V.S. Pritchett was a British short-story writer, novelist, essayist, critic, and travel writer, widely admired for his short fiction and literary criticism.
V.S. Pritchett
Did You Invite Me?
From Camberwell Beauty (1974), reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of V.S. Pritchett. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
Lived at 12 Regent's Park Terrace from 1956 to 1996.
The tame and once princely oasis where the trees looked womanish on the island in the lake or marched in grave married processions along the avenues in the late summer, or in the winter were starkly widowed...At night, hearing the animals in the zoo, they could send out silent cries of their own...
The two central characters in this story live on opposite sides of what seems to be Regent's Park, though it isn't identified as such and the houses surrounding it are 'small, white, stuccoed'.
the hippos mating and roaring...and the parrots, monkeys, seals...screaming with love...like a huge laughing party
Jeremy Treglown, in V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life (Chatto and Windus, 2004), quotes from a letter about the sounds from London Zoo on a night in spring. Walking in the park and on Primrose Hill in his final years, 'he had to remind himself that it was thought best for old men not to talk to people they didn't know.' In his notebook Pritchett wrote, 'If you sit on a seat and merely say "Nice Day", there will be shocked silence. There will be a firm silence. You are a walker, not a talker...Best sight - children of course. They can run'.