Nights at the Circus (16 page)

They looked at each other.

‘Oh . . . he can come as far as the bridge, can’t he?’

The stage doorkeeper in his creaking leather coat was brewing tea on his oil stove, stewing up tealeaves, milk and sugar all together, Indian style. Walser accepted a boiling jam-jar full of the stuff. The October morning grew lighter every moment but no brighter; it was a grey day of low cloud. The discarded orts of pleasure littered the pavement outside.

‘Spent all night with Fevvers, ’ave you?’ said the stage doorkeeper with a wink and a nudge. ‘Go on – don’t take offence, guv’nor. That Lizzie guards her like a watchdog. Besides, she’s a perfect lady, is our Fevvers.’

Yet, rolled up in a rusty black shawl, the big bones sticking through her face, dark stains under those blue eyes, her long hair roughly pinned up again, she looked like any street girl making her way home after an unsuccessful night, or even some girl rag-and-bone merchant, taking home a night’s dolorous scavenging in a sack on her back – the enormous burden, jutting out between her shoulders, that seemed to weigh her down. She sparked into a semblance of theatrical vivacity for the sake of the stage doorkeeper: ‘I’ll see you later, me old cock!’ but refused Walser’s offered arm, and they walked through Piccadilly in silence, among early risers on their way to work. They skirted Nelson’s Column, went down Whitehall. The cold air was not freshened by morning; there was an oppressive odour of soot and horseshit.

At the end of Whitehall, along the wide road, past the Mother of Parliaments, there came at a brisk trot a coal cart pulled by clattering, jingling drays, and, behind, an impromptu procession of women of the poorest class, without coats or wraps, in cotton pinafores, in draggled underskirts, worn carpet slippers on their bare feet, and there were shoeless little children too, running, scrambling after the carts, the girls and women with their pinafores outstretched to catch every little fragment of coal that might bounce out.

‘Oh, my lovely London!’ said Fevvers. ‘The shining city! The new Jerusalem!’

She spoke so flatly he could not tell whether she spoke ironically. She said nothing else. Walser was intrigued by such silence after such loquacity. It was as though she had taken him as far as she could go on the brazen trajectory of her voice, yarned him in knots, and then – stopped short. Dropped him.

Atop the sparkling tracery of the House, the gilt hands of Big Ben pointed to five minutes to seven. Both women looked up at the clock face and smiled a single, small smile of complicity of which Walser received the faded aftermath as she turned to shake his hand. A strong, firm, masculine grip. No gloves.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Mr Walser,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ve got enough to do your piece. If you have any further questions, you know where to find me. We can easily make our way home by ourselves from here.’

‘It’s been a pleasure,’ agreed Lizzie with an odd little ducking bow, proffering a glacé kid glove.

‘My pleasure, entirely,’ said Walser.

The minute hand of the great clock above them inched over the face. The women set out for the smoky south over Westminster Bridge against the clattering traffic that now streamed into town. Because of the difference in their heights, they could not walk arm in arm, so they held hands and, from a distance, looked like a blonde, heroic mother taking her little daughter home from some ill-fated expedition up west, their ages obscured, their relationship inverted. Their feet dragged slow as poverty yet that, too, was an illusion; pelted with diamonds, assaulted by pearls, she was too mean to take a cab.

The clock coughed up the prolegomena to its chime and then rang out the prelude to the hour. When the wind suddenly seized hold of Fevvers’ hair, tugged it from its pin and sent it flying over the sullen river in a wide, flaxen arc, he half expected her to unfurl too, all scarlet, crimson plumage, and clasping her tiny charge, her daughter, her mother, to her bosom, to whirl away up through the low ceiling of cloud, up and off. He shook his head, to clear away idle fancies.

Seven struck. Now the size of one big doll, one small doll, they reached the end of the bridge and looked back; he saw the pale wedges of their faces. Then traffic obscured them.

‘Cab, sir?’ The waiting horse blew a plume of oats over the top of the nosebag.

At his lodgings in Clerkenwell, Walser washed, shaved, changed his shirt and found, this morning, he preferred his landlady’s ingratiating if inept attempt at American coffee to the tea he usually drank; Lizzie had marinated his insides in strong tea, that night, until his oesophagus must be the colour of mahogany . . . He flicked through his notes. What a performance! Such style! Such vigour! And just how had the two women pulled off that piece of sleight-of-hand, or ear, rather, with the clocks? When he took out his own pocket-watch, he found, to his unsurprise, it had stopped short precisely at midnight.

But how had she done – or known – that?

Curiouser and curiouser.

A war correspondent between wars and a passionate amateur of the tall tale, he dropped in at his London office later that morning to find his chief brooding behind a green eyeshadow over the latest from South Africa.

‘How did you find the Cockney Venus?’

‘It’s the ambition,’ said Walser, ‘of every red-blooded American kid to run away with the circus.’

‘So?’ said his London chief.

‘I don’t think you realise just how much I’d like a break from hard news, chief. That last touch of yellow fever in Panama took more out of me than I thought. Keep me away from the battlefield for a while! I need to be refreshed. I need to have my sense of wonder polished up again. What would you say to a series of inside stories of the exotic, of the marvellous, of laughter and tears and thrills and all? What if, incognito, your correspondent follows the great confidence artiste in the history of the world to the world’s most fabulous cities? Through the trackless wastes of Siberia and then . . . even unto the Land of the Rising Sun?

‘Better still . . . why doesn’t your correspondent, incognito, sign up with Fevvers on Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour itself? The story straight from the Ringbark! Chief, let me invite you to spend a few nights at the circus!’

2

PETERSBURG

ONE

‘There was a pig,’ said the baboushka to Little Ivan, who perched, round-eyed, on a three-legged stool beside her in the kitchen as she blew on the charcoal underneath the samovar with a big pair of wooden bellows brightly painted with folk-art motifs of scrolls and flowers.

The toil-misshapen back of the baboushka humbly bowed before the bubbling urn in the impotently submissive obeisance of one who pleads for a respite or a mercy she knows in advance will not be forthcoming, and her hands, those worn, veiny hands that had involuntarily burnished the handles of the bellows over decades of use, those immemorial hands of hers slowly parted and came together again just as slowly, in a hypnotically reiterated gesture that was as if she were about to join her hands in prayer.

About to join her hands in prayer. But always, at the very last moment, as if it came to her there was something about the house that must be done first, she would start to part her hands again. Then Martha would turn back into Mary and protest to the Martha within her: what can be more important than praying? Nevertheless, when her hands were once more almost joined, that inner Martha recalled the Mary to the indeed perhaps more important thing, whatever it was . . . And so on. Had the bellows been invisible, such would have been the drama of the constantly repeated interruption of the sequence, so that, when the old woman blew on the charcoal with the bellows, it could have been, if a wind had come and whipped away the bellows, a little paradigm of the tension between the flesh and the spirit, although ‘tension’ would have been altogether too energetic a word for it, since her weariness modified the pace of this imaginary indecision to such an extent that, if you did not know her, you would think that she was lazy.

And more than this, her work suggested a kind of
infinite
incompletion – that a woman’s work is never done; how the work of all the Marthas, and all the Marys, too, all the work, both temporal and spiritual, in this world, and in preparation for the next, will never be over – always some conflicting demand will occur to postpone indefinitely any and every task. So . . . there was no need to hurry!

Which was just as well, because she was . . . almost . . . worn out.

All Russia was contained within the thwarted circumscription of her movements; and much of the essence of her abused and withered femaleness. Symbol and woman, or symbolic woman, she crouched before the samovar.

The charcoal grew red, grew black, blackened and reddened to the rhythm of wheezing sighs that might just as well have come from the worn-out lungs of the baboushka as from her bellows. Her slow, sombre movements, her sombre, slow speech, were filled with the dignity of the hopeless.

‘There was . . .’ puff! . . . ‘a pig . . .’ puff! . . . ‘went to Petersburg . . .’

Petersburg! At that, the charcoal glowed and sizzled; Petersburg – the very name, enough to perk you up, even when you lived there; even the exhausted soul of Mother Russia stirred, a little.

St Petersburg, a beautiful city that does not exist any more. Today, another beautiful city of a different name bestrides the mighty Neva; on its site, St Petersburg once stood.

Walser paused to flex his chilly fingers and insert a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter.

At the command of the Prince, the rocks of the wilderness transformed – turned into palaces! The Prince stretched out his lordly hand, pulled down the Northern Lights, used them for chandeliers
 . . .
Yes! built as St Petersburg was at the whim of a tyrant who wanted his memory of Venice to take form again in stone on a marshy shore at the end of the world under the most inhospitable of skies, this city, put together brick by brick by poets, charlatans, adventurers and crazed priests, by slaves, by exiles, this city bears that Prince’s name, which is the same name as the saint who holds the keys of heaven . . . St Petersburg, a city built of hubris, imagination and desire
 . . .

As we are, ourselves; or, as we ought to be.

The old woman and the child ignored the rattling of the typewriter behind them. They do not know what we know about their city. They lived on, without knowledge or surmise, in this city that is on the point of becoming legend but not yet, not quite yet; the city, this Sleeping Beauty of a city, stirs and murmurs, longing yet fearing the rough and bloody kiss that will awaken her, tugging at her moorings in the past, striving, yearning to burst through the present into the violence of that authentic history to which this narrative – as must by now be obvious! – does not belong.

. . .
its boulevards of peach and vanilla stucco dissolve in mists of autumn . . .

. . . in the sugar syrup of nostalgia, acquiring the elaboration of artifice; I am inventing an imaginary city as I go along. Towards such a city, the baboushka’s pig now trots.

‘There was a pig went to Petersburg to pray,’ said the weary baboushka, laying aside the bellows on which blossomed the only flowers in the barren garden of her life. She turned the spigot of the samovar on to a glass. How her old bones did ache! How bitterly she regretted having promised the child a story!

‘What happened to the pig?’ prompted Little Ivan, all eyes and spindleshanks, sucking a hot jam pie.

But it turns out the baboushka can’t be bothered with the pig and its story. No Scheherezade, she.

‘Wolf eat him. Take this tea to the gentleman and get out from under my feet. Get along out of doors with you. Go, play, boy.’

She fell to genuflecting in front of the icon. She might have prayed for the soul of her daughter, the murderess, had she not been so weary she could do no more than perform the physical rituals of faith.

In the shadowy recesses of the dour, soot-stained room, Walser, an indistinct yet vivid figure, sat at a crude wooden table banging out those first impressions of the city on a battered old Underwood portable, his faithful companion in war and insurrection. The child in felt boots inched reluctantly up and set down the glass of tea as far away from the typist as he was able.

‘
Spasebo!
’ Walser’s flying fingers halted and he offered the boy one of his few words of Russian as if it were a gift. Little Ivan sneaked a single terrified look at Walser’s face all covered with red and white make-up, gave a faint moan and was gone. In all his former life, Walser never frightened children; this child was very much afraid of the clowns, a nervous dread with the seeds of fascination in it.

Walser reread his copy. The city precipitated him towards hyperbole; never before had he bandied about so many adjectives. Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the dictionary with a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-correspondent. He chuckled, thinking of his chief’s brow wrinkling over the dispatch, and slid two gritty rectangles of grey sugar into his tumblerful of amber fluid – he respected his teeth too much to do as the baboushka did, suck the sugar lumps, precious as candy, while she sipped. No lemons, again. The clowns were lodged among the poorest.