We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ try to claw back towards some references to reality. ‘Well, that would at least sort out your accommodation problems for the next few years,’ I said. He weighed this remark, looked at me again and said, ‘I’ve got his coffin ready for him up here before.’ And it was true. A coffin with a picture of Peter Wearden in it had been in the restaurant for a period of about six months, even while the park was open to the public. ‘Now then, Ellis,’ said Nick, moving seamlessly on, ‘what about those stand-off barriers?’

      Ellis was polite but perceptibly preoccupied as he took us on the tour of the house again, even more briskly than last time, and I was surprised to see that it seemed in significantly worse condition than I remembered it. Whether this was cosmetic due to an increase in mess, or me misremembering the fabric of the place it was hard to tell, but the impression was strong enough to cause a new entry in my mental spreadsheet of expenditure.

      The first warning was the increase in the strength of the odour in the kitchen at the front of the house. This was Ellis’s entry point, and obviously one of the key rooms he used, but it stank. Last time it stank badly, but this time the stench was like a fog which you felt was clinging to your clothes. Women in Melissa’s condition are particularly sensitive to smells, and she nearly gagged as she passed through, pressing her hand to her mouth in case she had to forcibly suppress some sick – it is impolite after all, when someone is proudly showing you round their home, to vomit in it.

      The main source of the smell seemed to be a bucket in the corner containing raw mackerel, and dead day-old chicks to be fed in the mornings to the heron and jackdaw population. It was an ancient, yellowed plastic vessel and there had to be some doubt about its structural integrity, as a large, ancient, multicoloured stain rippled outwards from its base like a sulphur bog, but more virulent. Even Ellis was moved to comment; ‘Bit whiffy in here. But you don’t have to keep that there,’ he added, gesturing towards the bucket. ‘You’ll be moving things around, I suppose.’ Somehow I didn’t think that simply repositioning the bucket would expunge this odour. I vowed on that threshold that, if we got the park, no food would ever be prepared in this room again.

      The rest of the house seemed more dishevelled than we remembered it, and we still didn’t have time to get a full picture of how the floor plan worked. Half the house had been used for students, and this section was coated in plastic signs declaring, ‘No Smoking’, ‘Turn Off the Lights’, and oddly, ‘Being Sick on the Stairs is Forbidden’. But it mostly seemed like a standard rewiring, re-plumbing and plastering job would make it good. The other half of the house, with a grand galleried staircase and stone-flagged kitchen was marred by decades of clashing wallpapers, patchwork surface rewiring which snaked wildly like the tendrils of an aggressive giant creeper gradually taking over the house. And of course the all-pervading smell coming from the front kitchen.

      The stone-flagged kitchen had not been used for this purpose for decades, and in the fireplace, behind a ragged dusty sheet hanging on a string nailed to the high mantel above it, lay a rusted hulk of an ancient range, a door hanging off, clogged inside with what appeared to be bird droppings from the chimney above. ‘My grandma used to cook on that,’ said Ellis. ‘Bit of work would get it going again. Worth a few bob, that.’ I wasn’t so sure. But this room looked out over an old cobbled courtyard, now overgrown with weeds, which looked across to the cottage opposite, above the ‘stables’/junk depository. Melissa, who is good at spotting potential and visualizing a finished house, lit up. ‘This is the best bit of the house,’ she said. Really? ‘I can imagine doing the breakfast in here, looking across the courtyard, waving to Katherine or mum in their kitchen in the cottage.’ At that time Melissa was still seriously considering selling up and moving in too, five kids and Jim included. It sounded good. But in the time allowed, and with enough clutter to fill a hundred jumble sales strewn about, it was hard to gauge what it might be like to live in this house. Except that it, like the park, would require a lot of (expensive) work.

      We came back out of the house and met Nick in the restaurant again, thanked our hosts, and strolled down the drive. By now our objective and impartial advisor had become a little partisan. ‘I think it’s a great place,’ enthused Nick. ‘Much better than I thought it would be from all the stories. You’ll need proper site survey to be sure, but as far as I can see this could be a working zoo again without too much trouble.’ As an advisor on zoo design, Nick also had a few ideas to throw in at this stage. ‘Get the customers off the drive [which runs up the centre of the lower half of the park for a fifth of a mile] and into the paddock next to it. You could put a wooden walkway through it, meandering so that they don’t notice the climb, and get something striking in there like zebras, and maybe some interesting antelopes, so that as soon as they pass through the kiosk they enter a different world.’ Could we get zebras, I asked? ‘Oh, I can get you zebras,’ said Nick casually, as if they were something he might pick up for us at Tesco. This I liked. Spoken almost like a wholesome Arthur Daley: video recorders, leather jackets, zebras, roll up, roll up. But there was more to this glimpse into the workings of the zoo world which appealed. Nick was painting with the animals, as well as designing a serious commercial layout in his head. ‘You need more flamingos,’ he said. ‘Flamingos look good against the trees. The lake up there with the island has trees behind it, so if you put a few more in it they’ll look marvellous when the punters reach the top of the path. Then, having climbed that hill, they’ll be hot. So that’s where you sell them their first ice cream.’ Wow. Unfortunately, flamingos are one of the few animals which don’t usually come free from other zoos, costing anything from £800 to £1,500 each. Which is a lot of ice creams. And with the prospect of bird flu migrating over the horizon there was the possibility of a mass culling order from DEFRA shortly after we took delivery of these beautiful, expensive birds. Our flamingo archipelago might have to wait.

      I went back to France, Melissa to her children in Gloucester, and Nick went back to Whipsnade, where he prepared the report that was to dictate the direction of our lives. If it was negative, it would be definitively so, and there would be no point chasing this dream any further. In many ways, as before, I was half hoping that this would be the case and I could finally lay the idea to rest knowing categorically that it would be a mistake to proceed. If it was positive, however, we knew we had to continue, and the report itself would become instrumental in finding the backing to make it happen.

      Meanwhile I was learning more about the zoo every day. Ellis had once been seen as a visionary, designing innovative enclosures, putting in disabled access on a difficult sloping site long before legislation required him to do so, and developing an aggressive Outreach education programme, one of the first of its kind in the country and now copied by almost every other zoo. But he had absolute, total control. There was no one to tell him when to stop. And with over-investment in expensive infrastructure like the enormous restaurant (against advice which he overruled), an expensive divorce, and other zoos learning, copying and developing his techniques and continually changing their game while he began to grind to a halt, visitor numbers declined.

      My life became a series of long phone calls to lawyers, estate agents, bankers, family members and Ellis. Every time I spoke to Ellis, I noticed, he inexorably steered the conversation towards conflict. We were frank with him. We didn’t have the money to buy it yet, but we had assets of equal value, which we could borrow against or sell, if he could only hold on. ‘You’d think when someone offered to buy a place they’d at least have the money to do it,’ he said once, the type of observation which gave me an indication of why so many other sales had fallen through. Apart from anything else, Ellis was in the terrible position of having to sell his much-loved park, built largely with his own hands, the expression of his life’s vision over the last 40 years, so it was no wonder he was irascible. The only bidder left was a developer wanting to turn it into a nursing home, and Ellis didn’t want that. So, to his enormous credit, he agreed to wait for us.

      In this tense situation, I was genuinely concerned for Peter Wearden, who had become the focus of Ellis’s vexation, crystallized as the deliberate, Machiavellian architect of his downfall. It had all started with a routine inspection several years ago which had concluded СКАЧАТЬ