Читать книгу Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo - Julia Stuart - Страница 6

Standing on the battlements in his pyjamas, Balthazar Jones looked out across the Thames where Henry III’s polar bear had once fished for salmon while tied to a rope. The Beefeater failed to notice the cold that pierced his dressing gown with deadly precision, or the wretched damp that crept round his ankles. Placing his frozen hands on the ancient parapet, he tilted back his head, and inhaled the night. There it was again.

The undeniable aroma had fluttered past his capacious nostrils several hours earlier as he lay sleeping in the Tower of London, his home for the last eight years. Assuming such wonderment had been an oasis in his usual gruesome dreams, he scratched at the hairs that covered his chest like freshly fallen ash, and descended back into ragged slumber. It wasn’t until he rolled on to his side, away from his wife and her souk of competing odours, that he smelt it again. Recognising instantly the exquisite scent of the world’s rarest rainfall, the Beefeater sat bolt upright in the darkness, his eyes open wide like a baby bird.

The sudden movement of the mattress caused his wife to undulate for several seconds like a body drifting at sea, and she muttered something incomprehensible. As she turned away from the disturbance, her pillow fell into the gap between the head of the bed and the wall, one of the many irritations of living within circular walls. Balthazar Jones reached down into the dusty no-man’s land and groped around. After carefully retrieving the pillow, he placed it gently next to his wife so as not to disturb her. As he did so, he wondered, as he often had throughout their marriage, how a woman of such beauty, the embers of which still glowed fiercely in her fifty-fifth year, could look just like her father as she slept. For once, he didn’t feel the urge to poke her awake in order to rid himself of the harrowing illusion of sharing his bed with his Greek father-in-law, a man whose ferocious looks had led his relatives to refer to him as a good cheese in a dog’s skin. Instead, he quickly got out of bed, his heart tight with anticipation. Forgetting his usual gazelle’s step at such times, he crossed the room, his bare heels, cracked as a dry riverbed, thudding on the emaciated carpet. Nose and white beard against the pane, which bore the smudges of numerous previous occasions, he peered out. The ground was still dry. With mounting desperation, he scanned the night sky for the approaching rain clouds responsible for the undeniable aroma. In his panic not to miss the moment for which he had been waiting for more than two years, he hurried past the vast stone fireplace to the other side of the bedroom. His stomach, still bilious from the previous evening’s hogget, arrived first.

Grabbing his dressing gown, its pockets bearing the guilty crumbs of clandestine biscuits, the Beefeater pulled it across his pyjamas, and, forgetting his tartan slippers, opened the bedroom door. He failed to notice the noise the latch made and the subsequent incomprehensible babble it produced from his wife, a slither of hair skimming her cheek. Fingers sliding down the filthy rope handrail, he descended the corpse-cold spiral stairs clutching in his free hand an Egyptian perfume bottle in which he hoped to capture some of the downfall. Once at the bottom of the steps, he passed his son’s bedroom, which he had never brought himself to enter since that terrible, terrible day. Slowly, he shut behind him the door of the Salt Tower, the couple’s quarters within the fortress, and congratulated himself on a successful exit. It was at that precise moment that his wife woke up. Hebe Jones ran a hand along the bed sheet that had been a wedding present all those years ago. But it failed to find her husband.

Balthazar Jones had been collecting rain for almost three years, a compulsion that had started shortly after the death of his only child. At first he thought that rain was simply an infuriating part of the job, which, along with the damp from their abominable lodgings, produced in all the Beefeaters a ruthless specimen of fungus that flourished on the backs of their knees. But as the months grated by following the tragedy, he found himself staring at the clouds frozen in a state of insurmountable grief when he should have been on the lookout for professional pickpockets. As he looked up at the sky, barely able to breathe for the weight of guilt that pressed against his chest, he started to notice a variety in the showers that would invariably soak him during the day. Before long he had identified sixty-four types of rain, all of which he jotted down in a Moleskine notebook he bought specially for the purpose. It wasn’t long before he purchased a bulk order of coloured Egyptian perfume bottles, chosen not so much for their beauty but for their ability to conserve their contents. In them he started to collect samples, recording the time, date and precise variety of rain that had fallen. Much to the annoyance of his wife, he had a cabinet made for them, which he mounted with considerable difficulty on the living room’s curved wall. Before long it was full and he ordered two more, which she made him put in the room at the top of the Salt Tower, which she never entered because the chalk graffiti left on the walls by the German U-boat men imprisoned during the Second World War gave her the creeps.

When his collection had swollen to the satisfying figure of one hundred, the Beefeater promised his wife, who now detested wet weather even more than was natural for a Greek who couldn’t swim, that he would stop. And for a while it seemed that Balthazar Jones was cured of his habit. But the truth was that England was going through an extraordinary dry patch, and as soon as the rain started to tumble again, the Beefeater, who had already been reprimanded by the Chief Yeoman Warder for gazing up at the sky while he should have been answering the tourists’ tiresome questions, returned to his compulsion.

Hebe Jones satisfied herself with the thought that eventually her husband would complete his collection and be done with it. But her hopes evaporated when he was sitting on the edge of the bed one night and, after pulling off his damp left sock, revealed with the demented conviction of a man about to prove the existence of dragons that he had only touched the tip of the iceberg. It was then that he had some official writing paper printed with matching envelopes, and set up the St Heribert of Cologne Club, named after the patron saint of rain, hoping to compare notes with fellow wet weather enthusiasts. He placed adverts in various newspapers around the world, but the only correspondence he ever received was a heavily watermarked letter from an anonymous resident of Mawsynram, in north-eastern India, which suffered from one of the world’s heaviest rainfalls. ‘Mr Balthazar, You must desist from this utter madness at the most soonest. The only thing worse than a lunatic is a wet one,’ was all that it said.

But the lack of interest only fuelled his obsession. The Beefeater spent all his spare time writing to meteorologists around the world about his discoveries. He received replies from them all, his fingers, as lithe as a watchmaker’s, quiver ing as he opened them. However, the experts’ politeness was matched by their disinterest. He changed tack and buried himself in dusty parchments and books as fragile as his sanity at the British Library. And with eyes magnified by the strength of his reading glasses, he scoured everything ever written about rain.

Eventually, Balthazar Jones became convinced that he had discovered a variant that, from what he could make out, hadn’t fallen since 1892 in Colombo, making it the world’s rarest. He read and reread the descriptions of the sudden shower, which, through a catalogue of misfortunes had resulted in the untimely death of a cow. He became adamant that he would recognise it from its scent even before seeing it. Every day he waited, hoping for it to fall. Obsession eventually loosened his tongue, and one afternoon he heard himself telling his wife of his desperate desire to include it in his collection. With a mixture of incredulity and pity, she gazed up at the man who had never shed a tear over the death of their son, Milo. And when she looked back down at the daffodil bulbs she was planting in a tub on the Salt Tower roof, she wondered yet again what had happened to her husband.

Standing with his back against the Salt Tower’s oak door, the Beefeater glanced around in the darkness to make sure that he wouldn’t be spotted by any of the other inhabitants of the fortress. The only movement was a gentleman’s voluminous white vest and a pair of flesh-coloured tights swinging on a washing line strung up on the roof of the Casemates. These ancient terraced cottages built against the fortress walls housed many of the thirty-five Beefeaters who lived with their families at the Tower. The rest, like Balthazar Jones, had had the misfortune of being allocated one of the monument’s twenty-one towers as their home or, worse still, a house on Tower Green, the site of seven beheadings, five of them women.

Balthazar Jones listened carefully. The only sound emerging through the darkness was a sentry marking his territory, his footfall as precise as a Swiss clock. He sniffed the night again and for a moment he doubted himself. He hesitated, cursing himself for being so foolish as to believe that the moment had finally come. He imagined his wife emitting an aviary of sounds as she dreamt, and decided to return to the warm familiarity of the bed. But just as he was about to retrace his steps, he smelt it again.

Heading for the battlements, he noticed to his relief that the lights were off at the Rack & Ruin, the Tower’s tavern that had been serving the tiny community for two hundred and twenty-seven uninterrupted years, despite a direct hit during the Second World War. He did well to check, for there were occasions when the more vociferous arguments between the Beefeaters took until the early hours to be buried. Not, of course, that they remained that way. For they would often be gleefully dug up again in front of the warring parties by those seeking further entertainment.

He started down Water Lane, the cobbles slimy underneath his bare feet from the fallen leaves. As he approached Wakefield Tower, his thoughts turned to the odious ravens, which had been put to bed in their pens in the tower’s shadow. Their luxurious accommodation, with its running water, under-floor heating, and supply of fresh squirrel meat at the taxpayer’s expense, had been a constant source of irritation ever since he had discovered the true depth of their villainy.

His wife had taken an instant dislike to the famous birds when the family first arrived at the Tower. ‘They taste of shrouds,’ announced Hebe Jones, who, with the exception of peacock, which she deemed inauspicious, claimed to have eaten most species of animals.

However, the ravens had been an instant source of curiosity to Balthazar Jones. During his first week, he wandered over to one perched on the wooden staircase leading to the entrance of the White Tower, begun by William the Conqueror to keep out the vile and furious English. As the bird eyed him, he stood admiring the thousands of colours that swam in the oily blackness of its feathers in the sunlight. He was equally impressed when the Ravenmaster, the Beefeater responsible for looking after the birds, called the creature’s name, and it arrived at the man’s feet following a shambolic flight due to the fact that its wings had been clipped to prevent it absconding. And when Balthazar Jones discovered that they had a weakness for blood-soaked biscuits, he went out of his way to provide them with a splendid breakfast comprised of the delicacy.

Several days later, Milo, who was six at the time, shrieked ‘Daddy!’ and pointed to a raven standing on top of Mrs Cook, the family’s historic tortoise. All affection instantly vanished. It wasn’t just that it was extraordinary bad manners to hitch a ride – albeit at the most sedate of paces – aloft another creature that infuriated Balthazar Jones. Neither was it the fact that the bird had just left a copious runny deposit on top of his pet. What drove the Beefeater into a state of fury was the raven pecking at Mrs Cook’s fleshy bits with its satanic beak. And given the tortoise’s age of one hundred and eighty-one, there was a noticeable delay before she was able to draw her head and limbs into her worn shell away from the vicious assault.

It was by no means an isolated incident. Several days later, Balthazar Jones noticed that the ravens had assembled into what was indisputably an attack formation outside the Salt Tower, once used to store saltpetre. One of the birds squatted on top of the red phone box, three stood on a cannon, another perched on the remains of a Roman wall, and a pair sat on the roof of the New Armouries. The situation continued for several days as it took considerable time for Mrs Cook to explore her new lodgings. Eventually, she was ready for a change of scenery. But as soon as she set a wizened leg out of the front door, there was a uniform advance of one hop from the massed ravens. The birds displayed remarkable patience, for it took several hours for Mrs Cook to make sufficient ground out of the door to warrant a second hop. The Ravenmaster blamed the fact that it was well past their lunchtimes for what happened next. Balthazar Jones, however, vehemently insisted that their scandalous behaviour was not only a result of their allegiance to Beelzebub, but how they had been raised, an insult that pierced so deeply it was never forgotten. Whatever the reason, one thing was for certain: by late afternoon Mrs Cook, the oldest tortoise in the world, no longer had a tail, and one of the Tower ravens was too full for supper.

As Balthazar Jones passed Wakefield Tower, the sound of the Thames lapping through Traitors’ Gate seemed louder than usual in the darkness. He looked to his left and saw the vast wooden watergates that had once opened to let in the boats carrying trembling prisoners accused of treason. But he spared not a thought for such matters, the details of which he had to relate countless times during his working day to the tourists who were only interested in methods of torture, executions and the whereabouts of the lavatories. Instead, he pressed on, past the Bloody Tower with its red rambling rose, said to have produced snow-white blossoms before the murder of the two little princes. Neither did he notice the dancing candlelight at one of its windows, where the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh nibbled the end of his quill as he sat at his desk in what had been his prison for thirteen years.

Climbing up the stone steps, the Beefeater quickly reached the battlements. In front of him stretched the Thames where Henry III’s white bear had once swum for its dinner. But Balthazar Jones kept his pale blue eyes raised as he tried to work out from which direction the precious rain would come. Touching his white beard with his fingertips as he made his calculations, he scoured the sky through which the dawn was starting to leak.

Unable to sleep since her husband woke her as he left, Hebe Jones sneezed twice, irritated by the dust on her pillow. Rolling on to her back, she dragged a clump of damp hair from the corner of her mouth. Instead of coursing down her back as it had done during the lusty days of youth, it meandered slowly to her shoulders. Despite her age, apart from the odd strand that flashed like a silver fish in certain lights, it was the same luminous black it had been when Balthazar Jones first met her, a defiance of nature that he put down to his wife’s obstinacy.

As she lay in the darkness, she imagined her husband walking through the Tower’s grounds in his pyjamas, clutching an Egyptian perfume bottle in a hand that no longer caressed her. She had tried her best to rid him of his compulsion. During his first few attempts, she had caught him before he reached the bedroom door. But he soon improved his technique, and before long he was able to make it halfway down the stairs before he heard the seven words which he had grown to dread, uttered with the same red breath as his mother’s: And where do you think you’re going? However, dedication to the high art of vanishing resulted in a number of spectacular successes.

Hebe Jones began to monitor the escape manuals he borrowed from the public library, and locked the bedroom door before they turned out their reading lights, hiding the key while her husband was in the bathroom battling with the loneliness of constipation. But the trick backfired one morning when she could not remember where she had put it. Through a mouthful of humiliation which threatened to choke her, she asked him to help her in her search. He removed the loose stone next to one of the lattice windows, but all he found were the more aromatic love letters he had sent her during their courtship. He then strode to the fireplace, put his hand up the vast stone hood, and retrieved an old sweet tin from a ledge. Upon opening it he discovered a pair of silver cufflinks bearing his initials in the most alluring of scripts. His wife revealed that it was a gift she had bought for him four Christmases ago, which she had never been able to put her hands on. Her joy at seeing them again, and Balthazar Jones’s delight at suddenly receiving an unexpected present, distracted them both from their predicament. But before long, the hunt resumed until Balthazar Jones found what was indisputably a sex aid in the drawer of his wife’s bedside table. ‘What on earth is this for?’ he asked, pushing a button. Their dilemma was forgotten again for the next thirty-four minutes, during which many questions were asked. The answers that were forthcoming led to further questions, which in turn produced a series of accusations from both sides.

It was over an hour before they returned to their search. By then the cufflinks were back in the tin up the chimney with the announcement that he would have to wait until Christmas for them. Eventually, the pair admitted defeat, and Balthazar Jones reached for the phone and called the Chief Yeoman Warder to release them. The man made four attempts before the spare key sailed through one of the open windows. It was then that Hebe Jones spotted the original still in the keyhole, and she secretly removed it.

From then on the bedroom door remained unlocked, and no amount of protests would keep the Beefeater from his nocturnal wandering. It was with relief that Hebe Jones took the news one morning that her husband had been caught by the Chief Yeoman Warder. However, her relief turned to indignation when the rumours quickly followed that Balthazar Jones was carrying out a secret liaison with Evangeline Moore, the Tower’s young resident doctor, who quickened the heart rate of many of her patients. The claim was not without credibility as most affairs conducted by the Tower’s inhabitants took place within its walls, as they were locked in from midnight. While Hebe Jones knew instantly that there was no truth in the rumour – since Milo’s death her husband hadn’t allowed himself the pleasure of love-making – she nevertheless banished him from the matrimonial bed for a fortnight. Feet either side of the taps, Balthazar Jones slept in the bath. He endured the cramped, damp conditions dreaming amongst the spiders of being lost at sea in a sinking boat. Each morning Hebe Jones would get up early to run a bath, being careful not to remove her husband beforehand, and always ensuring that she ran the cold water first.

Now, as she looked at the bedside clock, fury coursed through her veins at yet another night of disturbed sleep. Her usual revenge, performed each time her husband returned to bed reeking of the night, was an anatomical masterstroke. Once she heard the muddy breath of a man descended deep into his dreams, she would suddenly leap from the bed and make the short journey to the bathroom with the gait of a demented sentry. Once installed on the lavatory, she would proceed to empty her bladder with the door wide open. The clamour of the catastrophic downpour was such that her husband would immediately wake in terror, convinced that he was lying in a nest of snakes. When the infernal hissing eventually came to an end, the Beefeater would instantly sink back to his dreams. But several seconds later, in a feat of immaculate timing, his wife would release a second, much shorter but equally deafening cascade, which would finish with a tone-perfect rising pitch, and wake her husband as brutally as the first.

Pulling the shabby blanket up to her chin, Hebe Jones thought of the cabinets of Egyptian perfume bottles filled with rain in the top room of the Salt Tower, and then of the cruelty of grief. Compassion suddenly chilled her rage. Ignoring the glass of water on her bedside table that she usually drank in its entirety on such occasions, she turned back on to her side. When her husband eventually returned home with his empty vessel after the clouds had fled, Hebe Jones pretended to be asleep. And when the torment of a full bladder woke her an hour later, she rolled on to her back to alleviate the suffering that eventually reached her ears.