Ah, Jane, Candy Striper to the Cosmos, Gray Lady of the Ineffable, when would I meet you, swap traveler’s tales of what was to be found in those hot jungles of self-seeking, those voyages to the center of the soul and other uncharted places, the steeps and deeps and lost coves and far shelves of being? Ah, Jane, oh Löes Lipton, half Europe loves you.
I went to London and stayed in the Bottom, the tall new hotel there. Lonely as Frank Sinatra on an album cover I went up to their revolving cocktail lounge on the fiftieth floor, the Top of the Bottom, and ran into Freddy Plympton.
“She’s here.”
“Jane Löes Lipton? I’ve heard that one before.” (We hadn’t been talking of her. How did I know that’s who he meant? I don’t know, I knew.)
“No, no, she is, at my country place. She’s there now. She’s exhausted, poor dear, and tells me her doctor has commanded her to resign temporarily from all volunteer fire departments. So she’s here. I’ve got her. She’s with Lady Plympton right this moment. I had to come to town on business or I’d be with her. I’m going back in the morning. Ever meet her? Want to come down?”
“She’s there? She’s really there?”
“Want to come down?”
There’s been too much pedigree in this account, I think. (Be kind. Put it down to metaphysics, not vanity. In asking Who? I’m wondering What? Even the trees have names, the rocks and clouds and grasses do. The world’s a picture post card sent from a far hotel. “Here’s my room, this is what the stamps in this country look like, that’s the strange color of the sand here, the people all wear these curious hats.”) Bear with me.
Freddy Plympton is noble. The family is old — whose isn’t, eh? we were none of us born yesterday; look it up in Burke’s Peerage where it gets three pages, in Debrett where it gets four — and his great estate, Duluth, is one of the finest in England. Though he could build a grander if he chose. Freddy’s real wealth comes from the gambling casinos he owns. He is an entrepreneur of chance, a fortune teller. The biggest gaming palaces and highest stakes in Europe, to say nothing of hotels in Aruba and boats beyond the twelve-mile limit and a piece of the action in church bingo basements and punchboards all over the world, the newsprint for which is supplied from his own forests in Norway and is printed on his own presses. Starting from scratch, from choosing odds-or-evens for cash with his roommate at Harrow, a sheikh’s son with a finger missing from his left hand — he was left-handed — which made him constitutionally unable to play the game (“He thought ‘even,’ you see,” Freddy explains), taking the boy, neither of them more than fourteen, to the cleaners in the third form. It, the young sheikh’s deformity, was Freddy’s initial lesson in what it means to have the house odds in your favor and taught him never to enter any contest in which he did not have the edge.
Freddy has one passion, and it is not gambling. “Gambling’s my work, old bean,” he says. (He uses these corny aristocratic epithets. They make him seem fatuous but are as functional to his profession as a drawl to a hired gun.) “I’m no gambler at all, actually. I’m this sort of mathematician. Please don’t gamble with me, please don’t accept my bets. We’re friends and I’m ruthless. Not vicious — ruthless. I will never surrender an advantage. Since I know the odds and respect them, to ignore them would be a sort of cheating, and since I’m honorable I couldn’t think of that. Don’t play with me. We’re friends. I was never the sheikh’s friend, never the friend of any of those feet-off-the-ground Fleugenmensch sons of rich men I lived with at Harrow and Cambridge and who gave me my stake. Where I was meditative they were speculative. I like you, as I like anyone who doesn’t confuse his need with his evidence. Let’s never gamble. Promise. Promise?”
So he has a passion, but it isn’t gambling. It’s animals — beasts, rather. Duluth contains perhaps the most superb private zoo in the world, a huge game park, larger than Whipsnade and much more dangerous. Where Whipsnade hedges with moats and illusions, at Duluth the animals are given absolute freedom. An enormous, camouflaged electrified fence, the largest in the world, runs about the entire estate. (“We control the current. The jolt merely braces the larger animals and only stuns the smaller, puts them unconscious. I’ve installed an auxiliary electrical plant for when there are power failures”) Although from time to time a few of the animals have fought and occasionally killed each other, an attempt has been made to introduce as near perfect an ecological balance as possible, vegetarians and carnivores who find the flesh of the beasts with whom they must live inimical, some almost religious constraint in the jaws and digestion, some once-burned, twice-sorry instinct passed on from generation to generation that protects and preserves his herds.
It was an ancestor of Plympton’s who began the park, and as a result of the care he and his successors put into selecting and arranging the animals, some of the most incredible and lovely juxtapositions in the world are to be found there. (Freddy told me that Henri Rousseau painted his “Sleeping Gypsy” while he was a guest on the estate.) From the beginning a single rule has determined the constituency of the zoo: all the beasts collected there must have appeared on the Plympton heraldry. Lions, bears, elephants, unicorns (“a pure white rhinoceros actually”), leopards, jackals (“One old boy helped to do in Becket, old boy”), pandas, camels, sheep and apes. The family is an old one, the list long.
Though Plympton and I had known each other for years — we’re the same age — this was the first time I had been invited to Duluth. I drove down with him the next morning, and of course it was not of the fabulous game park that I was thinking — I was not sure I even approved of it — but of Jane. I gave myself away with my questions.
“She’s ill, you say?”
“Did I? I thought I said tired. What she told me, anyway. Looks ruddy healthy, in fact. Tanner than I’ve ever seen her.”
“Is she alone?”
“What, is there a man with her, you mean? No, no, Ashenden. She’s quite singular.”
“How did she happen to drop in on you?”
“I’m not in it at all, dear chap. I’m a businessman and gamekeeper. My life’s quite full. I suppose that may actually have had something to do with it, in fact. She called from Heathrow day before yesterday. Said she was in England and wanted someplace to rest. Lord, I hope she’s not put off by my bringing you down. Never thought of that aspect of it before.”
“I won’t bother her.”
“No, of course you won’t,” he said smiling. “Sorry I suggested that. Just thinking out loud. A man concerned with animals must always be conscious of who goes into the cage with whom. It’s a social science, zoology is, very helpful in making up parties. I suppose mine, when I trouble to give them, are among the most gemütlich in Europe. Indeed, now I think of it, I must have realized as soon as I saw you last night that you’d be acceptable to Jane, or I’d never have asked you. Have you known her long?”
“We’ve never met.”
“What, never met and so keen?” I smiled lamely and Freddy patted my knee. “I understand. I do. I feel you hoping. And I quite approve. Just don’t confuse your hope with your evidence.” He studied me for a moment. “But then you wouldn’t, would you, or I’d not be so fond of you.”
“You do understand quite a lot, Freddy.”