Whistling for the Elephants Page 17

  ‘Who told you that?’ It was Mother’s only contribution to the festivities.

  ‘Miss Strange.’

  Father looked hard at me. ‘Miss Strange? I really think perhaps you shouldn’t go to that zoo. I really can’t have you coming up with these…’ Father’s voice rose almost to audible. I think he had had quite a lot of martinis because he lashed his arm out for emphasis and the jug of water smashed on to the floor. We went home in silence. Father was thirteenth on my list — the one who broke the water pitcher.

  That night I stayed up late watching The Johnny Carson Show on my own. I wondered if I could talk Father into colour TV but I didn’t know if he would see that as a trichromate I needed it. Mother had retired long before, but Father sat drinking carefully and steadily. It was very refined. For every drink he would remove the key to the tantalus from his pocket and unlock the top. Then he would remove the bottle and carefully pour himself a measure. The bottle then went back and was once more locked into place. It was very neat and very steady. He had given up on his project. A letter from the British Museum had put paid to that. It seemed that Elizabeth I had never visited Ickenham. The ER signature at the Ickenham Arms had almost certainly belonged to an Edmund Rossiter, a brush salesman who had passed through in 1598 with a bag of samples and a flourishing signature. The discovery seemed to have done him in.

  When Carson was finished I put Father to bed. The bottle in the tantalus was empty but still locked away. He lay staring at the wall. I didn’t change him or anything. I didn’t like to. I just loosened his tie. He lay there, immaculately dressed, intoxicated but not in musth. I took his shoes off and took them to the kitchen to polish. I thought if he had clean shoes in the morning he might forget about the zoo. He did, but the shoes had nothing to do with it. The next morning Mother was gone and she didn’t come back.

  Chapter Ten

  I was pretty sure that Mother left because I was so different. I knew I was from the way she used to look at me. I wasn’t the little girl she had dreamed about. I didn’t want any of the things she did. I didn’t even like the smells she did. The perfumes and the powders in her room made me feel like I was drowning. Yet when she had gone I went into the bedroom and sat on the bed sniffing the air. I looked at myself in the mirror and willed myself to be like other little girls. With friends my own age and dolls and a giggling laugh. That’s what Mother wanted. That was why she left. Because I didn’t laugh right. I tried to talk to Father but he was slipping from me too. He didn’t want to tell me anything.

  ‘She’s gone back to England. You’ll see her there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is she not well? Did I say something?’

  ‘It’s all right, Dorothy. It will be all right.’

  But it wouldn’t. If she could have gone to a shop to get another daughter I thought she would have. One in the right shade. Maybe I was a Dixie cup kid. Father went to work. I was used to being on my own but now it felt strange. Since we had arrived in America and gone to the house Mother hated, she had spent almost all her time in her room, but at least I knew where she was. Now I was adrift and to blame. I didn’t know what to do with myself Even the zoo didn’t seem like a good idea. I went up to the Burroughs House, the house of love, and let myself in. I don’t think anyone ever locked anywhere then. The others were all working out in the field and the place was completely still. The house was huge and there were plenty of rooms I had never explored. I stood in the vast entrance hail looking up at the chandelier. What would it be like growing up in such a place? Mother would have been happy here. She could have swept down the stairs at night in some elegant gown, ready for some elegant dinner. She wouldn’t even have had to know where the kitchen was. Father waiting for her in black tie and tails. Smiling at her. Loving her. Maybe I could have had a grey dress with pearls, like Phoebe in the painting, and Grace would have loved me. Mother would have loved me. I looked down at my beloved shorts and T-shirt and knew I had been a disappointment. Would always be a disappointment.

  Beyond the Polar Room, where Helen and I had first watched spiders spinning emotional turmoil, lay a set of elaborate double doors. I had never really noticed them before as they had always been closed. Now the right-hand door stood ajar and drew me down the room. There were no lights on but the morning sunlight drifted through the coloured glass from the garden. I stepped across a rainbow and looked through the open door. Inside was what must have been the largest room in the house. Acres of wooden floor stretched out under shuttered windows. There was no furniture but across the ceiling dancers from countries around the world tripped the light fantastic in a mosaic of painted movement. Thin shafts of light penetrated the wood shutters, giving the floor an irregular striped pattern over which moved Joey Amorato. Joey, the dog catcher, was dancing. He was not an athletic man but he moved over the floor with a ballroom dancer’s grace, holding an invisible partner close in his arms. It was an elegant soirée for one. I slid my back down the wall and sat watching. In the half-light, the brown dog—catcher’s uniform with the embossed name of the town across the back was the garb of a cavalry officer. Joey’s short, podgy figure was Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in one. Soaring music from a string quartet rose as … Joey saw me and tripped.

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. Geez,’ he said, stopping in the middle of the room. ‘I came for Miss Strange. She called me… about a dog. I came about a dog. Something with a goose. There was no one here.’

  ‘They’re all up at the field. There’s an elephant coming,’ I said. We stood looking at each other. I don’t know who felt more awkward. ‘I liked to see you dance,’ I said.

  Joey blushed furiously. He was mortified.

  ‘Oh, that’s not dancing. Not real dancing. I don’t. This place ain’t for people like me.’ Joey was very embarrassed. I think he thought the only answer was to go grown-up.

  It was what he did with everybody. There was a streak of officialdom in him which came out all the time. I don’t think Joey knew how to just be himself He was a town official through and through. He pulled his belly in above his belt and marched heavily over toward the wall where I was sitting.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyhow? You shouldn’t be here on your own. Does your mother know you’re here?’ I half expected him to whip out a notebook and take down a statement.

  ‘My mother left,’ I said. This stopped him for a moment.

  ‘Left? Like departed?’ I nodded. ‘Yes, well, that ain’t good. That ain’t good at all.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, kid. She was a beautiful woman,’ he added, as if she were dead. Small particles of dust drifted in the strips of light. ‘I came about a dog,’ he repeated before falling into another awkward silence. Maybe the mention of the dog reminded me of the sad goose, I don’t know. Whatever it was, I burst into tears. I don’t know which one of us was more embarrassed. Joey looked away and then slid down the wall to sit beside me on the floor. We didn’t touch but he sat close as though he meant to comfort me.

  ‘She left your dad, huh?’

  I hadn’t thought about that. I supposed perhaps she had. I had only thought about Mother leaving me. Maybe it was the anniversary dinner. The food hadn’t been anywhere near good enough but also I had talked too much. No one in our family ever talked that much or about such things, life and death and that. But maybe she hadn’t just left me.

  ‘It could just be temporary. Your mother might just be getting some air.’ We sat for a long time in silence. I didn’t think Mother was getting air. I don’t think she really approved of the stuff After a while Joey cleared his throat. ‘I read that sometimes couples, good couples, couples that were meant, get a rainbow bridge between them. Sometimes it’s an instant one, from the minute they meet, and sometimes it kind of grows. I mean something invisible. I never had that. Do you think your folks did?’

  I thought for a minute. I didn’t think so. I liked the idea of it but I was sure Mother and Father never had it. Harry and Judith didn
’t have it, and I didn’t ever remember seeing Uncle Eddie look at Aunt Bonnie that way. I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No. It’s rare, real rare. Mr Burroughs thought he had it with Billie but I don’t know. You couldn’t tell with Billie. I don’t think it counts unless both people feel it. They had a wedding like it was there but I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you know Billie then?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Did you ever see that rainbow thing?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t see it. You kind of feel it. You been to the pool here in the house?’ I shook my head. ‘Fantastic piece of work. Lots of Indian stuff Sometimes they used to let us swim there after school. Grace always took Phoebe. There was nothing of Phoebe. Even I could have lifted her and I was little when I was a kid.’ Joey was quite little now but I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Grace used to pick her up in her arms and carefully carry her down the marble steps into the water. Phoebe would move her arms and legs while Grace lapped the water on to Phoebe’s shoulders. There was this picture of an ocean on the ceiling and Phoebe would stretch out flat, staring up at it.’

  The indoor pool was new. It was to be the last building John Junior added to the Burroughs House. As with every architectural detail, the marble room was beautiful, if a little overwhelming. It owed its inspiration to the Raj. All around in minute mosaic detail, the god Vishnu floated on the cosmic ocean, dreaming his cosmic dreams. Grace liked this room best of all, for here Phoebe was free.

  She lifted her weak friend into her arms and carefully carried her down the marble steps into the water. She laid her gently on the surface and watched Phoebe take new life. Phoebe’s frail and unsure frame became usable and strong. Phoebe stared up at the cosmic ocean above her head.

  ‘Look, Grace, we are not in our world. We are somewhere else. We are free,’ mouthed Phoebe to the Indian god.

  Grace placed both her hands under Phoebe’s back and began to slowly swirl her in the water. Billie watched from the side in silence. It was a display of tenderness such as she had never been subject to. This was love. Not lust or sensible arrangement or reproduction or any of the other reasons why the men and women she knew clubbed together, but honest love. It hurt to watch it. For those three it was to be a final quiet moment. Not that anyone could have predicted it. Not that anyone would have taken the time.

  They still felt like winners. Winners for ever. When they got back to the main house they heard the news that Milton was dead. He had made one deal too far. It took all the steady part of their lives away. Milton might have been a crook but he had been a sensible one. Now the kids had no parent to tell them off when they went over the top. John didn’t know he couldn’t manage by himself He wasn’t grown-up enough. Sweetheart tried but it was too big a job and maybe it was too late.

  Joey sighed. ‘I remember watching Grace and Phoebe in the water. Billie didn’t swim but sometimes she would watch from the side in silence. I think maybe she was jealous. Maybe we all were. But that was that thing, that rainbow bridge.’

  ‘Did you go to the wedding? Billie and John Junior’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I was just a kid but I danced with Billie and Grace and Sweetheart. I was only eight. What a party. Mr Burroughs, he never did nothing small. The shows he did. I think that summer it was the big Joan of Arc stuff They had like a thousand performers, hundreds of soldiers on horses, forty elephants and a real fire at the end. When they took it to London they needed four ocean liners. That was something because P. T Barnum only needed three for his and he was some showman. Anyway, lots of the acts came. It was a heck of a party. Even the elephants got dressed up. What the hell were they called?’ Joey sat and thought.

  Ellen and Toto, Grace’s elephant couple, had been given new costumes for the event. They were dressed as bride and groom. Ellen had a full veil and a bunch of roses while Toto wore a bow tie, a silk-lined cape and a top hat. Grace didn’t like it.

  She thought it was wrong to dress them up like that, but it made Phoebe smile. John had bought an orchestromelchor for the occasion. It was a huge musical instrument which on its own could give the full effect of an orchestra for five miles.

  ‘I think they won’t like the music. It’s very loud. I don’t want it to upset them.’ Grace fretted over the elephants all day. No one else did. Everyone else was too drunk. It really was a day of carnival without end. Two hundred and fifty people turned up and six hundred bottles of champagne went down. The guest list was quite extraordinary. Quite a lot of John’s shows had closed ahead of paper. This meant they returned to Sassaspaneck before the end of their posted season. John didn’t mind the losses. He was busy organizing the biggest show ever, to blow Barnum out of the water.

  The Flying Vazquez Family arrived to add their dimension to Jeanne d’Arc’s demise. They drove around in a converted potato truck, yet somehow they looked like glamour. Italian-looking boys who hardly took a breath before they had rigged a rehearsal harness up in the trees by the bird house. Here they spent their hours on the triple somersault. Endless shouts of ‘Hup, hup, hey!’ as the youngest Vazquez swung back and forth, up to sixty miles per hour, before flipping three times and flinging himself out into the arms of his oldest brother.

  As Grace carried Phoebe to the ceremony, physical perfection was spinning over their heads. It was the strangest mix of people. Midgets, giants and the Fiji Cannibals headed for the temporary altar built on the lawn. Mabel Willebrandt, the Deputy Attorney General for the last eight years, was there. She had caused a great scandal when she adopted a baby girl after she got divorced. Then there was Lord Delamere, a man happy to take someone else’s money.

  ‘I am telling you, ostriches have been my downfall,’ he announced to Captain Adam H. Bogardus, Champion Wing Shot of America. ‘I was just on the verge of making a fortune out of the wretched birds’ feathers for hats when motoring took off Absolutely scattered the chances of feathers as finance.’

  It was a time of peacocks and champagne. Of lingering looks between men and their best friends’ wives. So many people being spoiled and badly behaved. Africa loomed large in much conversation as the tamer of John’s menagerie wandered about for the ceremony.

  ‘Do you remember Denis Finch Hatton? I heard a marvellous story about him the other day. There he was, deep in bush, hundreds of miles from anywhere, when he saw a sweaty native running after him with a cleft stick. The boy only had a telegram for him. It had come all the way from London in relays. Anyway, old Denis read the telegram and it said, ‘Do you know Gervase Pippin—Linpole’s address?” Do you know what he sent back as an answer? “Yes.” Isn’t that brilliant?’

  John was like a small child. Heady with excitement. Only Sweetheart kept cool and got everything going. She stayed sober for Harry because Harry needed her.

  ‘You must start the ceremony now, John,’ she counselled.

  ‘Yes, yes, I will, but look at this. Look at this wedding present.’ He stood in front of a small table made from a curious wood. ‘It’s not wood at all.’ He whispered his delight like a small boy with a dirty magazine. ‘It’s made entirely from coprolites. Do you know what they are? Fossilized saurian faeces.’ His voice boomed out his appreciation. ‘It’s a table made from old shit and no one will know. Isn’t that perfect? Isn’t it the most perfect thing? And look at these —candlesticks made from the vertebrae of an ichthyosaurus.’

  Everything was about wonder. About the extremes of experience, of human and of animal life. On that day you could have searched the ends of the earth for a rarer experience. It was unreal and it could not survive. Mine Yucca, the Female Hercules — the Strongest Woman on Earth, Handsome, Modest and Genteel, in the Costume of the Parlour She Performs Feats of Strength Never Attempted by Any Other Man or Woman — carried Billie on a carved chair out to the lawn. She looked like a white goddess emerging from the house. She had on her tiger-training uniform but everything was in white linen — the pants
, the shirt, her neat tie — and all finished off with knee-high white leather boots. It was Billie’s own way of dressing for a wedding.

  John looked more sombre in his dark suit, but his waistcoat was white silk with buttons made from the bones of an alligator. The orchestromelchor struck up as Ellen and Toto took up their places either side of the altar. As the priest began his rites Billie looked to Grace, but she was too busy making sure the animals were okay. She still thought the music was too loud. It wasn’t actually the music which caused the commotion. It was Mlle Zazel, the Human Cannonball. She was supposed to perform as the climax to the wedding vows. She had her trick down to a fine art. She was a small woman who stood on a circular platform within the tube of her cannon. The bottom of the small circle was attached to a heavy spring. As the tension in the spring was released, a light gunpowder charge was set off and she would sail off to land in a large net some seven fret away. Unfortunately, that day some wag had interfered with the quantity of gunpowder.

  As the ceremony concluded, John kissed Billie and Mlle Zazel flew over their heads with no apparent intention of stopping. She narrowly missed joining the Vazquez Family on a permanent basis and continued on over to the conservatory. It was the loud crash of glass which finally sent Ellen and Toto running off in separate directions. Grace, unsure who to follow, seemed to set off in both ways at once. John laughed and laughed, sure and confident in his domain. The animal world was his to command. With Billie secured to his side, he felt very powerful. More cocktails were gulped as the crowd moved to see his final gift to Billie.

  Rajan, her beloved Rajan, stood in the most magnificent new, round enclosure. It was the perfect setting for this most perfect of Bengal tigers. His massive striped head stared out at the wedding party from behind the bars. Grace, having ushered Ellen and Toto to their own enclosure, pushed Phoebe to the front of the crowd so she could see. Billie, immaculate in her white, stepped up to the cage door.