Nights at the Circus (22 page)

The small girls cried and slept. In the morning, father did not come, only the neighbours came. Of the inquest, Mignon retained only the vaguest memory, vaguer than that of the bounce of offal in the frying pan when her father stole a handful of guts from the slaughterhouse, or of the pretty ribbon a soldier gave her that her mother took away again. (Why had she done that?)

And, now she was a grown girl, she could have recalled, of her father, only a smell of stale meat and a pair of blond moustaches that always dropped down at the tips, his moustaches, which had entirely submitted to despair long before he seized the breadknife, concealed it in his shirt, took his wife by the hand and led her out to look at sunset reflected in the water.

Of her mother, hands moist with soapsuds; hands that took things away from her. And tears, inscrutable in memory as they had been in life, those tears that came when the faithless woman clasped her daughters to her bosom as she sometimes, although infrequently, would do.

In the short space of time Fevvers had been in Petersburg, it seemed she had mastered sufficient bad Russian to order meals and she added, as an afterthought, a bottle of that international beverage, champagne. Clearly Mignon’s condition had melted her heart, although, by the rasp of her blue eyes when she cast them at Walser, one would never have thought so.

Housed in the city orphanage, the children prayed, and, the rest of the time, busied themselves with household tasks. Then it was as if her sister went one way and Mignon the other; one morning, they woke in one another’s arms in the same bed and, that night, Mignon went to sleep on a heap of rags in the corner of a kitchen full of dark shapes of spits and pots and jars and presses to flatten ducks.

She bore it for six months, because it was winter, and the house in which she skivvied was stuck in the middle of the country in the middle of the snow. But when it was spring, she ran away and a peasant taking a load of cabbages to the city gave her a lift in exchange for sucking his prick. She did not dare go back to the orphanage, although for a long time she used to hang around the outside on the off-chance her sister might still be there but she never saw her sister again so she supposed she got a good place, somewhere, too.

Throughout the summer, Mignon made a living picking up discarded flowers in the market and putting them together in crippled bunches. She learned to exercise some ingenuity in arranging these little nosegays and also soon learned to augment her
trouvailles
with blooms picked from public gardens, but it wasn’t a good living, it was begging with paint on its face, and she stole other things, food, odd items of clothing, in order to get by.

She slept where she could, in passages, under bridges, in shop doorways, and it was all right as long as it was warm. She soon made a large acquaintance among the other street arabs, the accidental children of the city, and when the cold weather came she pooled resources with an entire gang of young creatures who made their headquarters in a disused warehouse.

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.

Yet however accomplished in pickpocketing, these children of the lower depths remained – children. They made themselves big bonfires, at nights, partly to warm themselves, partly for the fun of the flames crackling, they would play games of tag, and hide-and-seek, and jump-across-the-embers, and fall to childish quarrelling and squabbling among themselves, and then the fire got too big for its boots, consumed their quarters, ate up some of them, too. The home and the family Mignon had invented for herself went up in smoke and she was on her own again.

So she thieved, a bit, and tossed off nervous boys in back alleys for a few coppers, and let them put it into her against dreary walls for a few coppers more. She would have been about fourteen then.

The waiter knocked; and rolled in a clinking trolley. A tureen, and champagne in a silver ice-bucket, deliriously misted with chill. The waiter spread a place on one of the gay little tables with a shining white cloth, all the while furtively peering at Fevvers’ noble cleavage until Walser felt a strange desire rise within him to punch the young man’s nose. If Fevvers had ordered food for only Mignon, there were four glasses, like saucers on stems. These she peremptorily signed to be changed for flutes, a scrupulosity of refinement that charmed Walser.

Fevvers raised the lid of the tureen – bread and milk for the abused child, a maternal touch. She scooped some up on her finger, tasted it, made a wry face, sprinkled sugar lavishly from the silver caster. She replaced the lid and tucked a napkin round the tureen, to keep its contents warm. In spite of these hospitable preparations, the Cockney Venus remained in a foul mood, darting Walser speaking glances of contempt and irritation from eyes that, tonight, were as dark a blue as sailors’ trousers.

Ecstatic splashing and coos of delight came through the edges of the bathroom door, together with little puffs of steam. Then Mignon began to sing.

She possessed a sweet, artless soprano, so far so good; to that extent, her voice matched her immature body. But it was as though the scarcely-to-be-imagined tragedy of her life, the sea of misery and disaster in which she swam in her precarious state of innocent defilement, all found expression, beyond her consciousness of her intention, in her voice. She sang:

All three who listened felt the hairs rise on the napes of their necks, as if that lovely voice were something uncanny, its possessor either herself a sorceress or under some spell.

‘I thought she didn’t speak English,’ muttered Fevvers, ruffled, as if the child had been deceiving them.

‘Don’t you see?’ whispered Lizzie. ‘She knows the words but she doesn’t understand them.’

One winter’s night, as the snowflakes whirled around the chimneypots, Mignon, bold with hunger, strayed into the arcades of the commercial part of the city, where she rarely ventured. A gentleman in a snug greatcoat and a top hat rendered melancholy by the weight of snow upon its brim came hurrying down the pavement towards her, absorbed in his own affairs. She put herself in his path. She had not eaten for two days. She was so thin she did not cast a shadow. He made as if to brush her off, as though she were a fly who had settled on his arm, but then, glancing abstractedly at her face, an expression of low cunning and mean surmise crossed his own.

He was a medium and held office hours in his comfortable apartment above a grocer’s shop on the next block. Delicious odours of cloves, dried apricots and ham sausage seeped up through the cracks in the floorboards and, for the first time in her life, Mignon got enough to eat; but she did not put on any weight, it was as though something inside her ate it all up before she could get to it but she didn’t have worms.

This man, Herr M., had been returning home from a service at the spiritualist church where he occasionally officiated when he encountered the little streetwalker with the shawl over her head. He had indeed been preoccupied with a serious problem, to which her appearance provided the solution. For, only the previous week, his assistant, a buxom lass from Schleswig-Holstein, whom he trusted absolutely, ran off with a Brazilian gentleman, a travelling salesman who visited the grocer downstairs with samples of coffee. She having slipped downstairs one day to buy a snack of cheese and cookies, the pomaded and expansive Latin took time off from his little bags of green beans to bandy words with her in an irresistibly syncopated accent. She accepted his invitation to lunch in a fashionable restaurant one Sunday when Herr M., the medium, was visiting his aged aunt in a tree-shaded suburb. One thing led to another and, if the medium had keen eyes for the world beyond, he was blind as a bat to the developments taking place under his nose – until, under that nose, pinned, in fact, to the very pillow on which he was accustomed to wake to find her pig-tailed head, he discovered, instead, the note advising him she was already on the train that would take her to the port from whence she and her beau would embark for Rio. H’m!

The absconding assistant took a few bits and pieces of portable property such as Herr M.’s gold watch and a roll of banknotes he had deposited inside the grandfather clock for safekeeping, but he was a magnanimous man and felt he owed her
that
much. He also felt some relief that, far away in sunny Brazil, she would be in no position to spill another kind of beans than those in which her senhor dealt. But he was gravely inconvenienced to be without an assistant and regarded his meeting with Mignon as truly ordained by the spirits.

It was her great resemblance to a spectre that struck him most.

Mignon sang her foreign song without meaning, without feeling, as if the song shone through her, as though she were glass, without the knowledge she was heard; she sang her song, which contained the anguish of a continent.

Herr M., a once-a-night, on-and-off man, screwed Mignon with the absentminded regularity with which he wound the grandfather clock, although never for quite so long. As for Mignon, she could hardly believe her luck: a bed, with sheets; an armchair; a warm stove; a table, with a cloth; mealtimes! He had her deloused, paid a doctor to ensure a clean bill of health – miraculously, she had escaped infection; and sent her to the dentist, who pulled her rotten molars, greatly increasing the resemblance of her face to a skull thereby. Because she possessed only the rags she stood up in, he bought her several sets of underwear, some dresses of thrifty wool and cotton mix for every day and, for working hours, some pretty white nighties trimmed with broderie anglaise. She did not need a coat because he never let her out of the apartment. Mignon thought she was in heaven but it was a fool’s paradise and, in literal terms, that is an exact description of Herr M.’s establishment.

Herr M. had early formulated the following maxim: why steal, when there is more intellectual satisfaction to be obtained from cheating?

Mignon’s daily work henceforward consisted of personating the dead, and posing for their photographs.

Every morning, over breakfast, Herr M. studied the obituary columns in the newspaper, marking the deaths of young women with a mourning stripe of thick black pencil. Although young wives, preferably those who died in childbed, sometimes proved eminently satisfactory, marital relations could turn sticky, on occasions, and, best of all, he preferred the demises of only daughters of elderly parents. Epidemics of diphtheria and scarlet fever always put a smile on his lips and set him a-tapping at the top of his egg with an especially jaunty air. After he consumed his egg, his cheese, his salami, his toast and a couple of spoonsful of preserves – he enjoyed a hearty breakfast – he settled down with a second cup of coffee and entered the satisfactory results of his researches in his filing system. Sometimes, solemn as an undertaker and garbed in similar fashion, he attended those funerals where he judged there would be so few mourners that his presence would be remembered, and sent, to others, exquisitely chosen flowers such as a bunch of white violets or a garland of scarcely opened rosebuds, accompanied by his black-edged card. But, on the whole, he did not believe in striking while the iron was hot. No. He let the first fierce grief pass before he closed in. He preferred to work on subjects who knew from experience they were inconsolable.

He prided himself on his knowledge of the human heart.

So, for the main part, he relied on word-of-mouth advertising and kept up excellent relations with wreath-makers, embalming parlours and monumental masons. Of all his clients, he liked best those who sought him out independently. Cheeks creased with the trace of tears, they would come to enquire tentatively, often in almost an embarrassed way, at the Spirit Church, where the verger, an aged Swedenborgian of impeccably lunatic integrity, would take the names and addresses and allow Herr M. to approach them at his leisure. He liked to make them wait a little, not too much, only enough to let them understand how difficult were the negotiations he must make.

‘And shall we see her? Shall we truly see her?’

Oh, yes; she will cross from the abyss from beyond, she will leave her couch in beds of asphodel and materialise in this very apartment, when the curtains are drawn, in the dim light . . . she cannot stand the sunshine, now, you see, nor the artificial glare of the gas mantle, but she will bring with her her own radiant mist.

All young girls look the same after a long illness. Mignon wore a white nightgown, buttoned to the neck, and her hair loose. The bereaved sat at the round mahogany table with the red plush cover edged with a fringe of balls. They clasped hands. Herr M. was solid and reliable as a bank manager in his expansive waistcoat and his dark green velvet jacket and his oleaginous sentimentality. There was a little skullcap embroidered with arcane signs that he put on for his seances. His aunt sewed it for him.

He believed the best illusions were the simplest. However, as a hobby, he experimented with various optical toys and magic lanterns of the most sophisticated kind. Herr M. spent considerable sums on such devices, engaged in perfectly respectable research on systems of mechanical reproduction and, indeed, possessed many of the characteristics of a scientist
manqué.
He was sincerely fascinated by the art and craft of illusion and, during the entire time that Mignon worked for him, he was conducting a learned correspondence with a certain Mr Robert Paul, in London, about an invention which Mr Paul had patented. Mr Paul claimed his invention would materialise the human desire to live in the past, the present and the future all at once. It consisted of a screen on which was projected at random a number of sequences of pictures showing simulated scenes from time past, time present and time to come whilst the audience, seated in comfortable
fauteuils
, were subjected to a soft breeze directed at them from a hand-cranked wind machine to simulate the wind of travel. Herr M. even began discussions, on behalf of his colleague, with a troupe of dancers who worked in a cabaret he knew of, that they would personate historical personages for his own camera. (He was, it goes without saying, an excellent photographer.) All above board and in perfect taste.