The Elephant Keeper Page 26

  This reply seemed to satisfy her, for her trunk reached out and affectionately brushed my ear. After which, she gave me a little tap on the side of the head, as if to reprove me for such a foolish remark.

  5

  In the days after this surprizing visit, I found myself thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Sanders a great deal. It seemed altogether strange that he should have said that he was frightened of Jenny, when he was at Easton; hard as I searched my memory, I could not remember him being frightened. Nor could I explain Mrs. Sanders’s remark about old friends: it did not appear to me that Mr. Sanders and I had ever been true friends, or that we had even approached that condition. However, there was no doubt, that to invite me to their home for Sunday dinner was a clear offer of friendship.

  Ever since the calamities of my journey to Somersetshire, I had felt a great reluctance to leave Jenny’s side. However, the Sunday was a fine sunny day, and I reached Streatham in under two hours’ walking, and there had a very merry time of it. Mrs. Sanders cooked a shoulder of mutton, with capers, and potatoes in gravy, and afterward we ate gooseberry pie and a custard. I was then prevailed upon to try a pinch of Mr. Sanders’s snuff, which brought tears to my eyes and afforded the rest of the company a vast quantity of amusement; when Mrs. Sanders developed a fit of violent hiccupping, even their widowed daughter Jane, who had been very quiet, seemed to smile. Mr. Sanders later shewed me the plaster-of-paris mask which he had taken of Jane’s dead husband, and this I greatly admired.

  I walked back to the Menagery feeling much revived, and that very evening began to hunt for the History of the Elephant, which I wrote at Easton. At first, I could not find it, and became greatly agitated, lest it had been stolen. Who would want to steal such a worthless thing? Yet it meant more than a little something to me, both because of the many hours I had spent writing, all that time ago, and because of the memories which it contained. At length, I did find it, to my relief, though I also found that the ink had faded badly, and that a beetle had feasted on the sheets, devouring letters and even entire words, and tunnelling nearly to the end, where Death was written in the shape of its grey, flattened, snub-nosed skeleton.

  This, I said to myself, is the History of the Beetle, within the History of the Elephant.

  As I sat and turned its tattered pages, all kinds of curious thoughts ran through my head. Despite its title, the History no longer seemed to contain as much truth as it might have done. Certain things (it said) had happened; but they seemed as improbable as the adventures of Gulliver. Did I, Tom Page, truly once meet two Elephants, along with a dead leopard, and a baboon with a white beard and blue testicles, on the quay in Bristol? Did the hand of the same Tom Page truly hold the pen that made those marks, and those, on this trembling sheet of paper? Yet, as I read on, I also thought how different my life might have been. I might have married Lizzy, and stayed in Thornhill as an ordinary groom at Harrington Hall, or she might have come with me to Easton, and we would have had sons and daughters, like Mr. and Mrs. Sanders, and lived in a little house. Or, I might have followed Timothy to Grimsthorpe, and saved him from madness. Or, I might have ignored my father’s advice, and gone to sea in search of adventure, like my brother, and become a wealthy man. Another thought then crossed my mind: that I might never have gone to Bristol, all those years ago, and met Jenny and Timothy. Indeed, Jenny and Timothy might have died on the ship which brought them from the Indies, or might never have been captured and taken on board! How many possibilities we face, at every turn! I might never have been born! I might have been born an Elephant, not a human being!

  I do not feel any lasting regrets, however. They arrive like passing clouds; they blow across the sky and hide the sun, and then they are gone. The past is past; as to the future, it must be left to write itself. Jenny will very likely survive me, for while it cannot be true that Elephants live as long as two hundred years, no one doubts that the span of their natural lives greatly exceeds that of human beings, and so, though it pains me to contemplate the prospect, I must believe she will find another keeper. Long before then, however—and this I also must believe—there will come a time when she and I will leave the Menagery, or when the Menagery will leave London (for certainly we cannot stay here for ever, with Mr. Cross losing money, and what remains of his hair—it is, as Mr. Scott puts it, laughing, a nice question as to which will disappear sooner, for on the latter count Mr. Cross has only three or four greasy strands left, which he proudly drags over his pate or hides under his wig)—and we will once more find ourselves among the nightingales.

  Until then, I am attempting to follow Jenny’s example, that is, to avoid false hopes and to live in the present time, extracting what value I can from each passing moment. A giant, whiskered rat, tumbling through a hole in the ceiling’s rotten plaster, runs across my chest: Why, good morning, your Worship. A servant girl, leaning from a window, empties a chamber-pot, and its foul contents splash my feet: Well, good afternoon, Madam. Two watch-men, stopping outside the Menagery, wake me with their noisy shouting: Ah, good night to you, Gentlemen.

  After all, this city has much to offer. New stories, old stories, new versions of old stories, abound at every turn; they are part of the common currency, traded like any other goods. A visit to the Market supplies not only carrots and potatoes, but also the tale of a drunken butcher who fell into a drain, and was not recovered for ten days, and then only because his dog smelt him out, and barked at the entrance to the drain, raising the alarm. This story is probably untrue, or not wholly true. “It is not important. I believe them all,” Jenny says. “I like your stories, Tom. Tell me another.” So I tell her about the young woman, forced to work in a Lambeth stew, in which line of employment she found herself accosted by her own sweating father, whom she recognised during the act by a prominent mole on his ear-lobe. Or, say some, another part of his anatomy. Again, this is probably less than true, but the question of what is or is not true now seems less important to me. It may be true, it is possible; and on that possibility both she and I feed with relish.

  The summer has now faded, and we have sailed into autumn weather. It drips, it drizzles, it pelts, it pours; between clouds the sun shoots out a ray, but never for long. Leaves from distant trees whirl through the air, and carts and carriages clatter up and down the puddled streets. Two afternoons ago, between showers, I walked up to the Market and bought a sack of apples for Jenny; and having done so, joined a small crowd which had formed in a circle around a drunken man trying to dance to an organ. He swayed and lurched, rolled his eyes and seemed to trip on the wet cobbles, but then recovered himself. People were clapping and jeering. Presently, a crippled woman, bare-foot, with scarcely a tooth in her head, broke from the circle and joined in, the man clasping her by the waist and holding her in a tight embrace. I am certain that they did not know each other; they were complete strangers. But as I watched them reeling to and fro, growing ever more breathless and giddy, I found myself remembering Mrs. Sanders’s remark that one has to take what Life offers. I am sure she is right. Not to take what Life offers would be a great mistake, and taking what Life offers must be one of the secrets of happiness. Is that not what, in their own way, the two dancers were doing? And indeed, is that not what, in her own way, Jenny has taught me? If I remain uneasy, I think, it is perhaps merely because Life seems to offer different people such different things.

  The drunken man and crippled woman stumbled round and round, and at last they fell in a heap, gasping. Everyone cheered and jeered, and dispersed. I went to the east of the square, in search of fresh oranges; I found none, but noticed some short blackish objects, curved in shape, on a barrow which stood beneath one of the arches. Never having seen the like before, I asked the costermonger what fruit they were. “Bananas,” he told me. “Banana fruit.” Startled, I remarked that I had always understood bananas to be green—for I could remember Mr. Coad saying as much, years ago—whereupon he fired up and roundly declared that they were bananas when they were taken off the R
ose, which had landed at Deptford that very morning, after a voyage from the Indies, and since then they had not changed, they were still bananas. “And anyone who says otherwise is either a block-head or a liar,” he asserted, in a pleasant tone of challenge—which I hastened to decline, saying that I was sure that, since he said they were bananas, they could be nothing else, and had never intended to suggest otherwise. This mollified him; he grew more amiable, and told me that when bananas reached these shores, after weeks at sea, they were generally rotten; however, these particular specimens had, against the odds, survived the voyage in reasonable condition. “Sailors don’t like ’em,” he added. “Think they bring bad luck.” When I asked him about the taste of bananas, he replied that opinions varied. They had a curious taste, unlike any other fruit, being neither sweet nor sour. They had no pips, or none to speak of, and very little juice. The skin was not eaten. “You throw the skin away. The part you eats is inside the skin.” Taking up a banana, and stripping back the black skin, he revealed the pale, pulpy, sweet-smelling flesh.

  I bought six, even though they cost three shillings, and bore them back to the Menagery where, for once, I found a goodly number of visitors. Several were standing at Jenny’s cage—among them a little boy whose eyes, at the sight of an Elephant, nearly started from his head. He was no more than three years old, I would guess, and I found myself imagining that I, like him, was seeing an Elephant for the first time. What a magnificent creature she is, I thought—so huge and grey, so calm, so wise! How could I ever regret her part in my life? Yet there was a curious expression on her face, as though she was thinking about something very hard, so hard that she had not seen me.

  I put down the sack of apples and invited the boy and his mother into the cage, assuring them that they would be perfectly safe. Once they were inside, I gave a banana to the boy, who held it toward the Elephant. When she took it from him and put it in her mouth, his face lit with astonished delight. Her trunk came out a second time, and coiled round his hand, and shook it.

  “The Empress is thanking you,” I said. “Would you like to ride on her back?”

  The boy’s mouth fell open—in his emotion he lost all power of speech—but his mother said, “O, Sir, that would be such a treat for him, if he could!”

  In a moment, he was swung high through the air and seated on her neck. “Hold her ears, and you will be safe,” I said, and the boy reached out, and clung to her ears.

  He did not stay there long. She lifted him down, and he and his mother, having expressed their thanks, walked on.

  “How is it,” I said to Jenny, “that such a boy, so sweet and innocent and gentle, can become what most men become? What savagery is there, in human nature, waiting to emerge?”

  She stared at me. “What was that fruit, Tom? Have you any more?”

  Sliding my hand into the sleeve of my coat, I held up five black fingers. “Do you remember? They are bananas.”

  “I do remember, Tom,” she said. “I remember very well.”

  I gave her the bananas, one by one, and she planted them in her mouth, and her pleasure was such that it made me feel very happy indeed.

  It was near the end of the day. I lit my pipe.

  “What were you thinking of, Jenny?” I asked. “When I came in just now. What were you thinking?”

  She swung her trunk gently, and answered through a mouthful of banana. “I was not thinking, Tom. I was writing.”

  “Writing? Jenny, you cannot write!”

  “I write in my head,” she replied. “Surely, is it not true that all writing begins in the head?”

  “Or in the heart. Well…but how many pages have you written?”

  “I am not writing in pages. It is all one page.” She seemed shy. “One long Page.”

  “What are you writing? A poem?”

  “A story.”

  “A story? What story?”

  “I am writing the True History of Tom Page, the keeper of an Elephant, who was born in the year seventeen fifty-three, in the village of Thornhill, in Somersetshire,” she said.

  “O!” I took my pipe from my mouth and stared curiously at her. “And where does this History end? Here? Not here, I hope?”

  The end of her trunk gave an expressive twirl, this way and that. “Why, Tom, of course not; there are many possibilities,” she said.

  Part IV

  The repository, a concrete building to the south of the River Thames, gives no clue as to its contents. In a dream I press the intercom button, speak my name; the door softly opens. I advance down a corridor, tiled with black and white squares, to the reception area. Lying on an unmanned desk is a form, for visitors; it asks for my name and address, and the purpose of my research. I tick the box marked “Private.” It asks for the subject of my research; after some hesitation, I write:

  “Exotic animals of the 18th century.”

  There is no one to give the form to. I leave it on the desk, push through another door and find myself inside the mausoleum.

  Bones. The bones of birds, animals, reptiles hang in aisles like clothes in an enormous dry cleaner’s. The aisles taper into the distance, a hundred, two hundred yards, further; I can’t even see where they end. They disappear into a gathering gloom.

  The air is very still, and dry, humidity controlled. As for the smell, that’s hard to define, but it must be none other than quintessence of bone.

  The floor before me slopes gently forward, so that, as I take my first steps, I have a sense of a gradual descent, and also of a sudden self-consciousness. An overhead camera is recording my progress—someone, the keeper of the temple, is watching from another room—but that can’t be the reason, I’m used to CCTV. It must be the skeletons themselves. There are so many, so many more than I had anticipated, or thought possible; each species represented by dozens, even hundreds of specimens, each specimen similar to the other. In this great company, I am the only thing still alive. It feels as though the skeletons are watching.

  But, also, I’m watching myself. Who am I to disturb the dead air of this ossuary? By what right am I here?

  Every step seems an act of sacrilege. I wish that I had worn shoes with rubber, not leather, soles.

  I walk down an aisle of tigers, servals, lions, cheetahs, cougars, members of the cat family, baring their useless teeth. I take a right turn, and come upon the mallet and truncheon and club-hammer bones of the horses and zebras, their mouths neighing silently. I continue past small fish, large fish: arrangements of spikes and needles, eyeless and finless, though some still brandish their old weapons—spears, daggers, sabres, a once fearsome armory. The further I advance into this underworld, the greater my apprehension becomes. The skeletons seem more densely packed, the aisles narrower; it’s hard to move without touching the protruding bones. There’s less light, too; I’m negotiating a kind of interior dusk, a layered shade, in which the only colors are tints of gray. One could spend hours searching; one could lose one’s way and disappear forever.

  Yet I find the elephants easily enough; instantly recognizable, they hang in a long, lunar procession beyond the tapirs and wart-hogs. Their rib cages are the hooped sides of stranded ships. Their spines are lines of jagged rock on the seashore. Few have any tusks, which must have been removed, but some still have stumps embedded in the great sculptural plates of their skulls.

  Attached to each skeleton is an old-fashioned luggage ticket, on which are written the identity of the species in question, the sex of the animal and the date and manner of its death. The first elephants I examine are all Loxodonta africana, the African elephant; but at last I reach the Asian elephants. Elephas maximus.

  MALE, D. INDIA, 1959. SHOT

  MALE, D. SIAM, 1937. SHOT

  MALE, D. CEYLON, 1935. SHOT

  FEMALE, D, ASSAM, 1924. SHOT

  The shots ring out in my head. Shot after shot after shot after shot.

  FEMALE, D. RAJASTHAN, INDIA, 1913. SHOT

  BABY FEMALE, D. BURMA, 1903. SHOT

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nbsp; Label after label. As I walk slowly on, I realize that the skeletons have been hung in chronological sequence. The further I move along the procession, the further back in time I’m going.

  Thus I arrive at the late eighteenth century, and at a single gray, dangling shape. I reach up, my heart beating, to the label tied round one of the curving ribs.

  FEMALE, D. LONDON, ENGLAND, C. 1799. PNEUMONIA?

  A vast face, a dune of curves, with two dark hollows for the eye sockets. Is this, was this, once, my Jenny?

  No answer. But a low vibration disturbs me. What is this? Then I realize: beneath my feet, not far beneath my feet, must be an Underground line. As the trembling grows, I seem to see the train pass below me, its brightly lit carriages threading its cargo of passengers through the darkness. Men, women, children, none of them aware of what lies above, and each of their minds a little carriage of light, with its own pictures. I long to take my seat on this train, I long for the train to carry me away to the next station. But this is not where the dream is going. The vibration, having risen to a thrum, fades and dies, and again I am left in the strange twilight. I touch the skeleton with a gentle finger; it moves, and the movement transmits along the wire from which she hangs so that the next skeleton up the aisle moves too. I push again, harder now, and harder, and she sways, and a century of elephants begins to sway in unison, creaking to and fro, and for a moment it becomes nearly possible to reclothe these tatty bones in skin and flesh, to reimagine them into life. But the swaying soon subsides, like the passing train; imagination fails. If there are such things as spirits, why assume that they stay beside their bones? Surely the spirit of Jenny would be by Tom’s side, roaming in the warm fields? Where else could it be?