Nights at the Circus (15 page)

‘“Lie down upon the altar!”

‘Wondering, I stretch out face down on the coffee table. He approaches with a purposeful stride. I’d have clenched my teeth and thought of England had not I glimpsed, peering over my shoulder, a shining something lying along his hairy old, gnarled old thigh as his robe swung loose. This something was a sight more aggressive than his other weapon, poor thing, that bobbed about uncharged, unprimed, unsharpened . . . in the cold, grey light of May morning, I saw this
something
was – a blade.

‘Quick as a flash, out with my own! How I blessed my little gilded sword! He fell back, babbling, unfair, unfair . . . he’d not thought the angel would come armed. Yet, sir, strike I could not, nor harm another mortal even in self-defence . . . and, to tell the truth, even in the midst of my consternation, I was tickled pink to see the poor old booby struck all of a heap to see his plans awry and he was as much put out when I laughed in his face as he was to see old Nelson’s plaything.

‘Before he’d gathered his wits together, I was off and out of that open casement like greased lightning, I can tell you, although it was a tight squeeze and I left enough feathers to stuff a mattress caught on the frame. The mad bastard let out a shrill, high squeak to see his fleshy bottle of
elixum vitae
take off and only then came after me with what turned out to be an antique spear he’d found somewhere or other, and even succeeded in inflicting a flesh wound on the ball of my right foot, of which I still bear the scar – look!’

She withdrew one foot from its carpet slipper and thrust it on to Walser’s knee, dislodging his notebook so that it fell to the floor. Across the sole there ran a pale, puckered seam of flesh.

‘Oracular proof,’ said Lizzie, smothering a yawn. ‘Seeing is believing.’

Walser weakly retrieved his notebook.

‘But for that upward leap earlier in the evening in Madame Schreck’s bedroom, I hadn’t tried my wings for a cool six months but fright lent me more than human powers. I soared up and away from that vile place, over the maypole on the front lawn towards which, even at that moment, a troupe of children he must have hired from the village came trotting, in flimsy gauze tunics, in spite of the drizzle, with daisy chains in their hair, ready to dance and sing for the hideously refreshed adept, who’d planned to make a May sacrifice of me, sir.

‘They all scattered in fright, bawling for their mas, as I flew by.

‘I took refuge in a nearby spinney, in the top branches of an elm, where I startled a sleepy congregation of rooks. When I got my breath back, I peered out to see what was afoot below and saw Mr Rosencreutz’s bullies, now dressed as gamekeepers, beating the undergrowth for me, so I stayed put until night came on again. Then I went from covert to covert, always concealing myself, until I came to the railway line and borrowed a ride off a load of freight, climbed in amongst a truck of taters and pulled a tarpaulin over my head, because, at that time, I was not able to fly so high the clouds might hide me, and I can think of few things more conspicuous, even by night, than a naked woman dodging telegraph wires and hopping over signal boxes – for I needed the railway to guide me back to London. To my delight, the train soon steamed through Clapham Junction and I nipped out just by Battersea Park, to make my way with all speed through the empty dark up the Queenstown Road ducking behind the privet hedges as I went until I got at last happily home.

‘Where who do I find in my own bed beside Lizzie but the Sleeping Beauty?

‘I was so weary, so bedraggled, so hungry and my nerves so much on edge from my dreadful experience that I broke down and cried, that there was no room for me at the inn, so Lizzie woke up.’

‘And wasn’t I pleased to see her, I can tell you! For Toussaint had told all and we feared the worst. Our house was packed to the roof with the refugees from Madame Schreck’s and, if Fevvers had a tale to tell, oh! we had a tale for her! I fixed her up a nice cup of coffee with milk and she had a couple of boiled eggs and some toast and soon was all smiles again. As for Toussaint’s part in this scarcely credible narrative, sir, he wrote it down on a piece of paper which, happily, I have with me in my handbag.’

Lizzie thereupon excavated three impeccable sheets of manuscript, written on invoices for an ice-cream parlour, as follows:

After the man came and kidnapped Sophia, I was much distressed and would have followed them but the carriage vanished too quickly from my sight. I returned to the house and went to Madame Schreck’s room. But, though the widow’s weeds still hung from the curtain rod, now they were quite still. She did not move.

It came to me that there was
nothing left
inside the clothes and, perhaps, there never had been anything inside her clothes but a set of dry bones agitated only by the power of an infernal will and a voice that had been no more than the artificial exhalation of air from a bladder or a sac, that she was, or had become, a sort of scarecrow of desire. I climbed on a chair and lifted her down. She was weightless as an empty basket and her mittens fell to the floor with a soft plop. A little dust trickled out of the truncated fingers. I laid her weeds on the bed; they were stiff and dry as the shed carapace of an insect.

On her desk was a bill of sale. She had sold Fevvers to this Mr Rosencreutz for not two but five thousand pounds, half to be paid direct in cash to Madame Schreck when the bargain was struck, the rest to go to her . . . ‘afterwards’. (All Fevvers had been told was lies.) I did not like the sound of that ‘afterwards’ in the least, but I was at my wits’ end what to do next. I knew I had been the dumb witness to infamy but would the police believe that I, the last to have seen Madame Schreck living, had been the first to find her – not dead, for who can say, now, when she had died, or if she had ever lived, but . . . passed away? And who better than I to know what powerful friends the old procuress had in the force, since, every Friday since I entered her service, to me had fallen the task of taking by hand a
heavy envelope
to Kensington Police Station with orders to wait for no receipt?

Fanny was a pillar of strength. From Madame Schreck’s open safe she took the money that was owed on Fevvers’ account, and then, after some computations, a sufficient sum to recompense all the remaining five, including the Beauty, for the labour they had expended in that miserable place – not a penny more, not a penny less. Having dealt honestly with Madame Schreck’s estate; ‘now,’ she said, ‘let’s be off, sharpish, or else we’ll be accessories to the fact.’

‘What fact?’ I asked myself, gripped with fear. But we could do nothing except pray that Fevvers’ wit and ingenuity would keep her from harm. As to a place of refuge for we friendless ones, all I could think of was the address Fevvers herself once gave me, where I took the first and only cash Madame Schreck ever gave her. We must be gone, and quickly – before the first clients of the night arrived.

I carried the Beauty out to Madame Schreck’s carriage in the mews myself. I would take that carriage and the pony as the portion due to me; did not the slave deserve to inherit the means of escape? We arrived at Battersea just after midnight and those kind folk rose from their beds to give us a hospitable welcome, in spite of their distress at hearing of our beloved girl’s disappearance, and Isotta found couches, mattresses and blankets for us all.

The next day seemed interminable as, in a state of agitation that increased hourly, we waited for news of our lovely friend. Only after a long night’s watch had the house settled down for a few hours uneasy slumber when she miraculously returned.

Walser read this document, noted the scholarly handwriting, the firm signature, the all too checkable address. He handed it back to Lizzie humbly. She stowed it away again, with a pleased nod.

‘That Toussaint!’ she said. ‘He’s a lovely way with words.’

‘What has become of them all, sir?’ demanded Fevvers: and immediately answering herself, ‘Why, gone their ways! Isotta and Gianni, most loving parents themselves, persuaded the Wonder that no child can fall so far a mother nor father will not stoop to lift it up, again, so she presented herself again to her adopteds, who wept with joy to have her restored to the bosom of the family after so many years, when all their other fledglings had long left the nest. Albert/Albertina got a post as ladies’ maid with our Jenny and though s/he says s/he is much confined by female garments all the time, Jenny would not be without her treasure. Fanny returned to her native Yorkshire where, with the aid of her savings at Madame Schreck’s, she established an orphanage in a mill-town for the children of operatives killed in accidents on the looms, so now she has twenty lovely babies to call her “mama”. Happily, since I came into my good fortune, I have been able to interest a good friend, the academician, Sir R—. F—. in Cobwebs. He perceived her unique quality of vision and trained her hand to match her sight. Now she had a fine reputation as a painter in chiaroscuro, so you could say that, though she had not come out of the shadows, all the same, she had made the shadows work for her. As for the Beauty –’

‘– she is with us, still.’

Pause of three heartbeats.

‘She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movements under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she leads in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interruption of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those few necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate – a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world.

‘And, sir,’ concluded Fevvers, in a voice that now took on the sombre, majestic tones of a great organ, ‘we do believe . . . her dream will be the coming century.

‘And, oh God . . . how frequently she weeps!’

Followed a profound silence, as the women clutched hands, as if for comfort, and Walser shivered, for the dressing-room had grown cold as death.

Then, on the soundless air of night, now drifted to them the sound of Big Ben once again, but the wind must have changed direction a little for the first chimes were faint with distance, as if they came from very far away, and, when she heard them, Fevvers froze and ‘pointed’, just like a huge golden retriever. She thrust up her muzzle as if snuffing the air and the muscles in her neck bunched and clenched. One, two, three, four, five . . . six . . .

During the less-than-a-blink of time it took the last chime to die there came a vertiginous sensation, as if Walser and his companions and the very dressing-room itself were all at once precipitated down a vast chute. It took his breath away. As if the room that had, in some way, without his knowledge, been plucked out of its everyday, temporal continuum, had been held for a while above the spinning world and was now – dropped back into place.

‘Six o’clock! As late as that!’ cried Lizzie, springing to her feet with refreshed energy. But Fevvers seemed as if utterly overcome, exhausted to the point of collapse, quite suddenly, as if by the relaxation of tremendous amounts of energy. Her breast fluttered as if her heart wanted to fly out. Her heavy head hung down like a bell that has ceased tolling. She even seemed to have diminished in size, to have shrunk to proportions only a little more colossal than human. She closed her eyes and let out a long exhalation of breath. The colour left her cheeks and she looked haggard and very much aged in the colourless light of morning that gave the mauve glow of the gas mantles a lifeless and unnatural look. It was left to Lizzie to conclude the story, which she did with despatch.

‘After our joyful reunion,’ stated Lizzie briskly, ‘as we all sat lingering over breakfast, who should call in on us but Esmeralda and the Human Eel pushing an elver in a perambulator. “Tell you what, Fevvers,” she says. “You ever thought of the high trapeze?”’

Then Lizzie bounded up and began to fold and tidy the lingerie on the sofa, tacitly dismissing Walser. But Fevvers stirred a little, eyed Walser in the glass, wearily added a coda.

‘The rest is history. Esmeralda secured me that first engagement at the Cirque d’Hiver. No sooner did I venture on the high trapeze than I triumphed. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna . . . and now my own, beloved London. The first night here, at the Alhambra, after I’d climbed off-stage over a Snowdon of Bouquets, when Lizzie was taking off my make-up just as we were when you found us, comes a knocking on the door. And there’s a man in a billycock hat with a big paunch covered with a waistcoat made of Stars and Stripes, the jolly Old Glory itself, sir, and, right over his bellybutton, a bloody great dollar sign.

‘“Hi there, my feathered friend,” he says. “I’ve come to make your fortune.’”

She yawned, not like a whale, not like a lioness, but like a girl who has stayed up too long.

‘So I don’t doubt I’ll soon triumph in St Petersburg, in Tokyo, in Seattle, in San Francisco, Chicago, New York – wherever there’s a roofbeam high enough for my trapeze, sir. Now, if you’ve quite finished –’

Walser snapped his notebook shut. There was no room in it for one more word.

‘Yes, indeed. That’s fine, Miss Sophie, just fine.’

‘Fevvers,’ she correctly sharply. ‘Call me Fevvers. Now me and Liz must get home to bed.’

‘Can I call you a cab?’

‘Gracious, no! Waste good money on a cab? We always walks home after the show.’

But she tottered a little as she got up. The night had taken a heavy toll. She exchanged a last, inscrutable grimace with her warped reflection in the mirror.

‘Excuse me, sir, while I get some clothes on.’

‘I’ll wait at the stage door, ma’am,’ said Walser, stowing away his book. ‘Perhaps you ladies will allow me to escort you?’