The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (39 page)

By the time she had finished, the warmth had returned to Arthur Catnip’s hands. As she began to walk out of the ward he finally opened his eyes and turned his head. “I like your shoes,” he said.

HEBE JONES OPENED THE DRAWER
containing one hundred and fifty-seven pairs of false teeth and dropped another neatly labelled pair inside. Returning to her desk, she looked again at the bouquet of flowers from Reginald Perkins, and she
thought of his wife tucked up safe and warm amongst her daffodils. Just as she put the tiny Chinese slippers into the mailbag, she heard the Swiss cowbell. Turning the corner, she saw Samuel Crapper standing at the original Victorian counter, the tips of his ochre hair standing up in triumph.

“Someone handed in your briefcase yesterday. Sorry, I meant to ring you,” she said.

“Did they?” he asked. “I didn’t know I’d lost it. I’ve come because I’ve actually found something for a change.” He then picked up a large Hamleys shopping bag and put it on the counter. “It was on the seat next to me on the Bakerloo Line and was still there when everyone got off. I forgot to bring it in, so it’s been sitting at home for a few days, I’m afraid. I can’t for the life of me work out what it is.”

Hebe Jones pulled the object out of the bag and looked at it. Eventually she was able to speak. “It’s a cabinet of rain samples,” she said.

B
ALTHAZAR JONES STOOD
on the bridge above the raven burial ground, where a tiny freshly dug grave contained the remains of an Etruscan shrew. As he watched the workmen dismantling the enclosures in the moat, he was struck once again by how empty the place seemed without the animals. Unable to watch, he made his way up Water Lane, passing the Bloody Tower with its red rambling rose said to have produced snow-white blossoms before the death of the two little princes. No longer bothering to look around him in case he was being watched, he unlocked the door to the Develin Tower and started to sweep up the straw that had once warmed the belly of the bearded pig. As he worked his brush into the corner next to the vast stone fireplace, he discovered Hebe Jones’s mouldering grapefruit.

Under an endless cinder sky, he crossed the fortress and made his final journey up the Brick Tower’s spiral staircase. The workmen had already taken away the aviary fencing, as well as the trees in their pots and the artificial perches. All that remained of its previous occupants were the seed husks
covering the floor, dried droppings, and the white feathers shed by the wandering albatross. As he began to sweep the floor, he remembered the conversation he had had with Rev. Septimus Drew amongst the birds, and his subsequent decision to try and get his wife back. But despite the samples he had left on the Tube hoping Hebe Jones would come back, she had never gotten in touch, and the blade in his heart turned once more.

Picking up his black rubbish sack, he was about to leave when something on the windowsill caught his eye. He walked over and recognised one of the King of Saxony bird of paradise’s prized brow feathers that stretched twice the length of its body, a sight so extraordinary that early ornithologists dismissed the first stuffed specimen as taxidermic trickery. He picked up the bewitching blue plume and studied it in the light. After drawing it slowly through his fingers, he curled it up and put it in his pocket.

As he walked back to the Salt Tower, he was stopped by an American tourist who asked him whether he was the Keeper of the Royal Menagerie.

“I am,” the Beefeater replied.

“It’s such a shame that they took the Queen’s animals back to London Zoo,” the visitor said, adjusting his baseball cap. “By all accounts, the Geoffroy’s marmosets were a sight to be seen.”

Balthazar Jones put down his bag. “Maybe it was for the best,” he said, and he told the man about the wandering albatross that mated for life and had lost too many feathers mourning for its companion, which had remained at the zoo.

“I guess home is where the heart is,” the American said with a smile. But the Beefeater was unable to reply.

Picking up his bag, he crossed the lawn in front of the White Tower and looked at the marks left by the enclosure that had housed the reclusive ringtail possums and the sugar glider. Hearing a shout, he turned to see the Ravenmaster standing in front of the odious birds’ pens, calling mournfully to his charges so that he could say his goodbyes. It hadn’t, in the end, been the Chief Yeoman Warder who had asked him to leave the Tower. He had refused to take the hanging parrot’s words as any proof of wrongdoing, and had threatened to sack anyone repeating the historic cry within earshot of the tourists. It had, in fact, been the Ravenmaster’s wife who insisted that their days at the Tower were over, recognising instantly the footprint of infidelity in the emerald shriek. She had suspected her husband’s affairs over the years and had done nothing about them, reasoning that the more of his awkward intimacies he shared with others, the less she would have to endure herself. But the public exposure of his philandering by a parrot had been a humiliation too far. Waiting until their daughter was out of the kitchen, she turned round from the sink and informed him he would have to choose between her and the Tower. The Ravenmaster instantly picked his wife as he knew he was nothing without her. Leaving her husband to do the packing, she took the opportunity to go shopping, and eventually found the precise weapon she had been searching for in an antiquarian bookshop. And, as she watched the sales assistant wrap up the 1882 first edition of
Vice Versa or A Lesson to Fathers
by F. Anstey, she very much hoped that her husband
would find it as hilarious as the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope had. For, while laughing at a family reading of it, the author had suffered a stroke and died the following month.

When Balthazar Jones was called into the Chief Yeoman Warder’s office in the Byward Tower earlier that morning, he had assumed he was going to have to account yet again for his lamentable record in catching pickpockets. Instead, the Chief Yeoman Warder had offered him the position of Ravenmaster. But the Beefeater immediately turned it down, keeping to himself his thoughts on the birds’ villainous character. Still gripping the brim of his hat, he took the opportunity to ask if he could nevertheless move into the Ravenmaster’s superior quarters to escape the Salt Tower’s wretched damp, the mournful sound of chiselling, and the smell of Catholic priests’ mouldering sandals. For a moment the Chief Yeoman Warder didn’t reply, and engaged instead in a short burst of drumming with his embalmer’s fingers. It was eventually followed by a sigh and the words: “If you must.”

Balthazar Jones threw the black rubbish sack into the bin by the Tower Café and turned to see Rev. Septimus Drew striding past on his way to the Rack & Ruin, his nibbled red cassock billowing in the wind. The Beefeater immediately ran to catch him up and asked whether it was true that he was leaving the Tower. The chaplain invited him to the tavern, where they sat at the bar waiting to be served while the landlady confiscated the threepenny bit from the Tower doctor. He listened with regret as the clergyman told him that he would be gone by the end of the month.

“But what about our bowling?” Balthazar Jones asked.

Rev. Septimus Drew emptied his glass and put it on the
beer mat in front of him. “Everyone has to move on eventually,” he said. He then looked at his watch and apologised for not being able to stay any longer as he was taking Ruby Dore to see a little stuffed owl called Athena. He then put a hand on his old friend’s arm and asked whether he had done anything to persuade Hebe Jones to come back following their talk in the aviary. Balthazar Jones nodded.

“Any joy?” the chaplain asked.

The Beefeater’s eyes dropped to the bar.

“At least you tried,” said the clergyman, filling the silence.

After finishing his pint alone, the Beefeater wiped his mustache on the back of his hand and headed for the Salt Tower. As he climbed the spiral staircase, he heard the phone ringing and burst into the living room to answer it. But it was only the man from the Palace, and he sunk to the sofa.

“I thought you’d like to know that we’ve got the rockhopper penguins back,” the equerry said.

The Beefeater leant back. “Where were they?” he asked.

“They’d got all the way to Milton Keynes. A police officer noticed them on a roundabout in the early hours of yesterday morning.”

Once he had put down the phone, he made his way upstairs. Unable to bear the smell of Hebe Jones’s absence any longer, he stripped the bed, leaving her nightdress on his pillow. As he opened the airing cupboard to fetch a clean set of sheets, he noticed the gentleman’s white vest, and dropped it into the bin.

Confronted once more with the ruins of the wardrobe, he set about reassembling it. Once it was back on its feet, he picked up the clothes and started to hang them back up.
Amongst the pile he found several of his wife’s sweaters, and as he folded them he discovered Milo’s urn. He picked it up and sat on the bed looking at it. He thought about all he had had in life, and all he had lost, and concluded that he had never deserved any of it in the first place. He dusted the urn gently with his handkerchief, stood up, and placed it on the windowsill.

Lying down on the clean bedclothes, he hoped to get some rest before resuming his duties. But he was unable to get comfortable because of the ache of solitude in his bones, and he immediately sat up again. He descended the stairs to the living room, but was unsettled by the sight of the front end of the pantomime horse. He wandered into the kitchen, pulled out a chair, and sat at the table. But he soon got up again when he spotted the picture above the sink of three smiling figures, two large, one small, standing next to a colourful blob. Crossing back through the living room, he walked down the corpse-cold stairs.

He pushed open Milo’s bedroom door and pulled back the curtains he had made all those years ago, filling the room with March’s brutal light. He sat on the bed and ran a hand over the soft pillow where his son’s head had once rested. He looked around at his possessions, which he would soon have to pack. Picking up the matchbox from the bookshelf, he slid it open and looked at the fifty-pence piece. He reached for the ammonite and ran his thumb over its contours. Opening the book on Greek gods on the nightstand, he flicked through the pages, stopping to look at a picture of Hermes and a tortoise. He didn’t know how long he had been there when he suddenly heard a sound. When he looked up with eyes as pale
as opals he saw Hebe Jones standing in the doorway with her suitcase.

Neither said a word. Eventually, she put down her case and came to sit next to her husband. Balthazar Jones spoke first. “It was me who killed Milo,” he said, looking at the floor.

Hebe Jones raised a hand to her mouth. “What are you talking about?” she demanded, her eyes upon him.

The Beefeater haltingly told her about the argument he and Milo had the night he died, over the homework he had failed to finish, and his threat not to take the boy to the Science Museum at the weekend if it wasn’t done in time.