The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  “Well, darling, you’re not a psychiatrist. He was mentally sick.”

  Martha giggled. “Sometimes you seem like the comic American, not me.”

  “All right, he was off his chump.”

  “Yes. I know. But he was sexually starved too.”

  I kissed her and said, “We’ve talked about it enough.”

  I tucked her into the sleeping bag and went to my own mattress against the other wall. Then a fear that she had gone to sleep seized me.

  I whispered, “Martha.” She did not answer. Then I said loudly and casually, “In any case he was too old to be your lover.”

  She said, “Stop tormenting yourself, Simon. I couldn’t with anyone. I don’t think I care that much about sex with anyone but you.”

  I sighed and relaxed.

  She said, “Anyway your old formula—no sex without real affection—wouldn’t have kept me on the straight and narrow path. I truly am very fond of Bobby. I must tell you I went today to the hospital to ask about him. He’s been allowed to go home. Oh don’t worry. I shan’t go near him again. I’ve done enough harm. But I am very fond of him, and I was very, very sorry for him.”

  “But you can’t mix up being sorry with sexual love.”

  “Can’t I darling? I’ve told you I’m a very confused person. Awfully maternal anyway. I think I’m always very ready to be protecting someone I love. And when I feel protecting I want him to take me to bed if it gives him pleasure. I think that’s the basis of all sex for me really. Oh, I don’t know.”

  She sighed and seemed almost immediately to go off to sleep. As for me, it was as though she had suddenly hit me over the head with a heavy stick. I lay confused and awake for hours.

  Happily my life at the Zoo was still a very busy one. It was not the back-breaking navvy work of those first few days after the raid. Then, in the tension born of hourly expectation of long agony or annihilation, all personal differences seemed to be effaced, all identity almost to be lost in united toil. The closer the threat of general devastation, the harder we worked to preserve. Against a background of ruins and stench we banded together to save the collections—and for a week at least did not quarrel over priorities of what should be saved. Beard, with the support of Pattie Henderson’s research boys, advanced the priorities of current research; Matthew preferred birds, and, within the bird kingdom, some mysterious parrot-crowned hierarchy of his own; it was left to me to put forward the twin claims of rarity and cost. Somehow in those first days of revolutionary fraternity, we made a blend of these claims that disguised all factions. Apart from the fear of further enemy attack, we worked already under a hot May sunshine that showed the ruins in all their grisly details and rapidly turned the carrion to a stench of putrefaction. Each day we could see the condors and vultures wheeling high above us in the clear blue sky.

  Sanderson said, “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it really? Like the prisoners who were released from the Bastille, they know no other home.”

  I pointed out that they had come after food not home.

  “One would like to say that Nature provides,” he said.

  But even he could not say it. We were not on the Veld and we had to do our own scavenging. So for the first three days we buried our dead, or such as remained of them. More difficult proved the disposal of the huge, swollen hippopotamus carcasses that surfaced in the canal; and the vultures did aid us in this slow task before we had done. At last, the twisting, hovering, wheeling circles in the sky were seen no more; or only at a great distance. Sanderson remarked on this and hoped that they were getting fed. It was the only time when I saw Beard relax during those days.

  He smiled and said, “Oh, I’m sure people are feeding them, Sanderson.”

  So, shirt sleeved and short sleeved, we worked. Huge and red faced Pattie Henderson, in linen trousers and an odd straw sun bonnet like a donkey’s, worked side by side with Matthew, who in hot weather, trailed clouds of expensive scent behind him. Strawson dug and I buried. Newton netted and Nutting caged. Even the wives came to help—Mrs Barley, cockney in every crisis, got even Mrs Purrett laughing at her near-the-knuckle ‘cracks’. How happy everybody was, we are told, and I suppose they were—some English love improvisation and ‘do it yourself’. But I belong to the other English, who don’t like the right pigeon hole used for the wrong papers, or the wrong label on the right box. I chafed under all this glorious dissolution, chafed for law and order. Or perhaps it was that I had invented the old order, and now Beard—as Sanderson had said, ‘the man of the hour’—was imposing his new order on the chaos.

  “Get things away to Woburn” was his command—and, given an orderly conventional war, he would have been right. But if annihilation did not come neither was the last war reborn. For a few days lorries managed to get through b’y roundabout routes to Bedfordshire. Then two returned because roads were impassable; then one because police had refused to allow it beyond Hendon. Then a lorry driver trying to get through at night undetected overturned in a sudden crater near Welwyn Garden City; by some mischance two leopards escaped and added panic to the neighbourhood. We received military orders that no more live beasts were to be evacuated. At first Beard seemed unwilling even to notice this setback.

  “We must find someone to override this,” he said, “we can’t give up in midstream. You know the various Ministry chaps, Carter.”

  It was true—I did and he didn’t; I also knew that nothing could or indeed should be done. The Committee of the Society or such of them as were available in London had confirmed Beard as Acting Director; but they were too busy to do more than urge him ‘to do his best’. With some difficulty he got through to Lord Oresby, who, on Godmanchester’s death, had become Acting President; but—sign of the times!—that kindly patriotic old liberal Tory country gentleman strongly advised a quietist policy.

  “My dear chap,” he said, “quite frankly nobody knows what on earth’s happening and the situation’s so very fluid that I think it’s most unwise for the Zoo to get mixed up in any sort of action. Between ourselves I’ll tell you that, in my opinion, this is the time when the true patriot retires to his country seat and awaits events; but unfortunately there’s not the faintest chance of my getting through to Wiltshire. But certainly my advice to you is to do nothing. And as far as day to day administration goes, rely on Carter.”

  I think Beard would have contested even this if he could have rallied the support of the staff around him; but the same spirit of wait and see that had infected Oresby and most people in high places outside the immediate Government circle had now begun to spread to the population at large, and the Zoo staff was no exception. The glorious comradeship of the barricades was waning, a new feeling of sceptical boredom on which the Europeans were soon so cleverly to trade by withdrawing all their troops from England, was now in the air. Sanderson, for example, with his insect kingdom all but vanished, felt the pull of other ties.

  “I think it’s the turn of the humans now, don’t you,” he said. The proposal he based on this was less reasonable. “I wish you’d open to the public again, Beard. There’s a hundred poor souls who’d find a walk in the Gardens something to take their minds off things.”

  When this was refused, he began to appear less and less among us. I learned later that he’d collected a number of his proteges including Paper Bag Peter, and assembled them at his rambling old Wimbledon home. There, under protest from Mrs B. and Miss D. he managed somehow to keep alive a party of fifteen on the dwindling rations of three. Young Newton was summoned to military medical work, but Pattie Henderson and Nutting retired once more to their research. I was soon hearing new complaints from Pattie.

  “I say,” she said, “this chap Beard seems to be off his chump. He’s evacuated all the wallabies. He must know that Nutting’s working on Marsupials. But to crown all he has the cheek to tell me that the tachyglossus was killed in some lorry smashup. I don’t know what Newton’s going to think. I promised to look after his interests while he�
��s away on this army business and now this fool’s let the only living monotreme in the country get killed. Can’t you suppress him or something?”

  Beard was not checked by his staff’s lack of enthusiasm any more than he was deterred by physical impossibilities or military vetoes; but for some days he looked anxious. I thought, indeed, that the responsibility of his family might be weighing on him—anyone with a family in London at that time was likely to be worried, but a family of lunatics, cardiacs, spastics and hysterics might reasonably be too much for any man. When I asked him how his family had fared, he answered,

  “Thank you, Carter. People in that condition don’t change, you know.”

  “I meant rather what arrangements have you been able to make for them at this time?”

  “Arrangements? They’re on these borough evacuation lists, if that means anything. I suppose they’ll have the same chances as anyone else.”

  A few days later I learned what had been the real source of his anxious frown.

  “I don’t like doing it, Carter,” he said, “but I think we may have to modify our plans. I’ve decided that we can’t hope to evacuate live animals as things are except for a few essential breeding specimens and they’ve mostly reached Woburn. I don’t know how much it matters really. The basic concern in my case is with the anatomical specimens, especially since South Kensington lost everything in that raid. I’ve secured the cooperation of a small refrigeration plant near Dunmow. I can work on them at leisure there for future preservation. It’s too small to interest anyone militarily and it generates it’s own electricity supply—that part of Essex appears to have been so devasted that it is unlikely to be brought into this war again. There are ways and means of getting there by side roads, I suspect.”

  “Don’t you think that we’ve gone beyond the point of evacuation, Beard?”

  He said, “Oh, Lor’!” and vanished.

  I knew this well enough now to wait for his return. Sure enough he came back an hour later, and said,

  “It’s bad enough, Carter, you know, to have to alter my schemes without your backing out in this way. Of course, I’m well aware that things may get worse so we must be very selective in what we send.”

  Thus began a massacre of the animals by selection. It occasioned a breach between our acting Director and his closest ally, Matthew. There were some patriots, of course, who even at that stage of the war refused even to consider defeat—Matthew and Diana Price were among them.

  As Matthew said, when I asked him after Diana, “My dear Simon, she’s happy doing all the things that women must in war-time.”

  For himself, he confessed, he would have liked to rejoin his regiment, “only some ghastly man abolished it years ago,” Meanwhile Beard was his C.O. and I was soon to learn what that meant for Matthew. One morning I was imitating Beard’s curious capacity to dictate absolutely in a hesitant and tentative way.

  “Er, look, Carter,” I was saying, “this is ... er ... something I want done. I mean it’s ... er ... got to be given an absolute priority.” It could be a trial and a bore, I said.

  Matthew snubbed me sharply, “It’s hardly a time to criticize the Director,” he said. “In any case it’s not a question of putting him up for one’s club, is it? Though, of course,” he added, egged on by loyalty, “I should be delighted to do that if he asked me.”

  Their admiration for each other’s single-minded industry in the face of the enemy was mutual.

  Beard said, “It’s rather a pity Price has that foppish manner. He’s done so very well during these weeks. We shall have to let the Committee hear about that when the time comes.”

  Matthew, in his regard for his new chief, even showed him the little inner sanctum of the Parrot House, a favour reserved only for his intimates. In this room he kept three or four parrots bought in the Docks whose wide vocabularly of obscenities was a source of constant delight to him. Even this failed to alienate Beard.

  “Price showed me what he calls his ‘special parrots’ last night,” he told me, “I’m afraid I’m not a good enough ornithologist to grasp what he thought important about them.”

  Matthew, indeed, even postponed the evacuation of a large number of parrots, cockatoos and macaws because Beard’s list did not give them priority.

  “Once you’ve been in the army, you see, you learn to take orders,” he told me.

  Yet it was over these parrots left behind at the Zoo that the split between them now came.

  “You might give me a list of the birds you want sent into cold storage, Price, will you? Then we can have them killed straight away.”

  Matthew gulped. “I don’t think I quite understand what you said.”

  Beard repeated his statement. Matthew swayed and went out of the room. I could see that for him Beard was now some Captain Bligh or Commodus against whom even the most loyal praetorian officer or first mate might be driven to mutiny. The next day he came into the office.

  “About what you said, Director, there’s no need for any further evacuation of my collections,” he said.

  Beard was surprised, but he had other things to think of. A Ministry memorandum had arrived ordering us to hold ourselves in readiness to slaughter all the animals and to await the visit of an inspector of food who would decide what was suitable for human consumption.

  Beard brought the order into my room. He read it out loud.

  “I don’t think we need pay any attention to it, do you?” he said.

  As Rackham was in my office collecting the weekly pay cheques, I said only, “You needn’t wait, Rackham.”

  But Beard went straight on, “As a matter of fact, I think I told you, I always get my evening snack at the Lyons’ at Earl’s Court. A chap there, who seemed to know, told me that this Government’s rather insecure now.”

  I waited until Rackham had gone, then I told Beard that, although he was probably the last person to hear this whisper, he was also probably the first to shout it out loud.

  “It’s very unwise, you know, to say that sort of thing publicly in a beleaguered city when a war is going rather badly.”

  All the same I suddenly warmed to him for his naïveté.

  “Oh, I’m not at all political, Carter,” he answered, “I don’t think as a matter of fact that it’s ever been the tradition here, though we did get a bit too mixed up with that chap Godmanchester. Our job’s to care for the collections. At the moment that means preventing some idiot from cooking them all. We shall have to get the vital specimens away before that inspector comes.”

  “I’m not sure whether carcasses can be called vital,” I said. Then when I saw him frown at my levity, I felt remorseful. “We may have to obey the order, but I agree with you that we shouldn’t. After all it’s only a propaganda token gesture on the part of the Government. And in any case there’s shortage but no starvation in London . . .”

  “That’s hardly our concern,” Beard told me.

  The next day my resolution hardened. One of the two ‘independent’ news sheets that was allowed to circulate carried a chirpy little note that read, “Are we to eat Leo and Ebony? Most London citizens would be sad to see the familiar lion and black leopard go the way of all flesh. Some would say we should all have to be a lot hungrier than we are now—thanks to our navy’s campaign against the enemy’s atomic submarine fleet—before we should store lion or leopard in our larders, though there might be something to be said for a gazelle or antelope steak. But Food Ministry officials, anxious to conserve any potential stores of food, have given the Zoo the red warning light. ‘It’s not only a question of eating lions,’ one official told me yesterday, ‘it’s a question of what the lions themselves are eating. Wild beasts consume an awful lot of meat, you know, and a nation at war just can’t afford meat for lions.’ Reaction of the average man: sorry to see old Leo go, but the family comes before the pets. Reported reaction of the Zoo: Acting Director Langley-Beard, concerned for his research—the Government demand is nonsense; they will take th
e animals over my dead body. Big words, but there’s a war to win, Director Beard.”

  My reaction was to write a full statement of the diet of our surviving animals pointing out that the carnivores were fed on a diminishing stock of smaller fauna. I asked Beard to sign it and sent one copy to the Ministry, and another to the news sheet.

  “I don’t see why we need bother with that rot.”

  “Have you seen some of the crowds that have collected lately, Beard? Have you witnessed any clashes with the police?”

  “My dear Carter, you seem suddenly to have turned into a politician. We’ve got a hard job on here without all this political speculation.”

  “It isn’t political speculation. I want you to send this notice in the rather vain hope of undoing the effect that that poisonous little piece may have had on a lot of angry, bewildered people who read it, and on any loose Uni-Europeans still not imprisoned who are out to find a cause for fomenting trouble. In fact, I doubt if we can do anything to counteract its effect. For that reason I want you to request a special police guard for the Gardens.”

  Beard said, “Oh Lor’!” but not this time in the calculated surprise that I had come to recognize, but with genuine alarm.

  “I don’t think we can do that,” he said, “after all it’s difficult enough to get the specimens away to the storage plant against official orders without surrounding ourselves with police. Do you really think anyone would take any notice of that column you’ve shown me? I should never think of reading that kind of stuff.”

  “There are some millions of people in this city who will have read it. If only a few hundred decided to demonstrate against us we should be in a very unpleasant position.”