Nights at the Circus (25 page)

This was the only time, as she seated herself with her back towards them, that she felt lonely. Uneasy. At the first chords, the cats, whom she could not see, leapt on to the semi-circle of pedestals placed ready for them and sat there on their haunches, panting, pleased with themselves for their obedience. And then it would come to them, always with a fresh surprise no matter how often they performed, that they did not obey in freedom but had exchanged one cage for a larger cage. Then, for just one unprotected minute, they pondered the mystery of their obedience and were astonished by it.

Just for that moment, while she knew they wondered what on earth they were doing there, when her vulnerable back was turned towards them and her speaking eyes away from them, the Princess felt a little scared, and, perhaps, more fully human than she was used to feeling. Sometimes, then, she thought how much she’d like an accomplice, somebody else in the ring with her, not a stable-boy, not a groom, but somebody she trusted, somebody who could keep an eye on the cats during that tense moment when she played the invitation to the waltz whilst she asked herself, if, today of all days, this might be the day when they decided they would not take up her invitation. Whether tonight, of all the nights of their mutual treaty, the cats would not, one by one, succumb to the music and come down to choose their partners, but would . . .

She always kept a gun on top of the piano, just in case, and
this
gun was not loaded with blanks.

Nevertheless, she lived in the closest intimacy with her cats, nesting beside their cages in a bale of clean straw. She washed their eyes with boric acid and Argyrol, to prevent infection. She rubbed their tender feet with ointment for them. But she never smiled at her cats, because theirs was not a friendly pact; it existed in order to prevent hostilities, not to promote amity. And: ‘Cat got your tongue!’ you might have said to the Princess. Because, early in her career, she discovered how they grumbled at the back of their throats and laid their ears flat when she used that medium of human speech which nature denied them.

It was rumoured she was herself a tigress’s foster-child, abandoned in the jungle and suckled by wild bears. But there is no jungle near Marseilles. Since she said nothing, she never denied these stories. The Colonel spread them freely.

On the rare, random occasions when she took some other human back to her bed in the straw beside the sleeping tigers, she always made love in the dark because her body was, every inch, scarred with clawmarks, as if tattooed. That was the price they made her pay for taming them.

Now the crackling perfume of frying sausages and bacon mingles with heavy odours of dung, meat, pastry and wild beasts in the courtyard. The cookhouse – a stove, a counter – has opened up and is: heaven be praised! cry the stable-lads, serving honest English breakfasts.

When Samson, the Strong Man, brushing aside the Russian peddlers with a xenophobic oath, came to get his morning mug and doorstep, he suffered a deal of joshing from the roustabouts munching their bacon sandwiches, to have lost – according to the swiftly disseminated gossip of the circus – his inamorata to a clown. Samson never once let on he’d left Mignon to the mercies of the escaped tiger and
that
was when the clown stepped in; far from it! He boasted, flexing his gleaming pects, of what he’d do to that bastard clown when he got his hands on him and, indeed, his pride was genuinely piqued because Mignon had run off to Clown Alley after her saviour. In all this, Mignon assumed a woman’s place – that of the cause of discord between men; how else, to these men, could she play any real part in their lives?

The Colonel doffs his billy-cock hat with delighted glee as Fevvers, looking not in the least like india-rubber but very much flesh for the Prince of Wales, that connoisseur, stumps past. She is as ugly a walker as an unhorsed Valkyrie but her amazing curves promise delights of which the Colonel often dreams.

Lizzie, humping her handbag, which could look like that of a midwife or of an abortionist, hurled the Colonel a black look from some unguessable depths of Sicilian malice. For himself, the Colonel regarded the chaperone as the stumbling block between himself and an intimate
diner à deux
with the
aerialiste
which might lead – who knows to what? Yessir!

He burst out with a veritable plume of smoke at the thought, crushing Sybil to him in his enthusiasm so vigorously that she shrieked.

Lizzie paused to toss the gypsy fiddler a kopek, receiving in return a burst of incomprehensible gratitude and, for some reason, a tract or ballad sheet of some kind, which she stowed away in her handbag without a glance. The Colonel thought no more of it, although the hot jam pie vendor, in reality a member of the secret police, would have been curious to see the transaction. But Fevvers chose just that moment to disencumber him of his entire stock and lavishly distribute them among the Charivari children, who came tumbling off the washing-line for the treat, jumping about the pieman with such Latin enthusiasm he could scarcely see to take the money.

The two women had some girl with them, or, rather, a young lady – fair-haired, slim, nattily turned out in red wool. She impressed the Colonel only with a vague familiarity: ‘Ain’t I seen that somewhere before?’ And she made no impression at all on the Strong Man, so engrossed was he in describing to his friends the injuries Walser would suffer when they met again.

The Colonel chewed his cigar and sighed, because Fevvers gave him only the brusquest nod as the two females, with their guest, disappeared into the menagerie as if hot on the track of the bloody spoor the Princess had left behind her. The Colonel’s admiration for Fevvers grew in direct ratio to her indifference and the advance bookings.

But: ‘Hi, there! Hi, hi, hi!’ His easily distracted attention fixed on the tumultuous entry of the clowns and their pack of yapping dogs. His own recruit, he noted happily, was present and correct, if looking a little worse for wear – arm in a sling, and all.

‘Now’s your chance!’ said the guffawing stable-boys to Samson, but Samson took one look at Buffo, big as a house and already half seas over, shepherding his flock into the circus with his customary deranged majesty and the air of one about to commit grievous bodily harm. ‘Not ’alf,’ opined the Strong Man, judging discretion the better part. He shoved his mug back on the counter and buggered off. Catch ’im when ’e’s on ’is tod.

Buffo, leading the clowns. The dozen clowns. Hold hard, what’s this? A
baker’s
dozen clowns! Where, yesterday, had been twelve, today there were thirteen, and the thirteenth distinctly on the small side.

The clowns. See them as a band of terrorists. No; that’s not right. Not terrorists, but irregulars. A band of irregulars, permitted the most ferocious piracies as long as, just so long as, they maintain the bizarrerie of their appearance, so that their violent exposition of manners stays on the safe side of terror, even if we need to
learn
to laugh at them, and part, at least, of this laughter comes from the successful suppression of fear.

Little Ivan’s relations with the clowns went thus: first, he was afraid of them; then, he was entranced by them; at last he wished to become as they, so that he, too, could terrify, enchant, vandalise, ravage, yet always stay on the safe side of being, licensed to commit licence and yet forbidden to act, so that the baboushka back at home could go on reddening and blackening the charcoal even if the clowns detonated the entire city around her and nothing would really change. Nothing. The exploded buildings would float up into the air insubstantial as bubbles, and gently waft to earth again on exactly the same places where they had stood before. The corpses would writhe, spring apart at the joints, dismember – then pick up their own dismembered limbs to juggle with them before slotting them back in their good old sockets, all present and correct, sir.

So then you’d know, you’d seen the proof, that things would always be as they had always been; that nothing came of catastrophe; that chaos invoked stasis.

It was as though a fairy godmother had given each clown an ambivalent blessing when he was born: you can do anything you like, as long as nobody takes you seriously.

Buffo sewed bells on a three-cornered cap for his newest apprentice, so that he ‘won’t hear the trickle as his brains run out’.

Little Ivan, in cap and bells, somersaulted round the ring as if emancipated altogether from the bipedal posture until he bumped into Buffo somersaulting round the ring in the other direction. Then he got a thrashing for getting in the way and for at least five minutes thought better of running away with the circus but, though he sat sulking in the front row with his thumb in his mouth, still he could not take his eyes off the comedians.

Buffo thought up a routine especially for Walser, since he could no longer stand on his hands.

‘Crow like a cock.’

‘Cock-a-doodle-do,’ said Walser obediently.

‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’ amended Buffo as a little tribute to the Tsar of all the Russias. ‘Flap your arms about a bit.’

‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’ Entering into the spirit of the thing, Walser rose up on his toes and kneaded the air with his arms as best he could with one in a sling.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ intoned Buffo, ‘I give him – and you can take him! – the Human Chicken!’

Grik found an egg, not too fresh, inside his fiddle and tossed it between Walser’s eyes. Buffo creaked approval. Grok found a couple of eggs in the belly of his tambourine. Amid ululations of glee, all the clowns followed suit, whipping eggs out of various parts of their clothing and anatomies, and pelted Walser until egg liquor streamed down his face, blinding him. Grik and Grok struck up ‘A-hunting we will go!’ on their various instruments. Little Ivan thought how many pancakes his granny could have made with all those eggs that now spattered the sawdust but he did not think so for long because he was laughing too much to think.

Walser’s invisible tormentors whisked their satin coat-tails out of his reach as he lunged at them, tripped him up with their long shoes, shoved out their stilts to bring him down. When he heard Little Ivan’s peals of merriment, his anger rose: ‘What the hell’s so funny about this?’ And he lashed out, he knew not where.

They told him, afterwards, that his baulked gestures of fury were the funniest thing, as they drove him round the ring with blows and mocking cries; his baulked gestures of fury and his comic wound.

Henceforward, Walser will wear a cockscomb. And Buffo, after a little thought, massaging his great, white lantern jaw, decided that, with his cockscomb and his crowing, the Human Chicken should forthwith feature on the menu at the Clowns’ Christmas dinner.

Walser’s new profession was beginning to make demands on him.

Meanwhile, Fevvers, in the menagerie, maintained an animated if one-sided conversation with the Princess in raw French.

‘
Quelle chantoqze!
’ she said. ‘
Quelle spectacle!
’

The Princess, in her bloody apron, opened a panel in the cage and tossed in half a butcher’s shop. The tigers fell on the feast, snarling and cuffing one another about the ears in their greed. As she watched them, the Princess’s dark face was that of Kali and the perfume round her dense enough, rank and pervasive enough, to act as an invisible barrier between herself and all those who were not furred. Fevvers knew she was a tough customer. She was undaunted.

‘
Elle s’apelle Mignon. C’est vachement chouette, ça.
’

Mignon leaned against Fevvers’ shoulder, vaguely gazing at motes of dust in the light, unaware she was the subject of all this. If her new maroon dress with the quasi-military froggings reminded you a little of the uniform of the doormen at the Hotel de l’Europe, that was just what, until six o’clock that morning, it had been. (‘Just a stitch here and there, and it’ll fit her perfect. You don’t mind, do you, old chum.’) Lizzie had done her yellow hair in twisted braids round her head. She looked like a minister’s daughter, not a murderer’s whelp.

The Princess gave Fevvers a quizzical, interrogative look and tapped her own mouth. Fevvers understood.

‘To sing is not to speak,’ said Fevvers, her syntax subtler than her pronunciation. ‘If they hate speech because it divides us from them, to sing is to rob speech of its function and render it divine. Singing is to speech what is dancing is to walking. You know they love to dance.’

(‘Cross fingers and hope for luck,’ she added to herself.)

The Princess’s charges yawned and stretched. She took off her apron. She looked Mignon up and down. They were just the same height, both little things, frail, one as fair as the other was dark, twinned opposites. And both possessed that quality of exile, of apartness from us, although the Princess had chosen her exile amongst the beasts, while Mignon’s exile had been thrust upon her. Perhaps it was that homeless look of Mignon’s that made up the Princess’s mind for her. She nodded.

The replete cats lay with their heavy heads between their paws among the bloody bones, a beautiful still-life or
nature morte
of orange tawny shapes composed around the Princess’s open Bechstein grand; they drowsed like unawakened desire, like unlit fire. A tangerine cub curled for a nap on the piano stool.

Mignon realised for the first time the plans the grown-ups had laid for her and, when the Princess stepped into the cage, she hung back, clinging to Fevvers’ hand and mewing faintly with alarm but Fevvers, beaming encouragement, hugged her, scooped her up bodily and deposited her within, closing the door behind her sharply. The Princess motioned Mignon to a position beside the piano, from whence she could outstare the cats. But the cats, enjoying their postprandial snooze, registered Mignon’s presence by only the faintest twitchings of nostrils and whisker. The Princess patted the rifle on the piano top. That consoled Mignon somewhat.