by Angus Wilson
I said it with a certain fervour, since the operation had fallen almost entirely on me.
“Well, I only hope they won’t be moved again. After all, they’re in our care and we ought to consider that. By making them captive we take their welfare on our shoulders for good and all. Otherwise we’ve no right to deprive them of freedom.”
Bobby leaned back against his chair and gave a sort ot jaunty twist to his moustache that always indicated an attempt to mask rising anger under jocularity.
“My dear Sanderson,” he drawled, “have you ever thought how damned lucky the animals are that fall into the hands of the Society? By and large, that is, unless climate’s against them. No ghastly search for scarce food or water in times of drought! No relentless native huntsmen! No jungle rivalry! No old age, tracked down, feeble and desperate! I know the jungle and I can tell you this, that if our beasts here were shunted back between Wales and London for a year they’d be better off than the old lion or the sick rhino in their natural state or the giraffe separated from the herd. Think of them, Sanderson, before you bleat about our chaps’ cushy little troubles.”
Sanderson said, “I’m concerned for the animals here because they’re the ones I know.”
Afterwards Bobby reacted much as had his predecessor.
He said, “I haven’t seen much of Sanderson in the last few years. He appears to have become gaga.”
But I reserved my opinion. And Bobby sulked on and off for the rest of the day.
But as the British Day drew nearer, he was transformed. The old sick puma became visibly a sleek, handsome young leopard. The downward curving lines, the flabby bags and pouches, the grey that suffused his tanned skin had seemed less striking when he returned from America; now they were suddenly gone. Mrs Purrett said he looked every inch the soldier; Rackham said he’d like to see some of these young chaps today under Sir Robert’s command, they wouldn’t know whether they were going or coming; Jane said that she’d forgotten that she’d married such an old charmer; Sanderson announced that there was a strange, spiritual strength about our new Director that perhaps came from his knowledge of the East; Englander asked me if Falcon had come into money; Lord Oresby wondered if Falcon had been cutting down on wine and women, he looked so well; Strawson said there was something about the leadership of a gentleman; and Matthew, when I drew attention to Bobby’s dandyish, military appearance, said,
“Yes. He’s a terrible bounder, isn’t he? Like an advertisement for whisky.”
It was a unanimous verdict. With his refreshed appearance came a new and extraordinarily light hearted energy that bowled over even those of us who were amusedly scornful of his schemes. He laughed at himself all the time for being such an anachronism in this earnest age, yet he laughed at us even more for taking the age so earnestly. I saw in those weeks the secret of the success of his expeditions, that he made it all a game and, in so doing, assured everyone how tremendously serious it all was, for, after all, games were the only things worth doing well. It was an arrogant charm and I watched fascinatedly to see how he got away with it. For instance, there was an electrical engineer, the principal representative of the firm concerned with the lighting ‘on the great night’ whose pomposity soon became a bait of Bobby’s. He was, funnily enough, a heavy, handsome matinée idol sort of man like Bobby himself but several social or sophisticated rungs (you could call it which you like) lower in the charm ladder. Perhaps that was what riled Bobby. This man whose name was Johnson-White became ‘that charming fellow Bronson-Sprite’ or ‘that invaluable man Monson-Tight’. All this was as childish as it was snobbish, but it was done with such an air of enjoyment of what was known to be a cad’s trick that one couldn’t help joining in. Johnson-White, too, let himself in for it by suggesting, ‘if I may venture, a pastel shade for the Humming Birds House to tone down their somewhat strident tropical colouring’; now he could never set foot in the office without Bobby asking “what was that frightfully good phrase about the humming birds, my dear fellow?” Or, again, Johnson-White, after much hesitation and archness, recommended an old rose lighting for the Ladies’ Rooms on the night—”the ladies like a kind lighting, Sir Robert. That’s not my opinion, let me hasten to say, but Mrs Johnson-White’s. The age old wisdom of women about their own sex.” After that hardly a day passed that Bobby did not call upon Mrs Purrett for a spot of age old wisdom, and he even insisted on a tray marked ‘For Mrs Bronson-Sprite’ into which problems of entertainment or colour scheme were placed. Yet when Johnson-White might have expected to smell a rat and become offended, Bobby was to be found with him in real earnest, down on his hands and knees examining an angle of the tortoise house or a recess behind the pheasantry which opposed problems to effective wiring. His consumption of detail was alarmingly impressive and endeared him to all the technicians; so also indeed was his inventiveness and power to make do and mend.
“Look,” he would say to the works foreman concerned with the hydraulic problems of the “Seashore of Britain” exhibit, “we had a nonsense like this to sort out when I was pursuing the non-existent Nandi bear in Uganda . . .”
Or to the carpenters concerned with the trapdoors through which young otters were to disappear when amusing the public with their antics, “I had a problem a bit like this with a little racoon once, a lively little fellow. I constructed a box, a frightfully amateurish thing, but if I could just show you . . .”
It was not only his mental agility, however, that captivated, he was up and down ladders and across planks with the youngest workmen in the place. That he enjoyed all this exhibitionism he never for a moment hid. I have seen him leap from one scaffolding above the seals’ pond to another; and, when the workmen half-ironically clapped, he bowed to them with an equal half-irony. Sometimes my annoyance or disgust was stronger than the charm he exerted and I tried to puncture his performance with sharp remarks. But to no avail.
“My dear fellow,” he would say, “how frightfully good you are for me.”
Then a day later before a crowd of colleagues or visitors, he would say, “Simon, for goodness sake say something good for me. I’m in need of it,” and, when, from laughing at the absurdity of the face he pulled, I could say nothing, he would cry, “Nothing good for me! You’re not fulfilling your function! You’ve run out of moralities. Shame! Shame!”
I have written ‘visitors’ and that was another matter for marvel. I had known that Bobby ‘knew everybody’, but not how devoted ‘everybody’ was to him. For the staff and the workmen everyday was a field day, for Bobby brought television stars, Victoriana experts, stage designers, peers who were expert showmen of their gracious homes, actresses, ballet dancers, top journalists, explorers, gossip column financiers, Brains Trust scientists—anybody whose face adorned the popular dailies and the telescreen. He enrolled them somehow in his happy absurd antics and mixed them in with the staff and the contractors’ men. Debs got tied up in tartan ribbon that was to grace the Highland cattle; an important and doubtful financier was persuaded into being photographed with a warthog that horribly resembled him; a veteran revue star did her famous imitation of a seal from the sealions’ pool. Masons laying tiles for the Great Hall of Beasts found themselves cheek to cheek with beautiful starlets as they pondered over the William Morris patterns that Bobby had presented for their choice. As the Day grew nearer Jane, attracted by the theatrical atmosphere, became more and more involved. Indeed she and Bobby were photographed again and again as ‘London’s smartest Darby and Joan’—an irony that made me at times desperately sad for the Leacocks, whose dowdy devotion had never drawn the notice of even a passing camera. But it must be said that the Falcons did look extraordinarily elegant. And elegance was the keynote of the whole thing—elegance with a touch of chichi. Matthew thought it horribly vulgar. Lord Godmanchester, who appeared only once, looking tired and strangely purple in the face, hoped that Falcon wasn’t forgetting the Commonwealth aspect; but Bobby reassured him.
“Good Lord! I should think not
. We’ve got oodles of Kangaroos and Kiwis laid on.”
I ventured once to hint that the wonderful stink of the mob might be lost in all this wealth of stylized Victoriana, witty parody, Romantic charm and music hall pastiche, but Bobby took me quite literally.
“My dear fellow, you don’t know the crush I’ve asked for the opening, half London, and in this boiling weather!”
Of course, in a sense he was right, so long as there was enough sweat, it didn’t matter whether it came from the cockney crowd or the top people at play, the stink would be much the same.
And the weather that May was exceptionally hot. As the celebrities and the art students and the workmen took off more and more clothes, and Bobby improvised a bathing pool in the canal, where Jane’s actresses served out chicken sandwiches and iced beer and even iced champagne, the whole place assumed more the air of a free for all fête-champêtre. Not that it was an idle one, enormous quantities of hay were made. And in the evenings a small knot of us would gather in Bobby’s office—Jane, sometimes Martha strangely mute, a keeper or two, Mrs Purrett—and, eating a cold supper, we would work hard at the plans for the next day. Bobby, imitating the particular celebrated visitors of the past day, would draw me in to assist him, until all the work was carried on in a frenzy of mimicry and farce. On the whole I enjoyed myself very much, even when it all seemed to me most frivolous.
Bobby’s frivolity, indeed, seemed to know no limits. One afternoon Inspector Martin appeared upon the scene again; and this time he was not prepared to be fobbed off with the Secretary. His manner with Bobby was grave and a little servile; Bobby’s with him a schoolboy’s acting in an Agatha Christie.
“I imagine Mr Carter has already given you some account of my earlier visit here, Sir Robert, with reference to a member of your staff, Dr Emile Englander.”
Bobby assumed an absuredly conspiratorial manner, his moustaches hunched up under his nose.
“I should think so! It gave us a pretty good shock, I can tell you.”
Inspector Martin gazed at me as at one he had always known to be unreliable.
I said, “You told me to say nothing to anyone about Dr Englander’s foreign associations, Inspector, and I have not done so.”
Bobby leaned back as though immensely relieved.
“Trouble abroad! Oh, I know nothing of that. I thought you were referring to the sinister affair of the two schoolgirls and the bar of chocolate. But if you don’t know about that, Inspector, I’d prefer to say no more. It is after all entirely a Zoo affair. Perhaps you’d tell me something of the Doctor’s clandestine activities overseas.”
The Detective-Inspector, looking puzzled, outlined what he had said to me.
Then he added, “Since that time we have reason to think that Dr Englander may have associations with the Uni-Europe Movement.”
Bobby’s manner changed to his most arrogant.
“Oh, I hardly think that’s likely, Inspector. Surely they’re all corner boys and anti-semitic loafers and scum, aren’t they? Englander has a lot of connections with Europe certainly—he’s a scientist with a world wide reputation, but his friends are very distinguished people—European scientists, and businessmen and financiers. He comes of a big business family. He’s a very rich man, you know.”
The real reverence with which Bobby said this gave me a sudden insight into the strange foundations of his ‘patrician’ snobberies. I understood more than ever why Matthew found him vulgar. The Inspector seemed more impressed by Bobby’s naïveté.
He said, “The two things are not necessarily contradictory Sir Robert. The Movement has considerable funds, you know, although its membership is mainly confined to what you rightly describe as scum. I see,” he added suddenly, “that two of Dr Englander’s keepers are away on leave at the same time as he is.”
I said, “Yes, I believe that is so. The summer leaves are often difficult to fit in and we like to get as much leave taken in spring as possible.”
The Inspector said, “I was asking you, Mr Carter, whether Englander’s principal assistants were away on official leave.”
“I imagine so, Inspector. I haven’t the staff lists here . . .”
Bobby’s voice interrupted me.
“Doctor Englander, Inspector, naturally runs the staff side of his department as he thinks best. We’re concerned here, you know, with eminent people working in a world famous institution, not with the managers of branches of Woolworth’s.”
“I have my inquiries to make, Sir Robert. It would help if you could understand that.”
“My dear fellow, go ahead.”
“Has the Zoological Society any particular interest in the Western Islands of Scotland at the present time?”
“We have interests everywhere, Inspector. And for the moment particularly everywhere British.”
“Is it possible that the Zoological Society might be concerned with certain building activities there?”
“Where?”
“In the Western Islands, Sir Robert.”
“Yes, yes, my dear fellow. But the Islands are numerous. Mull, Staffa, Iona, which?”
“I see that any such activities were not licensed by yourself, Sir Robert. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.”
“You see no such thing, Inspector. As I’ve already said the senior staff here are internationally famed zoologists not schoolboys. If Dr Englander is constructing some building for his work in the Western Islands then he’s doing it for some very good scientific reason which I have no doubt that the Committee will approve. As a matter of fact, I expect he’s making a hideout to watch these snake-worship ceremonies. There’s a particularly bad outbreak of them in Scotland. I’m surprised that the Yard is not investigating that instead of the ridiculous antics of the Uni-Europe Movement.”
“Not everyone takes your view, Sir Robert.”
“Oh, Good Lord! Inspector! I have no view. But if the whole thing’s going out with a bang, it seems rather a waste of time running around fussing about who’s trying to put Roman Candles under the Houses of Parliament. But you don’t want my views on all that, my dear chap. As I say Dr Englander’s not a child, why don’t you ask him what it’s all about?”
“We should like to, Sir. But he left the country two days ago. I imagine on official leave.”
Bobby started angrily at the Inspector’s sarcastic tone.
“As you say, Inspector. Well, you have work to do, as you reminded us. And I must remind you that we’re very busy too. So if you’ve no more questions . . .”
As the Inspector went out, Bobby said, “By the way do take my advice about this Scotch snake worship seriously, Inspector. Now there is something pretty sinister going on,’ I’m sure.”
The whole interview seemed to fill him with delight.
“That chap didn’t like me at all, you know,” he repeated again and again that afternoon.
Once he asked me what I thought old Englander was up to; and with a certain hesitation I suggested that from what he had once said to me, he might be engaged on some private scheme for the evacuation of the reptiles. Bobby seemed amazed.
“I say, that’s pretty bad, when our President’s promised us an era of peace.” He roared with laughter. “I thought Englander was such a wise old bird. But what an optimistic chump he must be. The Western Isles of Scotland!”
It seemed a good moment for me to confess my own clandestine actions over the Aquarium. Bobby again kughed.
“Biscay water, eh? That must have cost us a’pretty penny. But I’m not surprised at you being an optimist, Simon, you’re such an innocent.”
“I’m a bit concerned about Jackley’s reaction when he hears what I’ve done.”
“Are you? I don’t care a damn. Just look at this letter of his.”
He took out a letter from his files and tossed it across to me.
“Dear Falcon, It is kind of you to enquire about my health. I am glad to say that I am now convalescent. You ask whether I shall be with you for the
British Day: having been away from England for so long I am not quite sure of the nature of this celebration; events at home seem to move so rapidly and jet, to an outside observer, the crises appear without significance. However I take it to be some social occasion unconnected with the scientific work of the Society. I seldom distinguish myself socially, and therefore, with jours and the Society’s permission, I shall absent myself from the junketing. Since I am unlikely to leave England again for some time after my return home, I should like, again with the Society’s permission, to visit our Marine Research Station at Funchal before returning to my duties . . .”
“Junketing,” Bobby said “He has the Society’s permission to go and . . . And so I’ve said in my letter. If he doesn’t want to be in on the Great Day, who the hell cares?”
A couple of days later Bobby told me casually that he’d looked into the Reptile House affairs.
“I suspect there are some of the most valuable specimens missing. But the chaps there are frightfully loyal to the old boy. They won’t say anything. Anyhow that head keeper Kennedy is a very good man and he’s co-operating nicely with my ideas for Reptiles on the big night. And the last thing we want is that sort of scandal now. We can give the old chap a rocket afterwards.”
I suggested that the Committee should be told of so serious a matter; it was after all a grave misuse of the Society’s property.
Bobby said, “What about your Biscay water? No, all right. I know it’s not the same thing. As a matter of fact, I’ve discussed it with Godmanchester. It’s frightfully difficult to get hold of him these days. He seems to be in a perpetual political flap. But he agreed. No scandal at any price, he said.”
The same afternoon he told me that Englander had telephoned from Zurich.
“I blew him up a bit about pinching our pythons. But you know what he is, he just chuckled. The main thing of course was to tell him that this inspector chap had been asking about him.”
“Wasn’t that a bit irresponsible?”