Nights at the Circus (23 page)

But, although he was passionately devoted to this hobby and spent most of his spare hours closeted in his study with his Praxinoscope, his Phasmatrope and his Zoopraxiscope, projecting on to a white screen photographs of plants and animals that often seemed to move, these studies remained no more than peripheral to his business, which consisted of fleecing the living by arranging interviews with their departed.

She will not speak; she will not smile.

Ah! how illness has changed her! how it has ravaged her little face! but, in the happy land where now she dwells, there is no sickness, no pain.

‘Oh, my darling!’

‘Hush! don’t burden her with your grief, for pity’s sake!’

So you can see there were still traces of common humanity in Herr M., and these he often applauded in himself; did he not comfort, did he not console? Did he not, out of the goodness of his compassionate heart, assuage the suffering souls who brought their pain into his parlour? Had he not hit upon that one compassionate innovation that set him apart from other mediums, could he not sell his unhappy clients authentic pictures of the loved and lost ones, that proved, in whatever world they now inhabited, they flourished still?

He busily interpreted unheard voices, with the best of intentions.

‘She begs you: “Papa! Mama! don’t cry!”’ Or: ‘She’s saying that she cannot rest in peace while you still grieve.’ Herr M. tucked the banknotes into his grandfather clock with a satisfaction that was not purely fiscal, was at least partly that of a justified Samaritan.

‘If they didn’t pay, they wouldn’t
believe
, and then they’d get no benefit at all, at all.’

His L-shaped drawing-room had lace curtains looped over the archway to the foot of the L, beside the green-glazed jardinière on which stood a Boston fern. Pointing towards this alcove was Herr M.’s mahogany camera, like a little wooden room itself. Behind the camera stood the round table at which Herr M. joined the hands of the parents as solemnly as if he were marrying them and begged them, in an urgent whisper, to stay stock-still. Although their line of vision was somewhat obscured by the camera, they always did as they were bid, never craned or peered, too much in awe. If the mourner came alone, Herr M. would clamp his or her hands down on the table with the assurance that, if contact with the plush were lost for one single moment, the ghost would vanish.

The alcove itself was always in darkness, and purple clouds of incense billowed out from Chinese pots. The bookcase against the further wall swung inwards on well-oiled hinges. Herr M. went round dimming the rest of the lights.

‘It’s only mummy and daddy, little one, come to visit you.’ Or: ‘Won’t you come to Hubby? Won’t you come back to Hubby?’ Whatever suited the clients’ condition. They sat at the table, held hands and hoped.

‘Come when I knock on the table, little one.’

Mignon, in her nightgown, slipped into the alcove from behind the bookcase. She carried an electric torch under her nightgown so that her outline glowed. It was as simple as that. Lit from beneath, clouded with incense, half hidden by the lace curtains, the reticulated fronds of fern and the bulk of the camera, she could have been any young girl.

And when they saw their heart’s desire their eyes were often blind with tears.

She smiled. Sometimes she held a lily in her hand and could hide behind it, if Herr M.’s tactful enquiries had discovered any facial peculiarity about the deceased, a squint, a harelip, something like that.

A breeze blew through the room, sweetly rattling the chimes of a glass harp behind her.

Herr M. ducked his head under the hood of the camera. In the unexpected thunder and lightning of the flash, Mignon’s face looked to each one who saw it the perfect image of the lost.

When the smoke cleared, she was gone and Herr M. went about lighting up the gas mantles again.

Why was he proficient only at summoning female ghosts? Because, he implied, taking out his tobacco-scented handkerchief and blowing his nose as if concealing manly emotion in a manly fashion, he himself, once, long ago, in a kingdom by the sea . . . Her high-born kinsman arrived, in due course, and took her away, but Herr M. contrived a deal with the high-born kinsman, provided he invoked exclusively spirits in the same category, to whit, young girls.

In spite of this specification, Mignon got a nasty fright the very first time he took her photograph. She went into the dark room with him out of curiosity and excitedly watched the picture crystallise on the paper as if by magic in the trough of acid. But then she tucked her underlip under her rather prominent front teeth; she was troubled. For the face that swam out of the acid emerged to her out of her memory in the same way.

‘Mother . . .’

Herr M. hugged her with genuine compassion.

‘Accidents can happen,’ he apologised.

In his undertaker’s weeds, he delivered the photographs by hand, each wrapped in a crisp shroud of tissue paper. The spirits are shy, he would assure his patrons; she wishes only those she loves best to see her thus. Show these photographs to
nobody
, or else her face will disappear! The indistinct features melting into darkness surrounding them were those of whomever longing and imagination made them.

He tipped his gloomy topper and accepted gratitude as if it were his due.

Mignon impersonated the dead so successfully that Herr M. even briefly contemplated giving her a salary as well as her keep but decided that, if he did so, she might save up and run away. So they lived out an odd kind of illicit, respectable life together. He was pleased to find she could sing, a little, and often wondered if there was a way he could incorporate her fresh, untrained voice in the act; angelic voices, perhaps? But then he thought, it will make things too complicated; and left her alone a good deal, curled up in an over-stuffed armchair in the drawing-room, lost in incoherent daydreams, whilst in his study he probed the problems of persistence of vision.

He lasted so long because he was venal but not greedy and always behaved with tact, discretion and even kindness. Finally, a mother could not resist it, showed the photograph of a dead darling to an older sister whose nose had been put so far out of joint by the late arrival that she could not endure the thought of her sibling’s posthumous rivalry, stole the portrait and took it to the police. Posing as a bereaved uncle, a burly detective knocked over the camera just as Herr M. fired off the flash and trapped Mignon by the tail of her nightgown as she made a hasty exit through the swinging bookcase. How she giggled! It had never been anything more than a game to her.

The jig was up. Herr M., rational as ever, made a full confession at once and produced Mignon in her nightgown in court as irrefutable proof. The scandal killed his aged aunt, unhappily, but Herr M. served only two years out of six in prison, maximum remission for good behaviour, making a number of valuable contacts amongst other upstanding embezzlers, frauds and confidence men whilst inside. On his release, he moved immediately to another city where, after a few difficult months, he set up in business, again, although, this time, he forswore spiritualism and set up a profitable line in exotic snapshots.

He reopened his correspondence with Mr Paul to such effect that, a year or two later, he was able to give up pornography altogether, and went into the motion-picture business. He prospered, although sometimes, in the teeth of his own scepticism, he felt almost tempted, now and then, to try to pierce the veil just once, this time for
real
, and have a word with auntie, whom he missed terribly.

Yet many of those who had been deceived by Herr M. did not believe in his confession. They took the cherished photographs out of those lavender-scented bureaux drawers in which they shared an old glove-box with, perhaps, a first curl in an envelope, or a rattle of cast milk teeth, and, however hard they scrutinised the glossy prints, they never saw Mignon’s face but saw another face, and heard, in their mind’s ear, the soft, familiar voice demanding the impossible: ‘Mama! Papa! don’t cry!’ So you could say the evidence of Herr M.’s crime remained, in itself, perfectly innocent. Oh, dear delusion! And still Mama sleeps with the picture under her pillow.

Mignon got off scot-free, no charges were so much as pressed against her, secure as she was in the victim’s defence of no responsibility. Now she had some nice clothes, she got herself a decent job serving in quite a good class of bar and she had a little room of her own and often thanked her lucky stars. She would sing, too, when the accordion player came round. She loved to sing. Sometimes she went home with the accordion player, sometimes not, she picked and chose. Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: ‘It can’t last.’ She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense.

One Saturday night, a gentleman in evening dress under an elegant red-lined cape came into the bar hand in hand with a miniature edition of himself, all but for the feet, for this little person, squat in stature, somewhat long in the arm, could find no shoes to fit him in any shop in the world. They took a booth in a corner and Mignon, full of curiosity, trotted over to serve them. The small person’s sleek, black hair was combed back from a centre parting. With grave ceremony, he took the carnation from his buttonhole and handed it to Mignon. She burst out laughing. ‘Don’t hurt his feelings,’ said the Ape-Man in a charming French accent. So Mignon took the flower and fixed it in her hair.

The Ape-Man ordered a bottle of wine and Mignon begged a banana from the kitchen. ‘My friend and colleague, the Professor. Give the pretty lady a kiss, Professor.’ The Professor was already investigating the banana but he put it down carefully on his plate, stood up on his chair, leaned across the table, put his arms round Mignon’s neck and gave her a smacking, tickling kiss on the cheek. You could say the Professor did the Ape-Man’s courting for him. Yes; she’d be delighted to share their wine.

She was still only fifteen and he took her on solely in order to abuse her. He had such a fine nose for a victim it was a wonder he’d elected to spend his life among the astute chimps, who whisked out of the way of his boot and, if he got them no supper, would steal his wallet from the pocket of his jacket as he lay on his bunk in a drunken stupor and go out and buy supper for themselves. He was a dark man out of Lyons and his eyebrows met. She went back to his van – he was with a travelling circus, then, that put up its canvas in parks – and next morning gawped like a child at the wise monkeys washing their faces in a bucket and queueing up to comb their hair at the cracked square of mirror in their travelling cage.

She did not bother to go back to her own room to pick up her clothes. She ran away with the circus, although it turned out he was a drinking man, hard, taciturn, violent.

On the third day on the road, he beat her because she burned the cutlets. She was a lousy cook. On the fourth day, he beat her because she forgot to empty the chamber-pot and when he pissed in it, it overflowed. On the fifth day, he beat her because he had formed the habit of beating her. On the sixth day, a roustabout got her down on her back behind the freak-show. The beating was now an expectation that was always fulfilled. On the seventh day, three Moroccan acrobats took her back to their van, gave her some raki, which made her cough, some hashish, which made her eyes shine, and then had her, in a variety of ingenious ways, one after the other, among the shining brass and cut-glass ornaments of the teak interior. Word about Mignon passed round quickly.

She had an exceedingly short memory, which alone saved her from desolation.

There was a stable-boy from England, an odd type, who heard her singing as she swept out the chimps’ cages and taught her a lot of new songs, some, though not all, of which had very rude words, not that Mignon understood them. He liked to hear the whey-faced orphan singing obscenities that were meaningless to her but he also liked to hear her sing other kinds of songs, for he was a musical boy, and she learned from him some German songs, about the quick trout and the rose in the heather, and more.

He spoke good German but kept himself to himself for he had a secret, he was running away from a scandal at his public school, he liked boys too much and left Mignon alone, for which she was grateful. She would go and sit with him in an odorous corner of the horse-box and they would sing in harmony: ‘Jolly boating weather’; ‘The lark now leaves his watery nest’.

One day, the Ape-Man knocked him insensible with a broom and beat her until the broom broke but the boy never recovered consciousness. They were on the road, camped outside a scrubbed conurbation of cuckoo-clocks in Switzerland, and the Ape-Man dragged the boy into some bushes and left him there.

The Ape-Man’s evening suit and cape, the uniform in which he escorted his charges into the ring, swung from a wooden coat-hanger (stolen from a Paris hotel) on a peg in caravans, in lodging-houses, in dressing-rooms. She bore this dress suit no resentment, although it had deceived her, and if she soon lost interest in the chimps, too, she did not treat them badly. She did their laundry and mended their costumes. The Professor never gave her another flower but, then, she never gave him another banana.

What the chimps thought about all this is a problem. One who had made a profound study of those creatures as they went through their routines that mocked us, the cycle race, the tea party, the schoolroom, might have concluded that the apes, in turn, were putting their own studious observations of ourselves to use in routines of parody, of irony, of satire. The more the Ape-Man drank, the more they ignored him.