The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (34 page)

FROM UNDER HER LUSTROUS LASHES,
Valerie Jennings watched as Hebe Jones turned the corner to answer the call of the Swiss cowbell. She got to her feet, hoisted up the waistband of her floral skirt, and walked over to the bookshelves. As she searched the titles of the obscure nineteenth-century novelist Miss E. Clutterbuck for something with which to escape the world, it struck her as strange that the only ticket inspector ever to discover the books was Arthur Catnip. Her mind turned once more to the last time she had seen him: on the steps of the Hotel Splendid, where he had risen to his toes and given her a goodnight kiss.

There had been no time after work to go home and change for dinner. Instead, she had made her way to the dress section of the Lost Property Office and rummaged through the racks with frantic fingers. Eventually, she found a black frock with three-quarter-length sleeves still with a label on, which she immediately snipped off. She then hunted in the handbag section for something to match it and eventually found a black clutch with a large diamante clasp that closed with a satisfying
snap. Scrabbling through the drawer of abandoned perfumes, she deliberated over Evening Sensation and Mystic Musk. Unable to choose between the two, she decided on both, and stood with her eyes closed as the heady precipitation descended upon her in a fragrant confusion. She opened the drawer below and found amongst the necklaces a string of cream pearls. Noticing that the diamante clasp matched the one on the bag, she put it on with tremulous fingers. In front of the lavatory mirror, she released her dark curls from their usual mooring at the back of her head, and they tumbled to her shoulders.

Standing on the meticulously swept steps of the Hotel Splendid, pitched forward by the shoes that forced her toes into two red triangles, she adjusted her freshly polished spectacles as she waited. When the tattooed ticket inspector arrived, she almost failed to recognise him as his hair had been shorn into what appeared to be a crop circle.

As they entered the dining room, she saw that it was even grander than the hotel’s Victorian conservatory filled with orchids where Hebe Jones took her for lunch on her birthday. As the waiter pulled back her chair, she noticed that theirs was the only table with yellow roses. Arthur Catnip sat down opposite her and commented on how lovely she looked, and she no longer felt the humiliation of wearing a stranger’s dress that didn’t quite fit.

When their starters arrived, the ticket inspector looked at Valerie Jennings’s oysters and pointed out that one of the few things he remembered from science lessons was that the shellfish could change sex several times during its lifespan. Valerie
Jennings replied that the closest she had ever got to a sex change was going to a hospital to distribute Christmas presents dressed as Santa, and having to use the gents’ lavatory so as not to confuse the children.

As the main courses were served, Valerie Jennings glanced uneasily at Arthur Catnip’s goose and told him how one had attacked her while she was feeding the ducks in the park. The ticket inspector recalled the time when he was six and ate all the bread his mother had given him for the ducks. His brother subsequently pushed him into the pond, and the park keeper had to pull him out by his hair when he sank.

While Valerie Jennings was waiting for her Danish apple cake, Arthur Catnip mentioned that if she ever fancied getting out her Santa suit again, Denmark was the place to go, as it held an international Father Christmas convention every summer. As they sipped their dessert wine, Valerie Jennings replied that she would never go to Denmark, as they had surrendered to the Nazis after just two minutes of occupation during the war.

The couple only realised it was time to leave when the waiter approached and told them that the restaurant would shortly be closing. They stood on the immaculate steps, oblivious to the bitterness of the night as the uniformed doorman hailed them each a taxi. When the first cab pulled up, Arthur Catnip wished her goodnight, then rose several inches and planted a kiss on her lips. It sent her into such a state of rapture she remembered nothing about her journey back home.

Cursing herself for muddling the time Denmark had taken to surrender, Valerie Jennings selected a book, returned to her desk, and slipped it into her handbag. As she sat down, the
phone rang. “London Underground Lost Property Office. How may I help you?” she said in the voice of a 1930s radio announcer.

A heavily accented voice asked whether he was speaking to Valerie Jennings.

“You are indeed.”

The parson of the Danish Church explained that it had taken a bit of work, but he had managed to track down someone by the name of Niels Reinking. “I have no idea whether he’s the man you’re looking for, but I have his address. Maybe you could write to him,” he added.

“What a good idea,” she replied. “I’ve always thought it such a pity that the art of letter writing is no longer revered. What is it?”

Valerie Jennings had no intention of wasting time subjecting herself to the vagaries of Royal Mail. As soon as she put down the phone, she reached for her
A to Z
, and fetched her navy coat from the stand next to the inflatable doll.

Less than an hour later, she was standing outside an Edwardian house that rose gracefully to the sky, its front door flanked by two laurel bushes. She pressed the bell and glanced through the bay window as she waited. A blue-eyed man with a snowdrift of hair answered the door.

“May I help you?” he enquired, wiping his fingers on a rag covered in paint smudges.

“Are you Niels Reinking?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Valerie Jennings from London Underground Lost Property Office. I was wondering whether you might have lost something.”

Niels Reinking put his hands on his hips. “I’m always losing things. Usually it’s my glasses, which my wife points out are on the top of my head. You haven’t found my chequebook by any chance, have you?” he asked, looking hopeful.

“It’s actually something a bit larger than that. It’s a safe.”

He looked at her for a moment, unable to speak. “I think you’d better come in,” he said eventually.

Valerie Jennings sat on the leather sofa in the drawing room looking at the curious paintings on the walls, while Niels Reinking disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with a pot of fresh coffee, which he poured with trembling fingers, then sat back in the matching armchair. Several years ago, he explained, the house was burgled and the thieves managed to make off with the safe. He should, of course, have followed the manufacturer’s instructions and bolted it to the wall, but he had never got round to it. Although he had reported the break-in to the police, he had heard nothing about it since, and had completely given up hope of getting the safe back. “And now you say you’ve found it?” he asked.

Valerie Jennings pushed her glasses up her nose. “A safe was left on the Tube a number of years ago, and we’ve just managed to open it,” she said. “But in order to verify that it’s yours, I need to ask you what was in it.”

Niels Reinking looked at the cream rug in front of him. “Well, it was a while ago,” he said, “but I suspect there would have been some documents relating to the shipping company I once worked for. I’ve been wondering where they’d got to. There was some cash in there too, which my wife quaintly referred to as her running away fund. Needless to say we’re
still together. But I’m not bothered about any of that. What I’d like to know is whether there was a manuscript inside.”

“There was something of that nature in it,” Valerie Jennings replied.

The kiss that subsequently landed on her cheek startled her to such an extent that the coffee she was holding slopped into its saucer. Niels Reinking returned to his seat, then told her the story of the manuscript, which was of such historical significance to his home country that he had been unable to insure it. Back in the seventeenth century, one of his ancestors called Theodore Reinking had been so incensed by Denmark’s diminished fortunes following the Thirty Years’ War that he wrote a book entitled
Dania ad exteros de perfidia Suecorum
, or “From the Danes to the world on the treachery of the Swedes.” The defamed country promptly arrested him, and after many years in prison, offered him the choice of decapitation or eating his work. He made the book into a sauce, duly consumed it, and his life was spared. Once released, he returned home. But while he was thin, bearded, and foul smelling, victory was all his. The author produced from his mouldering stocking the most damning section of his work, which he had torn out and stuffed down his undergarment. The relic was highly revered by his kingdom not only as testament to the superior cunning of the Danes, but also for being part of the only book in the world ever to have been cooked and consumed, which, explained Niels Reinking, was a great source of national pride.

WHEN HEBE JONES ARRIVED
at the coffee shop, Tom Cotton was reading a newspaper on the front of which was a grainy photograph purporting to be of a bearded pig taken in the Scottish Highlands. She took off her turquoise coat and sat down, asking how his day had been.

“I had to go to Birmingham by helicopter to deliver a heart to one of the hospitals,” he said, folding his paper.

She tore open a sachet of sugar and poured it into the coffee he had ordered for her. “Whose was it?” she asked, looking at him as she stirred.

“A man who’d died in a car accident.”

Hebe Jones lowered her eyes. “At least they know why he died.” There was a long silence.

Eventually, when she found her voice again, Hebe Jones recounted that terrible, terrible day. The night before her world ended, she had gone into Milo’s room to wish him goodnight as usual. He was lying in bed reading a book on Greek mythology that had belonged to his grandfather. After placing it on his bedside table, she pulled the duvet up to his chin and kissed him on the forehead. As she walked to the door, he asked who her favourite Greek god was. She turned, looked at her son, and replied in an instant: “Demeter, goddess of fertility.”

“What’s Daddy’s?” Milo then asked.

Hebe Jones thought for a minute. “I suppose it would have to be Dionysus, god of wine, merriment, and madness. What about you?”

“Hermes.”

“Why?”

“One of his symbols is a tortoise,” replied the boy.

The following morning, when Milo still hadn’t appeared for breakfast, she walked down the spiral staircase and opened his door. “A hungry bear doesn’t dance,” she said.

When he failed to stir, she approached his bed, and gave him a gentle shake. But still he didn’t wake. She then shook him more forcefully, which was when she started shouting for her husband. When the paramedics arrived, they had to pull him away, as he was still trying to revive the boy. They followed the ambulance to hospital, the only time in her life that she had ever seen her husband jump a red light.

It was a young Indian doctor who had told them that he was dead. After Hebe Jones collapsed, she came round in one of the cubicles, where the doctor informed her that she had to stay until she was fit enough to leave. And when she returned to the Salt Tower no longer a mother, she lay on her son’s bed for the rest of the day weeping as the ashes of her life rained down on her.

An expert pathologist examined Milo’s heart to find out why he had died. When the man stood up at the inquest, he announced that in about one in every twenty cases of sudden cardiac death no definite cause of death could be found, despite a specialist having examined the heart. This was called sudden arrhythmic death syndrome. He cleared his throat and said that a cardiac arrest was brought on by a disturbance in the heart’s rhythm. In some cases such deaths were caused by a group of relatively rare diseases that affected the electrical functioning of the heart, which could only be detected in life and not post-mortem. Some had no symptoms, he said,
while others had blackouts. Some youngsters died in their sleep or on waking, others while exerting themselves or suffering from emotional stress. Before he sat down he added that twelve young people died from sudden cardiac death each week.

When the coroner had heard from all the witnesses, he raised his eyes from his paperwork and announced that Milo Jones had died from natural causes. It was then that Hebe Jones stood up and screamed: “What’s so natural about a child dying before his parents?”