The Elephant Keeper Page 20

  Last of all, we encounter Jenny, whom Mr. Cross has given the name of “The Empress.” The notice outside her cage reads: Formerly owned by various members of the English nobility, The Empress descends from a line of Royal Elephants. She began her life a hundred and fifty years ago in the court of an Indian prince, whom she often carried on tyger-hunting expeditions, displaying great bravery. She was captured after a long battle and brought to Europe… The painting shews her deep in the Indian jungles, the prince seated on her back in a golden throne, and a ferocious, snarling Bengal tyger at her feet.

  When I protested to Mr. Cross that very little of this was true, he smiled at my innocence. “You think that we should say that she is two hundred years old? Tom, people like stories. So long as the stories are possible, it does not matter whether they are true or false.”

  Her true history is that she is about thirty-two years of age, and has spent much of that time in England. Her first owner was Mr. Harrington, of Somerset, who sold her to Lord Bidborough, of Easton, Sussex; after his death she was sold to Mr. Davies of Worcester, who found the cost of her maintenance too great to bear and was therefore obliged to sell her to Mr. Hockaday of Monmouth; he, too, could not bear the expense, and sold her to Sir John Fortescue of Northampton, who killed himself after losing his fortunes in a wild speculation. It was after this that she was bought by Mr. Gilbert Cross for his Famous Menagery.

  My fellow keeper at the Menagery is Mr. Sam Scott. We share lodgings above a barber’s in White Horse Yard, off Drury Lane; he sleeps there one night, while I stay at the Menagery, or the other way round. We do not divide the animals up between us, but it is understood that Jenny is my particular responsibility.

  The Menagery is situated in the Strand, to the north of the river. It opens at ten o’clock every morning, and remains open until ten o’clock at night. We are at our busiest on Sunday afternoons, though we are not nearly as busy as we once were. Then, everyone was eager to see the animals, and fashionable ladies and gentlemen waited in a line which stretched as far as Catherine Street. The novelty has worn off, however, and there are entire afternoons now-a-days when we may have only ten or twenty visitors. Lately, to persuade more people to pay their shilling apiece for the privilege of entering, Mr. Cross hired a fire-eater. He was a Negro. Long tongues of flame poured from his mouth, and his skin glistened like a black pond. Except for the snake, all the animals were frightened, especially Stephen, who shrank back cowering and gibbering, an arm over his eyes, a most pathetick sight.

  This ruse did not succeed in drawing a crowd. The truth is that, in a restless city, we no longer excite much curiosity, we are a stale attraction.

  “Do you think,” I ask Mr. Scott, “that the Menagery is certain to close?”

  “Most likely,” he answers, without the least visible concern, and puffing his pipe. Mr. Scott is a great lover of tobacco, holding (like many folk) that it serves as a defence against the infections that spread through the city; for which reason, out of prudence, I too now smoke a pipe.

  In the first few weeks of living here, I was so anxious that I scarcely ever left Jenny’s side. However, at the urging of Mr. Scott, who undertook to watch over the Elephant during my absence, I put on my coat and ventured further into the city. In my country imagination, I had formed two pictures of London: one, consisting of elegant buildings and wide, sunlit streets, full of clubs and coffee-houses in which gentlemen discussed weighty affairs of state; the other, consisting of taverns, whore-houses, and dark alleys inhabited by thieves and murderers. These pictures are true enough; what I had not imagined, what I soon discovered, was that the city has many other pictures. I had not imagined that, the streets being paved, there would be a perpetual din of iron wheels, continuing long into the night; nor had I imagined the hourly calls of the watch-men, which serve no obvious purpose except to wreck the smooth passage of sleep; nor the noxious air, which gives me a constant cough and dry throat; nor the stenches which rise and attack the senses during the heat of summer; nor the dark, murky fogs of winter which steal silently up the river and settle on the city for days, turning noon to the semblance of dusk, and bringing fevers and agues. Nor had I imagined that there could be such vast numbers of people, hurrying this way and that, each engaged upon his or her own secret business. Often, I would do no more than stand on some street corner and watch the bustle in a kind of open-mouthed amazement, wondering where such a person was going, where he came from, what his affairs were. Every man and woman seemed the embodiment of a walking story, in which only a few sentences, or words, were visible, the rest hidden in a peculiar kind of fog; while snatches of conversation, floating to my ears, intrigued me so much that, more than once, I followed in a vain attempt to hear more.

  This daze was complicated by fear: not so much the fear of being set upon and robbed, or of being pick-pocketed, though that did frighten me enough to make me walk about with my hands stuck in my pockets, as the fear of losing my way in the endless streets. In the summer months, as often as not, I would go to St. James Park, or across the river to the Vauxhall Gardens, where the temples and groves and bowers reminded me of Easton; indeed, every leaf on every tree, and every blade of grass, seemed a friend. I remember hearing how, not many years ago, there was a nightingale which sang at Vauxhall, every summer’s night, from the thickness of a bush along the Grand Walk. This bird, or, rather, the song of this bird, became famous; people came from far and wide to hear its music, which began without fail as twilight fell and continued long into the night. Courting couples, in particular, would stand and listen, entranced. When I heard this tale, I was thrilled at the thought of such a bird making its home in the city, which, but for caged larks and gold-finches, is mainly populated by hordes of thieving, chattering sparrows, and as I strolled down the Grand Walk I would wonder whether it was in this or that bush that the bird had sung, and tell myself that, if a nightingale once lived here, then a nightingale might live here again. A fond idea: for soon I learnt, from Mr. Scott, that the nightingale was a man, skilled at imitating the bird’s song, who had been hired by the proprietor of the Gardens to lurk in a bush and attract visitors, each one paying his or her shilling, in the same way that Mr. Cross had hired the fire-eater. However, this story puzzled me. Was it truly possible that people believed that they were hearing a nightingale?

  Mr. Scott, who was packing his pipe, a matter over which he takes a great deal of care, did not answer for a moment. “It’s a nice question,” he said at last. “I grant you, it would seem easier to have put a cage-bird in there, if it could have been prevailed upon to sing every night. They sing well enough in captivity, I believe. Still, maybe a man was thought to be more reliable.”

  “But, surely,” I replied, sticking to my point, “no one was truly deceived. No one could imitate a nightingale!”

  “It may be that some folk were truly deceived, and it may be that some were not.”

  “But there the man was, piping and whistling away! Those who were not deceived, or who suspected that it was not a nightingale, which must have been most people, surely—why did they not look into the bush, and discover the deception?”

  Mr. Scott struck a flint and lit his pipe. “Ah, well, there, you see, I don’t know; but I would guess that a second man was employed, supposedly to protect the nightingale from being disturbed, but really to prevent people from inquiring into the truth. But, probably, Tom, they wanted to be deceived.”

  This startled me. “Why?”

  “If their minds were on the business of courtship, they might prefer to believe that it was a true nightingale.”

  “But, if they wanted to be deceived, if they knew that they wanted to be deceived, they must have known that they were being deceived, and therefore they could not have been deceived.”

  “Yet they were, it seems.” He took a puff on his pipe. “Now, I don’t go to the play-house, it is of no interest to me, but people do go, all the time. Now, if they’re watching something happen on the stage
, such as a man being killed, do they believe that he is truly being killed? I’d say not. They allow themselves to be deceived into believing that he has been killed, though they must know that he is still alive, like you or me. Same with the nightingale. They believe it and they don’t believe it, at the same time.” Another puff. “Would you say that most people who visit the Menagery truly believe our little monkie survived a ship-wreck?”

  During the winter, the Gardens are closed, but in those early days I drew comfort from the river, imagining how the water that flowed under my eyes had once flowed through fields, and below the outstretched arms of willows. One such day, an evening, after walking along the Strand to the Devil Tavern at Temple Bar, I heard a familiar sound and, looking up, saw a party of duck flying high, following the river’s course to the west. The sun had set, but fiery fragments still glowed like fading embers along the breadth of the sky, into which the duck were flying in the shape of a V, and their faint calls were such music to my ears, I can scarcely begin to describe the emotions that passed through my mind. I watched until the duck were specks, or less than specks; and long after they were gone, my imagination pursued them through the night, until I seemed to see them circle and bank, and wheel, above the calm circle of a moon-lit pond. This pond was not any pond, but one which I had known some twenty years before in Somersetshire, a pond which was indeed frequented by duck, and in which the Elephants had sometimes bathed, when I worked at Harrington Hall; there, with a series of gentle splashes, I let them come to rest on the gleaming, shivering, stilling water. It was probably a different evening, though in my memory it seems the same, when I stood at the same spot by the river. The tide was low, exposing the thick slime of the river’s banks, along which some women were scavenging for fire-wood or other valuables. Among them, a couple of rats skipped and scurried; they have no fear of humans. On the river itself, a broad-bottomed boat was being slowly rowed against the current, so that it remained in the same spot, while a boatman probed the bed with his long, hooked pole. After some minutes, the rower shipped his oars, allowing the boat to move a few feet downstream, where the man with the pole tried again. There are many craft that ply up and down the river, and though I had probably seen such boats before, I had never paid them any attention, or bothered to ask myself what they were doing. Now, however, the man with the pole gave a cry, and, drawing a dark shape from the waters, hauled it aboard. At this, a man standing near me turned to his neighbour and said, “That’s the third this week.”

  I watched as the boat made for the wooden jetty at Temple Bar. It tied up to one of the jetty’s thin legs, exposed by the low tide. The glistening body, lain on the pebbles, seemed not quite human, as though it might have been that of a monkie, or a seal, or not a body at all, until I made out the thick hair, and the dangled arm.

  This fishing for the dead, as I have since learnt, is a regular occupation. Bodies of men, women, sometimes of little babes, are dragged from the river’s black depths; occasionally, I am told, a woman is drawn up with her babe still held to her breast. Ten corpses were discovered last month; eight, the month before; thirteen, the month before that. No one knows who these people once were, and why they are found in such numbers, but there are stories, there are always stories; they swirl round the city on invisible currents. One story says, these are people so far sunk in misery that they have thrown themselves off the bridges, though they must know that, by so doing, they will forfeit all chance of heaven. Another story holds that they have been murdered, though for what reason is again unclear. Either story may be true, or both, or neither; meanwhile, the city goes heedlessly on with its own life, as the river does too. The city and the river are perfect images of the other, violent, treacherous, powerful, and curiously alluring.

  In those early weeks, I sometimes used to find myself searching the crowd in the forlorn hope of seeing the face of someone whom I could claim as an acquaintance, however slight. I never saw anyone, with any certainty; but, once, as I walked quickly over Black Friars Bridge, I persuaded myself that I had seen someone I knew, from Somersetshire, who was walking alone in the opposite direction. My footsteps took me on, while I told myself that it could not be her, for why would she be here, in London—I could think of no possible reason—however, as I drew near the end of the bridge, the feeling grew upon me that it had been her, or might have been, and with the image of her face before me I turned and hurried back. However, she had disappeared, and I put her out of my mind.

  That same year, however, in the summer, as I was walking through some ill-lit streets to the north of Cow Cross, I saw or thought I saw her again. She wore a shawl, and stood deep in shadow, at the meeting of two streets. For some time, I watched her from across the street, but could not clearly see her face. A man came up and spoke to her, and they went away together down a dark alley. I went back to the Menagery in a state of great uncertainty.

  When my mother had written to me at Easton, she had never once mentioned Lizzy Tindall, though her letters had often carried information about other people in the village. Was it possible that Lizzy could have come to London? Was it possible? It was possible.

  “Do you remember Lizzy?” I asked Jenny.

  “Lizzy? Of course I do. Little Lizzy Tindall,” Jenny replied.

  “I think I have seen her.”

  Jenny eyed me, surprized.

  “I think I may have seen her. But I am not sure.”

  “Are you sure, Tom, that it was not her ghost that you saw?”

  I thought about this, for, certainly, there are said to be ghosts in the city, as there are in the countryside; they are seen, especially, during the winter fogs. Whether they are really ghosts, I do not know; nor, indeed, what a ghost is, if such a thing exists. An unhappy spirit, disturbed from its lodging, or an unsettled possibility floating through the mind? My mother, in her grief after my father’s death, used to say that she saw his ghost, leading a horse past our cottage; but no one else ever saw this strange apparition. What did she see? Nothing, or something?

  The next evening, I returned to the same spot, and waited. When she appeared, she had the same shawl over her face, and whether it was Lizzy or not I could not tell. In the gloom I could scarcely see her at all. I said: “Lizzy? Is it you? I am Tom. You are Lizzy, are you not? Lizzy Tindall? I am Tom Page.”

  I reached up to her shawl, but she stepped back, as if fearing a blow, as Stephen the monkie does at the Menagery.

  “I mean you no harm,” I said. “Believe me. To be sure—are you not Lizzy Tindall, from Thornhill? You worked for Mr. Harrington, you remember? At Harrington Hall?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In Somersetshire, in the west country, as you know, Lizzy.” I persisted: “I know you are Lizzy. I am Tom. Do you not remember me? We were sweet-hearts. You may not recognise me, I had an accident to my nose.”

  She did not reply, but led me down the alley, which was called Frying Pan Alley. The further we advanced, the darker it grew, and the more narrow, and for a moment I was afraid that I was being led into an ambush; many a man has been lured into an alley in order to be robbed of his money and cloaths, or worse. We turned through a low doorway, into a room, where an aged crone, huddled in an elbow chair, counted money by the light of a guttering candle. Beside her lay a huge dog, which rose to its feet and barked loudly. Pursued by these barks, I followed Lizzy up a flight of creaking stairs which seemed to continue longer than was possible; finally we arrived at the very top of the house, in a space as dark as pitch. I could not see even my hand in front of my face.

  “Can we not light a candle?”

  “I have no candles.”

  “No rush-lights?” I stared about me. “Is there no window?”

  “Here? No.”

  Her voice was low, and soft, the accent not west country but that of a Londoner. But, I said to myself, it is like the plumage of birds; according to our surroundings, we adapt and change. If she had lived in London for some years, it was only natura
l that she should speak like her fellow citizens.

  “You are Lizzy, are you not? Tell me you are Lizzy Tindall.”

  “If you want me to be Lizzy Tindall, I do not mind.”

  “No. No, I want you to be Lizzy Tindall, because you are Lizzy Tindall. I know you are Lizzy Tindall. Why deny the truth? You must know who you are.”

  “Why then, I do not deny it. I am Lizzy Tindall, indeed,” she said indifferently.

  I persisted. “Of Thornhill, in Somersetshire.”

  “As you say,” she said with a sigh. “I am Lizzy Tindall, your Lizzy Tindall, your own sweet-heart, from Thornhill. What else do I need to be?”

  “I need you to believe that you really are Lizzy Tindall, for, I assure you, without a doubt, you are.”

  “And I am, so I am,” she said.

  I continued to doubt, however. “There are no candles or rushes, anywhere?”

  “No—I have told you. Why do you not believe me?”

  She was standing, or so I guessed from her voice, about six feet in front of me. I moved toward her, my hands outstretched, fumbling in the blackness and encountering nothing, though I barked my shin on the sharp edge of the bed.