Shuttlecock

[28]

This Monday I didn’t see Quinn at all at the office. He didn’t even appear at his glass panel. Perhaps this was appropriate. Why should we make a point of bumping into each other when in a couple of days’ time we are going to meet, so to speak, more strictly face to face? Or perhaps Quinn is unwilling to see me because he knows that very soon he has some confession to make. At any rate, Monday was a better day than usual. I didn’t have to work late and I didn’t come home with my customary headache and bad temper. The kids had been out all day on their school trip and were tired and amenable and because they had not come home at their normal time I did not have to suffer Martin’s surveillance on my walk from the Tube.

Chessington Zoo, if you do not know it, is a sort of zoo with a funfair thrown in. There are whirligigs and a ghost-train. It makes no bones about what is implicit in most zoos — that they are places of entertainment rather than science, and that the dividing line between zoos and circuses is usually a thin one. Personally, I don’t care much for this circus element, but I am very fond of zoos as such. You can learn a lot from animals. About people, I mean, not just about animals. You can sometimes learn more about people from looking at animals than you can from looking at people. Take my advice: spend a few hours attentively in a zoo, then go and sit in a crowded pub. Or take a ride on the Tube. And there is something gratifying — something calming and reassuring, I can’t explain it — simply about being amongst animals. One of my favourite places — let me recommend it — is the Small Mammal House at Regent’s Park.

Yes, I know there is a falseness, a contradiction about the very concept of these animal playgrounds. Like golf courses and public commons: natural and artificial at the same time, wild-but-tame. But perhaps this is the way things must be now.

We were having a discussion along these lines at breakfast before the kids left. Or, rather, I was delivering a lecture to Martin and Peter. Parents had been asked by the teachers to provide their children not only with a packed lunch but with ‘a little pocket-money’ for the day. I doled them out a generous two pounds each. It was a way of securing their compliance. I could see all this money being spent on candy-floss and rides on dodgem-cars, and so I said: ‘You won’t forget to look at some animals too.’ They looked puzzled — weren’t they going to a zoo? But I could imagine them looking for a while at the leopards and antelopes, getting bored and then heading for the ghost-train. They wouldn’t linger, contemplate the warm fur, think of the rustle in the undergrowth … And then I launched into this monologue about the function of zoos. ‘You know, zoos aren’t just places to go and have fun,’ I began, ‘they have a serious purpose too.’ Phrases like ‘serious purpose’ were all right for Martin, but they go straight over Peter’s head. I forgot about eating my breakfast. ‘Zoos were originally set up, you see, as places to study animals.…’ And then I explained how in the nineteenth century when people started to live in big cities they also started to get interested in nature, as if it were something foreign, and zoos were an expression of this. This may all have been sheer bunk. I know nothing about the history of zoos or when the first zoos were founded. But I elaborated the point at length. I thought: how strangely you spend your time. Last night I was reading about my Dad’s experiences at the hands of the Gestapo and sniffing Marian’s talcumed body. Now I am propounding for my sons the growth of zoology in the nineteenth century. Half way through, I remembered that they no longer teach Nature Study as a subject in schools. ‘So you see,’ I concluded, ‘animals are really kept in zoos so we can understand them scientifically.’

Peter looked lost. Martin frowned and introduced into his expression a sardonic cast which he has been cultivating ever since his coup with Dad’s book. I could see that he thought what I was saying was so much grown-up claptrap. Worse — that he was actually going to take issue with me.

‘But how can you,’ he demanded, ‘— when they’re not the real thing?’ And then he said something pithy and aphoristic which made me inwardly panic at the speed of his mental development and, more than this (there was a sharp gleam in his eye), at his psychological penetration.

‘A lion in a cage isn’t a real lion.’

‘But it’s not practical,’ I blustered, ‘to study — er — monkeys, when they’re leaping about in the jungle.’

‘So why not leave them alone?’

Do other fathers have this terror over the breakfast table, when they realize their sons are growing up to be smarter than them?

‘But then you wouldn’t be able to go out for days at the zoo, would you?’ A weak argument. ‘And you’d never know about lots of interesting animals.’

‘Why should we have to know about them?’

All this was too clever by half. I thought, he will be saying next that keeping lions and monkeys in cages is cruel.

‘Keeping animals in cages is cruel, Dad.’

I looked at him. So, it’s cruel, eh? But I’d bet he’d still like a pet of his own.

‘But if you didn’t put them in cages you’d never get to see them.’

(For what else can you do these days, if you want to be close to nature, but put it in a cage?)

He paused for a moment.

‘Yes you would. There are plenty of good programmes about animals — on television.’

I was outwitted, nonplussed. I looked helplessly round the room for inspiration. Marian had left the table and was in the kitchen. She was preparing packs of sandwiches, slices of swiss roll and chocolate biscuits for the boys to take with them. Martin’s eyes were pinned on me. Peter was sitting, blinking and frowning, glancing now at me, now at his brother, daunted, once again, by Martin’s audacity, and by this clash of words which he did not really understand. He looked, himself, like a little caged animal. Might he be on my side? And then, in desperation, an answer came — an answer which in fact I thought rather a neat one and too subtle for Martin, so I delivered it in a loud voice, for Marian to hear:

‘But don’t you think television is just another sort of cage?’

Martin stared at me blankly for a while. I thought: now I have silenced him. And then he said, as if this conversation about zoos were merely by the by; ‘Dad — why do you walk in that funny way on your way home from the station?’

But in spite of this ignominious start Monday wasn’t such a bad day. I had woken up with the thought: On Wednesday I will see Quinn; on Wednesday I will know; I can be patient till then. And it was this thought that restrained me, just as I was about to let fly at Martin. And then something Marian said to me as we saw the boys off on their trip jolted me out of my sulks and made me forget almost completely this breakfast episode. The boys had to be early at school, where a coach was coming for the zoo party, and since this coincided with the time of my departure for work we all got into the car and Marian drove us first to the school, then took me on to the station. At the school two coaches were parked already outside the gates. There were all these gabbling children with picnic bags and satchels and plastic water-bottles on straps slung over their shoulders. Teachers trying to make counts; mothers fussing and petting. I thought of evacuees in war-time. I thought of the anguish of parents frightened of bombs. Coach-crashes, Marian got out of the car with the boys and kissed them both on the top of the head. She gave Peter an extra kiss and a little pat on the bottom for good measure. She didn’t walk across to the coach with them or wait to see them off. They had already spotted their friends and didn’t want us around. She’s a shrewd mother. I waved dutifully to one of the teachers, Mrs Thurleigh, who is always saying, as if it’s her phrase for all occasions, that we have ‘two bright boys’. (I never have the nerve to say to her, ‘But there’s something unnatural about them, isn’t there?’) Marian got back into the car and we waved through the window. And then, as we drove to the station, she said: ‘Did you know you yelled out in your sleep last night? You said: “Is there anyone there?” ’