The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  THE zoo was almost empty. It was a day in late September, dry and warm, quiet with sunshine. The school-holidays were over. And it was a Monday afternoon—most people had a week-end’s enjoyment on their consciences and would forbear to appear until the Tuesday.

  An exception to this was John Doole. He could be seen at about two o’clock making his way quietly past the owl-houses.

  Doole is what may too easily be called an ‘ordinary’ man, a man who has conformed in certain social appearances and comportments for a common good; but a man who is still alive with dreams, desires whims, fancies, hates and loves—none particularly strong or frequent. The effect of a life of quiet conformity had been to keep such impulses precisely in their place as dreams or desires, writing them off as impracticable.

  Doole would also have been called a phlegmatic man: at least, the opposite to a nervous type. When Doole compulsorily whistled to himself, or pulled up the brace of his trousers with his left hand while his right patted the back of his head, or took unnecessarily deep breaths while waiting for a train, so deep that he seemed to be saying Hum-Ha, Hum-ha with his mouth contorted into a most peculiar shape, or went through a dozen other such queer acrobatics during the course of his day—these gestures were never recognised as the symptoms of nervous unbalance, for too many other people did exactly the same, and Doole knew this too, he found nothing odd in such antics. In fact, he had just as many ‘nerves’ as a Mayfair lady crammed with sleeping pills—only his manner of outlet was different: also, since he never recognized all this as neurotic, it was the more easy to control.

  Doole was a man of forty, with a happy pink face and receding fair hair, a little paunch, and creased baby-fat round his wrists. He had three dimples, two in the cheeks and one on his chin, which gave him the happy, merry look—but his yellow eyebrows flew up at angles over pale lashed eyes, arching out like a shrimp’s feelers, and this gave him a little the look of a startled horse, his eyeballs rolled and seemed to shoot out, while those dimples had the effect of stretching the lip over his teeth into an almost animal fixity. He wore a richly sober brown suit, a little rounded over his short figure; an eyeglass bounced on a black ribbon against his paunch; his tawny shoes were brilliantly shined. The paunch seemed to pull him forward, and he threw his arms back as he walked, fingers stretched taut, and his whole body rested back on a very straight, backward-pressed neck. It was easy to imagine him in a bathing costume: one knew he had thin, active legs.

  He was in business, in fireplaces. But he would often take a walk in the afternoon between two and three. ‘Nobody comes back from lunch till three, you might as well not have a telephone,’ he often said. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to sit there like a stuffed dummy while they stuff the real man.’ He himself was principally a vegetarian, ate lightly and often alone. He loved animals. He often visited the zoo, though he shuddered a little at the hunks of raw meat dribbling from the vulture’s beak and the red bones lying about the lion’s cage.

  Now he stood for a moment discussing a large white owl. The two appraised each other, Doole’s eyes with their appearance of false anguish, the owl’s with their false wisdom. The owl had its trousered legs placed neatly together. Unconsciously Doole moved his own into a similar position: at any moment the two might have clicked heels and bowed. ‘Just a flying puss,’ Doole said to himself, considering the owl’s catface of night eyes and furry ears and feathered round cheeks. ‘Likes mice like puss, too,’ he thought with satisfaction, forgetting in the pleasure of this observation his vegetarian principles. It is satisfactory to come across a common coincidence in the flesh—and Doole expanded for a moment as he nodded, ‘How true!’ As if to please him, the owl opened its beak and made, from a distance deep inside the vase of feathers, a thin mewing sound.

  Doole smiled and passed on. All seemed very right with the world. Creatures were really so extraordinary. Particularly birds. And he paused again before a delicate blue creature which stood on one long brittle leg with its nut-like head cocked under a complicated hat of coloured feathers. This bird did not look at Doole. It stood and jerked its head backwards and forwards, like an urgent little lady in a spring hat practising the neck movements of an Indonesian dance. Doole took out his watch and checked the time. Nearly half-an-hour before he need think of the office. Delightful! And what a wholly delightful day, not a cloud in the golden blue sky! And so quiet—almost ominously quiet, he thought, imagining for a moment the uneasy peace of metropolitan parks deserted by plague or fear. The panic noon, he thought—well, the panic afternoon, then. Time for sunny ghosts. Extraordinary, too, how powerful the presence of vegetation grows when one is alone with it! Yet put a few people about the place—all that power would recede. Man is a gregarious creature, he repeated to himself, and is frightened to be alone—and how very charming these zinnias are! How bright, like a consortium of national flags, the dahlias!

  Indeed these colourful flowers shone very brightly in that September light. Red, yellow, purple and white, the large flower-moons stared like blodges from a paint box, hard as the colours of stained-glass windows. The lateness of the year had dried what green there was about, leaves were shrunken but not yet turned, so that all flowers had a greater prominence, they stood out as they never could in the full green luxuriance of spring and summer. And the earth was dry and the gravel walk dusty. Nothing moved. The flowers stared. The sun bore steadily down. Such vivid, motionless colour gave a sense of magic to the path, it did not seem quite real.

  Doole passed slowly along by the netted bird-runs, mildly thankful for the company of their cackling, piping inmates. Sometimes he stopped and read with interest a little white card describing the bird’s astounding Latin name and its place of origin. Uganda, Brazil, New Zealand—and soon these places ceased to mean anything, life’s variety proved too immense, anything might come from anywhere. A thick-trousered bird with a large pink lump on its head croaked at Doole, then swung its head back to bury its whole face in feathers, nibbling furiously with closed eyes. In the adjoining cage everything looked deserted, broken pods and old dried drop pings lay scattered, the water bowl was almost dry—and then he spied a grey bird tucked up in a corner, lizard lids half-closed, sleeping or resting or simply tired of it all. Doole felt distress for this bird, it looked so lonely and grieved, he would far rather be croaked at. He passed on, and came to the peacocks: the flaming blue dazzled him and the little heads jerked so busily that he smiled again, and turned contentedly back to the path—when the smile was washed abruptly from his face. He stood frozen with terror in the warm sunshine.

  The broad gravel path, walled in on the one side by dahlias, on the other by cages, stretched yellow with sunlight. A moment before it had been quite empty. Now, exactly in the centre and only some thirty feet away, stood a full-maned male lion.

  It stared straight at Doole.

  Doole stood absolutely still, as still as a man can possibly stand, but in that first short second, like an immensely efficient and complicated machine, his eyes and other senses flashed every detail of the surrounding scene into his consciousness—he knew instantly that on the right there were high wire cages, he estimated whether he could pull himself up by his fingers in the net, he felt the stub ends of his shoes pawing helplessly beneath; he saw the bright dahlia balls on the left, he saw behind them a high green hedge, probably privet, with underbush too thick to penetrate—it was a ten-foot hedge rising high against the sky, could one leap and plunge halfway through, like a clown through a circus hoop? And if so, who would follow? And behind the lion, cutting across the path like a wall, a further hedge—it hardly mattered what was behind the lion, though it gave in fact a further sense of impasse. And behind himself? The path stretched back past all those cages by which he had strolled at such leisure such a very little time ago—the fractional thought of it started tears of pity in his eyes—and it was far, far to run to the little thatched hut that said Bath Chairs for Hire, he felt that if only he could get among those
big old safe chairs with their blankets and pillows he would be safe. But he knew it was too far. Long before he got there those hammer-strong paws would be on him, his clothes torn and his own red meat staining the yellow gravel.

  At the same time as his animal reflexes took all this in, some other instinct made him stand still, and as still as a rock, instead of running. Was this too, an animal sense? Was he, Doole, in his brown suit, like an ostrich that imagines it has fooled its enemy by burying its head in the ground? Or was it rather an educated sense—how many times had he been told that savages and animals can smell fear, one must stand one’s ground and face them? In any case, he did this—he stood his ground and stared straight into the large, deep eyes of the lion, and as he stared there came over him the awful sense: This has happened, this is happening to ME. He had felt it in nightmares, and as a child before going up for a beating—a dreadfully condemned sense, the sense of no way out, never, never and now. It was absolute. The present moment roared loud and intense as all time put together.

  The lion, with its alerted head erect, looked very tall. Its mane—and he was so near he could see how coarse and strong the hair straggled—framed its big face hugely. There was something particularly horrible in so much hair making an oval frame. Heavy disgruntled jowls, as big as hams, hung down in folds of muscled flesh buff-grey against the yellow gravel. Its eyes were too big, and shaped in some sharp-cornered way like large convex glasses more than eyes—and from somewhere far back, as far away and deep as the beast’s ancient wisdom, the two black pupils flickered at him from inside their lenses of golden-yellow liquid. The legs beneath had a coarse athletic bandiness: the whole creature was heavy and thick with muscle that thumped and rolled when it moved—as suddenly now it did, padding forward only one silent pace.

  Doole’s whole inside was wrenched loose—he felt himself panicked, he wanted to turn and run. But he held on. And a sense of the softness of his flesh overcame him, he felt small and defenceless as a child again.

  The lion, large as it was, still had some of the look of a cat—though its heavy disgruntled mouth was downcurved, surly, predatory as any human face with a long upper lip. But the poise of the head had the peculiarly questioning consideration of cat—it smelled inwards with its eyes, there was the furry presence of a brain, or of a mass of instincts that thought slowly but however slowly always came to the same destined decision. Also, there was a cat’s affronted look in its eyes. A long way behind, a knobbled tail swung slow and regular as a clock-pendulum.

  Doole prayed: O God, please save me.

  And then he thought: if only it could speak, if only like all these animals in books it could speak, then I could tell it how I’m me and how I must go on living, and about my house and my showroom just a few streets away over there, over the hedge, and out of the zoo, and all the thousand things that depend upon me and upon which I depend. I could say how I’m not just meat, I’m a person, a club-member, a goldfish-feeder, a lover of flowers and detective-stories—and I’ll promise to reduce that profit on fire-surrounds, I promise, from forty to thirty per cent. I’d have to some day anyway, but I won’t make excuses any more….

  His mind drummed through the terrible seconds. But above all two separate feelings predominated: one, an athletic, almost youthful alertness—as though he could make his body spring everywhere at once and at superlative speed; the other, an overpowering knowledge of guilt—and with it the canny hope that somehow he could bargain his way out, somehow expiate his wrong and avoid punishment. He had experienced this dual sensation before at moments in business when he had something to hide, and in some way hid the matter more securely by confessing half of his culpability. But such agilities were now magnified enormously, this was life and death, and he would bargain his life away to make sure of it, he would do anything and say anything … and much the most urgent of his offerings was the promise never, never to do or think wrong in any way ever again….

  And the sun bore down yellow and the flowers stared with their mad colours and the lion stood motionless and hard as a top-heavy king—as Doole thought of his cool shaded show-room with all the high-gloss firestone slabs about, the graining and the marble flow, the toffee-streaming arches, and never, never again would he feel dull among them … never again….

  But it was never again, the ever was ever, at any minute now he would be dead and how long would it take him to die, how slowly did they tear?

  He suddenly screamed.

  ‘No!’ he screamed, ‘No, I can’t bear it! I can’t bear pain! I can’t bear it …’ and he covered his face with his hands, so that he never saw the long shudder that ran through the whole length of the lion’s body, from head to slowly swinging tail.

  *

  In the evening newspapers there were no more than a few lines about the escape of a lion at the Zoological Gardens. Oddly—but perhaps because no journalist was on the spot and the authorities wished to make little of it—the story was never expanded to its proper dimension. The escape had resulted from a defection in the cage bolting, a chance in a million, and more than a million, for it involved also a momentary blank in a keeper’s mind, and a piece of blown carton wedged in a socket—in fact several freak occasions combining, including such as a lorry backfiring that had reminded the keeper of a certain single gunshot in the whole four years of the Kaiser’s war—the kind of thing that is never properly known and never can be explained, and certainly not in a newspaper. However—the end of it was that the lion had to be shot. It was too precarious a situation for the use of nets or cages. The animal had to go. And there the matter ended.

  *

  Doole’s body was never found—for the lion in fact never sprang at him. It did something which was probably, in a final evolution over the years, worse for Doole; certainly worse for his peace of mind, which would have been properly at peace had his body gone, but which was now left forever afterwards to suffer from a shock peculiar to the occasion. If we are not animals, if the human mind is superior to the simple animal body, then it must be true to say that by not being killed, Doole finally suffered a greater ill.

  For what happened was this—Doole opened very slowly the fingers that covered his eyes and saw through his tears and the little opening between his fingers, through the same opening through which in church during prayers he had once spied on the people near him, on the priest and the altar itself—he saw the lion slowly turn its head away! He saw it turn its head, in the worn weary way that cats turn from something dull and distasteful, as if the head itself had perceived something too heavy to bear, leaning itself to one side as if a perceptible palpable blow had been felt. And then the animal had turned and plodded off up the path and disappeared at the turn of the hedge.

  Doole was left standing alone and unwanted. For a second he felt an unbearable sense of isolation. Alone, of all creatures in the world, he was undesirable.

  The next moment he was running away as fast as his legs would carry him, for the lion might easily return, and secondly—a very bad second—the alarm must be given for the safety of others.

  It was some days before his nerve was partly recovered. But he was never quite the same afterwards. He took to looking at himself for long periods in the mirror. He went to the dentist and had his teeth seen to. He became a regular visitor at a Turkish Bath house, with the vague intention of sweating himself out of himself. And even today, after dusk on summer evenings, his figure may sometimes be seen, in long white running shorts, plodding from shadow to lamplight and again into shadow, among the great tree-hung avenues to the north of Regent’s Park, a man keeping fit—or a man running away from something? From himself?

  Outburst

  LIGHTFOOT his name, but not Lightfoot my ruddy condition he thought as he faced his lop-sided one-and-a-half-size queue on a warm September afternoon, for his feet ached so.

  Mothers and their sons made up his queue, as they did other small queues formed towards the assistants behind their counters in this w
ool-smelling, carpeted School Outfitter’s; and it was surely a credit to some British sense of fair play that even among these the almost-rich, with pearls about their necks and sometimes cairngorm thistles pinned above well-supported left breasts, and at such an hour as four o’clock in the afternoon when they wanted badly their teas—that they should in every instance have formed patient, fair-minded, unembattled queues.

  However—Mr Lightfoot hardly considered that this afternoon, his feet ached too much: he had been standing since nine o’clock that morning, with only half-an-hour for lunch, for the school holidays were ending and there was now the usual last-minute rush for outfits, nobody having seriously considered that they were not the only persons in the world, and his feet ached; moreover, a veal-and-ham pie in his pocket for his tea was slowly melting, the jelly already sopping into its lardy crust; and on top of all this he had troubles at home, and in his conscience. One could not say whether feet or pie or wife or conscience afflicted his usually equable temper the most. Possibly each exacerbated the other, so that feet ached more and pie melted faster and conscience nagged harder and wife’s voice boomed louder than would singly have been the case: for, singly, would any have been so much noticed? Not such, in any case, for Mr Lightfoot to compute—his hot and heavy head only ached muddled with all these troubles, and he dearly wanted his own tea, let alone pie. Yet it was four already, and his queue steady and demanding.

  The hot smell of new grey flannel, trousers and jackets and caps, stifled the air; clean glints of plate glass and polished brass cleared it. The atmosphere was thus not overpowering, yet it might have been subtly the more poisonous for what went unseen—who knew what massed particles of stuff a sunbeam might not have revealed, who knew how wetly furred his lungs? Years ago toilet-saloons had been forbidden the old-fashioned machine brushes that ran on leather bands—you never see them now—because the particles of cut hair sucked down into their lungs gave the barbers pulmonary consumption: now who knew what wisps of cotton and wool might not be the innocent-seeming cause of a lingering death? But no sunbeam came to reveal the thousands of floating wisps, the sun had wandered away with the afternoon, and through the window the sky over the chimney pots had already a distant, evening set about it: the day was gone—yet still all these people pressing, wanting, choosing, chatting….