Scruffy - A Diversion (7 page)

The girl asked, “Do you come up here often to visit him?”

Tim replied, “Well—yes, in a way. You see, I’m Officer in Charge. I’m O.I.C. Apes.”

The girl now turned her gaze upon him in full astonishment and said, “I beg your pardon—you’re what?”

Tim said, “Officer in Charge of Apes. Forgive me, I should have introduced myself—and you’ve been so kind. My name is Tim Bailey.”

The girl was still regarding him with utter disbelief and amazement. She said, “Do you mean to tell me that the Royal Artillery actually appoints a Captain on active service to a post called Officer of Apes?”

Tim bristled perceptibly. “I do. The care of the Barbary apes of Gibraltar has been a tradition of the Royal Artillery for over a hundred and thirty years.”

Again a wave of contrition and extraordinary tenderness came into the face of the girl. “Oh dear, I
am
sorry. I didn’t mean— Of course— But you see, I didn’t know. We’re Navy. I mean I’ve just come out here to join my parents.” And she repeated again, “Oh dear—I am making such a muddle of this. I’ve hurt your feelings, and I didn’t mean to. I’m Felicity French. We live at the Mount—and after you’ve been so sweet about that nasty—I mean, your friend. Do forgive me.”

“Please, please,” Tim said, “that’s quite all right. I assure you I don’t mind a bit. Quite a few people think it’s odd.” In his mind a brief addition of two and two making four had taken place: the Mount and the name of French, and the fact that he was conversing, obviously, with the daughter of Admiral Sir Richard French, Flag Officer, and Second-in-Command of the Rock. He turned to her suddenly as a new idea entered his head and asked, “Had you ever thought what it must be like to be a monkey—I mean chaps like these who live where there are people?”

Felicity replied, “No, I hadn’t.” She went over and sat on the rail. Scruffy, having finished his peanuts, loped off, the mother ape returned, presented her rear end to her offspring, who climbed aboard her back and clung to her.

“There you are,” said Tim. “What kind of a future is there in store for that little thing?” He went over to it, plucked it from its mother’s back and let it hang from one of his fingers. He said, “That’s the girl, Adele—show the lady some of your tricks.” He placed the apelet on to his palm, where she did a neat handstand.

Felicity applauded. “Oh good!” and then asked, “Do they all have names?”

“Of course,” Tim replied. “I name them when they’re six months old and it looks as though they’re going to make it. But there again you have it—what’s the good of having a name if you can’t make use of it, like signing cheques or writing to your pals? What’s this little creature got to look forward to but being bitten to pieces in a fight, or dying of pneumonia when a Levanter moves in? That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to stop.”

“Tell me about it,” Felicity said, and knew not what she did.

Tim looked at her swiftly for an instant to see whether she was serious or having a pull at his leg, for recently everyone had been avoiding him, and it was less than an hour ago that the Brigadier had referred to him as the town bore on the subject of apes. “Do you really mean it?”

Felicity said, “Yes, please,” and now suspected that she might be in for something of a session. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you, would you?”

“Yes, of course. How very rude of me.” He offered her one from his case and lit it. She inhaled the smoke gratefully, folded her hands and waited.

After a moment’s mental floundering, Tim said, “You see, they’re all so lonely. Even though they have their own friends and families here, they’re lonely inside—and disappointed. It’s as though whoever made us had tried things out with them first and then cast them aside. But there they are.”

And from this earnest beginning he launched into the full narrative of his arrival on the Rock, his being made O.I.C., and his suddenly awakened interest in the Barbary apes entrusted to his care.

He talked and talked and talked, did Captain Bailey, the story, for the first time falling upon willing ears, pouring from him in a seemingly endless torrent. Felicity listened without interruption, smoking quietly and never seeming to take her grave, sweet eyes from his face. Much of what he was saying was unintelligible to her—statistics and logistics, measurements and complicated mechanical devices for protecting and controlling the apes, but dirough the story that he told somehow never involving himself or his disappointments directly, there emerged the picture of a good, kind and loving man in whose make-up there appeared more than the usual shred of tenderness and gentleness allotted to men, and concern for fellow creatures on the earth other than himself and his kind. And this picture went straight to the heart of Felicity and touched her.

Tim talked on. He told her about Lovejoy, the stickiness of bureaucracy, its sole concern with statistics and entries on the right side of the ledger, and the difficulty of getting its administrators to see or even consider the human—or rather, the animal—side of the question. With laughter directed at himself, he revealed the latest blow-up of the Brigadier which had sent him along up to the apes’ village to do some soul-searching, concluding with, “I suppose the Brig. has got more to worry about than monkeys—and old Scruff did tear up the town. Wait until the C.R.A. gets the list of damage he did up here before starting below.”

Tim ran down a bit at that point, and in the hiatus Felicity said firmly, “I think he’s horrid. You’re not appreciated.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” Tim said, “I don’t mind—I’ve never had quite so much fun or been so interested in anything—it’s for
them
, don’t you see, that I get discouraged and a little low sometimes. Nobody seems to care about them really but Gunner Lovejoy and myself.”

“I do!” Felicity heard herself cry with a fierceness that astonished her. “I do now, since you’ve told me about them. I think they’re sweet.” She was rewarded by a look of gratitude and worship combined that poured from Tim’s eyes. “And you’re not to become discouraged,” Felicity added firmly. “Supposing something happened and they all went away—they’d change their tune then soon enough.”

“Yes,” Tim said eagerly, “do you think so? Well, of course, there’d never be any chance of that happening.”

“What we ought to do,” Felicity said, and now she was frowning again from the intensity of her concentration on the subject, “is think up something which would call everybody’s attention to the wonderful work you’re doing.” Her face became suddenly exquisitely illuminated with the idea that had smitten her. “I’ve got it!” she cried. “You wouldn’t have one without a name, would you?”

Tim reflected. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact we have. There’s one just about the age of that little creature there that Lovejoy and I were going to name—but it’s a she.”

The two aquamarines in Felicity’s countenance were now lustrous with excitement. “Splendid!” she said. “You write to the King and tell him you’d like to name the new apelet Elizabeth after the Princess.”

Shock went through Captain Bailey in waves. “What?” he cried. “Write to the King? Why, I’d be court mar—”

“Nonsense,” said Felicity. “Anyone can write to the King as long as they don’t threaten him. It’s not as though you were going over anyone’s head. After all, you are O.I.C. Apes, aren’t you—and they’re in your charge, aren’t they—and you do have to find names for them, don’t you—and he is your King, isn’t he? Then why can’t you tell him what you’d like to do?”

“Do you know what,” said Tim, “that’s absolutely brilliant! Do you think the Princess would like it?”

“Certainly,” Felicity replied firmly, “she’d be thrilled. She may be a princess, but don’t forget she’s a thirteen-year-old girl, too—and she’d want a picture of it to put in her room.”

“I could send one along.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Felicity. “And what’s more, you must do it at once. Then perhaps you won’t be bullied by that nasty Brigadier any longer.”

She looked at her watch and said, “Goodness, I’ve kept you too long from your work. I had no idea it was so late. It’s been so nice meeting you. Do let me know what happens after you’ve written to the King.” She rose from the railing, offered him a cool hand and firm pressure, and said, “Good-bye then,” went to her car and drove off.

Tim stood looking after her, filled with the wonderful sensation of having found an ally. “What a funny kid,” he said to himself. Scruffy appeared on the concrete platform, bounced up and down on all fours, coughed and cursed. “What a jolly good kid,” Captain Bailey said aloud. And then, addressing the big Macaque: “You wouldn’t care to take a bite out of the other hand, would you, chum?”

One might consider it not exactly fair to suggest that the fate of the British Empire, which meant the fate of the then free world as well, was influenced by the fact that Felicity French, the daughter of the Admiral commanding the Naval Base at Gibraltar, had met an unknown, impoverished and unspectacular Captain of Artillery who was further handicapped by holding down the doubtful post of Officer in Charge of Apes.

Yet it is true that the threads of life twist, turn, cross and knot sometimes seemingly so unconnected with events they are due to affect that it is not even possible to trace them back. The fact remains that Felicity, who was a good driver and thoughtful and polite as well, set in motion a train of consequences when she came close to knocking down an individual, a Gibraltarian by the name of Alfonso T. Ramirez, with the fender of her car.

Entering Main Street from Library Street on her way back to the Mount, she was only half-looking where she was going and not at all thinking what she was doing. Her mind was taken up with the young man she had met, the quality of his smile and the charm of his concentration on and affection for some rather nasty brutes.

And thus she came to within a hair’s breadth of running down the man named Ramirez who was a third of the way across the street within a safety area where it was neither legal nor sporting to kill a pedestrian. All rights of the situation belonged to Ramirez.

Young and healthy, Felicity’s reflexes were quick enough. She tramped on the brakes and twisted the wheel hard right and the strange-looking little man with the thick-lensed spectacles and the
en brosse,
short, stand-up haircut which so ill became his squat dumpy figure, felt no more than the breeze of her left fender passing his person.

Because she was so frightened of what she had almost done Felicity cried out involuntarily, “Oh, why don’t you look where you’re going?”

Then she realized that it was all her fault and that not only had she been driving dangerously but had been inexcusably rude, and she cried contritely, “Oh dear me, I am so sorry, it was all my fault.”

Felicity had jarred the car to a halt midway on the crossing so that the individual she had so nearly erased was standing peering in at her, his face white and then flushed, level with her even though she was sitting down. Behind his thick lenses his eyes were pale and angry. His mouth was shaped like the small letter “o”.

The awful thing was that it didn’t seem to be able to give vent to his indignation. Whatever was bottled up inside of him, fright or wrath—he couldn’t get it out. He swelled up like a balloon, the little “o” of his mouth working furiously and silently. Felicity thought suddenly of the grotesque figure in the Michelin tire advertisements and the relief from panic led her to commit another unintentional rudeness.

She couldn’t help herself; she giggled.

There was no point in remaining there for ever on the cross walk, traffic piling up behind her, so she tittered nervously, said once again, “I’m sorry,” and drove on, leaving behind her a vain and misanthropic little man swollen by sufficient cubic centimetres of superiority complex to fly a dirigible, who had been laughed at by a girl of an alien race.

For Felicity it was an episode quickly forgotten, for Mr. Ramirez it was the beginning of an unfortunate day of humiliations, the end of which was to confirm him as an implacable enemy of Great Britain and all her people.

Arrived home at the flower-trellised Georgian mansion which served as the Navy’s home for its Flag Officer at Gibraltar, Felicity abandoned her car in the gravel forecourt and went banging happily through the house with all the joy and energy of her twenty-two years.

Eventually her ebullience washed over her mother, who was working on a piece of tapestry by the big picture window in the drawing-room that overlooked the sea and the dockyard. Lady French had started her first piece of tapestry at the time she had married young Lieutenant French, as an occupation eminently fitted to a sailor’s wife and the daughter of a baronet, while her sailor husband was away at sea. The habit formed was never broken, and the Admiral was once said to have confided in a convivial moment that when Lady French slept her fingers still continued the movements of running needle and wool through the holes of the pattern.

Felicity’s chubbiness did not stem from her but from her father. Lady French was tall, slender and cool. Her hair was still golden; she had been a great beauty. When she had married the consensus was that she had thrown herself away. But now she was Lady French, and an Admiral’s wife, so it actually had worked out all for the best. Still, it might not have done, and she had a quiet determination that her daughter Felicity should not expose herself to the same hazard. She was glad she had her come out to the Rock for the summer. In one sense it was a small, narrow, tight-fitting community, but as a Naval and Colonial base it was full of eligible young men of good families on the threshold of important careers.

Lady French looked up from completing a stitch and said, “Felicity darling, must you make so much noise? You know, you aren’t sixteen any more. In fact, you’ll have to be thinking very soon of—”

“Getting married,” Felicity completed for her, for this was one she had heard before. “I think of it all of the time, Mummy. Guess what! I’ve just met the nicest young man. Maybe I could marry him.”

Lady French was startled by this announcement, for she never knew when her daughter was joking. But ladies, in the lexicon of the Admiral’s wife, did not show emotion. She disciplined herself with three more stitches before she replied, “Really, dear? How very nice. Is it anyone we know?”