by Angus Wilson
The fashionable guests began to call for order, but the Uni-European reaction to these mild interruptions was less helpful.
“Throw them out! Traitors! Throw them out!” they cried.
I was utterly disgusted by the sudden brutality of the police who literally dragged the ear-ringed woman along the ground in removing her and knocked the Norfolk gentleman down before they took him off. There were murmurs of disapproval, but these again were drowned by the Uni-Europeans shouting, or rather singing to some impromptu tune, Strawson’s ridiculous lines, and in turn these same lines were taken up ironically here and there by ‘patriot’ groups. “Till the hoopoe lies down with the grouse” resounded on every side. The Director now sat down in despair and Harmer took his place, but he was no more successful in imposing silence. Fights and scuffles broke out in various places among the crowd. Looking round, I saw that Sanderson and his old ladies had disappeared. My own aim now was to get to Martha and take her away in case there was real violence. It was thus that I never heard Blanchard-White’s famous speech calling for the revival of the Roman Circus at the Zoo; although, as I walked round the Gardens in order to reach the rostrum from the other side, I heard the deafening cheers with which the Uni-Europeans greeted each suggestion that he made for realizing his ideal of justice combined with a little fun.
To get round to the back of the platform I had to pass by the former sea lions’ pool and through the magnificent glass hall that the Italian architect had built to house my exhibition of European fauna. As I came into the vast structure I expected my footsteps to echo in the emptiness as they had the day before, but instead I was greeted by a medley of voices, male and female, shouting—”Don’t shut up the animals, let England loose!”—and there chained to various railings were half a dozen or more energetic, fresh faced young men and women. I knew how excellent my exhibition was, how much work and intelligence I had put into it, and I suddenly felt furious with these young ‘patriots’. Surely they could see that by demonstrating against the Government they were simply making it easier for Blanchard-White and his gang to get full control. I have never hated the vanity of doctrinaire opinions so much as at that moment. My favourite lines of Pope echoed through my head—”For forms of government let fools contest, Whate’er is best administered is best.” I walked through to the door at the other end with what I intended to be an expression of contempt—I doubt if I succeeded. But my expression immediately changed, for there, being frog-rnarched away by two policemen, was a familiar back view—grey short cut hair above rolls of stubbly, red neck, a baggy Cambridge blue rough tweed coat and skirt, heavy beige stockings and low heeled golfing shoes. All around were scattered leaflets. I picked up one and read, ‘Dear Colleagues, as you know I have been for over a year in prison . . .’ I threw it down again angrily, but I ran after Pattie.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” I shouted to the policemen. “Miss Henderson’s a member of our staff.”
I think they would have arrested me but for my official Secretary’s badge.
“We’ve orders to arrest anyone delivering these seditious leaflets, Sir”, the elder man said.
“I’m sure there’s a mistake. Look, Pattie,” I cried, “I’ll be along and sort this out in two twos. Don’t let them upset you.”
But her round face had grown redder than ever, “That’s all right, Simon, the more the swine lock up, the more will come flocking to us.” The policemen began to move her on, then she turned and shouted, “Anyway, you mustn’t mix up with me. You’re the Vicar of Bray.”
And now another large woman descended upon me—poor Mrs Purrett in tears.
She said, “Oh, Mr Carter, poor Miss Henderson! I think you don’t know how I love this place. But it’s not right to stay. They’ll change it. They’ll do something terrible with it.”
“For God’s sake don’t you start losing your head, Mrs Purrett, I need your services.”
“Don’t try to persuade me, Mr Carter. I’m sure you know best for yourself. But I know what’s right. Anyway you’ll find some pretty girl to work for you instead of a fat old frump like me.”
I took her hand and she pressed mine, but dropped it immediately and, bustled away. I thought of James II and his deserting family. “So big bum’s gone too,” I said to myself. I was very near to maudlin tears.
I walked on to the booths set aside for Mr Blanchard-White’s display, pondering what I could do for Pattie Henderson. He had asked for large circus tents and such we had provided; but I had no idea how he had used them. Near the entrance to a smaller tent I came on Sanderson’s two old ladies wandering disconsolately on their own. Mrs Blessington’s hat had been knocked side-ways in the crowd: she looked tipsy.
“Oh, hullo,” she said, “I shouldn’t go in there if I were you.” She pointed her thumb towards the tent. “There’s an old bear there that smells to high heaven. Isn’t the noise shockin’ everywhere too? And what a nasty crowd! I lost Mr S. If you see him will you tell him that I’ve taken Miss D. back to Wimbledon by the underground? This is no place for her.”
Miss Delaney said, “I’m blind, you see. So I can’t manage crowds very well. When I was a girl my father took me to an exhibition that was being held at Earl’s Court, I think it was, and ...”
But Mrs B. had taken her away before I heard the end of the story. I walked into the smaller tent. There in a pit dug seven or eight feet below the ground level was an old mangy brown Siberian bear. I don’t know where Mr Blanchard-White had procured it, certainly not from the Society’s collections. It was tethered by one foot to an iron stake and was disconsolately trying to shake away a cloud of flies. On the railings at the crown of the pit was a large notice which read: ‘The Russian Bear in Difficulties’. High above was suspended a large bird cage in which a miserable looking American brown eagle was trying impossibly to spread its wings. The notice here read: ‘The American Eagle taught a lesson’. The whole show was so pitiful, ‘cheap’ and ridiculous that elation soon overcame my disgust when I reflected that no movement that sank to such feeble idiocies could possibly last a week. I left the booth with the feeling that I must hang on, for things would soon come right. And there by the entrance to the huge water tank where a porpoise underwent behaviouristic tests of direction finding, stood Martha. She was flustered and hot, I could see, but I did not realize how angry.
“You’ve been in there?” she cried pointing at the bear and eagle booth. “How could you? How could you put up with anything so disgusting and vile?”
I shook with anger that, on this day, when it seemed that people of every sort—’patriots’, Uni-Europeans, police—were behaving like barbaric children, Martha should allow so feeble and tasteless a jibe against the United States to upset her. I did not then, of course, know what she had heard in Blanchard-White’s speech.
I said, “Really, Martha, don’t say you’re going to join all this hysterical nonsense. I feel ashamed of English people. We try to show something of what can be done in the zoological field, experiments of fascinating importance, and a lot of hooligans choose to make a political demonstration!”
She stared at me. “Are you going to leave this vile place now, Simon, or are you not?”
I shouted, “No, I am not. What do you think I am, a weathercock? . . .”
But I was shouting at her back. As far as her hobble skirted green and white striped silk dress would allow her, Martha had strode away.
I was stubbornly angry, but even so I would probably have run after her had I not been cut off from her by a procession of the notables coming towards the Blanchard-White tents no doubt to inspect them. Mr Blanchard-White himself was at the head chattering almost maniacally; Englander looked suddenly like an old, mummified Chinese; Harmer and Tillotson were flustered and red in the face; poor Sophie Englander, her furs thrown back on her shoulders, was panting to keep up with them and smiling in a strange fixed way which suggested that she was on the point of tears. My courage failed me; I dodged into
the Porpoise House and out at the other end to avoid them. Most of the invited guests seemed to be going home, though some were visiting research houses with a desperate air of assumed normality; the Uni-Europeans, exhausted by their efforts no doubt, were picnicking all over the grounds. I decided to follow Martha home. Near the main entrance I met Sanderson. We walked together down through the Tunnel towards the North Entrance. He was deeply distressed.
He said, “Of course, I’ve lived out of the world. But it seems terrible that people should take these views of theirs so seriously. I know I’ve been lucky in work that absorbed me here. But even if their work is dull, there’s so much to do for others everywhere, at least that’s what I’ve always found—the less fortunate, you know.”
My anger was still upon me. I said, “Perhaps these people are the less fortunate.”
“There’s always love to give out, you know.”
I remembered all the worn out old cranks whose affairs he’d managed to lose interest in and to hand on to me.
I said, “Even love needs charting with a little intelligence.”
“Yes. I suppose I’ve tended to lose sight of the shape of things to come.” He looked at me reflectively. “Of course, one wouldn’t think it, Carter. But we’re two of a kind really there. Otherwise we shouldn’t still be hanging around here.” He gave me a sad little encouraging smile. “I’m too old to find my way now. But you’ll have to do so, I expect. I hope you’ll do it with loving kindness.”
We walked out into the Regent’s Park Road. Two policemen were holding an old man up from the ground—his body sagged like a half filled sack. Some Uni-European or ‘patriot’ straggler no doubt.
“I say,” Sanderson cried, “that’s old Paperbag Peter they’ve got there.”
He ran forward so fast that by the time I had reached the group, he was already protesting.
“I should advise you not to interfere,” one of the policemen was saying, “this chap’s got to go to the vagrants’ camp. He’s on the list. Watched for three days, he’s been, and found habitually unoccupied.”
“I know him very well. We’re old pals. Aren’t we, Peter?”
The old man seemed too far gone to do more than mumble.
The policemen were getting angry, “Will you kindly mind your own business?” one said.
I took Sanderson aside. “There’s nothing you can do. You said yourself only a few days ago that this new Government measure for putting homeless people into camps was a good one.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know them. Good God, Carter, I’ve known old Peter for over thirty years. Poor old chap, he’s always been a bit of a sponger. He won’t change now.” He rushed back to the policemen and demanded, “Constable, will you let that man go?”
“You’d better be careful or you’ll get taken up yourself.”
And taken up Sanderson was, for his own answer was to hit the constable wildly on the chin. It seemed to me that I could best help by not getting arrested, so I called to him that I should go at once to the police authorities to get him released.
It was easier said than done. I telephoned to Sanderson’s old women that he would be away for the night, then I spent three hours going from one police authority to another on behalf of Pattie and Sanderson, only to learn that, following the outbreak of riots that day of which the Zoo scenes were only a part, Habeas Corpus had been suspended and Sanderson would, in all probability, not even be brought to trial. I had some hope of helping Sanderson, but Pattie’s crime, it seemed, put her outside all hope.
As one superintendent said to me, “I’m afraid your friends have been arrested on an unfortunate day. These emergency imprisonments are likely to be rather lengthy and severe. As a measure of warning, if you take my meaning, Sir. Anyone in possession of treasonable leaflets is for it. But as to this Mr Sanderson, if he holds, as you say, an important position, you might well approach any influential friends of his ... Of course, that’s purely an unofficial suggestion.” He winked at me. Like too few of the policemen that day, his heart was in the right place.
In the end I set off for Highgate to ask Englander to use his influence. It was nine o’clock by the time I reached the large Regency house across the shrubbery of which gleamed the lights of London. Only these few rich men’s houses on the heights of Highgate, I thought, were still padded and cushioned from the city, presenting so beautiful and distant a panorama, by acres of gardens and shrubbery and by miles of heathland. The butler showed me to the conservatory where the Director and his wife were taking their after dinner liqueur. The heat was sub-tropical among the banana trees and poinsettias. Sophie Englander, almost the whole of her bony back naked above a black velvet evening gown was festooned by the magenta and chocolate and almond green and white of the cypripedia, and cattleya and odontoglossa she was spraying. Among them her diamonds caught the light and gleamed like tiny reflections of the London lights below us. The Director in dinner jacket made no concession to the heat. He was bent over his snake pit; with one hand he held the forked instrument that forced open the jaws of a long snake, with the other he poised a minute glass scoop which he thrust once, then twice to take a sample of venom. The twists and coils of steel blue that on the underside turned now to ochre and now to orange seemed like some intricate straw plaiting.
“It’s very beautiful,” I said.
“Diadophis annabilis,” Englander announced, as though that explained its beauty.
He siphoned the drops of venom into a glass tube.
“You call that old snake beautiful. Look at my orchids,” Sophie cried coyly.
It struck me that they were just an old couple like any other —he with his game of racing demon, she with her crochet work.
“Well,” he said, “you weren’t very helpful today, Carter.”
“No, you let poor Emile down. But he’s come to apologize, Emile, I can see that.”
“I haven’t, I’m afraid. Apology seems irrelevant to a ghastly occasion like that.”
The Director put down his apparatus. “We don’t want any post-mortems, Carter.”
“It’s not a question of post-mortems, it’s the future.”
“The future belongs to sanity, Carter. It must do. Too much is at stake. Men with vast fortunes all over Europe have invested in the new England, they’re not going to let a bunch of maniacs run the show. No, no, the thing is simply to lie low for the moment. Besides most of it is talk.”
“That’s much too easy an attitude.”
Sophie Englander broke in, “You know Emile, this boy’s right. When that horrible little man made that horrible speech, I thought he was joking. And then we saw that poor bear pulled down by those hounds, and the eagle torn to pieces. Emile, please, please don’t go on there. You can say you are too old. My dear, we are too old.”
With his puffy white hand he patted her scrawny old sun-lamped shoulder. “You said you would help me, Sophie. Please. This will be a battle for good sense. I hope you will stand by me, Carter, too. We have only to sit tight for a while, I am sure.”
But my mind was on Martha. “Do you mean that those animals were tortured and that Blanchard-White announced it in his speech. No wonder Martha was so upset . . .”
“It was terrible,” Sophie cried, “and he promises much worse things. We are too squeamish, he says.”
“Those people’ll overreach themselves,” Dr Englander said, “only we’ve got to sit tight. Are you with me, Carter?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I’ll have to see. But that’s not what I came here about.”
I told them about Sanderson. “You must do something for the poor man,” I said.
“Poor man! The chap’s a born fool! Of course we can’t do anything. Look, Carter, I talked to Harmer and Tillotson this evening. This Uni-European scum have put a Blanchard-White in every government department, institution and local office in the country and at the moment their capers are what the mob wants. The tragedy is, of course, that if those damned fools like
Godmanchester hadn’t opposed European Federation these people would never have been heard of. However scum’s only surface stuff, it always gets blown away. Whereas money and good sense are absolutes. But the one thing I promised Harmer was that we wouldn’t on any account kick against the pricks at the moment. And we’ve got to stick to that. Sanderson’ll have to cool his heels in jail until things are better.”
He was adamant; I appealed to her. “You know what prison is like,” I said.
She looked at her husband, then she said, “Well, if he does have a bath in carbolic—No, please forgive me,” she cried, “I shouldn’t have said that. Poor man! But I can’t say anything. I must help my old Emile. I can’t say anything.”
When I saw it was no good, I turned and walked out of the hothouse, all my clothes clinging to me with sweat. Sophie Englander ran after me, tottering on her high heels.
“Give me the address of those old women. Those at least I can care for.”
I did so, and thanked her, but I could not return her smile. Later I heard that she brought Mrs B. and Miss D. to live at Highgate during all those ensuing weeks. They must have seemed a strange pair among the orchids and the pythons.
I returned home that night in a strangely mixed mood. I was ready to explain to Martha that I had not known all she did when I had responded so angrily, I was ready to apologize, to think seriously about my commitments to the future. But I was not prepared to grovel—I did not want her pity, I wanted her respect—for what I had been trying to do at the Zoo; and, for the rest, my attempts to help Pattie and Sanderson should speak for me. I was too late.
I found a note from her to say that she could not stay with me while I accepted work under such a régime. She had left the house and would join the children in California as soon as possible. She must have left in a reckless state of mind because she had taken no clothes with her. It seemed to me then as though the rift that had separated us after Bobby’s fall had only been healed because of my collapse in the Essex cottage and her consequent pity for me. I scrunched up her letter and threw it angrily against the wall. “You should extend your compassion a little further,” I shouted to the empty bedroom. She had no right to judge me so easily.