One could have been forgiven for not recognizing him for what he was: a deus ex machina, a messenger of the capricious gods whose name – because things are so seldom what they seem – was Johnnie Biggs …
Toby and Margaret had reached the angel fish, so celestially slender that their organs could be seen pulsating winsomely inside them.
‘And you’ll see, she’s not one to hold down this job,’ said the elderly woman, raising her voice against the oncoming children, ‘and that’s menial enough for a girl with her background.’
‘Look, Toby,’ said Margaret from the next tank. ‘ Come here a minute. Interesting spermatophore development.’
But Toby didn’t come – quite simply couldn’t come. His scalp tingled and the delighted shrieks of the schoolchildren discovering the horrors of the electric eel reached him as only the faintest of tinklings.
For after all, the strange patch of summer ecstasy he’d been going through, the dreams of childhood seascapes, of long haired girls rising from the water, had been the prelude only to some particular condition. In short, he was going nuts. Because one minute, without a doubt, the tangled, sea-green strand hanging from the top of the tank had been a coil of seaweed. And the next minute, equally unmistakable, it had turned into a girl’s green-gold and streaming hair.
With a desperate effort he tore himself away and followed Margaret, who had reached the turtles. It was no good, he told himself, getting maudlin about turtles. So they cried when they laid their eggs and lumbered back into the water like heart-sick tanks. There was nothing one could do.
And then it happened again. Up there, among the bubbles of silver which defined the turtles’ sky, something floated. But not a fish, a plant … A wrist? A girl’s slender, blue-veined wrist with something hearbreakingly frantic in the way it broke the water.
‘Margaret,’ Toby tried to say, very calm, very matter-of-fact, ‘ I think there’s a drowned girl in this tank.’
But Margaret had moved on to a tank of tropicals in which ferocious dragons, seductive geishas, idiot clowns, all masqueraded temporarily as fish.
And inside which, beside the serrated, gaping mouth of a great conch, pale fingers – surely human fingers? – desperately searched.
‘Do you see anything, Margaret?’ said Toby frantically.
‘Well, naturally,’ said Margaret, and told him what she saw, which was a Schomburgk’s Leaf-fish with a fungus infection on its caudal fin.
‘Not a drowned girl?’ said Toby. ‘Not a drowned girl with sea-green hair?’
‘Harold, my feet are killing me,’ said Harold’s mother, and for a time said nothing more.
Because suddenly there was a strange, curiously unnerving thud and almost at once smoke began to snake in evil choking clouds through the hall. The schoolchildren began to cough, then to scream and run in a stampede to the door, and still the smoke came, blotting out sight, making each drawn breath an agony.
‘Margaret?’ called Toby, groping his way back into the hall, ‘Margaret?’ and getting no reply felt his way blindly towards a half-remembered door. ‘Margaret?’ he croaked again.
Then he reached it and here at last was Margaret blundering into him. He put out an arm and felt with relief the cold plastic of her sensible handbag before she fell, smoke-blind, against him. To his relief he found he could lift her somewhat solid bulk quite easily and stumbling between the storage vats and water pipes which made up this looking-glass world behind the tanks, came out at last into the open and laid Margaret down on a patch of grass.
Except that it wasn’t Margaret…
Meanwhile Harold, tying a clean handkerchief about his mouth and keeping extremely calm, extremely steady, began to sidle along the hand rails, one arm extended in a filial search for Mother.
‘Mother?’ called Harold. ‘Mother, where are you?’
And: ‘Here, here, Harold,’ called Harold’s mother. ‘Harold, I’m choking, I can’t see.’
Harold couldn’t either, but he bravely abandoned the handrail, ignored the stumbling children running for the exit and at last, with untold relief felt the cool slither of Mother’s unnecessary raincoat beneath his hand.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, putting a protective arm round her, and steered her, coughing and moaning a little, towards safety and daylight. ‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Harold, setting her down on the steps and managing in spite of the pain of his inflamed and swollen eyes to pat her soothingly upon the back. ‘ We’re safe now, Mother. Everything’s perfectly all right.’
Which in fact it was. Except that the person he was patting so soothingly wasn’t Mother.
Out of sight, on the other side of the Aquarium, Toby stared at the girl who lay stretched out before him on the grass. He should have known that Margaret, who was a hockey blue, would not have hung so lightly from his shoulders. This girl was slender, her long, blonde hair was soaking wet and she smelt movingly of fish. Moreover, the handbag which had bumped so coldly against him was not in fact a handbag. The object which the girl, half faint still, was nevertheless desperately clutching, was a large polythene bag filled with water, inside which swam, slowly and majestically, a large, grey fish.
‘You saved a fish?‘‘ said Toby, awed. ‘Wouldn’t he have been quite safe in all that water?’
She said nothing, but her eyes, sea-green like her hair, brimmed, overflowed and made tentative runnels of pink on her smoke-blackened cheeks.
‘Perhaps he’s special?’ suggested Toby, finding her silent grief unbearable. ‘A reincarnated Buddhist prince,’ he suggested, caught by a look of deep serenity somewhere round its nostrils, ‘with bliss-bestowing fins?’
She tried to smile through her tears, but almost at once she drooped again and ran desperate fingers through her soaking hair.
‘He’s swallowed it,’ she said in a choking voice. ‘At least I think it was him. I dropped it in the tank. I kept looking and looking. I work in there, you see, in the Aquarium. I’m a sort of lab girl.’
Of course. He saw it now. The seaweed-floating hair, the frenzied searching …
‘What did he swallow?’ said Toby, watching the fish – a tench, possibly – for signs of gastric tension.
‘My ring! My engagement ring. I always lose it. Harold’ll be so angry. He said if I lost it once more, we were through. It was two diamonds and a ruby and it didn’t collect the dust,’ she said wildly.
Harold. Toby remembered the voices in the Aquarium and everything fell into place.
‘I get it all so wrong. I’m supposed to clean the tanks, not fall into them. I’m sure to get the sack after this and I’m so worried about the tench. They were terribly hard diamonds.’
Toby leaned forward and took her narrow, smoke-black hand. ‘Ah, don’t,’ he said tenderly. ‘Don’t. He’ll be all right, I promise you. Diamonds for tenches are like grit for pigeons. Roughage, you know.’
And as she turned to him, believing it, radiant with relief, Toby felt, quite distinctly, the earth shiver beneath his feet…
Harold’s consternation on finding that he was soothingly patting a totally unknown and very personable female with a handsome figure and a pretty profile, was absolute.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I thought you were my mother.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Margaret, but she spoke sensibly and without rancour, as was her wont.
‘I mistook your handbag for her mackintosh,’ said Harold. ‘I felt it in the dark,’ and blushed, for it had to be admitted that he had felt other things also.
A couple of keepers came out of the Aquarium and Harold inquired for Mother. ‘Everyone’s safely out now,’ they assured him. ‘Your old lady’ll be along at the First Aid Post with the schoolkids, I dare say. A case of smoke without fire.’
‘I must go and look for my friend,’ said Margaret, knowing how little Toby was to be trusted.
This was the kind of problem Harold enjoyed. ‘You don’t, of course, propose to search round the Zoo at random?’
‘Indeed not,’ said Margaret. ‘A system is obviously necessary.’
‘Might I suggest ever-narrowing concentric circles,’ suggested Harold, ‘as if looking for a ball lost in a field?’
Margaret nodded. ‘You don’t happen to have a map?’
‘I have,’ said Harold, and Margaret sighed with approval because Toby never had anything except vinegar-flavoured potato crisps and stray pebbles whose veined markings he expected her to rave about. ‘However, if you will allow me, having ascertained that Mother is quite comfortable, I will accompany you…’
‘If I take him back, and explain, Harold’ll want him killed,’ said Nell, looking down at the fish who, no longer Buddhistically calm, was growing noticeably short of oxygen.
‘And Margaret will dissect him for you beautifully,’ said Toby.
They looked at each other. Then without a word they got up and walked together towards the Regent’s Park canal.
‘Cor!’ said the boy, walking beside Johnnie Biggs in the crocodile. ‘Did you see that?’
The Bracken Hill School party had re-formed and the children, now savouring in retrospect their narrow escape from death, were going home across the bridge. ‘It was a bloomin’ great fish jumped in the water.’
But Johnnie Biggs, the deus ex machina who had changed four lives, was not remotely interested in fish. Johnnie was in a state of exaltation far beyond speech. He’d done it. He’d done what the gang said. He’d let off the smoke canister they’d nicked from the army dump and he hadn’t been caught, so now they’d have to let him join. And Johnnie, whose father was in prison, whose mother had given up the struggle long ago, walked from the Zoo that strange, hot summer’s day filled with one of mankind’s oldest enchantments: the prospect of belonging …
Toby had explained to Nell gently, interestingly, the ideas of the great psychologist, Freud: that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose. Now they sat on the banks of the canal into whose green and muddy waters they had launched two hundred and twenty-five pounds’ worth of diamonds and in a sense, too, a great deal of well-designed Scandinavian furniture and a split-level oven which cleaned itself.
‘I didn’t really want any of it?’ inquired Nell.
‘No,’ said Toby.
‘Not even Harold?’
‘Particularly not Harold.’
‘I get afraid when I’m alone,’ said Nell. ‘All that ecstasy, all that despair…’
‘I hadn’t thought of you being alone,’ said Toby, shocked. ‘ I hadn’t thought of that at all.’
And as they turned to each other, not quite believing, yet, that dreams and reality could meet so unconflictingly, Harold, not seeing them, appeared on the other bank. His arm was through Margaret’s and though it must have become clear to both of them that Toby, unlike a ball lost in a field, was indulging in purposeless and confusing movements of his own, they continued – so pleased were they with each other’s company – to move gravely past the camel house, the zebras, the antelopes, searching, in ever-narrowing concentric circles, the emptying Zoo …
SIDI
THE SILKEN, sky-blue curtains of the luxurious fitting booth in London’s most famous department store parted and the young bride stepped out. Her dress of snowy muslin was tight waisted, wickedly full-skirted, ankle-length: a paean to the ‘New Look which Dior had launched, in a sunburst of ruched and tuckered extravagance to banish, in this spring of 1947, the austerities of the war.
But it was not at the dress that the bride’s erstwhile governess was staring, but at the look in the girl’s eyes. For here was radiance and serenity and a shining, unmistakable joy. No, this could be no marriage of convenience. In marrying John West, whoever he was, Sidi, with banners flying, was going home.
Well, why not? Why this ridiculous sense of disappointment, of betrayal? Had she herself not told Sidi, years and years ago in Berlin, about Lot’s wife and the uselessness of looking back? Did she really expect this child who, above all others, deserved her happiness, to remember a place that was now a heap of rubble, a country that was despoiled, dismembered and unreachable?
It was nine years since she had last seen Sidi, who had spent the war in America, evacuated with her English boarding school within a year of reaching Britain. Sidi’s excited voice on the phone, tracking her down in her Berkshire cottage to tell her of this wedding, had been their first contact since then.
‘You must come, Hoggy,’ Sidi had said, her voice still retaining beneath the New England burr she had acquired in the States the traces of her European origins. ‘I need you most particularly.’
And Miss Hogg had agreed to come not only to the wedding but to this fitting, for of all the children she had looked after only Sidi, that strange little Continental waif, had stayed in her memory. Yet as the dressmakers surged forward and Sidi’s glamorous mother, now in her third marriage to a wealthy stockbroker, issued her instructions, she longed to push them all aside and say to this illumined, joyous bride: ‘Don’t you remember, Sidi? Don’t you remember Vlodz?’
She had been named, among other things, for the woman who had loved and succoured the great German poet, Wolfgang von Goethe: Sidonie Ulrike Charlotte Hoffmansburg. But she was a small child with worried dark eyes, the frail, squashed-looking features of an orphaned poodle and soft, straight hair which was cut to lap her eyebrows but never quite made it to her ears, and ‘Sidi’ was as much of her name as she could manage.
This small girl traversed, four times a year, the great plains and forests of Central Europe – from her mother’s elegant apartments in Berlin or Dresden to her father’s estate in Hungary, sent ‘like a paper parcel’, she said to herself, backwards and forwards, forwards and back.
The year was 1935, divorce less common, less civilised. The little girl, the victim of her parents’ inability to endure each other, bled internally. All she hoped for as she climbed on to the train at the Friedrich Strasse Bahnhof, already pale with indigestion from consuming the sugared almonds and langues de chats pressed on her by her mother’s latest lover, was that her father would say one kind word about her mother. All she prayed for as she mounted the train in Budapest, clutching the doll in Hungarian peasant costume hastily procured by her father’s current mistress, was that her mother would at least ask how her father was. A simple wish, but one that in all her life was never granted.
This was the time of the great trains de luxe, beasts of power and personality which raced across the Continent. The Train Bleu, the Ahlberg-Orient, the Süd Express … Sidi travelled in immense comfort, gallantly swallowing five-course dinners in the restaurant car of the wagons-lits, retiring to snowy bedlinen in her damask-lined first-class sleeper with its gleaming basin and pink-shaded lamps. Yet her eyes, as she looked out over the heaths and birch forests, the great fields of maize and rye, seldom lost their sad, bewildered look. Who wanted her? where did she belong?
Sidi’s mother was an actress, the ravishing Sybilla Berger whose silken peroxide-blonde hair, plucked ethereal eyebrows and high cheekbones concealed the constitution of an ox and the single mindedness of a column of driver ants.
Marriage to a minor Austro-Hungarian landowner without influence or brains was a mistake she quickly rectified. After three years of domesticity in Vienna she divorced him, moved to Berlin, broke into films … ‘Home’ for Sidi with her mother was a series of suites in ‘ Grand Hotels’ from which the little girl was exercised by the hotel porter along with the dachshunds and schnautzers of the guests and ‘listened for’ at night by suitably tipped chambermaids. Sometimes taxis would call for her and she would be taken to film studios, patted by directors, kissed by actresses – and then forgotten, sometimes for hours. She played under café tables and, in the corners of frowsty dressing-rooms; made pebble houses in the courtyards of restaurants, looking up occasionally to trace through the clouds of cigarette smoke the face of her loved and unattainable mother.
Then suddenly there would be a spate of clothes-and-present
buying to impress the other parent, an affecting scene at the station as Sybilla, surrounded by admirers, took leave of her little girl… and the long journey to the moated Wasserburg at Malazka to see if perhaps it was her tall, good-natured father with his easy laugh who really loved and wanted her – and to watch the tumbrils cross the cobbled courtyard with the piled corpses and blood-stained antlers of the deer which her father spent his days in killing as he killed, with seasonal enthusiasm, his pheasants and water-fowl and boars.
Sometimes, when her parents tired of their tug-of-war, other pieces were thrown on the board: a grandmother in Prague, a trio of maiden aunts in Paris – and Sidi, the small pawn in their machinations, was put on to yet another great train with some hastily assembled travelling companion.
Thus Sidi, at nine years of age, was a child to whom one could not give a present without her passing it on within minutes to some recipent from whom she might buy even a momentary affection; a child who, if you played her at halma, would wrinkle her abortive nose, trying and trying to lose so that the winner might be pleased and care for her. A child at whose feet the waters of Babylon inexorably lapped.
At which point there entered Miss Hogg.
Miss Hogg was English, a governess, imported with Frau Hoffmansburg’s marmalade and riding boots. A stout redheaded lady, she proceeded to bring order and routine into Sidi’s life – but not love. Love was a commodity in which Miss Hogg no longer dealt.
Once it had been different. Once, long ago, Miss Hogg had been the Vicar’s Sarah-Ellen with a bridge of freckles across her upturned nose and waist-length tresses that struck fire from the sun. Once she had had an adored twin brother, two gingerhaired boy cousins with a penchant for dreadful practical jokes and a fiancé called Hughie who could melt her bones just by entering the room. On her nineteenth birthday her brother and the twins and Hughie had taken her in a punt down the river with hampers and bottles of champagne and a gramophone that played ragtime. A year later, not one of the four young men was still alive. When the last of the telegrams came, the one that told her of Hughie’s death on the Somme, Sarah-Ellen had excised her heart, gone to a training college and become, eventually, a governess.