The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (15 page)

When he eventually found a parking space between the television satellite vans, he remained behind the wheel for a few moments trying to summon enough courage for the task ahead of him. But it never came, so he got out anyway, forgetting his partisan. He walked through the wrought-iron gates and stood watching as a single file of penguins waddled up a gangplank into a van following a trail of glistening fish. Once they were inside, a solitary bird stood at the door looking back towards the enclosure. The driver, the sleeves of his checked shirt rolled up to his elbows, shooed it inside, swiftly removed the gangplank, and closed the door. Suddenly the Beefeater heard the sound of slapping. He turned to see a solitary penguin following the wet footprints, rocking from side to side as it attempted to run.

“You’ve forgotten one!” he yelled.

“For Christ’s sake!” said the driver, who had already reached for the cigarettes he had vowed to give up that morning. “I knew this job would be a nightmare. It’ll have to come in the front with me. I’m not opening that door again. It’s taken me over two hours and a trip to the fishmongers to get the ruddy lot in. They’re worse than bloody kids. And I should know, I’ve got four of ’em. What’s that you’re wearing, anyway? Fancy dress or something?”

Things began to deviate wildly from what Oswin Fielding had referred to as “The Plan” when he approached Balthazar Jones and informed him that the press wanted to take a picture of him with some of the Queen’s animals. After berating the Beefeater for leaving his partisan in the car, the equerry
then herded the journalists towards the monkey house. He stopped outside the Geoffroy’s marmosets’ enclosure, seduced by the innocence of their white faces and their fluffy black ears. What he didn’t know, however, was that the creatures’ keeper had been trying all morning to entice them out of their cages in readiness for their journey to the Tower. But the longer she tried to lure them with pieces of chopped fruit, the more desperately they clung on to the bars, until she gave up and went to weep in the lavatory. When the man from the Palace introduced Balthazar Jones to the press as Keeper of the Royal Menagerie, and stood him in front of them, the marmosets displayed their most defensive behaviour yet. And the monkeys continued to flash their privates long after the most sexually depraved of the journalists had blushed to the roots of their hair.

The Beefeater escaped the cameras and went to the aviaries to make sure that the two lovebirds were being loaded into separate vans. On his way, he stopped to admire the herd of bearded pigs, in a state of ecstasy as they rubbed their behinds against their itching post, and he regretted that they belonged to the zoo rather than the Queen. Much later, when the full ramifications of his actions dawned on him, he put his gross lack of judgement down to having been seduced by their stupendously hirsute cheeks, which were even more lustrous than his colleagues’. In his defence, it seemed that the animal had been entirely complicit. For when Balthazar Jones succumbed to the temptation of an open van door, and pointed in its direction, the pig quite happily trotted inside. And it only took the Beefeater seconds to shut the door behind it, in the wholly deluded belief that no one would notice its absence.

Just as he was about to fetch the Etruscan shrew, he saw the Komodo dragon lumbering away from its terrified keeper, who was attempting to shoo it into a lorry with flaps of his handkerchief. The giant lizard came to a stop next to the gift shop and stood perfectly still, flicking its forked tongue. Balthazar Jones followed its gaze and saw Oswin Fielding tapping a box of animal feed with his umbrella, the wind lifting the remains of his hair like a palm branch. As the animal headed towards the equerry with surprising speed, the Beefeater recalled the creature’s ability to swallow a small deer whole, after which it would lie in the sun for a week to digest. It was then that he started to run.

Within seconds, the ugly reptile had thundered past the equerry towards its target of a discarded hamburger. But by then Balthazar Jones, who hadn’t run so fast since rugby-tackling a pickpocket on Tower Green with five wallets down his trousers, had built up such a speed he was unable to stop. He collided with Oswin Fielding with a force that brought both men to the ground in an instant, and resulted in the equerry’s silver umbrella no longer being splendid. It was only when both men confirmed that they were still conscious and struggled back to their feet, that the man from the Palace conceded it was a good job Balthazar Jones hadn’t been carrying his partisan after all.

The Beefeater was still mournfully inspecting the hole in the knee of his uniform when the cavalcade of vehicles began to leave for the Tower. He watched as the first van passed, a solitary penguin standing on the passenger seat looking at him through the window. He winced at the smell emanating from the second, carrying the zorilla, and then shouted as
he saw the open-topped lorry bearing the giraffes approach the exit, the top of which threatened to decapitate all four of the beasts. Six members of the zoo’s staff then stood around the vehicle holding out tantalising branches to encourage the creatures to lower their heads long enough to pass underneath the wrought-iron arch. As soon as they were safely through, the animals raised their necks again and closed their eyes in the breeze as the lorry picked up speed. Balthazar Jones waited until the final truck pulled out, then headed to his car carrying a cage bearing the Etruscan shrew. He placed it on the back seat, and lashed his partisan to the headrest to prevent disaster. Searching amongst his CDs, he selected Phil Collins’s
Love Songs
in the hope of calming his highly strung passenger. The Beefeater then started his journey back to the Tower, attracting all manner of honks and two-fingered gestures on account of his pitiful speed.

RUBY DORE KNOCKED
at the blue door facing Tower Green and stamped her feet to banish the cold as she waited for it to open. It had taken a week for the doctor to call, informing her that the test result was ready. She had spent the time feeling more and more distressed, knowing that as each bloodless day passed, the future she had dreamed of—a husband first and children later—was increasingly unlikely.

When Dr. Evangeline Moore finally appeared, the landlady searched her face, but was greeted by the inscrutability of a poker player. Ruby Dore walked swiftly along the hall to the surgery and sat down. Taking her place opposite her patient,
the doctor picked up a pen from her desk and held it with both hands in front of her. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” she said. “It’s just as you thought, you are pregnant.”

Ruby Dore remained silent.

“Is it good or bad news?” the doctor asked.

“Not the greatest, considering the circumstances,” the landlady replied, fiddling with the end of her scarf.

Once the consultation was over, she ran back to the Rack & Ruin and bolted the door behind her. She climbed the narrow wooden staircase that led to her cramped home with its low ceilings, worn furniture she couldn’t afford to replace, and smell of beer, which she never noticed.

Moving aside several books, she sat down on the only sofa she had known and closed her eyes. Immediately she saw the man she had met in the village bar while visiting her father in Spain, the white Rioja they had enjoyed, and the tumultuous hour they had spent together on the beach before she crept back to the villa, accompanied by the dawn. She thought of the woman and child whose hands he had been holding when she bumped into him the following day, and his refusal to acknowledge her. And she wondered whether he lied as much to his family as he had to her in the brief time that she had known him.

Her thoughts turned to the humiliation of having to tell her parents she was pregnant. Her mother would naturally blame her father, as she continued to do for most things despite having divorced him more than two decades ago. Her father would blame himself for not having raised his daughter well enough after her mother left, unable to bear life in the
Tower any longer. It had taken him weeks to admit to his daughter that she was gone for good. When the nine-year-old asked yet again where her mother was, Harry Dore finally gave her the answer: “Your mother is in India trying to find herself. God help her when she does.”

Opening her eyes, the landlady looked around the living room at the display cabinets containing the family collection of Tower artefacts, amassed by generations of Dores while running the tavern. She remembered telling the man about it in the bar when he asked where she lived, and he had even feigned interest. There was the Tower report written in 1598 complaining that the Beefeaters were “given to drunkenness, disorders and quarrels.” On the shelf below was the mallet used in 1671 by Colonel Blood to flatten the state crown before hiding it in his cloak during the only attempt to steal the Crown Jewels. Next to it was a piece of the cloak worn by Lord Nithsdale during his escape from the Tower in 1716 disguised as a woman.

Every piece had been researched and labelled, a project she and her father had shared. Harry Dore would recount the objects’ history with the mesmerising delivery of an oral bard, after which his daughter would print the labels in her best schoolgirl’s handwriting. But their time together had not been enough to heal the damage wrought by the years Ruby Dore had spent watching her parents serve each other their curdled devotion. Her mother had advised her to remain single. “There’s nothing lonelier than marriage,” she warned. However, Ruby Dore refused to believe her. But during her search for affection, she had found herself seeking it from the shadiest of hearts. And no matter how often she opened her
bedroom window, never once had she been touched by the moonlight of love.

HEBE JONES HAD HAD NO LUCK
with the register of deaths. She had searched it thoroughly, but all those listed under the name “Clementine Perkins” had died several decades ago. She had since put it out of her mind and got on with easier items that guaranteed the warm glow of victory, such as handbags containing their owners’ phone numbers. But the sight of the urn still sitting on her desk unsettled her.

“Valerie,” she said, looking at the brass plaque.

“Yes,” came the muffled reply. Hebe Jones turned to see that her colleague had squeezed herself into the front end of a pantomime horse, found on a bench at Piccadilly Circus station.

“It smells in here,” said Valerie Jennings, positioning herself so that she could see through the small mesh window in the neck.

“What of?”

“Carrots.”

“I need to ask your opinion about something,” Hebe Jones continued, ignoring the reply.

Valerie Jennings sat down at her desk, and crossed her matted fur legs.

“If someone died, but their death wasn’t officially recorded, what would that mean?” Hebe Jones asked.

Valerie Jennings scratched the back of her leg with a brown leather hoof. “Well, it could mean a number of things. Maybe the person hasn’t died after all, and someone is pretending
that they have,” she said, tugging on a cord, which sent the horse’s eyes shooting left. “Or maybe the person really did die, but someone wants to keep it a secret and they bribed the crematorium staff not to inform the authorities,” she continued, tugging another cord, which sent the horse’s eyes shooting to the right.

“I think you read too many books,” suggested Hebe Jones.

“Then, of course, there’s human error,” she added, pressing a switch that sent both sets of lustrous eyelashes fluttering. Standing up, she then headed towards the fridge. But just as she secured the horse’s long, yellow teeth around the door handle, the Swiss cowbell sounded. After a brief bout of wriggling and blaspheming, she found that she was firmly wedged inside. Hebe Jones got up and tried tugging on the creature’s enormous felt ears. But eventually she gave up as they started to work loose.

The bell started up again, and continued with such urgency that Hebe Jones quickly went to answer it, not even stopping to try and open the safe that had been left on the Circle Line five years ago.

When she turned the corner she found a man at the original Victorian counter wearing a navy uniform. Middle age had run its fingers through his neat, dark hair.