The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (12 page)

Milo, who had listened transfixed, asked: “But if spots are beautiful, why does Mummy always get cross when she gets one?”

“Because spots are beautiful on leopards, but not on ladies,” Balthazar Jones explained.

The following night, Milo returned to his own bed, lured by the promise of the next installment. The Beefeater sat down, saw in his son his wife’s dark good looks, and continued his tale.

In 1251 another present arrived at the Tower, this time from Norway. The polar bear and its keeper turned up unannounced outside the fortress in a small, salty boat. By then the pair, who had been travelling for months after being blown off course, could no longer abide one another’s company. Their journey up the Thames only increased their foul mood. Both had a rabid dislike of being stared at, and the hysteria caused by the sight of the white bear, the first to be seen in England, to say nothing of the comments made about the keeper’s dress
sense, brought about a monumental double sulk that grew worse as soon as they saw their ruinous lodgings within the fortress. Assuming the creature to be aged well over three hundred on account of its white fur, Henry was content to simply look at it, as if it were a rare antique.

“What’s an antique?” Milo asked.

“Something that’s very old.”

There was a pause.

“Like Granddad?”

“Exactly.”

Harald, the bear’s keeper, who would take the creature to fish for salmon in the Thames while it was attached to a rope, soon realised that no one understood him, the Beefeater continued. Nor he them. He gave up trying to communicate and spent all his time in the company of his white charge, sleeping in the animal’s pen, their quarrels long forgotten. Eventually each knew what the other was thinking, though neither of them ever spoke. At night the pen would fill with dreams of their homeland, with glinting snowy expanses and air purer than tears. When scurvy eventually claimed Harald’s life, the white bear was dead within the hour, felled by a broken heart.

When Balthazar Jones had finished, he noticed a line of tears running down each of Milo’s cheeks. But the boy insisted that his father carry on. In 1255 Henry was sent yet another animal, courtesy of Louis IX, which was also the first of its kind in England, the Beefeater continued. A number of ladies who had stopped on the banks of the Thames to witness its arrival fainted when they saw that it drank not with its mouth, but with an excessively long nose.

The King ordered that a wooden house be constructed for
it within the Tower. But despite the creature’s docile disposition and wrinkly knees, the monarch was too terrified to enter, and he would gaze at the beast through the bars, much to the hilarity of the Tower’s prisoners. It came as some relief to the King when, two years later, the animal took one final breath with its mysterious trunk and keeled over, trapping its keeper for several days before help eventually arrived.

“But why did the elephant have to die as well?” Milo asked, clutching the top of his stegosaurus duvet.

“Animals die too, son,” Balthazar Jones replied. “Otherwise there would be no animals in heaven for Grandma, would there?”

Milo looked at his father. “Will Mrs. Cook go to heaven?” he asked.

“Eventually,” said the Beefeater.

There was a pause.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Milo.”

“Will I go to heaven?”

“Yes, son, but not for a long time.”

“Will you and Mummy be there?”

“Yes,” he replied, stroking the boy’s head. “We’ll be there waiting for you.”

“I won’t be alone, will I?” the boy asked.

“No, son. You won’t.”

A
FTER MAKING HIMSELF SOME GINGER TEA
in his sorrowful teapot for one, Rev. Septimus Drew carried it up the two flights of battered wooden stairs to his study, lifting the ends of his nibbled skirts so as not to trip. The only trace of comfort in the room was a forlorn leather armchair bearing a patchwork cushion made by one of his sisters. Next to it stood a mail-order reading lamp that had taken months to arrive as the address was assumed to be a joke. Above the mantelpiece hung a portrait of the Virgin Mary, resolutely Catholic in origin, the brushwork of which had seduced his father into buying it for his bride on their honeymoon. Feeling the draught from the sash windows, the clergyman looked with regret at the fireplace that he had been forbidden from using since a coal escaped and set ablaze the ancient rag rug in front of it. It was assumed that the chaplain must have been deep in prayer for him not to have noticed the foul-smelling smoke that reeked of thousands of pairs of unwashed feet. However, the truth was that he had been in his workshop
trying to fashion a miniature replica of the Spanish Armada on wheels, fitted with fully functioning cannons.

He took off his cassock and dog collar, which he deemed inappropriate attire on such occasions, and hung them on the hook on the back of the door. His heart afloat with relish for the task ahead of him, he sat on the dining chair at the simple desk and took out his writing pad from the drawer. As he unscrewed the lid of the fountain pen that had remained at his side like a trusty sword ever since school, he read the last sentence he had written, and continued with his description of the rosebud nipple.

While the clergyman’s imagination was one of his many assets, he had never envisaged becoming one of Britain’s most successful writers of erotic fiction. When he started to pursue creative writing, inspired by the effect George Proudfoot’s storytelling had had on his mother, he had assumed that if his work were to encounter success, it would be in the mainstream market. When he finished his first novel, he sent it off to the country’s leading publishers with a silent prayer of hope. It was only after waiting eleven months for a reply which never came that he assumed that there was no interest. By then he had already penned another work. Convinced that his address at the Tower was preventing him from being taken seriously, he rented a post office box and sent out his new manuscript, his heart aflutter with the thrill of expectation. The unequivocal rejection slips that eventually arrived only served to encourage him, and when each new novel was finished it was swiftly sent off with the same benediction, uttered with closed eyes.

Just as he was about to put copies of his eighteenth work
into the post, he received a number of envelopes that his fingers detected did not contain the standard printed card of rejection. Such was his excitement, he was unable to open them for a week, and the envelopes remained on the mantelpiece, glowing more brightly than the halo of the Virgin Mary above. But when he finally worked his ivory letter-opener into their spines, instead of the offers he was expecting, he discovered letters requesting him to refrain from ever submitting a manuscript again.

For a week Rev. Septimus Drew laid down his pen. But he soon found his holy fingers reaching once more for its slender barrel, and, having exhausted every other genre, he submerged himself in the musky vapours of erotica. His chastity was his advantage as there were no experiences to limit his imagination: everything was possible. Assuming the pseudonym Vivienne Ventress in an attempt to slip under the barbed wire erected in front of him, he sent his first effort,
The Grocer’s Forbidden Fruit
, to the prohibited addresses, minus a benediction. By the time he checked his post office box, several of the publishers had sent their third letter imploring Miss Ventress to sign a six-book deal. All of them had seen a uniqueness in her work: the glinting chinks left open for the reader’s imagination; the strong moralistic tone that gave her work a distinctive voice never previously heard in the genre; and her absolute belief in the existence of true love, a theme none of her contemporaries had explored. Rev. Septimus Drew assumed a position of infinite coyness, drizzling his replies with the lustiest of fragrances as he wrote to each one turning them down. The tactic worked, as the offers were immediately raised. The chaplain accepted the highest, insisting on a
clause in the contract allowing good to triumph over evil in every plot. He kept the huge advance cheque hidden underneath the brass crucifix on his study mantelpiece. And when the royalties started arriving, there were sufficient funds for him to set up a shelter for retired ladies of the night who had been ruined by love in its many guises.

The chaplain continued writing until lunchtime, when he rose to the surface again, distracted from his forbidden romances by a sudden gust of loneliness. As he thought of the woman who had reduced him to a cursed victim of insomnia, he gazed down out of the window hoping to see her. But all he saw was the first of the day’s tourists, one of whom had just made the instantly regrettable error of trying to pet an odious raven. His mind filled with the chaste thoughts that permeated his own romantic fantasies, and he wondered whether she could ever think of him as a husband. The ambulance had already collected the sightseer by the time Rev. Septimus Drew, lost in the devastation of love, came round from his reverie. He slid open the desk drawer, put away his pad, and got up to prepare himself for an afternoon of ministry with the retired pedlars of love whose shattered souls he sheltered. He left the house holding an umbrella in one hand and a treacle cake in the other, having long ago recognised its pagan ability to comfort.

THE RAIN HAD BEEN DRIVING
against the door of the Rack & Ruin with such ferocity that it started to seep underneath it, spreading like a pool of blood across the worn flagstones. Not
that Ruby Dore noticed. The landlady, who had been alone since the lunchtime drinkers finally left, was looking into the cage at the end of the bar trying to coax her canary to sing. The bird was suffering from chronic agoraphobia brought on by its dramatic fainting fit into the slops tray. Despite her previous attempts, which had started with cajoling, progressed to bribes, and ended in threats, nothing could induce from it even the most humble of melodies. Much to Ruby Dore’s consternation, the bird was also suffering from what gut professors euphemistically called “the trots.” They had been brought on by the feast of dainties fed to it by a succession of Beefeaters to encourage it to sing, in the hope of securing a free pint. Paper napkins had been unwrapped on the bar containing crust from a steak and ale pie, leftover Christmas pudding discovered at the back of the fridge, and the remains of a Cornish pasty. But the only sound that came from its cage was an intermittent quiver of yellow tail feathers followed by an unladylike splat.

Plump lips close to the bars and her cinnamon-coloured ponytail running down her back, Ruby Dore whistled a final salvo of random notes assembled in an order that no one of musical persuasion would ever choose. But the bird remained mute. In an effort to distract herself from her failure, she set about dusting the cabinets of Beefeater souvenirs mounted on the tavern’s walls. The collection had been started by her father, the previous landlord, who had retired with his second wife to Spain, suffering from a surfeit of bearded conversation. The cabinets contained hundreds of Beefeater figurines, ashtrays, glasses, mugs, thimbles, and bells—anything on which
could be stamped the famous image of a hirsute gentleman in crimson state dress, complete with rosettes on his shoes and the sides of his knees.