The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  “My dear Simon, my responsibility is to my senior colleagues.”

  He was so fierce that I drew back.

  “I was only suggesting. After all Englander might conceivably be mixed up with this Uni-Europe Movement and, although it hasn’t been declared illegal, it could obviously be a danger to the State in certain circumstances.”

  “I doubt if scum like that will play a large part in Armageddon.”

  “They might bring it closer.”

  He laughed, “We’ve only got a fortnight to the British Day. Surely Godmanchester can hold off the last trump for that short time.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to be serious, Bobby. It’s no use these days.”

  “Good. Good. You’re the serious man, not me. Though mind you, I doubt if you have the faintest idea of what really ranks as serious.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “Good Lord no! It’s not my job to spout metaphysics. We must leave that to the saintly Beard.”

  Beard alone of the senior staff, as a matter of fact, incurred Bobby’s real hostility at that time. He showed almost no interest in the preparations for ‘the day’. That, as Bobby said, would hardly have mattered since there was no idea of having a post-mortem tableau; but he was still intent upon checking the statistical data from the office records. Since the row over the typists’ pool, he had given up asking for assistance, but he stayed after hours to do the work himself. Many of our jolly evening sessions with cold duck and white wine, or pâté and claret, were marred by the presence of the Prosector inexpertly climbing ladders and dangerously balancing boxes of files one upon another. He seemed ostentatiously unaware of our presence, or perhaps he genuinely was so.

  One evening when Bobby could bear it no longer, he shouted, “For God’s sake Beard, pay some attention to what’s going on, or get out.”

  Beard looked down over his glasses from the ladder’s height, blushed, and said, “Oh, Lor’!” and fled.

  Yet the next evening he was back again. From then on Bobby tried angrily to ignore him.

  It was all the more infuriating then, when a few nights before the Great Day, Jumbo, our largest elephant, fell ill with some skin trouble. He had been re-christened from his more modern name ‘Trunk Call’ to prepare him for the tableau representing Frith’s famous painting. Neither Strawson, Bobby himself, nor Beard’s assistant hastily summoned from his home in Highbury seemed able to diagnose the trouble. It was nine o’clock at night and for once the Prosector had not stayed late. I rang his home number again and again, but it was always engaged. The operator, urged to test, reported that it was not out of order. There remaining nothing for it but to fetch him. His assistant was very unwilling to do this.

  “Dr Beard’s absolutely forbidden anybody to intrude into his home life.”

  Should we send a messenger? Perhaps he would ignore the summons. Bobby clearly felt that he would lose caste by going to Beard’s house. I set off myself in a sanctioned taxi for the gloomy reaches of Cromwell Road—since the rebuilding of North Kensington, West London’s chief remaining slum. I had not before known where Beard lived and it came as a shock to me to think that my last visit to this area had been with European tourists who wanted to see how English people ‘used to live’. The old Edwardian block of flats at which the taxi drew up was almost an exhibit of decay—I thought how Bobby had missed a ripe example of old England by not undertaking the mission himself. Yet Beard’s salary, if not princely in Englander’s terms, established him many economic rungs above the ‘handicapped’, that flotsam class which inhabited such areas as this. Perhaps, I thought, his living here was a mortification, or, perhaps, he was too dedicated to notice. I told the taximan to wait and going through the open front door, made my way up the uncarpeted stone stairs. The door of the first floor flat was opened by a fat, thirtyish woman with mottled bare legs and plimsolls. The crocheted jumper that covered her large, low-slung breasts seemed home made, as did the ridiculously short crimson silk skirt that was drawn tightly over her large hips and belly. Her dark hair looked as though it had been cut under a pudding basin. Her wrists were tightly bandaged.

  She asked, “Are you the nurse?”

  When I explained, she said, “Oh, well, you’d better come in then. Father’s with Granny. She’s had an attack and we’re waiting for the nurse.”

  I began to apologize for my unseasonable arrival, but she took no notice.

  “Father,” she shouted, “a man from the Zoo.”

  There was no answer from the long, dark corridor down which she called, and she set off to fetch him. The large hall in which she left me was filled with the bric-à-brac of a middle class household of half a century ago, a proliferation of cheap Asian objects suggested the sort of ex-Indian home which I seemed vaguely to remember from my youth (or was it from some novels? After the age of thirty fiction gets inextricably mixed into fact). The room was dark, dirty, airless, and infinitely depressing. Apart from its general gloom, however, I could see no object that connected with Beard the scientist or Beard the Christian. Two or three doors were banged very loudly. Miss Langley-Beard (if she was as fatly virginal as she looked) returned. She said, “He’ll be in in a sec.”

  I began to explain my errand, and to suggest that if old Mrs Langley-Beard’s attack was so serious, I should withdraw. She commented on this only by giggling each time I used the word ‘elephant’.

  Then she asked, “Do you want coffee?”

  Before I could reply, a door in the passage was flung open and from the room came a cracked contralto voice. It spoke with difficulty and with long pauses for breath.

  “My dear Charles, you’d much better let them put me into hospital. I shall be less trouble to you all there.”

  I began to speak again to cover what seemed a very private conversation, but Miss Langley-Beard said rather irritably, “Ssh!” Then, repeating her giggle, she announced, “They’re rowing.”

  They were indeed, for Beard’s voice now came to us, loud and far more assured than it ever sounded at the Gardens. “It’s no help to make useless suggestions, Mother. They won’t take chronic cases as you’ve been told again and again.”

  “I’m sure they won’t have me there for long, dear, anyway.”

  “I’m afraid your assurance of that isn’t worth very much. You’ve recovered from other attacks.”

  A young man’s voice, much deeper than Beard’s, now said, or rather shouted, “And we hope you do from this, Grannie. We know you will.”

  Beard said, “It can hardly help your grandmother to tell her what is not true, Alan.”

  Then he appeared from the doorway and came out to me in the hall.

  “I had hoped,” he said, “to be left in peace in my home.”

  I apologized and explained the nature of my errand. As I was talking a very handsome young man in his late twenties came twisting into the room on crutches. As with most spastics, the enormous breadth of his chest and shoulders were somehow more distressing than the twisted, puny shape of his legs. He swung himself with practised complication into an armchair. Striking out with one crutch, he tapped Beard on the ankle.

  “That was disgusting,” he said breaking through my speech, “talking to Grannie like that. You know she’s frightened out of her wits.”

  “Pretence isn’t going to help her.”

  “Pretence! A little human sympathy!”

  “Since you can do very little at a time like this, I would suggest that you at least spare us hysteria, Alan. If you want to help your Grandmother, you can pray for her.”

  “If I had any prayers, I should offer them for you.”

  The young man got up again, but as he twisted and writhed, Beard turned his back and spoke to me.

  “I’ll come straight away. Not that I was aware that we had an elephant called Jumbo.”

  “It used to be called Trunk Call but Falcon’s renamed it.”

  Beard laughed scornfully.

  “A most useful occupation for the D
irector.”

  “Are you sure that you can leave here?”

  “I suppose so. Why not?”

  “Your mother . . .”

  “Oh, she’s been dying of cardiac trouble for some time.”

  Alan Langley-Beard with difficulty twisted round in his walk and put his face close to his father’s.

  “If Gran dies while you’re away, I hope you’ll never forget it.”

  “I asked you not to be hysterical, Alan.”

  Now Miss Langley-Beard, who had been sitting, trying hopelessly to mend the broken strap of her sandal by knotting together two very tough pieces of leather, looked up and said, “Don’t keep on at Alan, Daddy. He’s only trying to help. You shouldn’t call him hysterical.”

  Beard looked at his daughter’s bandaged wrists.

  “I really don’t think, Catherine, that hysteria is a thing that you’re qualified to discuss.”

  Her plain, fat face flushed and she bent down quickly again to her sandals. Beard spoke to his children in a firm tone but without bitterness, yet his remarks clearly evoked a fierce response.

  “You have the doctor’s telephone number, Catherine, if the nurse isn’t here in the next half hour ring him up. Come along, Carter, if you’ve got that taxi waiting.” Going downstairs he said, “Now you see why I prefer to keep my home life to myself.”

  Once again he spoke without bitterness—as an observation. I made no comment.

  In the taxi Beard expressed particular interest in Jumbo’s symptoms.

  “You were quite right to come for me. It may well be some inflammation of the hair follicles. What you’d probably call acne and no doubt suffered from as an adolescent,” he laughed delightedly. “I shall be glad to have an opportunity of watching the course of the disease.”

  I said that surely if it was only such an infection he should on no account have left his family.

  “No, no, the doctor’s coming. They must learn to manage. I’m only surprised that you thought to let me know.”

  I emphasized that our anxiety had been to make sure of Jumbo’s presence on the British Day.

  Beard said, “I don’t make much of all that really, do you? We should be getting on with the plans for evacuation in the event of war. I’ve not been idle you know there. I’ve been listing specimens of particular anatomical interest.”

  “Well, of course, we have always had perfectly clear plans for the evacuation to Woburn Park of the most valuable animals. Long before Stretton was ever mentioned. But the war scare has receded.”

  “That wasn’t the view at the time of all that move to Stretton. And I suppose we’d still be there if old Leacock hadn’t upset Godmanchester or something. Not that that’s my concern.”

  “It was mainly our confidence that war was now far less likely that led to the return.”

  “Was it? I don’t understand that sort of thing, I’m afraid. Once I get working on an idea I very seldom go into reverse.”

  We sat in silence. I looked out of the window, trying to decide what kind of a man he really was. Then suddenly in the light of Piccadilly Circus, I glimpsed a late night paper placard. It said, ‘Godmanchester: Grave anxiety’. It seemed, I discovered, that the Great Reaper was working over-time. Not only Jumbo and Langley-Beard’s mother, but Godmanchester too. He had had a stroke in his office. He was alive, but unconscious and paralysed. So we all moved into a new age.

  For the next two days, however, Godmanchester rallied, and Bobby spurred us feverishly on to further preparations for the Day. The weather was still gloriously hot, and the nights were pleasantly cool. I remember well on the second evening walking round the Gardens with Bobby. He was in a peculiarly elated mood, for, to Beard’s disappointment, Jumbo was much recovered and would now figure in the Frith tableau. On that clear, moonlit night, the extraordinary theatricality of the Zoo’s new décor merged happily into the starry background. We wandered round looking at the great massed beds of auriculas and tulips and wallflowers that spelt ‘God Save the Queen’, and ‘Norman, and Saxon and Dane are We’, and the fountains playing in coloured jets. Here at the entrance to what was being shown as the Old Victorian Zoo were to be the recitations and the tableaux and later a show of fireworks with two set pieces— a British lion and an Indian elephant. The Old Zoo looked peculiarly charming with all the Decimus Burton Houses picked out with very subtle lighting (Jane’s work), with a chalet for the old woman who was to sell fresh cows’ milk and bags of buns, and booths for the peanut men and coconut shies, with goat chaises, and a wondrous bear pit. Beyond the Old Zoo, the Lemur House, its modern lines disguised with ferns and hothouse plants, had been converted into a chef-d’oeuvre à la Paxton; and in this great glass palace, to Matthew’s delight, were to be housed birds from every corner of the earth that was now or ever had been British. For, of course, it was only by cheating and taking in history, that a British Day could cast its net wide enough. From this show centre of the Old Zoo, the aviaries and the gardens, five separate roads led off each to a separate continent—to Stanley’s Africa, to Botany Bay, to a Hudson Bay fur station, to the jungle of the British Raj, and, a little incommensurately (but by a determined whim of Bobby’s) to the Apes of the Rock. Strictly European animals or those creatures such as lemurs, armadillos, Brazilian tapirs, sloths and manatees whose species had never known the glories of British rule, were temporarily banished to a remote corner of the North Side of the Gardens. Had Beard so wished, I think, he could have slaughtered them all with an easy nod of assent from our President or our Director. Their mere presence was in some sense a counter-demonstration.

  “Well?” Bobby asked.

  “It’s all very enchanting.”

  “We’ve made something beautiful,” he said. “Never mind too much about all this British business of Godmanchester’s. Commonwealth, Empires, all that stuff—it’s always needed by men like him, whose memories have no deep roots. But once get the crowds in here, and it’ll be English! A real night out, a lark, a spree, wakes week! Think of it, Simon, Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday, Henley, Epsom Downs and the Colonial Garden Party all rolled into one. What fun it’ll be, what beautiful, high old fun!”

  It occurred to me that between Godmanchester’s Wembley Empire stuff and Bobby’s elegant Crystal Palace, and the cockney crowds, and Jane’s chichi, the whole thing might somewhere have missed its mark; but I was too disturbed by Bobby’s dissociated elation to give much thought to this.

  I said hesitantly, “Bobby! With Godmanchester so ill, you have considered that the whole thing may have to be postponed?”

  My voice sounded over loud and dramatic as it carried away on the evening air.

  “Oh, Good Lord! We shan’t postpone. If the old boy’s too ill, we’ll have all the other old boys along.”

  I was frightened and angry.

  I said fiercely, “What if war comes, Bobby? Remember how we all rely on Godmanchester for our peace. What if war comes?”

  “Then we’ll die merrily, like first class passengers and not rats. Your cataracts and hurricanes, spout! And then, all shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s moulds . . .”

  Before he had finished he had left parody behind. If I could have met him somewhere on his own dramatic level, I might still have found some way to ease him; but such histrionics made me shrink into myself with disgust.

  I said in what I could hear to be my prissiest voice,

  “Neither the Titanic nor Lear, Bobby, seem sufficient for the occasion.”

  He looked down at me, his eyes puzzled as to what I was doing there beside him. Then he frowned impatiently.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake go and boil your head,” he shouted and strode off into the darkness.

  On the next day Godmanchester died. Whether he was a great man or not, I don’t know. I’m not qualified to make judgments on public events. Some say now that he might, as he believed, have prevented war. Again I’m no expert. Certainly his death had an immediate depres
sive effect in England. But we soon had more to think about than ‘the passing of a great symbol’, as the Advertiser described it. I do not believe that any honest man who remembers that week can say that anything but terror—terror, to be fair, in varying degrees— possessed everybody. The reiteration of the Russo-American Declaration, which once had seemed to me to banish war, now seemed to imply that the Great Powers feared its certainty. And once war really stared us in the face, who could stay reasonable enough to take comfort from the Declaration’s restraining threat? We had so long associated war with annihilation that no reasoning could now banish that image. There were a few, who for different reasons, like Matthew or Bobby, behaved as though nothing had happened; but fewer than is now said, I suspect. I don’t think I behaved more wildly than most, I was not involved in the various panic scenes that, as the current phrase goes, ‘marred those vital days’.

  For once I had returned home in time for tea on the day that we heard of the invasion of our ally Portugal. I took Martha in my arms, and for a long time we lay holding each other tightly, tightly enough to prevent the shivering fits of fear that seized us both. Every minute of that time, I think we expected intense agony and final extinction. Yet all the while, I could hear outside the ordinary street noises of the day. I now know that our moment of terror came to us earlier than to the greater mass of people—even death’s terrors seem obstinately to deny my egalitarian feelings. For most people the overrunning of Portugal, even the fall of Gibraltar and the capture of Malta by the Italo-Greek forces soon after, meant no personal threat—meant indeed only an end of anachronisms, loved or despised. Strangely enough it was the news an hour later from the North of the invasion of Sweden by the Benelux-German troops that really struck alarm into the majority of people and caused, the various panic scenes that so aided the Uni-Europeans.

  By that time Martha and I had recovered from our terror—if annihilation were coming, we had decided, it would already have come. I see now that this was no more ‘sensible’ a view than any other taken then, but where could sense be when all was confusion, when the bogey had become real, when we had rubbed our eyes and woken up and found that the nightmare had come in through the bedroom window? Many people at that time ran away from London, but only the foolish thought that there was anywhere to run to. We decided to go about our business. I pulled my top lip down stiffly and said, “If I keep a stiff upper lip, darling, will you hold your head high?”