The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (14 page)

THE RAVENMASTER TOUCHED THE BRIM
of his hat as Hebe Jones walked past, and she nodded stiffly at him in return, her nose reddened by the cold. Once she was out of sight, he waited a few more minutes until he was certain that she had reached the Salt Tower. He then headed towards the wooden bird pens next to Wakefield Tower, barely visible for the clouds
masking the moon. But when he reached them, he simply glanced at the closed doors and carried on walking, smoothing down his pigeon-grey mustache in anticipation. Arriving at the Brick Tower, he checked behind him, then felt for the enormous key he had slipped into his pocket while in the office.

He cursed under his breath at the noise the lock made when it eventually turned, and looked behind him once more. He then pushed open the door, and shut it behind him. Flicking on his lighter for a moment to get his bearings, he made his way up the steps of the tower that had once imprisoned William Wallace. Reaching the first floor, he groped in the darkness for the door latch and entered the empty room. He looked at his watch, a present from his wife, which glowed in the gloom. Still a few minutes early, he sat down on the wooden floorboards, took off his gloves, and waited, his heart clenched with anticipation.

Eventually, the Ravenmaster heard the bottom door open and gently close again. He rubbed his moist palms on his trouser legs as the sound of heels climbing the steps echoed up the stone staircase. It hadn’t taken him long to discover the delights of the Tower Café when it re-opened. However, his appreciation had nothing to do with the menu, which horrified the Beefeaters as much as the tourists, but everything to do with the delicious new chef. He immediately forgot Ambrosine Clarke’s lack of talent, which some believed bordered on cruelty, the moment he saw the glow of her formidable cleavage as she leant over to stir what was allegedly turnip soup. Her mind enfeebled by poor nutrition, she agreed to meet him at the Pig in a Poke pub, a short walk from the fortress. Sitting on
the bar stool, she forgave him his lack of imagination regarding the choice of venue when he whispered into her ear his insurmountable appreciation of her eel pie. She forgave his repeated assertions that ravens were more intelligent than dogs when he placed a hand on her sturdy thigh and muttered exaltations about her tripe and mash. And she even forgave the fact that he had a wife when he ran the back of his fingers over her cheek, still flushed from the heat of the kitchen, and assured her that her suet pudding was better than his mother’s.

The Ravenmaster watched as the glow from a match crept its way up the wall towards him. Suddenly it was blown out, and the tower was plunged back into darkness. He listened as the footsteps approached the door, and passed slowly through the threshold. Recognising the smell of cooking fat, he got to his feet and reached for her. And when the Ravenmaster got to taste the succulent Ambrosine Clarke, he finally forgave her catastrophic cuisine.

ONCE SHE HAD LET HERSELF
into the Salt Tower, Hebe Jones climbed to the roof to take down the sodden washing. It was stubbornness, rather than optimism, that had made her peg it out that morning before going to work. Lit up by a bone-coloured moon that had momentarily broken free of the clouds, she worked her way along the line, dropping into the plastic basket the heavy clothes that reeked of damp from the Thames. As she struggled to take down the bed sheets without trailing them in the puddles, she glanced over to Tower Bridge, and she remembered having to convince Milo, when
he was still terrified of the place, that it had been old London Bridge, down the river, that had been mounted with severed heads.

When she walked into the kitchen with the basket, she found her husband sitting at the table with his head in his hands, his mustache still damp from a final swig of Scavenger’s Daughter to complete his reparation.

“Feeling all right?” she asked, squeezing behind his chair to get to the tumble dryer.

“Fine,” he replied, moving in his chair. “How was work? Anything interesting brought in?”

Hebe Jones’s mind immediately turned to the urn still sitting on top of the gigolo’s diary. “Not really,” she replied, feeding the sheets into the machine.

Once she had finished cooking supper, she reached for the two trays propped up against the bread bin. The couple no longer ate at the kitchen table in the evening, as neither could stand the silence that sat like an unwanted guest between them. After serving out the mousaka, a recipe passed down generations of Grammatikoses which she had hoped to teach Milo, she carried the trays to the living room and placed them on the coffee table in front of the settee. It was there that she found her husband again, dressed in a pair of ancient trousers with a hole at each pocket from the weight of his hands. They ate with their eyes on the television, rather than on each other. As soon as they had finished, Balthazar Jones got up to wash the dishes, which he no longer left until the end of the evening as it gave him an excuse to leave the room. Once he had finished, he stepped over Mrs. Cook and headed for the door to the staircase.

“What do you think Milo would have looked like now?” Hebe Jones suddenly asked as he raised his hand to the latch.

He froze. “I don’t know,” he replied, not turning round. After closing the door behind him, Balthazar Jones made his way up the spiral staircase, the scuff of his tartan slippers amplified by the ancient stone that surrounded him. Arriving at the top floor, he felt in the darkness for the handle and pushed open the door to the room that his wife never entered, as the chalk graffiti left on the walls by the German U-boat men imprisoned during the war gave her the creeps. He switched on the light, revealing the night at the lattice windows surrounding him on all sides, and sat down on the hardback chair at the table. Picking up his pen, he started to compose his next batch of letters that he hoped would secure him a fellow member of the St. Heribert of Cologne Club. And two floors below him Hebe Jones sat alone on the sofa trying to answer her own question as the cracks of her heart opened.

T
HE DAY EXOTIC BEASTS RETURNED
to the Tower of London, Mrs. Cook’s ancient bowels defeated her. Balthazar Jones discovered the disgrace as he made his way to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning. Still seeking the courage to tell his wife about the animals’ imminent arrival, he hadn’t slept. He had hoped that the news would have reached her, sparing him the onerous task. But she remained completely oblivious. This was due, he concluded, to her having given up all social activities within the fortress, which included folding herself up into mysterious positions after one of the Beefeaters’ wives indoctrinated her into the cult of yoga.

He sat in the darkness on the side of the bath, his pajama leg pulled up to his knee as he washed Mrs. Cook’s indiscretion off his foot. He gazed out of the lattice window towards the Thames, glowing with the sparks of a new day. And, as he looked at the Tower wharf, his thoughts turned to the tale he had told Milo of when the ship bearing England’s first ostriches arrived, courtesy of the Dey of Tunis, the North
African ruler, in the eighteenth century. He and his son had been collapsed on deck chairs on the lawn by the White Tower, the loathsome tourists long since locked out for the day. After handing him a glass of lemonade, the Beefeater told the boy how the curious crowd that had gathered when the vessel docked at the fortress recoiled with dread as two giant birds stalked down the gangplank, shook their dusty behinds, and released a volley of evil-smelling droppings.

The Londoners quivered at the sight of their hideous two-toed feet, he continued, and gasped when a beaming crew member held above his orange turban a white egg almost the size of his head. The onlookers’ horror was complete when the birds fluttered their long, lustrous eyelashes at the crowd and lunged their pitifully small heads at the nearest bystanders to snatch a pearl button and a clay pipe, which were immediately swallowed. The pair were swiftly housed in a roofed pen to prevent them flying away. But it wasn’t long before one of them was dead, having swallowed too many nails fed to it by an eager public convinced of the rumour that the creatures could digest iron.

Milo listened in silence, gripping the sides of his seat as the story unfolded. Afterwards he kissed his father on the cheek and ran off to ride his bike around the moat with the other Tower children. Balthazar Jones didn’t give the ostrich tale another thought until two days later, when they rushed Milo to hospital white with pain, and the doctor tapped his pen on the X-ray of the boy’s twisted gut, indicating the edges of what was unmistakably a fifty-pence piece.

BALTHAZAR JONES ROLLED DOWN
his pajama leg and returned to bed. Convinced his wife was safely settled on the seabed of slumber, he turned his head towards her and muttered that not only was the Tower about to have a new menagerie, but that he had been put in charge of it. Satisfied that he had finally done his duty, he turned away and closed his eyes. But Hebe Jones immediately rose to the surface of her sleep with the thrust of a sea serpent.

“But you know how much I hate animals,” she protested. “Putting up with that geriatric tortoise has been bad enough, and I only did that because you insisted that she was part of the family.”

The argument only came to an end when Balthazar Jones got up to go to the lavatory again, where he remained for so long battling against the obstinacy of constipation that Hebe Jones fell asleep.

When the shriek of the alarm woke them several hours later, they got dressed on either side of the bedroom in silence. Neither had breakfast so as to avoid having to sit at the kitchen table together. And when they eventually bumped into each other the only thing they exchanged was the word “goodbye.”

After his wife had left for work, Balthazar Jones ran a clothes brush over the shoulders of his tunic and grabbed his hat from the top of the wardrobe. He drove out of the Tower headed for London Zoo, his hands clamped tightly on the wheel as he tried to concentrate after so little sleep. Sliding around next to him was his partisan, an eight-foot pike-like weapon that could gut a man in an instant. Though it was usually reserved for ceremonial occasions, Oswin Fielding had
insisted that he bring it along as the equerry wanted him to look as “Beefeatery” as possible for the press.