The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Page 2

  AS BALTHAZAR JONES PASSED WAKEFIELD TOWER, the sound of the Thames lapping through Traitors’ Gate seemed louder than usual in the darkness. He looked to his left and saw the vast wooden watergates that had once opened to let in the boats carrying trembling prisoners accused of treason. But he spared not a thought for such matters, the details of which he had to relate countless times during his working day to the tourists, who were interested only in methods of torture, executions, and the whereabouts of the lavatories. Instead, he pressed on, past the Bloody Tower with its red rambling rose, said to have produced snow-white blossoms before the murder of the two little princes. Neither did he notice the dancing candlelight at one of its windows, where the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh nibbled the end of his quill as he sat at his desk in what had been his prison for thirteen years.

  Climbing up the stone steps, the Beefeater quickly reached the battlements. In front of him stretched the Thames, where Henry III’s white bear had once swum for its dinner. But Balthazar Jones kept his pale blue eyes raised as he tried to work out from which direction the precious rain would come. Touching his white beard with his fingertips as he made his calculations, he scoured the sky, through which the dawn was starting to leak.

  UNABLE TO SLEEP SINCE HER HUSBAND woke her as he left, Hebe Jones sneezed twice, irritated by the dust on her pillow. Rolling onto her back, she dragged a clump of damp hair from the corner of her mouth. Instead of coursing down her back as it had done during the lusty days of youth, it meandered slowly to her shoulders. Despite her age, apart from the odd strand that flashed like a silver fish in certain lights, it was the same luminous black it had been when Balthazar Jones first met her, a defiance of nature that he put down to his wife’s obstinacy.

  As she lay in the darkness, she imagined her husband walking through the Tower’s grounds in his pajamas, clutching an Egyptian perfume bottle in a hand that no longer caressed her. She had tried her best to rid him of his compulsion. During his first few attempts, she had caught him before he reached the bedroom door. But he soon improved his technique, and before long he was able to make it halfway down the stairs before he heard the seven words which he had grown to dread, uttered with the same red breath as his mother’s: And where do you think you’re going? However, dedication to the high art of vanishing resulted in a number of spectacular successes.

  Hebe Jones began to monitor the escape manuals he borrowed from the public library, and locked the bedroom door before they turned out their reading lights, hiding the key while her husband was in the bathroom battling the loneliness of constipation. But the trick backfired one morning when she could not remember where she had put it. Through a mouthful of humiliation which threatened to choke her, she asked him to help her in her search. He removed the loose stone next to one of the lattice windows, but all he found were the more aromatic love letters he had sent her during their courtship. He then strode to the fireplace, put his hand up the vast stone hood, and retrieved an old sweet tin from a ledge. Upon opening it he discovered a pair of silver cufflinks bearing his initials in the most alluring of scripts. His wife revealed that it was a gift she had bought for him four Christmases ago, which she had never been able to put her hands on. Her joy at seeing them again, and Balthazar Jones’s delight at suddenly receiving an unexpected present, distracted them both from their predicament. But before long, the hunt resumed until Balthazar Jones found what was indisputably a sex aid in the drawer of his wife’s bedside table. “What on earth is this for?” he asked, pushing a button. Their dilemma was forgotten again for the next thirty-four minutes, during which many questions were asked. The answers that were forthcoming led to further questions, which in turn produced a series of accusations from both sides.

  It was over an hour before they returned to their search. By then the cufflinks were back in the tin up the chimney with the announcement that he would have to wait until Christmas for them. Eventually, the pair admitted defeat, and Balthazar Jones reached for the phone and called the Chief Yeoman Warder to release them. The man made four attempts before the spare key sailed through one of the open windows. It was then that Hebe Jones spotted the original still in the keyhole, and she secretly removed it.

  From then on the bedroom door would remain unlocked, and no amount of protest would keep the Beefeater from his nocturnal wandering. It was with relief that Hebe Jones took the news one morning that her husband had been caught by the Chief Yeoman Warder. However, her relief turned to indignation when the rumours quickly followed that Balthazar Jones was carrying out a secret liaison with Evangeline Moore, the Tower’s young resident doctor, who quickened the heart rate of many of her patients. The claim was not without credibility as most affairs conducted by the Tower’s inhabitants took place within its walls, as they were locked in from midnight. While Hebe Jones knew instantly that there was no truth in the rumour—since Milo’s death her husband hadn’t allowed himself the pleasure of love-making—she nevertheless banished him from the matrimonial bed for a fortnight. Feet either side of the taps, Balthazar Jones slept in the bath. He endured the cramped, damp conditions, dreaming amongst the spiders of being lost at sea in a sinking boat. Each morning Hebe Jones would get up early to run a bath, being careful not to remove her husband beforehand, and always ensuring that she ran the cold water first.

  NOW, AS SHE LOOKED AT the bedside clock, fury coursed through her veins at yet another night of disturbed sleep. Her usual revenge, performed each time her husband returned to bed reeking of the night, was an anatomical master stroke. Once she heard the muddy breath of a man descended deep into his dreams, she would suddenly leap from the bed and make the short journey to the bathroom with the gait of a demented sentry. Once installed on the lavatory, she would proceed to empty her bladder with the door wide open. The clamour of the catastrophic downpour was such that her husband would immediately wake in terror, convinced that he was lying in a nest of snakes. When the infernal hissing eventually came to an end, the Beefeater would instantly sink back to his dreams. But several seconds later, in a feat of immaculate timing, his wife would release a second much shorter but equally deafening cascade, which would finish in a pitch-perfect rising scale and wake her husband as brutally as the first.

  Pulling the shabby blanket up to her chin, Hebe Jones thought of the cabinets of Egyptian perfume bottles filled with rain in the top room of the Salt Tower, and then of the cruelty of grief. Compassion suddenly chilled her rage. Ignoring the glass of water on her bedside table that she usually drank in its entirety on such occasions, she turned back onto her side. And when her husband eventually returned home with his empty vessel after the clouds had fled, Hebe Jones pretended to be asleep as he clambered in beside her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 Balth
azar 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 of 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 hat. 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 because they were 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 Yeoman 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 (and torturing) prisoners, 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 of a shopping 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 rejecting 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 that he reveal not 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 hordes eventually left, and 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 while 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 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.