‘I get it all so wrong. I’m supposed to dean 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,1 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 longues 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.