by Jane Langton
CHAPTER 22
“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father. “Don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down-stairs!”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Margo Shaw cornered Professor Dubchick in the south gallery as he approached the Zoology Office. “Oh, Professor Dubchick, I’ve been wanting to speak to you.”
William paused and looked at her soberly. At last week’s dinner party he had taken a dislike to the woman. She had questioned him eagerly about his years in Ecuador, but she had really been boasting at the same time, showing herself an old hand at primate physiology. Glibly she had touched on the digestive systems of proboscis monkeys and the grooming habits of baboons. William had responded politely as she skipped from primate to primate, while her flattery ran off him and puddled on the floor. Her understanding was shallow. He guessed she had been reading some sort of popular book, Our Cousins of the Jungle.
Now she slipped an envelope into his hand. “I hope you will look favorably on my little plea,” she said, simpering. Margo was the possessor of one dimple. Turning her head slightly, she gave it full play.
“Certainly,” murmured William. Turning away abruptly, he thrust the envelope into his coat.
In the office he read Margo’s letter with mounting anger.
Dear Professor Dubchick (William, if I may presume!), As you know I have been engaged in topping up the containers in the museum’s vertebrate and invertebrate spirit stores. While this is not an onerous duty, it makes little use of my education and experience.
I have an undergraduate degree in biology from Sweet Briar, summa cum laude. My master’s thesis at the University of Virginia was a study of malocostracans in Chesapeake Bay. (Hal and I met beside a rock pool, each with our collecting nets!) And to cap it all, I am au courant with computers and all current office software. In other words, I feel highly qualified to act as your assistant, particularly in the preparation of the book on which, I understand, you have been working for the last decade. Perhaps my strictly technical help would hurry it along a trifle?
Yours most sincerely,
Margo Shaw
William glanced up from the letter and looked at Helen Farfrae. She was sitting calmly in front of the computer, running patiently through the entries for his index, cross-referencing, expanding, adding the common names for species as well as their Latin names—dingo for Canis dingo, seahorses for Syngnathidae.
His anger increased. He was surprised at the ferocity of his feeling. Furiously he crumpled Margo’s letter and uttered an obscenity.
Helen looked up. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” said William. “Nothing is the matter. Nothing at all. Everything is perfect, absolutely perfect.” Going to her he put his hand on the back of her chair and looked at the screen. “Oh, good,” he said, “pygmy hog. How stupid of me to think I could get away with Sus salvanius.”
CHAPTER 23
“She’s in that state of mind,” said the White Queen, “that she wants to deny something—only she doesn’t know what to deny!”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
DIARY OF FREDERICKA DUBCHICK
I’m quite sure Father’s forgiven me for stealing the picture of the dodo. He seems happier with those dried-up old crabs than he’s been for years. Maybe it’s because his book is almost done. I hope he’ll be satisfied with what people say about it. Margo Shaw says it might be embarrassing. Did Hal tell her that? I can’t believe it!
I think Oliver senses something new about me, that I’ve changed again (he calls me capricious, and maybe I am).
Yesterday he took me to Burford, to visit the stately home of his ancestors. It’s called Windrush Hall, because it’s right beside the Windrush River. It’s a hideous nineteenth-century pile with enormous rooms full of ghastly furniture. Even the guidebook has nothing good to say about it except “Notable for early plumbing, a patent toilet and a monumental bathtub.”
It doesn’t belong to Oliver’s family anymore, because it had to be given to the Crown or the National Trust or something when his grandparents died, in order to avoid death duties. Oliver was five years old at the time, and he’s never forgotten the shock of moving out with his mother and father. He told me his parents pretend they don’t mind, but he thinks they must.
Oliver certainly does. He preens himself on his connection with that heap of spoiled marble and all those gigantic bedsteads and glowering portraits and thick carpets. He had a secret place to show me, he said, and he was as proud and excited as a little boy, but it was really pitiful. It’s a couple of little rooms he rents from the trustees, so that he can sleep there sometimes. How pathetic!
Then it was on, on! to the local church to see the tombs of his ancestors. It was so important for me to understand the glorious nature of his forebears (Father Bear, Mother Bear, Baby Bear, and Itty-Bitty Bear).
Oh, God how I detest inscriptions clotted with lichen! But then we went inside the church, and I found a stone that was extremely interesting.
Oh, not the heraldic shields and elegant inscriptions all over the wall, memorials to ladies Gifted in Arts and gentlemen Virtuous and Holy. And certainly not the grandiose tablet describing the glorious qualities of His Grace, the Bishop of Warwick, 1800-1863. Oliver made me stand in front of it while he talked about the bishop’s important tracts and his friendship with other princes of the church, like Pusey and Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.
Oliver’s face simply glowed. He wants to walk in his ancestor’s footsteps, he said, and start a new movement of reform, just the way the bishop did, with a revival of High Church principles and a loftier standard of Christian life in the British Isles. Oh, dear! I thought the bishop sounded terribly stuffy, but I didn’t say so.
The only interesting thing about him was his early demise. According to the inscription, he was “SNATCHED BY UNTIMELY DEATH.” Oliver doesn’t know what happened to him. Lots of people died young in those days.
So I was only half listening when I discovered a funny little inscription crowded into a dark corner, way down near the floor. I had to get on hands and knees to read it, and then I gasped. It was a memorial to another Oliver Clare!
So of course I jumped up and asked Oliver about it, and he looked shocked, in fact he turned pale, like a Victorian lady about to swoon, and said he didn’t know anything about it, but I think he did. (He does have the most beautiful pink-and-white complexion, with the rosy color coming and going.)
The dates of the first Oliver Clare were 1810 to 1863. There was only one other word on the stone:
FORGIVE!
I almost forgot the duck. Someone had scratched a crude drawing of a duck beside his name. What does it mean?
CHAPTER 24
If you knew some of the experiments … which I am trying, you would have a good right to sneer, for they are so absurd even in my opinion that I dare not tell you.
Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Hooker
They were having lunch with Helen Farfrae. “I’m sorry, Helen,” said Mary. “This place is Homer’s choice.” It was a tiny café on St. Giles, serving cheap greasy food. There were small plastic tables, each with its own ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, ashtray and paper-napkin holder. The menu on the wall listed GAMMON STEAK & CHIPS, CORNISH PASTY & CHIPS, SAUSAGE EGG & CHIPS, and BEANS ON TOAST. The tables were crowded. Amplified music boomed above the sizzle of frying sausages.
“Number twelve!” shouted the woman behind the counter.
“That’s us.” Homer squeezed past a crowd of teenage girls in heavy boots, took a handful of change out of his pocket, looked at it with baffled concentration, and paid for his order.
The woman picked up the coins, slapped them back down, and gave him a drop-dead look. “I said pounds, not pence.”
“Whoops, sorry.” Hom
er groped in his billfold and produced a ten-pound note.
She snatched it, dropped the change in his hand, and roared, “Thirteen!”
Homer took the tray of beans and sausages, fried eggs and chips, to the corner where Mary and Helen were deep in shouted conversation. He sat down, struggling to fit his legs under the table, and said, “Humbling educational experience, living in a foreign country.”
“Homer,” said Mary, “Helen’s wondering if the police have learned anything more about who could have dumped those jars outside her office.”
Homer dug his fork into a sausage. “I talked to Mukerji this morning. He thinks Dr. Helen Farfrae is either slightly insane or else she’s some kind of holy woman with second sight. I think he was joking, but I’m not sure.”
Helen leaned forward and stared at Homer keenly as he opened his mouth for a forkful of sausage. “But haven’t they found any sort of clue? I should think a self-respecting criminal would have the decency to drop an initialed handkerchief or a monogrammed button or something.”
“Not this criminal, I’m afraid.” Then Homer remembered something. He patted his jacket pockets. The left one was lumpy. He pulled out three wadded tissues, a Park and Ride ticket stub, and a small oval of stainless steel rings. Homer stuffed everything else back in his pocket and held up the object for inspection.
“What is it?” said Mary.
“I don’t know. I found it at the foot of the ladder on the roof. It might have been there for ages.”
“Let me see.” Helen reached for it, turned it over in her hand, then gave it to Mary.
“Helen, tell me,” said Homer, “why did you use the word creature when you talked to Mukerji about the person you saw on the roof? What did you mean, creature?”
Helen put down her fork and clasped her hands in her lap. “It was so extraordinary, the way it ran up the side of the glass roof. Not the way a person would try to climb it, leaning on the glass and holding on with his fingernails. It was almost running up that steep slope. Like—it was like—”
“Like a monkey, that’s what you said.”
Helen’s lips tightened, and she nodded. “Yes, exactly like a monkey.”
“Wow,” said Mary. “Did you tell Inspector Mukerji it looked like a monkey?”
“Oh, yes. He was very polite. He wrote it down.”
Homer dabbled another forkful of sausage in a pool of ketchup, and changed the subject to the scientific methods of Charles Darwin. “There was something he called fool’s experiments. Did you know about that?”
“Yes, of course,” said Helen eagerly. “Fool’s experiments. He asked his son to play his bassoon beside a sensitive plant to see if it was affected by the music. Things like that.”
“Right. He was so imaginative and clever, he tried all sorts of simple things, so simple a child could have invented them, or a fool. Only nobody did. It took someone as brilliant as Darwin to think them up.” Once again Homer’s conversation took a crazy zigzag. “Helen, tell me, isn’t there a zoo in London somewhere?”
“Of course, in Regent’s Park.”
“A zoo!” said Mary. “Oh, Homer, what do you want with a zoo?”
“I want to play my bassoon, that’s what, like Darwin’s son.”
“Your bassoon?” Helen laughed. “Oh, I see. You mean metaphorically speaking. You want to conduct a fool’s experiment, like Darwin.”
“Oh, good,” said Mary. “I love zoos. May I come along?”
“Certainly. We’ll take the 7:52 to Paddington tomorrow morning. How about it, Helen, do you want to join us?”
“I’d love to, but I can’t.”
A trio of large boys surged up beside them, cutting off air and light. The table was in demand. “Let’s go,” said Homer, standing up. “Come on, you lot.” On the way out he apologized loudly, “Oh, God, I’ve done it again. I said ‘you lot.’ I can’t help it. I’m really sorry.”
Fool’s experiments—Homer tried one that afternoon. He stood in the north aisle of the museum for half an hour, looking at the display of stuffed primates, from the tiny painted tree shrew and the long-haired spider monkey to the indri and the pigtailed macaque. They clung to their short pieces of branch against the blank wall of the display case, looking homesick for the jungles of Sarawak, Brazil, Madagascar, and Java.
Then Homer moved on to the primate skeletons in the same case farther to the east—the orangutan, the gibbon, the chimpazee, the gorilla and, as a glorious final ornament to the family of anthropoid apes, a human skeleton in all its bony glory.
God, they looked alike! Well, for that matter Homer had been stunned from the beginning by his own resemblance to the iguanodon, that long-extinct dinosaur. Most of its bones were repeated in his own wincing physique.
It was even more so with the primates. Everything was the same, just warped a little out of shape. Their arms, look at the way they dangled almost to the ground! The chimpanzee was doing its best to stand upright, and the gorilla was hunched only a little forward, staring through its huge eye sockets at the backbone of Homo sapiens, who was marching along so arrogantly in front of the rest of them on his way to cash a check in Barclay’s Bank. The orangutan brought up the rear. It didn’t look so cousinly, bowed down behind the others, its fingers brushing the bottom of the display case.
Even so, it aroused twinges of recognition in Homer’s bones. On the whole he recoiled from the anthropoid apes. They were too close for comfort.
But the question was, could a creature like one of these have prowled around the museum one night in October? Exactly like a monkey, Helen said. It wasn’t hard to picture the chimpanzee, for instance, scuttling up the side of the glass roof, but of course it was impossible to imagine it with armfuls of jars containing antique crabs.
As a mental exercise, the examination of the primates in the north aisle of the museum was a perfect example of a fool’s experiment. You’re a fool, all right, Homer told himself.
But they went to the zoo anyway. It was easy to get there, once the train pulled into Paddington. You took the underground to Baker Street, then walked across Regent’s Park.
“Oh, Homer, look!” said Mary. “Look at the penguins.”
“You look at the penguins.” Homer barreled ahead, ignoring the penguins and the grazing antelopes. In the primate house he sped past the cages of lemurs and twittering marmosets.
“Homer, wait,” shouted Mary, “you’ve got to see the squirrel monkeys. Come back.”
“No, no, they’re too small.” Homer emerged into the sunlight and looked around. “Ah, there we are.” He bounded forward and stopped in front of the gorilla’s cage. “This is more like it.”
“Oh, isn’t he handsome,” gasped Mary, catching up. They stood silently looking at the gorilla, which was sitting calmly against a tree trunk, sorting a heap of fruit. The gorilla looked up at them briefly with its great flat face, its eyes projecting from a mass of wrinkles. They were world-weary eyes, glowing with intelligence and contempt. Delicately it plucked at a bunch of grapes.
Homer had read a book by Darwin’s friend Huxley. Mary listened patiently while he explained. “He said the gorilla is more like us than any of the other apes. I don’t know what people think now. I guess these days it’s a matter of similarities in tooth enamel and nucleotide sequences, stuff like that, and nobody agrees with anybody else.”
“Well, I don’t care whether he’s related to me or not,” said Mary. “I like him.”
Homer was mesmerized by the gorilla’s great sad face. “Come on, friend,” he muttered, “why don’t you climb that tree?”
The gorilla showed no interest in climbing the tree. It just sat there. While they watched, it skinned a banana and ate it neatly, showing its white teeth.
They moved to the next enclosure, where four or five orangutans were swinging back and forth on ropes. “Hey, look at that,” said Homer.
The orangutans were huge and red, with heavy fat bodies and long hairy arms. Their expressions we
re impassive, their eyes small and beady. One of the females swung her rope in the direction of a distant branch. Grasping it, she heaved herself up and sat on it solemnly, disregarding the applause of a family of children crowded at the railing.
“Hey,” said Homer, “wasn’t that neat? Really neat.”
The children ran away to look at the chimpanzees, but Homer and Mary went on watching the grave acrobatics of the orangutans. Back and forth they swung their heavy bodies from rope to rope, from branch to branch. There was no sense of playfulness in their swinging. It was simply what orangutans did all day.
Homer was charmed. Surely an orangutan could do all sorts of things normal humans couldn’t do? It might even be able to swing to the top of a glass pyramid, for instance.
His fool’s experiments, he decided, were not altogether wasted.
CHAPTER 25
In all cases, in order that the males should seek efficiently, it would be necessary that they should be endowed with strong passions.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
DIARY OF FREDERICKA DUBCHICK
Diary, I raise my right hand to swear to the truth. Hal Shaw has stopped making jokes and kidding in a friendly way and looking at me when he thinks I don’t know it. He’s not just flirting anymore. For the last two weeks it’s been really heavy breathing. He turns fiery red when he tries to talk to me, only he can’t talk because his voice is knotted up in his throat. (How I love it! How I love every embarrassed blotch on his face! every choked remark about the weather!)
But he’s married! Oh, a pox on Margo Shaw! Mostly I don’t think about her at all. I just enjoy prancing along this high wire between Hal and Oliver, twirling my parasol, teetering one way, then the other. It’s so exciting!