The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (18 page)

“It’s there in the corner.”

The man reached for his glasses and took another look. “That thing there? Are you sure it’s alive?” he asked.

“Of course I’m sure. I saw it move this morning.”

The Yeoman Gaoler continued to gaze at the creature, then scratched the back of his head and declared: “To be honest, I don’t think shrews are my thing.”

The Beefeater studied him for a moment. “The other thing I had you pencilled in for was helping to look after the penguins,” he said. “They were a gift from the President of Argentina. Apparently they’re from the Falkland Islands after all.”

After showing Balthazar Jones out, the Yeoman Gaoler returned to the kitchen, sat down, and looked at the cage with the unfocused gaze of the exhausted. He had gone to bed at a respectable hour the previous night, dressed in a celebratory new pair of pajamas, convinced that the horror was finally over. Before taking his evening bath, he had opened all the
windows in the house and, according to the ancient remedy for driving out ghosts, stood in the corners of each room brandishing a smouldering bunch of dried sage. The vapours had curled up against the walls towards the ceiling and drifted off into the night. But shortly before dawn, he was woken by the sound of boots striding across the wooden dining-room floor below him, and the most heinous profanities deriding the Spanish uttered in a Devonshire accent. After mustering the courage to descend the stairs, which were flooded with the stench of tobacco, he found that the potatoes he had left out to fry for his breakfast were missing. Returning swiftly to bed, he locked the door, drew up his covers, and listened in a state of terror to the unearthly sounds that continued until well after dawn.

HEBE JONES ARRIVED
at London Underground Lost Property Office earlier than usual, having been woken by the uproar of the red howler monkeys. Her irritation had been complete when she discovered that not only was her husband missing, but so too was the grapefruit she had bought herself for breakfast. As she waited for the water to boil for her cup of tea, she looked through the fridge for something to eat and discovered a solitary Bakewell tartlet belonging to Valerie Jennings behind a carton of carrot soup. Seduced by the lurid red cherry on top, she convinced herself that her colleague would not miss it, carried it back to her desk, and took a bite. But it was to be her only memory of the succulent almond filling. For her fingers immediately reached for the gigolo’s diary, and she became so engrossed by an entry that involved the ruination of
a boardroom table by one of his lovers’ heels that she ate the rest without realising.

Just as she was wiping the evidence off her mouth, the phone rang.

“We do indeed,” she replied, turning her eyes towards the inflatable doll with the red hole for a mouth. “She’s blonde … I see … They’re white … Her shoes are definitely white, I can see them from here … She doesn’t appear to be yours then … We’ll be in touch if she shows up … We always take great care of anything that’s handed in … I quite understand … Not at all … Each to their own … Will do … Goodbye.”

Sitting back in her chair, her eyes fell to the urn, and she dusted the wooden lid with her tiny fingers. She reached for one of the London telephone directories on the shelf above her desk and leafed her way to residents called Perkins. Hebe Jones was not beyond looking for a needle in a haystack, a method both she and Valerie Jennings had been forced to adopt on numerous occasions. Its rare successes had meant that they both returned to it when desperate, with the dogged hope of a gambler. She looked at the first entry and dialled the number.

“Hello, is that Mr. Perkins?” she asked.

“Yes,” a voice replied.

“This is Mrs. Jones from London Underground Lost Property Office. I’m calling to enquire whether you might have left something on the Tube network recently.”

“I wish I had, dearie, but I haven’t left my house in over twenty years.”

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

“That’s quite all right. Goodbye.”

She peered at the phone book and dialled again.

“Hello, is that Dr. Perkins?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Mrs. Jones from London Underground Lost Property Office.”

“She’s at work. I’m the cleaner. Can I take a message?”

“Do you know whether she happened to have left a wooden box on the Tube recently? It has a brass plaque bearing the name Clementine Perkins.”

“I doubt it,” the woman replied. “There are no Clementines in Dr. Perkins’s family.”

As Hebe Jones put down the phone, Valerie Jennings arrived in her usual flat black shoes. But as she hung her navy coat on the stand next to the inflatable doll, there were none of her usual complaints about delays on the Northern Line during which she had to suffer the indignity of being tightly pressed against her fellow passengers. Nor was there a word about the bitterness of the morning and a prediction of snow on account of the twitching of her bunions. And when she opened the fridge, there wasn’t even a look of reproach when she searched in vain for the Bakewell tartlet that she had hidden behind a carton of carrot soup.

“You’re not still worried about those ears, are you?” enquired Hebe Jones, thinking of Valerie Jennings’s eventual release from the front end of the pantomime horse, which had resulted in the detachment of both appendages as she lurched backwards. “I took the horse home last night and Balthazar said he’d sew them back on and you’d never notice.”

“It’s much worse than that,” said her colleague.

“What?” asked Hebe Jones.

“Arthur Catnip asked me out to lunch while you were gone yesterday afternoon.”

“What did you say?”

“Yes … He caught me off guard.”

There was a pause.

“It gets worse,” Valerie Jennings continued.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to go.”

FOLLOWING A DAY
of defeat at the office, Hebe Jones made her way up Water Lane, hunching her shoulders in the darkness. While she welcomed the fact that the tourists had been shut out of the Tower by the time she returned each evening, she dreaded the solitary walk in winter when the only light came from the fleeting appearance of the moon. As she passed Traitors’ Gate, she remembered the time when Milo dived for coins dropped by tourists into the stretch of the Thames that seeped through its wooden bars. With no regard for the visitors still touring the monument, he and Charlotte Broughton had shed their clothes and descended the forbidden steps to the water’s edge in their underpants and vests. They had retrieved several handfuls of coins by the time the alarm was raised. Running back up the steps, their underwear heavy with water, they dodged the Beefeater who had spotted them and took off down the cobbles. As they headed up Mint Lane, several off-duty Beefeaters who saw the pair from their living rooms joined the chase. They were eventually cornered against the Flint Tower, where they stood with their heads bowed, dripping with water. Not only did they endure the
wrath of their parents and every Beefeater in the Tower, but they were summoned to explain themselves to the Chief Yeoman Warder. The coins were duly thrown back into the murky water, apart from a single gold sovereign that Milo slipped into the leg of his underpants and kept with his other treasures in a Harrogate Toffee tin until he presented it to Charlotte Broughton two years later in exchange for a kiss.

The Salt Tower was in darkness as Hebe Jones approached, save for a light on the top floor. Passing Milo’s door at the foot of the spiral staircase, she wondered whether her husband would remember that their son would have been fourteen the following day. As she changed into something warmer in the bedroom, she thought of the time when she used to be greeted on her return home. She went down to the kitchen, and while searching in a cupboard for a pan, she recalled the evenings when there had been so much noise, she had had to shut the door. If it wasn’t her husband playing Phil Collins hits on Milo’s kazoo, a uniquely irritating habit that had led her to hide the instrument, it was his attempts to help the boy with his homework. Unless the subject was English history, Balthazar Jones would walk around the living room suggesting answers that were wholly arbitrary. When asked a question he was unable to even guess at, he would go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the fact that he was as mystified as his young son. Leaving the room under the pretext of needing the lavatory, he would riffle through the sacred text he kept hidden by his bed that held the key to the world’s most troubling enigma: how to do fractions. He would emerge victorious through the living-room door, trying to hold the formula in his head, and
the pair would wrestle with mathematics until the monster was eventually slain.

When supper was ready, she walked through the empty living room and called up the spiral staircase to the room at the top of the tower that she never entered. When they had finished their chops in front of the television, Balthazar Jones immediately got up to do the dishes, then disappeared once more to his celestial shed. And when they met each other again, several hours later in bed, Hebe Jones looked at the outline of her husband in the darkness and thought: “Please don’t forget what day it is tomorrow.”

B
ALTHAZAR JONES WOKE EARLY
and turned onto his back, away from his wife muttering in her dreams next to him. As he waited for sleep to reclaim him, the question Hebe Jones asked him the previous week about what Milo would have looked like had he lived floated back to him. He tried to imagine how tall his son would have grown, and the shape of his face that had always appeared to him to be that of an angel. He had never had the pleasure of teaching him how to shave, and the razor that had belonged to the boy’s grandfather, which had travelled around India in its battered silver tin, remained in the Beefeater’s sock drawer with no one to pass it on to.

Unable to bear his thoughts any longer, he got up and dressed in the bathroom so as not to disturb his wife. He left the Salt Tower without stopping for breakfast, barely noticing the snow pirouetting down from the sky like feathers. He drifted from enclosure to enclosure, as he wondered how his son’s voice would have sounded today, on his fourteenth birthday. When he led the eleven o’clock tour of the fortress, he
didn’t have the stomach to show the tourists the scaffold site, and only mentioned its location while standing at the chapel door as they were about to file out at the end. It caused such annoyance that even the Americans, whose mystification over English history the Beefeaters always forgave on account of their famous generosity, failed to press a tip into his hand. He crossed Tower Green and started to patrol Water Lane, but kept seeing his son amongst the visitors. He left to check that the Komodo dragon’s enclosure was completely secure in readiness for the opening of the menagerie to the public, scheduled in a couple of days’ time. But all he could think about as he tested the locks was how much Milo would have liked to see the mighty lizard that was strong enough to bring down a horse.