by Angus Wilson
I STILL, of course, had my own future plans to decide. Leacock, when he said goodbye, urged me, despite my great distaste for doing so, to stay on.
“But I think you’ve been abominably treated, Leacock, and, in so far as it counts with the Committee, I should like to register my protest.”
“No, no, Carter, we’ve had enough gestures. Besides you don’t owe me any loyalty. I misled and deceived you at the beginning as much as Godmanchester did. I foresaw much of this, but as I’ve told you I couldn’t afford to wait. I was determined to fight it out and, frankly, if this ghastly blow hadn’t hit me, I think that I’d have won. But you’re badly needed here. I can testify to that. The orders you were given may have been wrong but nobody could have administered them more efficiently.”
“Thank you. But I’ve had the idea of leaving for some time. I’m so much happier when I’m simply working as a naturalist and I’m beginning to wonder why I shouldn’t indulge that happiness.”
“I’ve never been happy, Carter, so I can’t advise you about that. Oh, of course, I’m happy at home, gloriously so. But I’ve always been an ambition driven man and always shall be. So happiness in work isn’t quite my field. Pleasure in work at times, of course; I’ve had great pleasure down here. But I’ve always expected trouble, you know, in my life. Now I don’t think you’re ambition driven, but you are a man with a strong sense of duty. I don’t think you’ll be happy if you neglect it. And your duty’s here. As to field work, Godmanchester’ll want to keep you, and if you insist on retaining the British Reserve here, he won’t be able to say no. After all with the exceptions of the Scotch wild cats and a few red deer, all the fauna were here before anyway.”
“I couldn’t be beholden to him.”
“Well, that I understand. But if you’re worrying about having to deal with him, I shouldn’t. He won’t have time for Zoo affairs again in his life, I’m sure. Anyway I hope you stay. I’d like to think that you’ll be Director in time.”
Bobby Falcon gave quite other advice. He begged me not to waste my time in administration. Of course, he’d be delighted to have me work with him, but frankly he had never thought of the Secretary’s job as one for a man of real ability. He felt sure he could do it all himself with the assistance of a couple of good old fashioned clerks, if such could be found nowadays. He must tell me honestly that he proposed to put the clock back at Regent’s Park a good deal, to a more leisurely and most especially, a more colourful age. Godmanchester was giving the world a bit of a respite, God knew for how long, and the least he, Falcon, could do was to try to bring back the good old days while it lasted.
I was strengthened in my impression that since his return from America, he had been ill at ease with me, no doubt because he knew me to be a Leacock man.
I was angered by his low estimation of administrative work; I was horrified by what might happen to ‘the administration if he were in sole charge; I did not really see why he should get rid of me so easily. On the other hand it might well be as unpleasant as he predicted, and why should I go on seeking discomfort. I told him that I should not decide until I had consulted by letter with Martha.
“Well that’s all right then,” he said. “You’ve as good as gone. I know what she thinks.”
I wrote a full account of my dilemma to her that night. Three days later I received a cable which read, ‘AIR PASSAGE BOOKED RETURNING WEDNESDAY DO NOTHING UNTIL I ARRIVE CHILDREN STAY ALL MY LOVE MARTHA’. That morning one of Godmanchester’s secretaries phoned me, requesting that I should visit the Lord Privy Seal’s office the next day at 11.15 a.m. precisely.
Godmanchester’s personal office was sumptuous in the most old fashioned, late Victorian sense of that word: good leather everywhere and an array of inkstands and cigar boxes on his desk that looked as though they had been the gifts of Indian Rajahs to the Queen Empress Victoria. I was reminded of a story of some Foreign Secretary—was it Curzon?—whose first act in office was to have the silver inkstand replaced by one of gold. Waiting for Godmanchester, I wondered whether, in fact, he was the saviour that England needed. Or whether senile megalomania had imposed itself upon a desperate people. However politics were not—I had never allowed them to be— my concern. In any case my reflections were interrupted by the flushing of a cistern and, a moment later, Godmanchester ambled out from behind a concealed door, doing up his fly-buttons. It was clear that his manner of enhancing grandeur was by treating it with contempt.
“You’re a very lucky man, Carter,” he said, “I’ve no time for business like yours at the moment. But I’ve heard you’re thinking of resigning from the Zoo service and I don’t want you to do it. Now I’ve got exactly ten minutes I can spare for you. Do you think you can come to your senses in that time?”
“I’m waiting for my wife to come back from the States before I decide what I do. She’ll be back here next week.”
“I take it that you’re not such a fool as to be ruled by your wife’s decision so we’ll regard that as an evasive ruse. Now I’ve told you before that I think you’re very good at your job and that I hope you’ll be Director later on. I think you’ve been a fool in fighting Leacock’s battles for him, however loyalty’s a fault I’ve no objection to so long as it’s not persisted in ridiculously. You tried to help Leacock, so did I. We failed. Forget it. It’s over. He could have kept his Historic Reserve but he wouldn’t play ball. Now you can have your British Reserve, more easily in fact than his historical one. Badgers and polecats are one things, wolves and wildboars quite another. I know you’ve imported those Scotch wild cats, but I don’t see why the people of Herefordshire shouldn’t face the same remote dangers as the people of Argyll. You want the British Reserve. We want you at Regent’s Park. All right. Will you stay?”
“I’ve told you, Lord Godmanchester, I shall consult my wife.”
“Look! Is it my treatment of Leacock that’s sticking in your gullet? Or is it that you think I made my own uses of an important zoological venture? I don’t know why I should have to argue with you about it. I’d like to tell you where to put your moral scruples and kick you out of the room. But I can only say to you that I wouldn’t have done a lot of the things I’ve done in the last year if I’d seen any other way of campaigning myself into office. And if you say—who cares whether you’re in office?—I can only answer that no one in this country will ever know how much they ought to care, because they’ll never know the ghastly things I shall save them from. But, if you can waive your glorious disbelief for a moment, I’ll tell you what is true—that I’m particularly upset about the Zoo. In point of fact there are many other places, yes, and people, some of them old friends, who have as much reason to complain of my treatment of them as the Zoological Society has, but I happen to feel more about the Zoo. And that’s why I want you to stay on and give the place the administration it needs.”
“I don’t think I can order my life to help settle your conscience.”
Godmanchester rolled back in his padded leather armchair in disgust.
“Go on. Get out,” he said, “I don’t believe that anyone as priggish as you can be indispensable. I just can’t believe it.”
“I’m sure I’m not. Sir Robert Falcon will tell you that the work can be done by a couple of clerks.”
“Yes, yes. Falcon’s just the man that’s needed there at the moment, thank God! But he doesn’t understand the first thing about how any organisation works. Why should he? His métier is being a colourful personality.” He paused, then leaning his short stubby arms on the huge desk, he loomed towards me, a blubbery shapeless old mass. “Will you stay on for this year, Carter? After that we can train somebody else. Particularly for this spring. I want to have the biggest show put on in London this spring that we can mount—tradition, art, sport, enterprise, everything we’ve got—to show the confidence we feel. Economically we need it, politically it may save us. There isn’t a famous building or a celebrity that I don’t intend to rope in. But my name’s particularly assoc
iated with the London Zoo and for that reason I want to stage a fine show there. Falcon’s got ideas. Will you stay at least until the British Day, as we’re going to call it, in the first week of June, and help him to put his ideas into practice?”
“I don’t know. You’ve given me some reason for thinking that I may be very useful, if that gratifies you. But I still intend to talk to my wife before I make a decision. I’ll let you know next week.”
Godmanchester began to study a memorandum. He said in an off hand way,
“Tell one of my secretaries. I shan’t be on tap for this sort of thing in the future. Anyway you’ve had more than your ten minutes. Goodbye.”
When from the balcony overlooking London Airport, I saw Martha stepping briskly across the tarmac from the aeroplane gangway, outpacing in her eagerness even the commanding air hostess, I felt such an upsurge of love and lust and reproach and remorse for my reproach that in dizziness I had to steady myself by holding on to the railings. In her turn, when she came out of the customs room and saw me standing, as she said, like a puppy ready to bound forward at a look of love or backward at the raise of a correcting arm, Martha felt, she afterwards told me, exactly the same turbulent swell of emotions. We silently concurred, too, in letting our remorse and reproach lie unspoken in the hope that a few day’s happiness together would make them seem too paltry even to be thought of. I had taken a week off and we gave it up to trivial talk and happy reminiscence. We wanted nothing more than a flat, brightly painted backcloth against which we could express unimpeded our pent-up love and desire. It was a sunny, gusty March week, where even from Primrose Hill or Regent’s Park the stiff puffy white clouds could be seen scudding across the pale blue sky, pursuing one another at irregular speeds and intervals like tableaux trying to catch up with the main procession in a splendid but ill-rehearsed pageant. Just to walk out in the parks or on the Heath under such skies banished the sense of London’s confinement and gave the illusion of open plains or mid ocean. I felt more than ever at such a time that my hope of blending town and country, the Zoo’s office life of human contact and the Reserve’s peace of heightened sight and sound was not an absurdity. On the last evening of that week we sat on a seat near the Open Air Theatre, sheltered from the wind by a magnolia tree already coming into flower. The dying sun was almost fierce on our faces for a while. I looked in turn at the strolling crowds, the scudding clouds or the white crocuses frosting the bank beneath the magnolia; and, wherever I looked for those few minutes, the world seemed to have some secret unity. Pleasure and duty need not, I thought, tear me apart.
Martha said, “I haven’t said anything yet, darling, about the job. I believe you want to stay at the Zoo. And that’s all that matters to me. I felt sick when I read your letters about the end of Stretton and I only wanted you to get away from the whole lot of them. But something I learned from seeing Hester again, I think, is that one can live with the past and disregard it. She was just the same—all the small things that maddened me and seem to spoil a very nice person—and yet I could manage to think of her simply as someone I was visiting with a view to leaving the children in her care. The truth is, Simon, that I’ve come back feeling exactly about her as I did before, but quite sure that the children will be happy and safe with her. She’s two people—an infuriating sister from the past and a decent guardian for Reggie and Violet if war comes here.”
I spoke through a haze of happiness, as though I knew everything would be all right from now on.
I said, “I trust you know best, Martha. And about my work too.”
But she cried, “No, no, Simon. That’s just it. You must do what you want. I only told you about all that because I thought maybe you were anxious lest the past, all that horrible business at Stretton, might dog your life at the Zoo in the future. And from my visit to Hester, I could say to you that it would always be there but that you could go ahead and get what you wanted out of the place all the same. Yes, I know darling, and give what you wanted too.”
“I want to keep the place running properly and I should like, too, to make a first rate Reserve available to British naturalists. But at Stretton, Martha, and by Godmanchester’s courtesy! It’s not easy to swallow.”
“Oh, phooey to Lord Godmanchester! He’s made use of you. You try and make use of him. But I’m not going to give advice, Simon. I’ve gone on far too much wanting this and that for you. You know best. What I know is that I want to be with you, and, as soon as we feel able, to have the children with us too. I’ve been too goddamned pleased with myself, fussing about whether you’re fulfilling yourself. You are you and that’s that.”
“I like you to approve of me.”
“Approve! Simon. Approve, pity, admire, despise, revere—I suppose I shall come around to the lot of them in the years ahead.” She touched the bench on which we sat, “Given any years that is. But let’s call it love and not start sorting out the bits. Whatever my immediate emotions I shall love you as ... as, well, as Jane doesn’t love Bobby.”
I took her hand in mine and stroked it.
“Thank you.”
What she had said seemed part of this sudden sense of unity, of allrightness that had settled upon me. I did not need to sort out her words. Stroking her hand, watching a lion shaped beast hurrying across the sky to join (as it never could) a grey white map of Australia, I made casual conversation — or was it casual?
“Bobby seems thriving at the moment anyway. Heaven knows what jubilation he’s concocting for the Zoo. I can’t get as enthusiastic about it as I was about Leacock’s Stretton scheme. But I think I can help him, even if I’m only an amused observer, because whatever he intends will presumably need organizing and I doubt if he could organize a church bazaar.”
“He’s organized some important expeditions in his time.”
“Yes, God knows how. I may be wrong. In any case the Society’s affairs have to be looked after, jubilee or no jubilee; and I’m quite sure that he’ll never attend to day to day work. The only trouble is that he doesn’t want me there. He says it’s a waste of my time. But in fact I think he really does believe he can do it all himself. He’s quite wrong of course . . .”
Martha broke in fiercely, “Bobby’s a stupid coward. You must not take any notice of him. If he looks like being a nuisance I’ll deal with him.”
I laughed. “First steps in the policy of non-interference. As a matter of fact I hadn’t intended to take any notice of him now that I know you agree with my decision to stay.”
Australia had blotted out the sun, the wind came fiercely through the shiny magnolia leaves, whipping up dust and a discarded cigarette packet around our feet, the crocuses still seemed like snowfall, but cold and dead now without the reflected light. Martha got up.
“Well, that’s all right then. We must move on, darling, I’m getting cold.”
And so I telephoned to Godmanchester’s secretary to say that I was remaining.
Bobby Falcon was absolutely charming, once he had gulped down the news.
“My dear Simon,” he said, “if you and Martha are happy about it, nothing could be better than to have you holding my hand at this critical moment.”
It was a strange régime that we entered upon, ironically as like as two peas to the days before Leacock’s television programme. Bobby transformed the Director’s room into a symbol of all we stood for. He moved in furniture of the eighteen fifties and decorated the walls with his collection of Victorian genre paintings of the Zoo, including the vast canvas of Frith’s “A Ride on Jumbo”, and the series of sketches of mountain goats on the Mappin Terrace made by Holman Hunt before he left for the Dead Sea. Deposited around the room were a model of Steller’s sea cow, some authentic dodo feathers, a Victorian card case covered in quagga skin, the thigh bone of a moa, and a genuine stuffed Great Auk surveying the world with great surprise from its viewpoint of extinction. There was also a case containing broad-sheets and comic songs that referred to the Zoo. Against this background he carrie
d on his remarkable manic-depressive Directorship—elated, lively, charming, competent, and above all imaginative when preparations for the British Day were under discussion; morose, rude, inattentive and sometimes surprisingly obtuse when other business had to be done. He only became really angry, however, when Stretton was mentioned; and once the animals, including Godmanchester’s so generously given own private collection, had arrived safely in London, Leacock and the Exotic Reserve were banished from all tongues.
Pattie Henderson, once, at the Staff Restaurant, pouring down her usual lunch-time two pints, did say to me, “Is all that business down in Wales wound up now?”
And when I said that it was, except for my own proposed Naturalists’ Reserve, she said, “Do you mean the creatures that were there anyway? The whole thing seems to have been rather a sweat for nothing, I must say. But of course you admin boys have to think up these bright ideas to keep yourselves busy, I suppose.”
Then she told me that she was only chaffing.
The only person who confronted Bobby with criticism of the move was Sanderson. He came into the Director’s office one morning when I was there.
Gravely looking down at the ground, he asked, “Is all this moving of the poor animals over yet, Falcon?”
Bobby, whose mind was on a scheme for rehousing the species most popular with the public in special replicas of the Victorian cages, said,
“No. We’ve hardly begun, Sanderson. But I don’t think we shall trouble you much. I’ve got one or two ideas for showing the ants and the butterflies with moral texts, but I’ll let you know about that later.”
Sanderson grew red in the face.
“I don’t only think of my own exhibits, you know,” he said. “It seems to me completely damnable the way these poor beasts have been moved down to Wales and back again. And you say it’s not even completed.”
I intervened. “The Director misunderstood you. All the exhibits were back from Stretton a week ago.”