The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (10 page)

Valerie Jennings watched her turn the corner and immediately regretted not having asked her to bring back a Chelsea bun from the high street bakery. Despite her patronage, she had long lamented their offerings, and had once even boycotted the establishment when she noticed two French tourists looking into its windows and discussing whether its wares were for the purpose of plugging holes. But eventually she relented, defeated by patriotism and necessity.

After labelling a yellow canoe, she took hold of one end and dragged it through the office, shuffling backwards in her flat black shoes, uttering a string of profanities. Eventually, she managed to slide it onto the bottom shelf of the nautical section. Standing up, she arched her back, then made her way to the original Victorian counter and noted down the shelf number in an inscrutable code in one of the ledgers.

It was the only office in the whole of London without a
computer, the introduction of which the two women had refused with a steadfast obstinacy. When, five years earlier, they were informed that the unfathomable machines were to be installed, both immediately offered their resignation with the freaky concurrency of twins. Then, like two circus curiosities, they demonstrated their encyclopedic knowledge of every item stored on the meticulously numbered shelves, including on which Tube line they had been abandoned.

Their invincible memories were not, however, enough to dissuade the authorities from accepting their resignations until an attempt was made to follow the logic of the cross-referencing in the ledgers. The antique code, invented by clerks to make themselves indispensable, had been handed down from Victorian times, when the office was established to handle the onslaught of muffs and canes left behind on the breathtaking new transport.

As soon as management realised what they were up against, one of them filled his pockets with barley sugar and visited the only other staff still alive who had worked in the antiquated office. He found the pair propping each other up in the sitting room of an old people’s home, covered in a coat of dust. But despite the joy of an unexpected visitor, and one with such treasures in his pockets, nothing could persuade them, when the mist of senility temporarily parted, to give up the key to the code that had ensured them a job for life. All attempts at modernisation were therefore abandoned until the next change of management, which, despite renewed tactics, always failed as emphatically as its predecessor.

Arriving back at her desk, Valerie Jennings reached into her black handbag and returned a novel to its place on one of
the bookshelves. Each volume she borrowed was brought back to the office the next day lest its owner arrive to claim it. There it would remain until she slipped it back into her bag again on leaving. And, once at home and installed in her armchair with the pop-up leg rest, she would rampage through the pages, intoxicated by the heady fumes of fantasy.

On hearing the Swiss cowbell, she brushed away a kink of hair that had escaped from its mooring, pushed her glasses up her nose, and headed back to the counter. On the way she tried to open the safe, as was the office custom. But it remained as closed as the day it had been discovered on the Circle Line five years ago.

Turning the corner, she found Arthur Catnip partially obscured by a bunch of yellow roses. It was the second bouquet he had bought her. When he found the shutter closed the first time, his courage instantly abandoned him and he fled to the street. He offered the flowers to the first woman he encountered, but she, along with the eleven after her, rejected the gift in the common belief that all fellow Londoners had the potential to be psychotic lunatics.

Flowers were not the only gift the ticket inspector of limited height had bought for Valerie Jennings. Recognising her weakness for literature on account of her habit of reading the back of each novel he handed in, he scoured the capital’s second-hand bookshops for something to give her pleasure. Ignoring the bestselling paperbacks, he eventually came across the work of the obscure nineteenth-century novelist Miss E. Clutterbuck. Skimming the pages, he found that the female protagonist who featured in all of her work was graced with stoutness, a fearsome intellect, and a long line of suitors of
varying heights. Never once did a tale end without the heroine having discovered a new country, invented a scientific theory, or solved the most fiendish of crimes. It was only then that she would retire to her parlour with a bowl of rhubarb and custard to consider her numerous marriage proposals, surrounded by love tokens of yellow roses. Arthur Catnip bought all the novelist’s work that he could find, and would arrive at the original Victorian counter with his latest musty, cloth-backed purchase, claiming he had found it in a carriage. Valerie Jennings’s face would immediately light up at the prospect of another installment. And she would gaze with unfettered anticipation at the colour plates of the fleshy heroine throttling a serpent in a newly discovered land, introducing her latest invention to awed gentlemen in Parliament, or stepping out with one of her elegantly mustached admirers, a number of whom were of inferior height.

Suddenly finding himself in the presence of Valerie Jennings while holding the flowers of choice of Miss E. Clutterbuck’s suitors, Arthur Catnip was unable to speak.

“How lovely!” she said, peering at the bouquet. “They must have been for someone special. Where were they left?”

Panic rattled him, and Arthur Catnip found himself uttering the three wretched words that he spent the following week regretting.

“The Victoria Line.”

REV. SEPTIMUS DREW CROSSED THE COBBLES
on his way back from the chapel, where he had waited yet again in vain for the woman who had unsettled his heart. As he approached
his front door, he looked around hoping to spot her, but all he saw were the first of the loathsome tourists who had started to seep into the Tower. As he reached into his cassock pocket for the key, he noticed that these visitors were not in fact the first, as there was someone already sitting on the bench next to the White Tower staring straight at him, her knees clamped together, and short gunmetal hair lifting in the breeze. Instantly he recognised the chairwoman of the Richard III Appreciation Society. For months she had been trying to persuade him to become a member, her passion for the maligned monarch inflamed by the gasoline of unrequited love for the clergyman. Fearing that she was going to try and convince him yet again of the injustice of the King’s reputation as a hunchbacked child slayer, Rev. Septimus Drew quickly unlocked his door and closed it behind him.

He made his way down the hall to his bachelor’s sitting room, where he spent more time than he cared to. Avoiding the unruly spring, he sat down on the sofa, a relic from the former chaplain, along with the rest of the mismatched furniture. Picking up a biography of Jack Black, rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Queen Victoria, he started to read. But he soon found his mind wandering after the woman who had failed to return to the chapel. His gaze settled on the family portrait on the mantelpiece taken on Christmas Day, when his six sisters had come to his home for lunch with their husbands and numerous children. As his eyes ran along the familiar faces, he tasted the bitterness of failure for being the only one who still wasn’t married.

His nose still invaded by the smell of rat droppings from the chapel, he picked up a bottle of Rescue Remedy from the
side table and released two drops onto his tongue. His belief in the mystical powers of the blend of five flowers, and the other more lunatic offerings distilled by the druids of alternative medicine, was as strong as his belief in the Holy Spirit. As the chaplain advanced towards middle age, he had begun to grab all the defences against ill health he could find, filling his bathroom cabinet with the latest tinctures and potions brewed for the worried well. For he was firmly of the conviction that the body was more susceptible to disease without the presence of love to warm the organs.

The belief was not without its foundations, however unstable. He had watched his elderly mother, the colour of porridge, lying in a hospital bed for months, while the entire family was convinced that she would meet her maker at any moment. It was such a foregone conclusion that the music for the funeral had been chosen, and the florist put on standby for the approaching calamity. With her sheet pulled up to her whiskered chin, Florence Drew spoke of nothing other than joining her husband in heaven. Her only fear was that he would fail to recognise her on account of the disease that had infiltrated her body.

One night the man in the opposite cubicle, who had never received a visitor, got out of bed and came to sit on the grey plastic chair next to her. Switching on the night-light, George Proudfoot reached into the pocket of the new dressing gown that would be his last, pulled out a paperback, and started reading to her simply to hear his own voice before he died. He returned each night, but never once did the widow acknowledge his presence.

When, one evening, he failed to arrive, she called out to
him, unable to bear the thought of dying without knowing the ending. George Proudfoot, by now so close to death he was barely able to speak, eventually made his way to the grey plastic chair. With the hermit’s voice that was all that was left to him, he proceeded to make up the dénouement, no longer able to read. The twist was so ingenious that Florence Drew immediately asked for another tale, and every night he arrived with his dose of storytelling. The widow would lie hypnotised, her head turned towards him, unable to take her eyes off his lips for a minute. Depending on the nature of the tale, her fingers, twisted like hazel by age, would grip the top of the sheet with dread, or reach for it to dry the tears that cascaded onto her pillow.

Suddenly, she no longer looked forward to death, as George Proudfoot always left the ending to the following night, too weak to complete a whole story in one sitting. He also stopped praying that he would be taken as swiftly as possible, as he wanted time to think up the endings, which he was as eager to know as she was.

One night, after several weeks, he straightened the top of Florence Drew’s clutched sheet and planted a kiss on her forehead before returning to bed. The footnote to their ritual continued after every visit. The widow’s colour returned with such force that the florist was stood down, and blood tests were repeated three times to check their accuracy. It wasn’t long before her heartbeat started to stampede out of range again, this time in the opposite direction, sending her monitors shrieking. Eager medical students formed a queue at the end of her bed to witness the patient who was seized by the mania of love.

Eventually, the staff decided it was such a hopeless case nothing could be done, and the chaplain’s mother was discharged, along with George Proudfoot, who was just as badly afflicted. The pair moved into opposite rooms in a nursing home, their doors left open so they could continue their nocturnal courtship, and never once did the man’s imagination fail him. They lived in such a state of bliss they became the envy of the young nurses, whose romances were always in tatters.

When, eventually, Florence Drew died, George Proudfoot followed within minutes. Both had left instructions to be buried in the same coffin, as neither could bear to be parted from the other even in death. Her six daughters opposed the request, but Rev. Septimus Drew insisted that the couple’s instructions be carried out, as the holy state of love wasn’t to be meddled with. And the couple were lowered into the ground together, the first time they had lain in each other’s arms.

BALTHAZAR JONES SAT
in the small black hut next to the Bloody Tower, no longer able to feel his toes. He had been unable to use the three-bar electric fire that usually acted as defence against the cold from the open hatch door. For, several moments after turning it on, he had been engulfed by the putrefying smell of bacon fat, a result of the Yeoman Gaoler’s second breakfast the week before.

It had been a busy morning for the Beefeaters as an unfathomable dry spell had encouraged the tourists to wander round the monument instead of sheltering in the towers, and few could resist the urge to pose them a question of infinite
idiocy. Balthazar Jones had already been asked in which tower Princess Diana had been kept following her divorce, whether he was an actor, and if the Crown Jewels, which had been on public display at the Tower since the seventeenth century, were real. These had come on top of the usual enquiries that came every few minutes regarding executions, methods of torture, and the location of the lavatories.