for Mia

Nobody liked to talk about the elephant in the room.

They were all perfectly happy to talk to him, of course, but not about him. Or rather, they did not like to talk about one particular aspect of him.

Whenever the subject seemed upon the verge of rearing its head, people would look at their feet or pluck invisible fluff off their clothes or quickly think of something else to talk about.

When people say there is an elephant in the room, they usually mean there is a rather obvious, rather large subject which they trying to avoid mentioning even though everyone knows it is there. Like a bad smell in a lift, or no ice cream at a party.

They do not, on the whole, mean there is a real elephant in the room. And yet here one stood. He was a smart, well-dressed elephant called Arthur Biscuit.

As unusual as that was, it wasn’t what people tried to avoid mentioning each time they met him. And nor was it that this was an elephant in a beautifully tailored jacket and tie who stood sipping prosecco out of a bucket at the party. No. It wasn’t even that this elephant perfectly understood, and was currently nodding his head in agreement at, Miss Daisy’s complimentary statements regarding his jacket and tie.

And yet there it was, the one thing about Arthur Biscuit, that well-dressed elephant and regular party guest, which everyone found hard to ignore but impossible to comment upon. Until, that is, Miss Daisy came rushing in on clattering high heels, making all manner of apologies for being late to the party.

Miss Daisy was actually breathlessly enthusing about Arthur’s new tie with its rather fetching ruby pin when she noticed the thing everyone else was trying not to notice. And Miss Daisy being Miss Daisy, a bubbly and often quite skittish young lady, didn’t think twice about blurting it out.

The pin wasn’t the thing either. Arthur had made the pin himself to look like his uncle, Bernard. Uncle Bernard had always said that it was always best to be smart. To be, in fact, the smartest elephant in the room. What dear old Uncle Bernard actually meant was that an elephant ought to be clever. That way the smartest elephant would get all the best of the food and the muddiest puddle to stand in. Not being the cleverest elephant in the room, Arthur misunderstood and set out upon on the road to high fashion and good hygiene.

He began simply enough by taking extra care to brush himself down with hay each morning, and avoid the muddier puddles in the enclosure. If his keepers, or the endless stream of gawking children, noticed then none of them said a word. To them an elephant was an elephant, however clean he might be.

It was only when Arthur began to fashion a rudimentary hat from leaves on the old acacia tree, that anybody began to take an interest.

‘Silly Arthur,’ they would say. ‘What have you got on your head?’

Any other elephant might have become a little despondent after that, but not Arthur. It is, he would tell himself, better to be noticed than to be one of the herd. That is, he would say, what makes one the smartest elephant in the room. Encouraged by his own words, Arthur began to experiment with clothes too. At first he kept it simple: a short cloak woven from bamboo and a set of flip-flops to keep the mud away. The keepers changed from sniggering at an elephant with a few leaves on its head, to nodding admiringly.

‘New blanket, Arthur?’ they said as they scooped up the night dung.

After a while, Arthur’s skill at tailoring showed impressive signs of improvement. Cloaks and blankets (which, after all, even a monkey might make) gave way to shirts and waistcoats. These were eventually topped off with perfectly tailored jackets and overcoats.

News of this well-dressed elephant soon spread. Visitors began to travel thousands of miles to have their photograph taken with Arthur. He made all the other elephants look a bit, well, scruffy, and before long the keepers moved him to a new enclosure with a long table to work at and a fancy wooden globe to keep his drinks in. There was even a standard lamp for nights when Arthur was finishing the ruff on a splendid new shirt, or a particularly difficult but quite inspired double-breasted jacket.

The double-breasted jacket was his pride and joy. He had attempted to offset the bulk of grey on display by colouring it with red lapels and buttons of saffron. It was a triumph and, in many ways, established him in respectable society.

The jacket was such a success that he found himself invited to all the best parties. This, it has to be said, was where the trouble began. Only the best people attend the best parties, and only the best people feel they can judge others without ever actually letting that person (or elephant) know.

To get to the parties, Arthur’s keepers would arrange for a lorry to collect him at his rooms (now extended to include a delightful conservatory for when Arthur felt the need to enjoy the sun without any chance of a breeze ruffling his best shirt). The lorry would carry him slowly through the streets and along the motorways where cars would honk their horns and those awful, gawking children would wind down their windows and, well, gawk. He was always polite, but Arthur really felt these creatures could do with smartening themselves up. Children wore such awful things, little better than rags in Arthur’s opinion.

Each party had to be arranged in a place that could accommodate Arthur’s gentlemanly bulk. A church hall, a field at a summer fête, a palace. Once, he had acquiesced to attend the naming ceremony of the latest earl of such-a-place, but the baby’s regency ballroom was barely bigger than the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery and Arthur had the most terrible time turning around to say hello to the Queen.

What an embarrassing event that had turned out to be. Arthur had stepped back into a tray of vol au vents and almost slipped, only stopping at the last moment by grabbing the Duke of Gloucester by his coat tails. The duke, caught quite by surprise, had thrown his champagne into the air and shrieked so loudly it had woken the baby earl who proceeded to be quite inconsolable for the rest of the day. The champagne had also ruined Arthur’s fine double-breasted jacket, but nobody but Arthur seemed to care in the least about that. He waited twenty minutes and asked to go home, saying how he had left the door unlocked and was worried monkeys might sneak inside and ruin his latest designs.

The incident did not, thankfully have any lasting effect upon the number of party invitations Arthur received. There was the occasional, light-hearted joke of course. Arthur trumpeted with polite delight at such things, eager to appear gracious whilst inwardly thinking how rude it was to raise the issue time after time. A joke could become tired, just as a new shirt or coat could.

After a while, Arthur began to notice that something more was behind the joke. He began to notice that something wasn’t being said. People still complimented him on each fine new outfit but, well, when they did so it felt different. An elephant can be deceptively sensitive, thick skins going only so far, and Arthur was clearly more sensitive than most.

It was at the party to which Miss Daisy had arrived late that Arthur finally learned what was being left unsaid.

It was a fine enough party. The Queen had been unable to attend, sending her excuses as she so often did these days, but nonetheless the music was spirited and the food quite excellent. Arthur was sporting a new jacket, cut from cloth made out of the brush hair of a hundred lemurs. He had quite fetchingly offset the jacket’s texture and colouring with a snakeskin tie, shed only that very morning and so translucent that it seemed to be woven from the light of the sun.

The conversation was also fine, ranging from the polite to the inconsequential. Then Miss Daisy’s high heels caught everyone’s attention, rather like a best man tapping his glass at a wedding.

The room hushed and Arthur looked around, thinking at first they had hushed for him. This had, it must be said, not been the case for quite some time. People were curious, occasionally interested, but never quite as devoted to him as they once were. It was nice to be the centre of attention again.

He soon saw that he was merely next to the centre of attention, for it was to Miss Daisy that all eyes were pointing.

Miss Daisy was new to the kind of social circles Arthur had been invited into. New, but not unknown. Most party hosts tried to find reasons not to invite her because, whilst Miss Daisy was kind and clever and interesting, she was not what you might call… tactful. It was something everybody knew but nobody liked to talk about.

Miss Daisy was the kind of lady who might comment on any number of things you’d rather she didn’t. From shouting out that you had tomato sauce on your jumper, a chip in your hair (or on your shoulder) or were wearing odd socks, to pointing out (across a crowded room) that your dress was tucked into your knickers or your wig was on back to front.

Miss Daisy was even the kind of lady who would say something like: ‘He wasn’t a very nice man, was he?’ This might be a reasonable thing to say, even an honest thing to say. But not, perhaps, at a funeral about the man who had just died and to that man’s weeping widow.

And so it was that when her heels began to chatter across the room, the room fell silent with everyone wondering (but not saying) what she might blurt out.

‘Hello, I’m Daisy,’ said Miss Daisy. ‘Miss Daisy Daisy. We haven’t met before but I’m awfully glad to meet you. This is a nice party, isn’t it? Oh gosh, Mr Tupper has put on an awful lot of weight. Hello Mr Tupper. Is that your grandmother with you? Oh, it’s your wife. Hello Mrs Tupper. I must say, Mr Biscuit, I’m very pleased to be here. I’ve been simply dying to meet you for quite some time. I do like your tie pin. It sets off your tie quite perfectly. Do you really make these things yourself? It’s quite extraordinary. For an elephant, of course.’

Miss Daisy was, when she began to talk, very difficult to stop. Rather like a stampede, in fact. Not that Arthur minded in the least, of course. Here was a bright, intelligent young lady complimenting him upon his style.

She had been about to canvas Arthur Biscuit’s insight into living within a matrilineal family group when she suddenly stopped and stared. Arthur felt a little uneasy within her gaze and loosened his tie a little.

If the room had been quiet before then it was deathly now. Had one of the party guests chosen that moment to make a comment about how quiet it was then perhaps what followed might have been averted. But nobody did and so Miss Daisy finally said what everyone was thinking.

‘Mr Biscuit,’ she said. ‘Why on earth aren’t you wearing any trousers?’

A laugh began to ripple through the room. A snigger here. A chortle there. Even a relieved guffaw could be heard as each and every party guest felt the tension snap. Many pointed. Some fainted. Others turned away. And Arthur Biscuit, that most unusual elephant in the room, thundered out leaving everybody to talk about him a great deal indeed.

—
WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PUT A TIE OR SHOES ON AN ELEPHANT.
Whilst writing this large elephant story, I began looking for charities which help protect those wonderful animals. As far as I can see – this one looks to be ethical, sustainable and responsible. It’s called Save Elephant Foundation and you c
an read more here: http://www.saveelephant.org/. That said, if anyone knows different (or of others) then I’m happy to alter this.

The word ‘matrilineal’ is wonderful, isn’t it? Did you spot it and wonder what on earth I was talking about? Maybe you looked it up. As I was reading about elephants, I was surprised to discover that the head of an elephant family is the mother. Male elephants grow to live apart from the herd, so in my story Arthur Biscuit might be a young elephant – still sensitive to the opinions of others.

If you enjoyed this and would like to support my work then please…

The illustration is courtesy, and copyright, of Gary Brown.