“Tell me about Hoffmeier.”
Hoffmeier’s name, Hoffmeier’s deeds sounded endlessly on my uncle’s lip, but of the man himself one scarcely knew anything.
“Hoffmeier? Oh, expert in his field. Undisputed …”
“No — what was he like?” (I said “was” though I had no certain knowledge that Hoffmeier was dead.)
“Like—?” My uncle, who was preparing himself, pipe raised to stress the items, for the catalogue of Hoffmeier’s credentials, looked up, his wet lips momentarily open. Then, clamping the pipe abruptly between his teeth and clutching the bowl with his hand, he stiffened into almost a parody of “the comrade recalled.”
“The man you mean? Splendid fellow. Boundless energy, tremendous dedication. Couldn’t have met a kinder … Great friend to me …”
I began to doubt the reality of Hoffmeier. His actual life seemed as tenuous and elusive as that of the antelope he had rescued from anonymity. I could not picture this stalwart scientist. He had the name of a Jewish impresario. I imagined my uncle going to him and being offered the antelope like some unique form of variety act.
I asked myself: Did Hoffmeier exist?
My uncle, poking his head forward oddly, in one of those gestures which made me think he could see my thoughts, said: “Why, he used to come here, stay here. Many a time. Sat in that armchair you’re sitting in now, ate at that table, slept—”
But then he broke off suddenly and began to suck hard at his pipe.
I was having no luck in my attempts to find a suitable flat. London grew more faceless, more implacable, the more I grew accustomed to it. It did not seem a place in which to be a teacher of maths. My philosophy lectures became more esoteric. I gave a particularly successful class on Pythagoras, who, besides being a mathematician, believed one should abstain from meat and that human souls entered the bodies of animals.
Four weeks after my talk with Uncle Walter about Hoffmeier, things took a sudden bad turn. The male antelope developed a sort of pneumonia and the fate of the pair and — so far as we may know — of a whole species, seemed sealed. My uncle came in late from the Zoo, face drawn, silent. Within a fortnight the sick animal had died. The remaining female, which I saw on perhaps three subsequent occasions, looked up, sheepishly, apprehensively, from its solitary pen as if it knew it was now unique.
Uncle Walter turned his devotion to the remaining antelope with all the fervour of a widowed mother transferring her love to an only child. His eyes now had a lonely, stigmatized look. Once, on one of my Sunday visits to the Zoo (for these were often the only occasions on which I could be sure of seeing him), the senior keeper in his section, a burly, amiable man called Henshaw, drew me to one side and suggested that I persuade Uncle Walter to take a holiday. It appeared that my uncle had requested that a bed be made up for him in the antelope’s pen, so that he need not leave it. A bundle of hay or straw would do, he had said.
Henshaw looked worried. I said I would see what I could do. But, for all that I saw of my uncle, I scarcely had an opportunity to act on my promise. He came home after midnight, leaving a reek of stout in the hall, and sneaked straight upstairs. I felt he was avoiding me. Even on his off-duty days he would keep to his room. Sometimes I heard him muttering and moving within; otherwise an imprisoned silence reigned, so that I wondered should I, for his own sake, peer through the keyhole or leave behind the door a tray of his favourite fibrous food. But there were times when we met, as though by accident, in the kitchen, amongst his books in the front room. I said to him (for I thought only an aggressive humour might puncture his introspection) didn’t he think his affair with the female antelope was going too far? He turned on me the most wounded and mortified look, his mouth twisting and salivating; then he said in a persecuted, embattled tone: “You been speaking to Henshaw?”
He seemed conspired against from all sides. One of the things that distressed him at this time was a proposal by the Council to build a new inner link road which, though it would not touch his own house, would cleave a path through much of the adjacent area. Uncle Walter had received circulars about this and subscribed to a local action group. He called the council planners “arse-holes.” This surprised me. I always imagined him as living in some remote, antiquated world in which the Zoological Society, august, venerable, was the only arbiter and shrine. So long as he could travel to the warm scent of fur and dung, it did not seem to me that he noticed the traffic thundering on the North Circular, the jets whining into Heathrow, the high-rises and flyovers — or that he cared particularly where he lived. But one Saturday morning when, by rare chance, we shared breakfast and when the noise of mechanical diggers could be heard through the kitchen window, this was disproved.
My uncle looked up from his bowl of porridge and bran and studied me shrewdly. “Don’t like it here, do you? Want to go back to Norfolk?” he said. His eyes were keen. Perhaps my disillusion with London — or maybe the strain of sharing a house with him — showed in my face. I murmured non-commitally. Outside some heavy piece of machinery had started up so that the cups on the table visibly shook. My uncle turned to the window. “Bastards!” he said, then turned back. He ate with his sleeves rolled up, and his bare forearms, heavily veined and covered with gingery hairs, actually looked strong, capable. “Bastards,” he said. “Know how long I’ve lived here? Forty years. Grew up here. Your Aunt and I—. Now they want to …”
His voice swelled, grew lyrical, defiant. And I saw in this man whom I had begun to regard as half insane, a grotesque victim of his own eccentricities, a glimpse of the real life, irretrievably lost, as if the door to a cell had momentarily opened.
I began to wonder who my true uncle was. A creature who was not my uncle inhabited the house. When not at the Zoo he retired ever more secretively to his room. He had begun to remove to his bedroom from his “library” in the corner of the front room certain of his zoological volumes. He also took, from on top of the bookcase, the framed photographs of his wife. At three, at four in the morning, I would hear him reading aloud, as if from the Psalms or the works of Milton, passages from Lane’s Rare Species, Ericdorf’s The African Ungulates and from the work which I had already come to regard as Uncle Walter’s Bible, Ernst Hoffmeier’s The Dwarf and Forest Antelopes. In between these readings there were sporadic tirades against certain absent opponents, who included the borough planning committee and “that shit-can” Henshaw.
The fact was that he had developed a paranoiac complex that the world was maliciously bent on destroying the Hoffmeier’s Antelope. He was under the illusion — so I learnt later from Henshaw — that, like children who believe that mere “loving” brings babies into the world, he could, solely by the intense affection he bore the female antelope, ensure the continuation of its kind. He began to shun me as if I too were a member of the universal conspiracy. We would pass on the stairs like strangers. Perhaps I should have acted to banish this mania, but something told me that far from being his enemy I was his last true guardian. I remembered his words: “The speed of the cheetah, the strength of the bear …” Henshaw phoned to suggest discreetly that my uncle needed treatment. I asked Henshaw whether he really liked animals.
One night I dreamt about Hoffmeier. He had a cigar, a bow tie and a pair of opera-glasses and was marching through a jungle, lush and fantastic, like the jungles in pictures by Douanier Rousseau. In a cage carried behind him by two bearers was the pathetic figure of my uncle. Watching furtively from the undergrowth was a four-legged creature with the face of my aunt.
The attendances at my philosophy classes fell off. I devoted two lessons to Montaigne’s “Apology of Raymond Sebond.” Students complained I was leading them along eccentric and subversive paths. I did not mind. I had already decided to quit London in the summer.