Читать книгу Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo - Julia Stuart - Страница 7

It was the sight of her husband’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the bedroom door, an Egyptian perfume bottle still in its pocket, that reignited Hebe Jones’s anger the following morning. She pressed down on the latch with irritation, having lost all compassion for her husband because of a headache brought on by her broken night’s sleep. She descended the stairs in her pink leather slippers and nightclothes, recalling the previous occasions that her dreams had been disturbed by her husband’s obsession. When he joined her for breakfast at the kitchen table, she placed in front of him a plate of eggs that had been scrambled more vigorously than usual, then released the full fury inside her.

Several minutes later, the Beefeater’s stomach shrank again as she suddenly veered away from his compulsion, and launched into the many injustices of living within the fortress. She started with the Salt Tower roof that was such a poor exchange for her beloved garden at their house in Catford, which the wretched lodgers had let go to seed. Then there was the gossip that spread through the monument like fire. And finally there were the mournful sounds that permeated their home, once the prison of numerous Catholic priests during the reign of Elizabeth I, which both had pretended to Milo that they couldn’t hear.

For a moment Balthazar Jones closed his ears, having heard the complaints on countless previous occasions, and picked up his knife and fork. But suddenly his wife came up with a wholly new deprivation that caught his attention. Despite her unrepentant aversion to Italian food, which her husband put down to her nation’s historic distrust of Italy, she suddenly declared: ‘All I want in life is to be able to get a takeaway pizza!’ He remained silent as there was no escaping the fact that they lived at an address that cab drivers, washing machine repairmen, newspaper boys, and every official who had ever given them a form to fill in, assumed to be fictitious.

He put down his cutlery, and looked up at her again with eyes the colour of pale opals, something people who met him never forgot. ‘Where else could you live surrounded by nine hundred years of history?’ he asked.

She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Virtually anywhere in Greece,’ she replied. ‘And it would be a lot older.’

‘I don’t think you realise how lucky I was to get this job.’

‘A lucky person is someone who plants pebbles and harvests potatoes,’ she said, evoking the Greek mysticism of her grandparents. She then hunted around, searching amongst the rubble of their relationship for past hurts that she held up again in front of him. Balthazar Jones responded in kind, taking her examiner’s torch and shining it on ancient grievances. No shadow was left unlit and by the time they left the table, every fissure of their teetering love had been exposed to the damp morning air.

With furious, quick steps, Hebe Jones scuffed back up the stone spiral staircase to the bedroom. Dressing for work, she thought with regret at the part she had played in helping her husband secure a job at the Tower after his second career failed. As he had been a master stitch in the army, responsible for altering the magnificent Foot Guard uniforms, tailoring had seemed an obvious choice when he finally hung up his bearskin. When he suggested renting some premises, his wife thought of the mortgage they were still paying off, and warned: ‘Don’t extend your feet beyond your blanket.’ So he commandeered the front room of their terrace house in Catford, and built a counter behind which he presided, his measuring tape hanging around his neck with the sanctity of a priest’s stole.

A year later, Milo arrived after two fruitless decades of conjugal contortion. Balthazar Jones took care of him while his wife was at the office. In between customers, he would set the infant’s basket on the counter, pull up a chair, and proceed to tell his son all he knew about life. There were warnings to work hard at school ‘otherwise you’ll end up an ignoramus, like your father’. The child was informed that he happened to have been born into a family whose members included the oldest tortoise in the world. ‘You’ll have to look after Mrs Cook when old age turns your mother and I cuckoo, for which your maternal grandparents have always shown a natural disposition,’ he said as he tucked in Milo’s blanket. And it was pointed out that of all the blessings that would come to him in life, none would be greater than having Hebe Jones as a mother. ‘I’ve pitied every man I’ve ever met for not being married to her,’ Balthazar Jones admitted. And Milo would listen, his dark eyes not leaving his father for a moment as he chewed his own toes.

For a while it appeared that he had made the right decision in opening a tailor’s. But gradually fewer and fewer customers knocked at the house with the tiny Greek flag flying from the roof of the birdhouse in the front garden. Some stayed away, unsettled by having to wait while a nappy was being changed. Later, others blamed the brevity of their trouser legs on the attention the bewitched tailor gave to the boy, who ran round the shop as his father refused to send him to nursery. And when Milo was finally at school, some of the new trade that Balthazar Jones managed to pick up never returned after being measured, unsettled by the brutal honesty of a former soldier.

When he realised how precarious the family’s finances were, Balthazar Jones thought about the ways in which other soldiers earned a living after leaving the army. He remembered the time he had spent on sentry duty at the Tower of London, and the Beefeaters in their splendid uniforms, who went by the exalted title of Yeoman Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeomen Guard Extraordinary. Not only were they all former warrant officers from Her Majesty’s Forces, but each had an honourable service record of at least twenty-two years. Fulfilling both requirements, he posted off an application form. Four months later, a letter arrived informing him of a vacancy for the historic position, which had once entailed guarding prisoners, as well as torturing them, but since Victorian times involved acting as an official tour guide.

Hebe Jones, whose own earnings were modest, knew that their savings would never stretch to the university education they both wanted for their son. Ignoring the dread that set like cement in her guts, she dismissed her husband’s warning that they would have to live at the Tower if he were successful. ‘It’s every woman’s dream to live in a castle,’ she lied, not turning round from the stove.

When Balthazar Jones discovered that she had never visited the famous monument, he asked how it was possible since she had spent most of her childhood in London. She explained that her parents had only ever taken their four daughters to the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles. The sound of Mr and Mrs Grammatikos weeping as they stood in front of the Greek exhibits pilfered by the English was so catastrophic that the family was eventually banned from the museum for life. The couple consequently refused to visit any British landmarks, a protest Hebe Jones had kept up in adulthood out of familial solidarity.

In case his wife wasn’t aware, Balthazar Jones pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, but it had once been England’s state prison, had witnessed numerous executions, and was also widely believed to be haunted. But Hebe Jones simply disappeared into the garden shed, and emerged with a blue-and-white striped deck chair. She sat down and pulled out from a carrier bag a guide to the Tower that she had purchased to prepare her husband for his interview. With the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions at the man who had failed his history O-Level to such a spectacular degree that the astonished marker kept a copy of his paper to cheer herself up during her most debilitating bouts of depression. Hebe Jones maintained the battery as her husband paced up and down the lawn, scratching the back of his neck as he searched for the answers in the empty birdcage of his head.

His wife’s determination was absolute. Balthazar Jones would receive a call at lunchtime asking not what he fancied for supper, but the name of the woman who was sent to the Tower in the thirteenth century for repulsing the advances of King John, who subsequently poisoned her with an egg. She would return home from work and enquire, not how her husband’s day had been, but in which tower the Duke of Clarence had been drowned in a butt of his favourite Malmsey wine. Bathed in sweat after love-making, she would lift her head from his chest and demand not that he reveal the depth of his devotion for her, but the name of the seventeenth-century thief who made it as far as the Tower wharf with the Crown Jewels. By the time the job offer arrived in the post, Balthazar Jones’s brain had been unsettled by so much English history, that it provoked in him a mania for the subject that afflicted him for the rest of his life.

Rev. Septimus Drew woke in his three-storey home overlooking Tower Green, and glanced at his alarm clock. There was still some time before the gates of the Middle Tower would open to let in the loathsome tourists, the worst of whom still thought that the Queen Mother was alive. At times the chaplain rose even earlier to capture more of this exquisite period. The place was never the same when the infernal hoards eventually left, the gates shut swiftly behind them, as the air in the chapel remained as putrid as a stable’s until nightfall.

His mind immediately turned to the new mousetrap he had painstakingly laid the previous evening. With the mounting excitement of a child about to inspect the contents of his Christmas stocking, the clergyman wondered what he would find. Unable to wait any longer, he swung his legs out of bed, and opened the windows to clear the room of the mists of unrequited love that had clouded them overnight. The movement sent tears of condensation running down the panes. He dressed quickly, his long, holy fingers still stiff from his endeavours in his workshop the night before. Pulling on his red cassock over his trousers and shirt, he screwed his sockless feet into his shoes, not bothering to unlace them. As he rushed down the two staircases, he clutched the front of his cassock so as not to trip, the back pouring down the battered wooden steps behind him like crimson paint. Despite his purchase of a jar of thick-cut Seville orange marmalade from Fortnum & Mason, he didn’t stop for breakfast in the tiny kitchen with its window overlooking Tower Green, screened with a net curtain to prevent the tourists seeing inside. Not, of course, that it stopped them from trying. The chaplain was forever coming out of his light blue door to find them with their hands cupped against the glass, jostling for position.

His beetle-black hair still in turmoil, he walked the short distance across the cobbles to the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula. He had never got used to it being included in the Beefeaters’ tours. Many of the sightseers ignored the instruction to take off their hats before entering, only to receive a retired soldier’s reprimand once inside. Some even attended the Sunday service, and the chaplain would watch them from the altar, his fury mounting as they sat amongst the Beefeaters and their families, gazing at the walls around them. And he knew that their wonderment had nothing to do with being in the House of God, but everything to do with the thrill of sitting in a chapel which housed the broken remains of three Queens of England who had been beheaded just outside.

He naturally blamed the tourists for the rat infestation, assuming they showered the place with tantalising crumbs as they snacked, listening to the Beefeaters’ talks. However, the sightseers were entirely blameless, for any food they made the grave mistake of purchasing from the Tower Café, which made a rude profit from dismaying the tourists, went straight into the bin after the first mouthful. The truth was that the current rat population were descendants of the rodents that moved in not long after St Peter’s was first built as an ordinary city parish church outside the Tower walls, before being incorporated into the castle following Henry III’s extensions. The rats had decamped briefly on the two occasions when the chapel was rebuilt, and for a third time during the nineteenth-century renovations when more than a thousand human corpses were discovered under the floor. But the vermin soon returned, lured by the succulence of the new tapestry kneelers. They had harassed a succession of chaplains to such a degree that each was obliged to wear his cassock several inches above the dusty chapel floor to prevent the ends from being ravished whenever he stood in contemplation. But it did nothing to stop the nibbling while they knelt in prayer. Rev. Septimus Drew found such radical tailoring one humiliation too far, and had devoted his eleven years in the post to the extermination of the creature not worthy of a mention in the Bible.

His time had been spent studiously converting the humble mousetrap into a contraption of suitable robustness to annihilate a rat. First he turned one of the empty bedrooms, which he had hoped would be used by the family he had longed for, into a workshop. It was there that he laboured on his inventions late into the night, the shelves lined with books on basic scientific laws and theories. Numerous plans with perfectly to-scale drawings lay unfurled on a desk, weighed down by anaemic spider plants. A series of models, made out of pieces of cardboard, off-cuts of wood and garden twine, were laid out on a table. The arsenal of weapons included a tiny sling and marble, a razor blade which had once formed part of a doomed guillotine, a tiny trebuchet, and a pair of minuscule gates complete with murder holes in the top, through which deadly substances could be poured.

Arriving at the chapel door, he pressed down on the cold door handle. His hopes mounting for a formidable body count, he pushed open the door and made his way across the worn tiles to the door that led to the crypt. As he approached the tomb of Sir Thomas More where he had set up his latest apparatus (which had taken two months of planning and execution, as well as a call to a weapons expert at the Imperial War Museum), he heard a sound in the main body of the church. Irritated at being disturbed at such a delicious moment, he retraced his steps to determine the source of the noise.

His resentment at being interrupted immediately evaporated the moment he recognised the figure sitting in the front row of chairs next to the altar. Caught off guard by the sight of the woman who had chased away his dreams, he quickly hid behind a pillar and stood with his palms flat against the cold, smooth stone. It was the moment he had been imagining for months: a chance to speak to her alone, take her hand in his and ask whether there was any hope that she might feel for him the way he did about her. While still uncertain of the merits of such an antiquated approach, he considered it the best out of all those he had thought of since his heart had taken flight. But in all the wistful fantasies he had concocted as he stood at his window overlooking Tower Green hoping for a glimpse of her, his hair had always been perfectly combed into the style first inflicted at the age of eight, and his teeth had been brushed. Cursing himself for having left the house with hangman’s breath, he looked down at his skinny, bare ankles and deeply regretted not having taken the time to put on his socks.

As he berated himself for his unsavoury state, a burst of sobbing echoed round the ancient walls. Unable to ignore a soul in anguish, he decided to offer her comfort, despite his wretchedness. But at that very moment came a thud and a high-pitched squeak from the crypt. The woman jumped to her feet and fled, no doubt in fear of one of the many spectral apparitions said to haunt the Tower. Rev. Septimus Drew remained where he was, playing the scene over in his mind with a spectacularly different ending as the incense, which he burnt in copious amounts to mask the stench of rat droppings, curled around his skinny, bare ankles. When, eventually, he returned to the crypt, not even the sight of a slaughtered rat improved his mood.

When Balthazar Jones had recovered the will to report for duty after his disastrous breakfast, he clambered into his dark blue trousers and pulled on the matching tunic with the initials ER emblazoned in red across the front, surmounted by a red crown. He reached up to the top of the wardrobe for his hat, and pulled it on with both hands. Like all the Beefeaters before him, he had initially worn the Victorian uniform with pride. But it hadn’t been long before it became a source of utmost irritation. The outfits were unbearably hot in the summer and insufferably cold in the winter. Not only that, but they itched from the clouds of moth repellent sprayed on them twice a year while the Beefeaters were still wearing them lest they shrank.

Descending the Salt Tower’s stairs, he locked the door behind him, and turned right past the Tower Café. Assigned the post outside Waterloo Barracks, which housed the Crown Jewels, he chose a spot at sufficient distance from the sentry who had won a fistfight with a Beefeater the week before. His pale blue eyes instinctively searched the sky, and his thoughts drifted with the clouds on their way to drench the washing of the residents of Croydon. When his concentration briefly returned, he braced himself for the battery of ludicrous questions from the tourists who had started to seep in.

An hour later, Balthazar Jones had failed to realise that it had started to rain. Such was his expertise, his subconscious had instantly dismissed the downpour as a particularly common variety for January. He remained in exactly the same position, staring intently but seeing nothing, while the visitors had long since run for cover. When the man from the Palace eventually found him, he was still standing in the same spot, completely sodden and smelling fiercely of moth repellent. On hearing his name, Balthazar Jones turned his head, causing a raindrop to fall from the end of his nose on to the red crown embroidered on the front of his tunic. The man in the dry coat immediately covered the Beefeater with his silver-handled umbrella. Introducing himself as Oswin Fielding, an equerry to Her Majesty, he enquired as to whether he might have a word. Balthazar Jones hurriedly wiped his beard to rid it of water, but then found that his hand was too wet to offer. The man from the palace suggested that they had a cup of tea at the Tower Café. But as they approached, he sniffed twice, flinched at the affront to his nostrils, and headed straight for the Rack & Ruin.

The tavern, from which members of the public had always been barred, was empty apart from the landlady, who was cleaning out her canary’s cage. Oswin Fielding walked past the empty tables, and chose one against the back wall. He hung up his coat, and approached the bar. Balthazar Jones, who had forgotten to remove his hat, sat down and tried to distract himself from his anxiety about what the man wanted by studying the framed signature of Rudolf Hess hanging on the wall. It had been given to a Beefeater during the Deputy Führer’s four-day imprisonment at the Tower. But Balthazar Jones had studied it so many times before, it failed to hold his attention.

The Beefeater’s hope that Oswin Fielding would be seduced by the real ales evaporated when he returned with two teas and the last Kit Kat. He watched in silence as the man from the Palace removed the red wrapper, and offered him half, which he refused on account of his fluttering insides. The equerry proceeded to dunk each finger before eating it, a process that doubled the length of consumption, while at the same time enquiring about the pub’s history. Balthazar Jones answered as briefly as possible, and failed to mention the fact that the man had chocolate on his chin lest it deterred him further from getting to the point. When the courtier spotted the framed signature of Rudolf Hess, the Beefeater instantly dismissed it as a fake as he could no longer bear waiting for the executioner’s axe to fall.

But much to his annoyance, Oswin Fielding started to talk about a golden monkey called Guoliang, which had belonged to the Queen. ‘It was a gift from the President of China following his state visit in 2005,’ he explained.

Balthazar Jones was not the least bit interested in golden monkeys, royal or not. He glanced out of the window and wondered whether the equerry had come about his lamentable record for catching pickpockets, which was the worst amongst the Beefeaters. By the time he opened his ears again, he realised that Oswin Fielding was still discussing the late Guoliang.

‘The creature’s death has caused Her Majesty immense personal sorrow,’ the equerry was saying, shaking his head, which barely possessed sufficient hair to warrant such a meticulous parting. ‘Someone at the Palace looked up its name, and discovered it means “May the Country Be Kind”, which makes its demise even more unfortunate. It caused the most stupendous diplomatic row. Golden monkeys are indigenous to China and there aren’t many of them left. We explained that we even got in a feng shui expert to redesign the enclosure as soon as it appeared off-colour, but the Chinese didn’t seem that impressed. For some reason they had got it into their heads that it would be kept at Buckingham Palace. But with the exception of horses, the Queen keeps all animals given to her by heads of state at London Zoo. Which is just as well, as the Palace is enough of a monkey house as it is.’ The courtier paused. ‘Don’t repeat that,’ he added hastily.

Just as Balthazar Jones could take no more, Oswin Fielding adjusted his rimless spectacles and announced that he had something of the utmost importance to tell him. The Beefeater stopped breathing.

‘As you will know, relations between Britain and China are in a rather delicate state, and as an emerging super power we need to keep them on side,’ the courtier said firmly. ‘No one has forgotten those unfortunate comments made by the Duke of Edinburgh, either. As a gesture of goodwill, China has sent Her Majesty a second golden monkey. Shame, really, as they haven’t got the most attractive combination of features – a snub nose, blue cheeks and hair the same colour as Sarah Ferguson’s. Anyway, the Queen is stuck with it. To make matters worse, the Chinese also noticed the similarity in hair colour, and have named it the Duchess of York. The Queen is understandably rather unsettled by that.’

The Beefeater was about to ask why exactly he had wanted to see him, but the equerry continued.

‘While the Queen has the utmost respect for London Zoo, she has decided to move the new monkey, as well as all her other gifts of animals that are kept there, to a more intimate location. The problem is that foreign rulers always take it as a personal slight if their creature dies.’

The courtier then leant forward conspiratorially. ‘I’m sure you’ve guessed where the animals are to be newly lodged,’ he said.

‘I can’t imagine,’ replied Balthazar Jones, who was contemplating fetching himself a pint.

Oswin Fielding then lowered his voice and announced: ‘They are going to be transferred to the Tower to form a new royal menagerie.’

The Beefeater wondered whether the rain had rusted his eardrums.

‘It’s not as daft an idea as it sounds,’ the man from the Palace insisted. ‘Exotic beasts were kept at the Tower from the thirteenth century. Foreign powers continued to send the monarchy animals over the years, and the menagerie became an immensely popular tourist attraction. It didn’t close until the 1830s.’

Like all the Beefeaters, Balthazar Jones was well aware that the Tower had housed a menagerie, and often pointed out the remains of the Lion Tower to the tourists. He could even have told the equerry that the elephants were given red wine by their keepers to banish the cold, and that the lions were rumoured to have been able to determine whether or not a woman was a virgin, tales he used to stun the more irritating visitors into silence. But he didn’t utter a word.

Oswin Fielding continued: ‘Her Majesty very much hopes that the new menagerie will increase the number of visitors to the Tower, which has been declining.’ He paused before adding: ‘Hirsute gentlemen in antiquated uniforms are not much of an attraction these days. No disrespect to you, your trousers, or your beard.’

He paused yet again, but the only movement that came from the Beefeater was a raindrop plunging from the brim of his hat. Slowly, the courtier raised his eyes from the spot where it had landed.

‘It’s a little-known fact that Her Majesty is rather partial to tortoises,’ he said. ‘She is aware that you are in possession of the world’s oldest specimen, which, of course, is a source of great national pride. Such an animal undoubtedly requires the most tender care.’ And with a triumphant smile the man from the Palace added: ‘The Queen can think of no one better than you to oversee the project.’

Oswin Fielding patted Balthazar Jones on the shoulder, and then reached underneath the table to dry his hand on his trouser leg. As he stood up, he warned the Beefeater not to tell anyone of the plan, particularly the Chief Yeoman Warder, as details had yet to be ironed out. ‘We’re hoping to transfer the Queen’s animals in about three weeks’ time, and give them a few days to settle in before opening the menagerie to the public,’ he said.

Announcing that he would be in touch shortly, he put on his coat, and walked out with his splendid umbrella. Balthazar Jones remained on the red leather stool unable to move. He didn’t manage the monumental task of getting to his feet until he was asked to leave by the infuriated landlady who complained that the stench of mothballs had caused her canary to faint, and it had landed in the slops tray.

It had stopped raining by the time Hebe Jones returned to the Tower, having left work early on account of her headache. The sky remained an obstinate shade of used bathwater, ready to disgorge a second filthy load at any moment. She nodded at the Yeoman Gaoler, the Chief Yeoman Warder’s deputy, who was sitting in a black hut at the entrance to the Tower, a three-bar electric fire preventing the damp from decomposing his toes. When he enquired about the visit from the man from the Palace, Hebe Jones replied that there had been no such thing, or her husband would have called to inform her. But the Beefeater backed up the sighting with a further nine eyewitness accounts, each of whom he named while unfurling a plump finger.

‘Don’t sprout where you haven’t been planted,’ Hebe Jones snapped, and continued through the gates. Her passage was soon thwarted by a suffocation of tourists staring at the Beefeaters’ terrace houses along Mint Street. Feeling more than ever the weight of her supermarket shopping in each hand, she squeezed her way sideways up Water Lane, wishing that the visitors would indulge their lunatic weakness for British history elsewhere. As she passed Cradle Tower, she was struck sharply in the chest by a rucksack whose owner had turned to see the window from where two prisoners had escaped on a rope stretched across the moat in the sixteenth century. Once she had caught her breath, she continued on her journey, seeing nothing but the Greek cottage of her fantasies.

Arriving at the Salt Tower, she searched for the key that failed to fit into a pocket, and discovered that it had already torn the lining of her new handbag. After turning it in the lock, a feat that required both of her doll-sized hands, she made her way up the steps with half her bags, the narrowness of the spiral stairs preventing her from carrying them all up in one go. As she started her descent for the second load, gripping the filthy rope handrail that still bore the sweat of the condemned, she wondered, as she often did, how many of them had kept their heads.

She put away the shopping, and started to wash the breakfast dishes, remembering the argument with her husband that morning. After losing Milo, instead of clinging to each other cheek-to-cheek as they had throughout their marriage, the couple had found themselves swimming in opposite directions as they battled to survive. When one needed to talk about the tragedy, the other wanted to experience the fleeting seconds of tranquillity they had found. They eventually ended up collapsed on distant shores, marooned by their grief, and aiming their anger over losing him at each other.

As she scrubbed, she looked up at the picture on the wall in front of her depicting the Salt Tower in wobbly pencil strokes, coloured in with felt tip. Great care had been taken, but not always achieved, to keep within the lines. Next to the Tower stood three smiling figures, two tall, one short. Only the artist’s parents had recognised the small object next to them, which was also smiling, as that of the oldest tortoise in the world. And she peered, with mounting distress, at the colours that had started to fade.

Suddenly she heard the thud of the Salt Tower door. Not long afterwards, her husband appeared in the kitchen and silently presented her with a warm, flat cardboard box. Hebe Jones, unable to admit that she still detested pizza, set the table, and forced down the white flag in small mouthfuls that threatened to choke her. And for the rest of the evening the air in the Salt Tower was so fragile that they spoke to each other as if the place were filled with a million fluttering butterflies that neither dared disturb.