its ghastly Liverpudlian gloom. Poor darling! Being at a loose end. I always forget what turtle doves you two are. I tell you what, I’ll send you some tickets for that new musical from Angola. It’s rather heaven. And you can take what Bobby calls a cutie. I’m sure Martha wouldn’t mind for once.”

  I didn’t take a cutie. I took Mrs Purrett. And on the whole it was my most enjoyable evening of the Christmas season. Martha and I had a lot of friends—mostly young married couples. Two or three of these asked me for Christmas dinner, but I realized how little I liked social life without the postmortems Martha and I indulged in on our return home. I refused, and spent Christmas and Boxing Day going over some field notes I had made for a book I had planned on British mammals. If I had been in the country, I thought, I should have had no difficulty in passing my solitary time.

  On the whole I was glad to be back at the office, though I awaited Bobby’s return with mixed feelings.

  Despite the fact that the new Brazilian government was still proving intransigent, Bobby seemed extraordinarily buoyant.

  “California’s done wonders for Martha. You can imagine that the last thing I should want is for anyone to settle out of England, but she needs to live America out of her system, Simon. After all it was her mother’s country. I think you ought to give up here and go out to her. It’s a beautiful country tho’ I shouldn’t want to live there. And they’d welcome you at the San Diego Zoo or better still on one of the Reserves.”

  I explained that the British Reserve at Stretton seemed likely to give me all I needed.

  “I see. Well you know your own mind. All these escapes down there look pretty bad, don’t they?”

  “All? One lynx!”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find there are more than that. Even The Advertiser got worried about them and, since it’s Godmanchester’s place . . .”

  I asked Mrs Purrett about it and found that, immersed in my loneliness, I had missed a lot of news. I studied the accounts of escapes from Stretton in The Advertiser and in rival papers. They came, it seemed to me, to very little and that rather absurd: an escaped wombat found by a well-known sculptress in her garden shed, a llama belonging to a travelling circus that scared some race horses near Hereford, and a small girl’s very dubious report of a leopard glimpsed in a wood. I pointed out to Bobby how feeble the stories were.

  “All the same, I think Godmanchester’s rather worried from what he told me.”

  “I don’t believe a word he says.”

  “Oh, that’s rather steep about our President.” He laughed. “Perhaps you’re right. He’s an old scoundrel. But we need a scoundrel to save us and I think he’ll do it.”

  “To give him his due, he’s done it already by giving us the National Reserve.”

  Bobby scowled, “I meant a bit more than that. I think he may save
the world. Oh, only like Justinian—for a breather. The smash is bound to come. But, if we’ve got to go, we may as well go with all lights blazing. And I don’t mind if it’s by courtesy of Godmanchester or of any other scoundrel.” .

  I found Bobby’s apocalyptic talk no less tedious now that he was buoyant.

  I said, “Gas lighting, no doubt.”

  He answered with great excitement, “Good man! You see the point. Yes, by God! Gas lighting!”

  A few days later the world was saved. At any rate Godmanchester was appointed Lord Privy Seal, with what the Prime Minister called ‘a roving commission to put our house in order’. The Advertiser told us that all our troubles were over. And Edwin Leacock’s troubles really began to get serious.

  A wisent escaped. In view of the extreme rarity of these beasts, I was neither surprised nor unsympathetic when I heard that Strawson had resigned because the Director had refused to spare its life. It was only a few days later that I saw in The Advertiser that Strawson had in fact refused to carry on at Stretton because he felt unhappy about the security there. He was described in the newspaper as “the jovial keeper of elephants, a ‘character’ beloved by generations of children, not least of the grown up kind”. There was a photograph of him with open-necked shirt and sandals. He was quoted as saying, “I’ve come regretfully to the conclusion that what we are doing at Stretton is wrong. An animal that cannot trust in the surety of its own confinement is an unloved animal.” He intended, he said, to devote himself to photographing the human form as it blends with the changing Mood of Nature. Apart from his joviality, his resignation took the colour of Krishna Murti casting off the rule of Mrs Besant, or a serious split in the ranks of the Goetheaneum. I warmed to Edwin Leacock when he told me on the telephone that, he was “heartily glad to be rid of the humbugging mountebank”.

  Bobby Falcon, however, was not prepared to take Straw-son’s departure lying down—”My own head keeper ... an invaluable man.” It was a sign of the times that, despite the Director’s disagreement, the Committee agreed with Bobby that Strawson should be asked to return to the Society’s service. With difficulty he was persuaded to leave his photography; indeed, the wooing of him, in which I refused to take part, was long and, for his hurt pride, no doubt, delicious. However in the end he returned to Regent’s Park. To this also The Advertiser gave full publicity but in a wholly sentimental vein: “Trunk Call’s keeper returns to the Zoo he loves”. Sir Robert was quoted as saying, “The place has not been the same without its landmark, Strawson. He was part of the old Zoo which is a happy rock in a world of bewildering shifting sands.” Wisely Strawson was not asked to make any metaphysical pronouncement on that occasion.

  But that was only the beginning of Leacock’s worries. Godmanchester, of course, was too busy to concern himself or even perhaps to care what happened to the Zoological Society. But just as he had been active in bullying galleries, libraries, museums, factory units, schools to leave London in his campaign of ‘no confidence’ in the Government, so, now that he had got office, his henchmen were equally busy urging these bodies—including us at Stretton—to return. The campaign to destroy confidence in government without Godmanchester had, after all, been a touch unethical and had been carried out covertly; but the restoration of confidence in government with Godmanchester was patriotic and needed shouting. The publicity could now be loud and open.

  Only Dr Leacock withstood the pressure. Every Committee member of the Zoological Society, eminent Fellows, the senior staff, even the rank and file were approached in an attempt to bring pressure to bear upon him.

  But Godmanchester’s aides were not Godmanchester and their effect was not so happy. Leacock, too, emerged well as a man with a purpose, reasonable about what had gone wrong— a lynx and a wisent did not make a ravening horde; Godmanchester began to appear inevitably as double-faced and unreliable.

  “After all,” said Lord Oresby, “supposing war did come.”

  These reactions were enough to decide Godmanchester. The campaign was called off. There was enough other evidence of returning confidence. It was not worthwhile forcing a showdown with Leacock, or, by seeking to annul the lease, risking a scandal. Stretton and Leacock’s work were quietly forgotten; where the Zoo was remembered at all in Godmanchester’s Press or on the television channels on which his companies advertised, it was as the famous London Zoo, the happy, cheery family binge Zoo of Falcon’s dreams. Sir Robert’s, indeed was fast becoming one of the best revived faces of our day. In all this victory of Leacock’s, I hope and think, that I played my part.

  What we had not reckoned on was that the Press opposed to Godmanchester would not let him alone. Finding little else in the domestic field to attack, Godmanchester’s critics began to look round for signs that he was not so confident as he pretended. They found a reddish, angry seeming spot to test in the affairs of the Zoo. Everyone, their articles told us, recognized the remarkable venture upon which the Zoological Society and, in particular, its Director had embarked in founding the Stretton National Reserve. The public, it predicted, would be amazed at the success of this enterprise when in April the Reserve was opened to visitors. Even the most obstinate critic of the Lord Privy Seal must concede his splendid generosity in making this imaginative project feasible; it could indeed be that when the noise of party politics had died away, future historians would find in Stretton Reserve the finest monument to Lord Godmanchester’s name. Nevertheless it was an open secret that, in some part, the decision of the Zoological Society to send so many of its valuable specimens to Stretton, in particular the exotic animals which could never be acclimatized, had been actuated by a strong suspicion that affairs in the hands of the Prime Minister and his government did not give promise of lasting peace. Fearing, at any rate, a limited and conventional war, the Society had decided on a limited and conventional evacuation from London. At that time Lord Godmanchester, as President, had no doubt only been acting on what Lord Godmanchester as politician and newspaper proprietor had been prophesying. Now, however, Lord Godmanchester’s newspapers one and all gave us to understand that with their proprietor in office the danger was over, the government, otherwise unchanged, had overnight become an assurance of peace. Yet, if actions spoke louder than words, it was curious that Lord Godmanchester as President of the Zoological Society did not this time follow up the words he uttered as statesman. None of the exotic animals had returned from the inclemency of the Welsh Border to the assured safety of Regent’s Park. Some liaison had broken down between the split personalities of the noble lord; he should not be surprised if the public drew its own conclusions.

  Having touched this spot, and found from a rather injudiciously scornful comment in The Advertiser that it hurt, the opposition newspapers pressed on it continually. Yet even the report that Godmanchester was very angry, did not frighten Leacock into giving way. If Godmanchester cared publicly to break the lease with the Society, let him do so and give his reasons. Godmanchester did not so care.

  In this atmosphere I went down to Stretton for a few days to encourage and abet Leacock, to get away from Falcon and Beard, and to devote my time to the pleasures of the British Reserve.

  December’s snows had been unseasonable, and we now had an equally unusual February, mild though wet. Heavy rain had turned the crumbling bracken fronds from cinnamon brown rust to a blackened mush, the wet orange stalks and the bruised purple of the remaining bramble leaves alone gave colour to the undergrowth; yet the scent that came up from the sodden bracken where I trod on it was as acrid as that given out by the tender green fronds of spring. Too early yet even for precocious aconites, the woods were a black skeleton world of branches and trunks and twigs in the early dusk. Now and again the snuffy, catarrhal scent of crushed acorns came to me, nauseous and quickly gone. Since the importation of a pair of wild cats from Scotland, I was setting the example of carrying a revolver as well as my field-glasses and my torch. Yet the woods were filled enough with deer and hares and pheasants to
satisfy the needs even of so fierce a pair.

  I made straight for the badger setts; I was to be in place by the beech tree half an hour or so before the first came out to sniff the evening air. I was anxious to establish my suspicion that last year’s young had already begun the establishment of new setts. I heard once or twice the retching bark of foxes; and before me on a long witch-fingered branch of an oak tree sat a little owl who let me go by as happily as though I had been a passing motor car and he perched on a telegraph pole. There was no other noise. I was only a quarter of a mile from the setts when I heard at a long distance shrieks and howls that seemed to come from within the woods, yet might have been the strange calls of forty different creatures in the Exotic Park. I strained to identify them, but an airliner bound for Ireland and, no doubt, the U.S.A. blotted out the sounds with its throbbing hum, and switched my thoughts to Martha and the children. My mind had then only one thought—’They must come back, they must come back, they must come back’—and to the rhythm of these words I tried to adapt everything around me, even my own breathing. To my superstitious distress the pace of my breathing would take only the words, ‘they must come’—’back’ I could not fit in. Then into these obsessive thoughts there came the sound of heavy panting and of feet rapidly padding upon the soft surface of rotting leaves. That, at least, was no wild cat, perhaps a fox, but strangely noisy for such. The sound gained upon me. I thought with increasing nervousness of escaped wild beasts—a wolf, a lynx, a jackal, what? Was I to die for my own cause? Then through the tracery of bare boughed brushwood I saw the long muzzle and blazing eyes of what? a young wolf? a jackal? In two seconds I was up six feet above the ground among the branches of a huge oak tree, sending some wood pigeons crashing and flapping through the nearby branches. Danger soon renews agility. From above I saw clearly the creature that was padding through the undergrowth, on a blind path that would certainly pass beneath my oak tree—a large Alsatian dog, Rickie, his muzzle flecked with foam and, as I saw in the torch light, with spilling blood. I flashed my torch directly in his eyes, he paused for a second, but then came on. I think it was only fear that made me draw the revolver; and yet, six feet up, I had nothing to fear. But I aimed as he came within yards and shot him in the left foreleg. He came, howling and limping, towards me. Now kindness as well as fear made me fire again and this time the bullet passed into his narrow skull and, with a shiver running through his shapely body, he fell dead.