Free The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart Page A

on the meticulously numbered shelves, including on which Tube line they had been abandoned.
    Their invincible memories were not, however, enough to dissuade the authorities from accepting their resignations until an attempt was made to follow the logic of the cross-referencing in the ledgers. The antique code, invented by clerks to make themselves indispensable, had been handed down from Victorian times, when the office was established to handle the onslaught of muffs and canes left behind on the breathtaking new transport.
    As soon as management realised what they were up against, one of them filled his pockets with barley sugar and visited the only other staff still alive who had worked in the antiquated office. He found the pair propping each other up in the sitting room of an old people’s home, covered in a coat of dust. But despite the joy of an unexpected visitor, and one with such treasures in his pockets, nothing could persuade them, when the mist of senility temporarily parted, to give up the key to the code that had ensured them a job for life. All attempts at modernisation were therefore abandoned until the next change of management, which, despite renewed tactics, always failed as emphatically as its predecessor.
    Arriving back at her desk, Valerie Jennings reached into her black handbag and returned a novel to its place on one ofthe bookshelves. Each volume she borrowed was brought back to the office the next day lest its owner arrive to claim it. There it would remain until she slipped it back into her bag again on leaving. And, once at home and installed in her armchair with the pop-up leg rest, she would rampage through the pages, intoxicated by the heady fumes of fantasy.
    On hearing the Swiss cowbell, she brushed away a kink of hair that had escaped from its mooring, pushed her glasses up her nose, and headed back to the counter. On the way she tried to open the safe, as was the office custom. But it remained as closed as the day it had been discovered on the Circle Line five years ago.
    Turning the corner, she found Arthur Catnip partially obscured by a bunch of yellow roses. It was the second bouquet he had bought her. When he found the shutter closed the first time, his courage instantly abandoned him and he fled to the street. He offered the flowers to the first woman he encountered, but she, along with the eleven after her, rejected the gift in the common belief that all fellow Londoners had the potential to be psychotic lunatics.
    Flowers were not the only gift the ticket inspector of limited height had bought for Valerie Jennings. Recognising her weakness for literature on account of her habit of reading the back of each novel he handed in, he scoured the capital’s second-hand bookshops for something to give her pleasure. Ignoring the bestselling paperbacks, he eventually came across the work of the obscure nineteenth-century novelist Miss E. Clutterbuck. Skimming the pages, he found that the female protagonist who featured in all of her work was graced with stoutness, a fearsome intellect, and a long line of suitors ofvarying heights. Never once did a tale end without the heroine having discovered a new country, invented a scientific theory, or solved the most fiendish of crimes. It was only then that she would retire to her parlour with a bowl of rhubarb and custard to consider her numerous marriage proposals, surrounded by love tokens of yellow roses. Arthur Catnip bought all the novelist’s work that he could find, and would arrive at the original Victorian counter with his latest musty, cloth-backed purchase, claiming he had found it in a carriage. Valerie Jennings’s face would immediately light up at the prospect of another installment. And she would gaze with unfettered anticipation at the colour plates of the fleshy heroine throttling a serpent in a newly discovered land, introducing her latest invention to awed gentlemen in Parliament, or stepping out with one of her elegantly mustached