The Old Men at the Zoo

by Angus Wilson

  Meanwhile Harry and his companion had forced open the lorry door.

  “Monkey!” the labourer cried. “Now that is a rare old surprise.”

  “Actually,” Harry said, “I think they’re lemurs.”

  His grandmother took charge.

  “My dear Harry, whatever they are, I’ve no doubt they can be eaten.”

  “Ah! No! Monkeys wouldn’t go down proper with my stomach,” said the man who had not spoken. “That’d be a tough little old dinner.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Palmer,” the girl said grandly, “it’s only a question of boiling the things long enough.”

  I heard a shot.

  “I don’t think I’ll shoot them all at once, Gran,” Harry said, “they’ll be fresher if we kill them as we need them.”

  “My dear boy, I don’t know what you think we’re going to keep them alive on,” she answered. He had clearly been in the habit of bringing inconvenient pets home as a child.

  I got up with difficulty and began to walk away into the darkness, shining my little hand torch before me.

  “You’re leaving your friend,” the old lady cried. I started to run.

  “Oh, let him go, Granny,” the girl said. “We don’t want to feed half London.”

  “Yes, for God’s sake, let him go, Gran,” Harry said, “who knows whether he’s the forerunner of some bacteria infected invasion from London. You heard the last warnings they sent out.”

  “In that case,” I could hear the old lady’s voice say, “you’d better get rid of this.” I ran on.

  Some little while after I had crawled into the wood, I caught my foot under the thick sprawling root of a beech and fell, striking my head against an old tree stump. The wound on my temple stung fiercely, yet I think that I did not faint, but passed out into a sudden sleep from exhaustion and hunger. I came to once when it was still dark; and then with a cruelly aching head to a pale, white misted dawn and a deafening bird chorus, yet not so deafening that I did not at once slide off into sleep again; when I woke fully the sun was hot even through beechleaves that cast a dappled pattern upon my naked thigh where I had torn my trouser leg in forcing a way through the undergrowth. Each time I had woken mysteriously to a stink of garlic, and now I could see the tightly furled white flowers and the shiny green leaves smashed and pulped by my fall. With my ball pen I dug up garlic roots here and there until I found a good sized clove, but, as soon as I had munched it, the sharpness burned my tongue and I felt sick. By pushing against the trunk of the great beech tree I managed to lever myself to my feet. For a few seconds the scene revolved before me and I thought I should fall. I leaned against the tree and then, breathing in the clear air, walked on. I heard a cock pheasant crow once, started some wood doves flapping above me, noted high up in a larch tree a squirrel’s drey, but I had no gun with me. Once too a stoat ran across my path, heard me, coiled snake like and hissed, and was gone into the bramble and the briar. Every now and again I had to cross the narrow beds of dried up streams that seemed to me in my weakness like canyons. Near one of these where the yellowish clayey soil suddenly changed to an ochre sandy surface I saw what seemed to be long used entrances to badger setts. And sure enough nearby I saw evidences of badger dung and there were flattened paths through the surrounding growth. There were no berries at that season, not even bracken fronds to be eaten. At last in a thicket of hawthorn I found a blackbird’s nest of three eggs, and fearful lest the clumsy instrument should smash the delicate shells, I punctured each with the tip of my ball-pen and eagerly sucked two delicious yolks. The third had addled and the stench alone almost made me sick. At last I chanced upon a man-made path, dry and hard to the foot from the long season of hot weather. Water avens and some late oxlips flowered at its side; behind them the brambles and briar roses seemed impenetrable. From these thickets came persistent noises of birds stirring or even, perhaps, of some animal, although it was difficult to see what animal would be on the move at that hour. The path turned sharply round a clump of elms and there before me in a clearing was a small wattle and clay cottage, thatched, its whitewashed walls pargetted with a small shell pattern. The garden was bright with early roses and oriental poppies, and at the side, above a plot of onions and potatoes some sheets hung feebly stirring in the light breeze. I could see no sign of life. I began to make my way towards its small iron gate, when, from the briars at my side, stepped a thin, sunburnt boy of about fifteen, dressed in faded blue jeans and a short sleeved flowered cotton shirt. He was pointing an old shot gun at me.

  “Keep away from here. That’ll be just bad for you, if you don’t.” He spoke with a broad Essex accent. “Mum. There’s a man.”

  A voice came from the cottage, shrill and even more broad in accent than the boy’s. “Ah! Well, he’d best keep right on walking. There’s nothing here for no one.”

  She came out—a white faced, reddish haired woman of forty in a bright blue sleeveless dress. Mother and son both had freckled arms.

  “That’s all finished,” she said, “we had the last tin of baked beans Tuesday.” I pointed to the plot of vegetables.

  “Ah! That’s what it looks like coming down to,” she said, “last we saw on the tele before that faded out was they was bringing proper tinned stuff from Norwich.”

  “By helicopter,” the boy added.

  “Ah, tinned soup, and that,” she announced, “but nothing come.”

  “I reckon old Norwich has about copped it,” the boy said and laughed.

  His mother said, “Ah, likely. Then what’s to do, eh?”

  I asked, “Haven’t you shot anything in the wood?”

  She answered for him, “Oh yes, he’s brought back pigeons and that. One time it was a pheasant, wasn’t it, Stanley? But I reckon that’s got too cunning, that knows he’s coming.” She suddenly smiled at me. “We could about do with them rabbits now, couldn’t we? He’s never seen a rabbit, have you Stanley?”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Ah, pictures’s not the same.”

  “Well I seen them anyway.”

  Their voices, hers shrill and his now falsetto now in his boots, echoed round and round my head. The pink daisies on his shirt and the bright blue of her dress pulled tight across her large breasts glared in my eyes, fused, drew apart, and fused again. The poppies blazed in fires of scarlet, pink and flame. The fire flared up at me, licked my face and I fell.

  When I came to I was lying on what had once been called a contemporary patterned sofa. I was aware first of its chocolate material with a design in pistachio green thread. Then I smelt hyacinths and moving my eyes with pain, I saw the tightly twined blue locks, now half dead, above a paper frilled flower pot. I turned my head and there was the boy, holding my coat with one hand, and going through its pockets with the other. I closed my eyes.

  “You oughtn’t to do that, Stanley, that’s not right.”

  “That’s what they do on the tele.”

  “Well, that don’t make it right.”

  “Well, it don’t make it wrong, do it? Ah and that might be this travelling sickness that was on the tele that come from gas,” the boy looked very knowing. “I reckon we ought to get rid of him,”

  The woman said in a very final tone, of resignation and of determination, “You can’t get rid of a sick man, Stanley. That wouldn’t be right.”

  I thought that I should scream if I had to live with this cross talk act for long. I asked for water.

  “Ah! Now the water all went when the soldiers was at Chelmsford.” I could make no sense of this. “There’s well water,” the woman added. “Get him a glass of that, Stanley. But there’s nothing to eat. That all went Tuesday when we had the last tin of baked beans.”

  I did not believe her. I said, “I think I could show your son where to get food in the wood.”

  “In the wood?”

  “Yes. I’m fairly sure there are badgers, but I’m too weak to get there unless you can find me something to eat first—the potato
es in your garden?”

  The boy came back with the glass of water.

  She said, “‘E says there’s badgers in the wood.”

  “Ah, that might be, Mum.”

  He sat down. The woman turned and hit the television screen.

  “Still nothing out of that thing.”

  “I reckon old Norwich has copped it.”

  “Ah! That’s what too.”

  I said, “You could live off badger meat for a long time. It’s like pork.”

  It took them a lot of talk to decide that my scheme was sensible. I lay back and closed my eyes. I was woken by the woman shaking me.

  “Here,” she said, “that’s a last tin of steak. Or pretty well. What’ll we do after that?”

  The boy said, “That could be something to have them badgers, but that needs a lot of digging out, don’t it? I reckon we haven’t got the strength to dig.”

  I asked the time. “That’s after five now.”

  “Wake me at half past eight and I’ll take you there.”

  She woke me with a plate of tinned steak and diced vegetables.

  She said, “That’s seven o’clock.” Then she pointed to two tins of soup on the table. “That’s all there is and that’s the truth.”

  This time I believed her. The food brought back my stomach pains; but, with the sleep, I felt stronger. I did not intend to waste my energy by walking to the wood before dark. As the woman and her son ate, I read an old newspaper.

  But at last the light began to fade, and it was time to set out on our errand.

  We stood before an old ash tree with the breeze running in our faces. A hundred yards away across a patch of dying oxlips beaten down to form a path for the animals, I could see the openings in the yellowish sandy soil. The boy had a lucky and remarkable power of stillness; because of my stomach pains I found the wait more difficult. But we had not to wait long, not more than twenty minutes. First a snout, then a flash of black and white, then a heavy boar badger trotted out and stood sniffing the wind. He moved across to the midden. A few minutes later, came, more cautiously, his mate. She was followed by two young cubs who began at once to snap and roll over each other in mock fighting. The sow joined in the play, and soon even the old boar was sliding and rolling with his family. This was the happy family play whose healing innocence I had been cheated of again and again in the days of watching at Stretton. I nudged the boy’s arm. He fired and the boar fell, screeching, on his side. Instantly the mate was down the sett, followed by her cubs. But before they had reached the entrance, the boy had fired again and one of the cubs lay dead. The boy walked over to where the old boar lay, only grunting now; he knocked it on the head with the butt end of his rifle, half crushing its skull. Even together we had not the strength to carry the body back. The boar must have weighed around forty pounds. So, for the next hour, in the clear light of the now risen moon, I hacked away at the carcass; and the boy and his mother made journeys to and from the cottage, carrying badger joints. The cub required only the one journey.

  It was long after ten when we had done; and yet, I knew that until I had washed the slimy blood from my hands I could not sleep. To my surprise neither the woman nor the boy would let me carry the pails of well water to the detached bath house. Though they still talked to one another in endless desultory chatter, they seemed somehow to regard me as a part of their life there.

  “That was a right little old job we had to do,” the boy said.

  “Ah, that’s brought us together like,” the woman added.

  I tried to smile, but I felt I must be grimacing like the third murderer. After my wash, they settled me, dressed in some pyjamas that had belonged to her ‘old grandad’, on the sofa. They wrapped me in blankets, but I spent a weary night, journeying to and from the outside privy. At last towards six, I fell into a heavy sleep to awake to a smell more nauseating than I ever thought could be. Mother and son were feeding avidly at the table.

  “That’s proper good that old badger of yours,” the boy said.

  “Ah, you’d best have a piece of that,” the woman told me.

  Nausea fought with hunger in me. I sat up on the sofa, conscious of the ludicrous effect of the ill-fitting pink candy striped flannel pyjamas. But neither of them laughed. The woman brought me a plate of what appeared to be pinkish, greasy, fried pork.

  “That’s real good,” she said. “That’ll put body in you.”

  I cut a small piece, and, to my surprise, it tasted rich and delicious. In a short while I had eaten all but a small piece of browned fat. I speared it with the fork, felt its grease against my lips, and then suddenly I vomited. So violent were the spasms that it seemed as though my body were rejecting all its vital organs. I spewed a flash of light vermilion blood. The room span round. My head fell back on the cushions and everything became dark, became nothing.

  VII

  THE HOOPOE LIES DOWN WITH THE GROUSE

  SOPHIE ENGLANDER, whose maternal affection for me seemed to increase every week, signalled to the butler to fill up my glass again.

  “It came direct from Paris for Emile. Two cases of burgundy. In the French diplomatic bag. You see, they’re making a fuss of him in his old age. You must drink it up, Mr Carter. It’ll give you body. With the winter coming on, you need body. And you don’t wear enough. After your long illness you mustn’t take risks. You’re very pretty, my dear,” she said to Martha, “but that won’t keep him warm. Or at least not altogether.”

  Her heavily made-up old face creased and cracked with the sentimental chuckle that was now so familiar to my ear. Then, from laughing she began to wheeze and cough until her cheeks, usually a sort of dull orange from the peculiar colour of her make-up, turned almost as crimson as her dark hennaed hair. She signalled to the butler to fill her tumbler with water and she drank it in sips, still laughing until drops of sweat stood out from the thick powder on her rather bony bare shoulders and dripped down among the diamonds and sapphires of her neck collar. Though Martha was still guarded with them both, I was pleased to note that she liked the old woman enough to say, “Well, Mrs Englander, I had no idea that Simon and I were that funny as a couple.”

  Mrs Englander’s dark eyes looked worriedly through a mist of blue eye shade and mascara for a moment to see if Martha was offended, then, when she saw that it was a joke, she called down to her husband.

  “Emile, these young people are trying to make me die of laughter. You’re a naughty girl,” she said to Martha, “but all the same, my dear, you must feed that husband of yours. He’s eaten nothing this evening. Juicy steaks and red wine. That’s what he should have.”

  “Well, we could kill him off that way, certainly,” Martha said.

  “Kill him! Nonsense, don’t you listen to those doctors. Red meat never killed anyone. Emile’ll get them for you. He knows where.”

  I saw Martha’s neck tauten, as it had already done at the sight of the huge saddle of mutton cooked French gigot fashion, that had appeared on the carving table.

  I said, “Dear Mrs Englander, I don’t think I should be happy to eat porterhouse steaks, even if I were allowed to, so long as food in England is in such short supply.”

  I hoped that my intervention would take the edge off Martha’s anger. And so it proved.

  “Many people who come to the Relief Office never see meat at all, Mrs Englander,” she said.

  “Oh, my dear, I know it’s terrible.”

  I liked the old woman too much to let her off lightly. “There’s a lot of real starvation you know.”

  She cried, “Oh my God! Is there? That’s terrible. You see, Emile always keeps sad things from me. He’s always spoilt me terribly. You hear that, Emile? Mr Carter says there’s real starvation. No more saddles of mutton, my dear. Not even for you, Herr Kâstner,” she called down to the Second Secretary from the German Embassy, a frequent guest there. “No, something light—that’s what we’ll have to live on. But not eggs because they make Emile look quite yellow. You would be g
etting jaundice, Emile, and then we’ll have to send you to Vichy. Oh, how I hate it there. So dull, though the pastries are very good . . .”

  Dr Englander cut into his wife’s stream. “Now, now, Sophie. Don’t you take any notice of their nonsense. We shan’t be going to Vichy and we shan’t be having anything light. I’ve got a hard job of work to do and I need a proper diet to do it on.”

  He looked indeed plumper and more comfortable than I remembered him; like a tortoise in his thick protective covering of woollen waistcoats and a little padded satin quilt coat that he had put on over his dinner jacket because of draughts, though no one else could feel them. But central heating was not available then, even for the Englanders, so he was sure there must be some draughts.

  “Anyway all this distress, it’s bound to happen after a war. But the Government’s got it in hand, don’t you worry your head, Mrs Carter, it’s much too attractive.”

  Sophie Englander whispered with delight, “Emile loves a pretty girl. Food and pretty girls! I don’t think he could do without them. And his old snakes.”

  “I’ll tell you why your husband’s got to put on weight and get really well. It’s because I need him back with me to put the Zoo on its feet again. There’s no use in our French friends and our German friends sending us valuable animals every day as they are doing,” here he raised his glass to Herr Kastner, who returned the salute, “so long as there’s nobody but an old man like me to run the whole place. That’s my interest in Carter’s health—selfish.”

  Sophie was delighted with this, her old red head on which she had put some sort of sapphire ornament, bobbed about, as she cried, “Oh, yes, that’s it. Selfish, nothing but selfish.” She whispered to Martha, “Emile’s teasing you.”

  “As a matter of fact, staff shortage is one of our worst difficulties, Harmer.”

  He turned to a short, fat little man, who said, “You’ll get your staff, Englander, don’t you worry. Now we’ve got a government that has foreign confidence, the whole prosperity cycle so far as businessmen are concerned, will start up again soon enough. And once that happens your technicians and scientists will start flocking back to the country. And we’ve got sensible men at the head of labour now too, chaps like our friend Tillotson here who will pool their labour with Europe, not kick against the pricks.”