The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (36 page)

Passing Hebe Jones her cup, Reginald Perkins lowered his brittle frame into his chair, placed his hands on the armrests, and began to tell the tale of Clementine Perkins’s extraordinary journey.

They had first met as children while queuing for their ration of sugar just after the war. Their mothers forged a friendship as they waited, bonded by the unforeseen difficulties of suddenly having their husbands home. The youngsters were left to play with each other when the women met to swap stories about the stranger in the house whom the children had long forgotten and now had to call Daddy.

Years later, the mothers lost touch when the Perkins family moved. But the distance was not enough to fell the friendship that had developed between their offspring. Unwilling to suffer the delays of the postal service, the teenagers sent each other notes via the milkman, who, recently married himself, understood the agonies of the love-afflicted. All went well for a
while, until he started to confuse the notes given to him by the two lovers with those from his other customers. Before long housewives for miles were cursing the besotted milkman with his scribbled outpourings of devotion left on their doorsteps with the wrong order, while the lovers struggled to understand the romantic subtext of a request for an extra pint of milk.

The wedding was a small affair, and by the end of the year Clementine Perkins was pregnant. Two further children followed, and they lived a life of suburban contentment. Eventually, they both took early retirement in order to spend more time together, and their biggest pleasure was taking day trips to see England’s historical treasures. But as old age approached, Reginald Perkins was seized by a secret dread of being separated from his wife, and he would look at her in the garden from the living-room window, wondering which would be worse: dying first or second.

He still hadn’t made up his mind when he found her collapsed in the bathroom during a holiday to Spain, which they had taken to lift her spirits during the gloom of winter. He flew home in silence, his wife’s remains in his blue holdall on the empty seat next to him. For months he refused to leave their home, and no amount of begging by his children could prise him from her ashes.

One afternoon, as he was sitting in his armchair, he could no longer stomach the poison of loneliness. So he went into the kitchen, made some fish paste sandwiches, and put them into his holdall, along with the urn. He then made his way to Hampton Court Palace, the next stately home he and his wife had planned to visit.

It was the first of many places that he and Clementine
Perkins visited following her death, and suddenly his life had meaning again. But, while returning from a trip to Kew Palace, he fell asleep on the Tube, lulled by the heat and the rhythm of the carriages. When he woke, he discovered someone had taken the bag containing his wife’s remains, and he sank into a decline.

“My greatest fear was having to face her in heaven, knowing what I’d done,” he said, a tear running down his sunken cheek. “Where was it found?”

Hebe Jones put down her tea that had gone cold as she listened. “On the Central Line,” she replied. “It’s not unusual for thieves to abandon things once they realise they’re of no value to them. Why, if you don’t mind my asking, was your wife’s death not registered?”

Reginald Perkins took out a white handkerchief and wiped his cheek. “We registered it in Spain,” he said, returning it to his trouser pocket. “You don’t have to do it here as well. What am I going to do with a certificate telling me she’s dead?”

There was a pause.

“The wood’s beautiful,” said Hebe Jones.

His eyes returned to the urn. “They gave me such a wretched thing to carry Clementine home in. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in it, so I had something special made for her. It’s pomegranate wood. The fruit is a symbol of everlasting life.”

They sat in silence as the gas fire hissed.

Reginald Perkins suddenly turned to his visitor. “I think I’d better find Clementine a resting place before I lose her again. Would you care to help me?” he asked.

Hebe Jones followed him into the back garden, where he
stood, a trowel in one hand, contemplating the borders. He knelt down stiffly on his worn-out knees, and dug a hole in the earth. Picking up the urn that had spent so many weeks on Hebe Jones’s desk, he gave it one final kiss, then placed it inside, and covered it with dark, moist soil. She helped him to his feet, and he stood surveying his handiwork.

“She’ll get the sun there,” he said with a smile. When there was no reply, he turned and looked at his visitor.

“Let’s get you inside, luvvie,” he said when he saw the tear fall.

When Hebe Jones was back on the sofa, warming her fingers on a fresh cup of tea, she told Reginald Perkins about the terrible, terrible day. When she had finished, she added: “We still haven’t even scattered his ashes. We couldn’t decide where. Neither of us could bear to talk about it.”

“Where are they now?”

“Still in the back of the wardrobe.”

It was Reginald Perkins who was left holding a cup of tea that had chilled as he listened. He put it down on the table and sat back. After a while he said: “At least you’ve still got your husband. That should be some comfort.”

Hebe Jones stared at the ball of sodden tissue in her hand. “I haven’t,” she replied, and she told him how she had walked out with her suitcase and hadn’t spoken to her husband since. “What I can’t forgive is that he’s never even cried.”

The old man looked at her. “We might love each other in the same way,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean that we grieve in the same way.”

Hebe Jones looked at him through a veil of tears. “It makes me wonder whether he ever loved him.”

Reginald Perkins held up a crooked finger. “Did you ever wonder whether he loved the boy when he was alive?” he asked.

“Never.”

“There’s your answer, luvvie,” he said, lowering his hand.

SITTING IN HIS WHITE WROUGHT-IRON CHAIR,
Rev. Septimus Drew gazed out over the fortress from his rooftop garden. Through four varieties of sage ravished by winter he watched a group of tourists standing in contemplation at the scaffold site, and another wandering out of Waterloo Barracks mesmerised by the shimmering vision of the Crown Jewels. His eyes turned towards the chapel, and he thought again of what Ruby Dore had said to him in the Well Tower. Was he really fit to call himself a servant of God? It was a question that had plagued him since his literary career took off, but the transformation of the ladies, who nurtured the kitchen garden with more tenderness than they had ever shown themselves, had always chased away his doubts.

Filled with regret that his relationship with the landlady was over before it had begun, he saw himself in years to come still sitting on the sofa with the unruly spring in his melancholy bachelor’s sitting room. Unable to bear the vision any longer, he rose to his feet and trudged down the stairs. Opening the door to his study, he sat down at his desk to write a sermon. But inspiration evaded him. He got up and looked for it out of the window, then studied the floorboards that he started to pace. When it still failed to arrive, he sat in his worn leather armchair with his eyes closed, waiting for it to descend from
heaven. But the only thing that dropped was a dusty spider, its legs clutched neatly together in death. He got to his feet and stood on the singed rag rug before the hearth, gazing up at the portrait of the Virgin Mary, the brushwork of which had seduced his father into buying it for his bride on their honeymoon. But the memories of his parents’ happy marriage immediately drove his thoughts back to Ruby Dore, and his torment increased. His gaze came to rest on the white embossed invitation to the Erotic Fiction Awards, propped up on the mantelpiece. He picked it up and looked at it, the gold edging glittering in the embers of the afternoon light. In a moment of utter lunacy, which he later put down to acute stress, he took off his cassock and dog collar, put on his coat, and headed out of the Tower to buy himself a wig.

It was easier than the chaplain had imagined to transform himself into Vivienne Ventress. He had known exactly where to go, having passed the shop on numerous occasions on his way to his favourite butcher’s. The Spanish salesman, dressed in a frock that did nothing for a figure destroyed by patatas bravas, immediately came to his rescue. After picking out a shoulder-length brunette wig, the assistant riffled through his racks for something smart enough for dinner, but discreet enough not to attract attention. Rev. Septimus Drew contemplated each option with mounting horror, and refused to try any of them on. The salesman returned to his racks and with the furious, quick movements of the piqued, selected a second batch. Amongst them the clergyman spotted a plain black long-sleeved dress, which he was willing to take into the changing room. And not even the difficulty of clambering into it with his excessively long legs snapped him out of his madness.

When he drew back the curtain, his wig in place, the assistant clasped his hands together and ushered the chaplain to the mirror in the middle of the shop. Both men cocked their heads to one side and knew instantly that nothing could trump the long black frock with the charming row of pearl buttons. After broaching the delicate matter of underwear, the assistant disappeared into the back and returned with a large cardboard box. He opened it with a flourish, revealing a pair of black pumps of such colossal size an entire colony of rats could have set sail in them. By the time the assistant had finished his terrifying assault with the weapons in his make-up bag, Rev. Septimus Drew, looking at his reflection, was convinced that he looked even more alluring than the bearded Lord Nithsdale had when he escaped from the Tower in a skirt.

Wearing his heavy overcoat, he stood on the opposite side of the road to the Park Lane hotel, where the ceremony was being held, feeling the wind through his tights. When he had gathered his courage, he crossed the road with the cumbersome gait of a man not used to the feminine pitch of heels. Not daring to raise his eyes from underneath his crow’s-wing lashes, he flashed his invitation at the woman on the door and slipped into the ballroom, where the guests were already seated around tables set for dinner. Standing at the back, away from the candlelight, he refused each invitation to sit down, having caught the attention of a number of single gentlemen. As the ceremony began, he resisted the urge to offer up a prayer for victory, and resorted instead to evoking the pagan god of good fortune by crossing his fingers. With his back against the wall to ease the ache caused by his footwear, he watched as the winners were called one by one to the stage, his
only consolation being the conviction that his was the most elegant gown.

When the master of ceremonies left the stage and the waitresses filed in with the first course, the clergyman slipped out through the nearest door and found himself in the bar. He sank into an armchair and only remembered to close his legs when the waiter approached to take his order. He remained where he was for over an hour, distracted from the pinch of his shoes as he sat under the rockfall of failure. He was eventually brought round by the waiter asking him whether he wanted another drink, and he got up to go home. As he passed the door to the ballroom, he glanced in and saw that the master of ceremonies had returned to the stage.

“And now,” the man said, leaning towards the microphone, “the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It gives me great pleasure to announce the overall winner …”

Rev. Septimus Drew crept in for his final moment of humiliation. The man in the bow tie then opened an envelope, looked up, and uttered two words that sent the chaplain into a state of shock. He failed to hear the subsequent praise for Vivienne Ventress’s unique prose: the teasing chinks left for the reader’s imagination; the moralistic voice never previously heard in the genre; and her absolute belief in the existence of true love, which gave her work an extraordinary quaintness that rivals had tried to imitate without success.

It was the sight of his publisher getting to his feet to accept the award on Miss Ventress’s behalf that catapulted the chaplain towards the stage. He glided up the steps with his head bowed and received the award with a flutter of his crow’s-wing eyelashes. Despite the loud chorus of “speech!” he left the
stage without uttering a word. And he maintained his demure silence all the way to the door, through which he escaped at speed, clutching his shoes before his publisher could shake his hairy hand.