The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (7 page)

WHEN HEBE JONES HAD RECEIVED THE CALL
from the undertakers to say that Milo’s remains were ready for collection, she instantly dropped the vase of flowers that had just arrived from Rev. Septimus Drew. Once Balthazar Jones had swept up the glass from the living-room carpet, he fetched the car keys from the hook on the wall and they made the journey in brittle silence. Balthazar Jones didn’t put on Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” so he could play the air drums to the music while they waited in traffic, nor was there anyone on the backseat joining in with his father at the best bit. The couple only spoke when they arrived, but neither of them could say the purpose of their visit, and all they offered were their names. The receptionist continued to look at them expectantly, and it wasn’t until the funeral director came out that the awkwardness ended. But it started again as soon as he presented them with the urn, as neither of them could bear to take it.

On their return to the Salt Tower, the heady fumes of white lilies flooding the spiral staircase hit them. Hebe Jones, who had clutched the urn while sitting in the passenger seat in a private state of agony, placed it on the coffee table next to Milo’s kazoo on her way to the kitchen to make three cups of tea. The couple sat on the sofa in suffocating silence, the third cup abandoned on the tray, neither of them able to look at the thing on the table that induced in them both a secret wish to die. Several days later, Hebe Jones noticed that her husband had placed it on the ancient mantelpiece. The following week,
unable to bear seeing it any longer, she put it in the wardrobe until they had decided upon Milo’s final resting place. But each time one of them brought up the subject, the other, suddenly caught off guard, had felt too bruised to reply. So it remained at the back of the shelf behind Hebe Jones’s sweaters. And every night, before turning off her bedside light, the mother would find an excuse to open the wardrobe doors and silently wish her child goodnight, unable to abandon the ritual she had performed for eleven years.

F
OR WHAT HE CONSIDERED
to be very good reasons, Balthazar Jones decided not to tell his wife about the visit from the equerry with the splendid umbrella. When, several days later, at the demonic hour of 3:13 a.m., Hebe Jones sat bolt upright in bed and asked, “So what did the man from the Palace want?” the Beefeater muttered with the colourful breath of a man still embedded in his dreams that it was something to do with the drains. He instantly regretted his reply. Hebe Jones remained in the same erect position for the following eleven minutes as she pointed out that while their lavatory may very well be connected to an historic garderobe, the monstrous smell of petrified effluent left by centuries of prisoners that hung like a fog in their home whenever the drains blocked was not protected by any royal decree.

The Beefeater had considered Oswin Fielding’s proposal to be utter lunacy. Once the tourists had been locked out of the fortress for the day, he spent the rest of his afternoons collapsed on his blue-and-white-striped deckchair on the battlements engulfed in the creeping darkness, hoping that royal
enthusiasm for the menagerie would wane. While he didn’t suffer from his wife’s natural horror of them, animals offered little in the way of interest for him. The one exception was Mrs. Cook, whom generations of Joneses had completely forgotten was a tortoise. She was regarded more as a loose-bowelled geriatric relative with a propensity for absconding, such a protracted habit that nobody ever realised she had vanished until weeks later, as her sedate trajectory across the room was still burnt on their memories.

It was only after being summoned to the office in the Byward Tower that the Beefeater realised that being in charge of the Queen’s beasts might in fact be to his benefit. He pushed open the office’s studded door to see the Chief Yeoman Warder sitting behind his desk within the cold, circular walls, his fingers, as soft and pale as an embalmer’s, laced over his stomach. He looked at his watch with irritation and then gestured to a seat. Balthazar Jones sat down, placed his dark blue hat on his lap, and held on to its brim with both hands.

“I’ll get straight to the point, Yeoman Warder Jones,” the man said, his grey beard clipped with the precision of topiary. “Guarding the Tower and capturing professional pickpockets are very much part of the job for which thousands of retired British servicemen would give their back teeth, if they still had any, to be selected.”

He leant forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “You were one of our best when you first arrived,” he continued. “I remember the time you rugby-tackled that chap on Tower Green. He had five wallets on him at the time, if I recall correctly. I know things haven’t been easy, what with that dreadful business with the little chap. But time has moved on. We can’t
afford to have a weak link. Let’s not forget the Peasants’ Revolt, when all those hoodlums stormed the place.”

“That was back in 1381, sir.”

“I’m well aware of that, Yeoman Warder Jones. But the point is that the Tower is not infallible. We must be alert at all times, not gazing around the place enjoying the view.”

The Beefeater looked through the arrow slit behind the Chief Yeoman Warder’s head as he remembered the last time he had been called into the office. On that occasion the man had bothered to get to his feet when he came in, and immediately offered him his condolences. “I know exactly how you feel,” he had insisted. “When we lost Sally we were just devastated. She had such an extraordinary character. One of the most intelligent dogs we’ve ever had. She’d been with us for nine years. How old was the little chap again?”

“Eleven,” Balthazar Jones had replied. He then looked at his hands, while the Chief Yeoman Warder’s gaze fell to his desk. The silence was eventually broken with an offer of more time off work, which Balthazar Jones refused, insisting that the three days had been sufficient. He left to walk the battlements, hoping to find a reason to live.

“ARE YOU LISTENING,
Yeoman Warder Jones?” the Chief Yeoman Warder asked from behind the desk.

The Beefeater, his cloud-white hair flattened from his hat, turned his gaze to him and asked: “How’s the new dog?”

“She’s fine, thank you for asking. Top of the obedience class.”

Balthazar Jones’s gaze returned to the view through the arrow slit.

The Chief Yeoman Warder studied him with a frown. “I don’t think you realise that your future here hangs in the balance. I suggest you sit there for a while and think things over,” he said, getting up. “This can’t go on.”

The Beefeater jumped as the door slammed. He looked down at his hat and slowly wiped away the raindrops that shone like diamonds on its crown. Too defeated to get to his feet, he stared ahead of him. His mind turned once more to the night Milo died and his terrible, terrible secret. When his stomach eventually settled, his eyes dropped again to his hat, and he wiped it with the tips of his fingers, though nothing was there. Standing up, he put it back on, tugged open the door, and returned to duty.

By the time the letter arrived from Oswin Fielding asking him to come to the Palace to discuss the new menagerie, Balthazar Jones had convinced himself that his new duty would protect him from losing his job, which had given him a reason to get up in the morning when the weight of remorse pinned him to the sheets. He slipped the letter into his tunic pocket, where it remained hidden from his wife, along with the crumbs from the biscuits she forbade him to eat to safeguard his heart.

ON THE MORNING HE WAS DUE
to meet the Queen, the Beefeater sat on the bed in his dressing gown waiting for the final echo of his wife’s footsteps as she descended the spiral
staircase. He scurried to one of the lattice windows to check that she was on her way to work. Through the ancient glass he recognised instantly the gait of a woman determined to reunite a lost possession with its absent-minded owner. He fetched from the wardrobe his red and gold state dress uniform, which Oswin Fielding had insisted he wear for the occasion. And, with the thrill of a woman about to put on her most alluring underwear, he retrieved his white linen ruff from the trouser press.

He started to dress in front of the mirror, which for the last eight years had stood on the floor as he had been unable to mount it on the circular walls. It was a miserable room, as miserable as the living room downstairs, despite the efforts he and Hebe Jones had made to disguise the Salt Tower’s repugnant past as a prison. The cheerful curtains he had made for the windows not only failed to keep out the draughts, but threw into sharp relief the wretchedness of the place.

The couple had pushed the wardrobe in front of the worst of the pitiful carvings by prisoners who had scratched onto the walls their hopes of keeping their heads. But the others could still be seen. At night, when the couple were unable to sleep, fearing the catastrophic dreams inspired by their lodgings, they were convinced they could hear the mournful sound of chiselling.

When the family first arrived at the fortress, Hebe Jones had insisted that all the Salt Tower’s decrepit furniture be taken away and replaced with their own. But it was a decision both of them regretted. While a bed, a chest of drawers, and a desk had been easily carried into Milo’s bedroom on the ground floor, there was little they could maneuver up the spiral
staircase to the floors above. As a result, the furniture had to be dismantled outside and brought up piece by piece. Not only did it refuse to fit back together correctly, but it failed to stand flush against the curved walls, a problem neither of them had foreseen. Despite the folds of cardboard that Balthazar Jones had wedged underneath, the furniture stood at precarious angles, made worse by the pitch of the floor, until the next thunderous collapse that invariably happened in the middle of the night.

Savouring the opportunity to put on the famous uniform reserved for royal visits to the Tower and special ceremonies, Balthazar Jones clambered into his crimson tights. Pulling in his stomach, he managed to do up the matching breeches, which he concluded must have shrunk while they were hanging in the wardrobe. After putting on the tunic with the initials
ER
embroidered in gold thread across the chest, he tucked in the ruff’s hem, and saw in the mirror the remains of a man who had dedicated his life to serving his country. Gone were the waves of hair that his wife, an amateur artist driven by hope rather than talent, had once declared was the precise shade of mummy brown, a paint whose pigment came from the dusty remains of ancient Egyptians. Over the years, the rich, earthy crests had been replaced by a low, grey undulation that had suddenly turned white. And his once clean-shaven cheeks were hidden by a beard of identical colour, grown as insulation against the wretched damp.