Nights at the Circus (32 page)

Then came a wet crash and clatter as the ice-carving of herself collapsed into the remains of the caviare in the room below, casting the necklace which had tempted her amongst the dirty supper things. The bitter knowledge she’d been fooled spurred Fevvers into action. She dropped the toy train on the Isfahan runner – mercifully, it landed on its wheels – as, with a grunt and whistle of expelled breath, the Grand Duke ejaculated.

In those few seconds of his lapse of consciousness, Fevvers ran helter-skelter down the platform, opened the door of the first-class compartment and clambered aboard.

‘Look what a mess he’s made of your dress, the pig,’ said Lizzie.

The weeping girl threw herself into the woman’s arms. It was the dark abyss of the night, into which moon plunges. In this abyss she had lost her magic sword. The station master blew his whistle and waved the flag. The train, slowly, slowly, began to pull its great length out of the station, dragging with it its freight of dreams.

‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ said Fevvers and, sitting up, ripped off her bracelet and earrings.

There was a sudden flurry and a burst of outraged boyish protest in the corridor. The door of their stateroom burst open and in came Walser, clutching in his arms a kicking, vehemently protesting little bundle dressed up in a clown’s clothing.

‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,’ he said to Fevvers. ‘But
this
young gazooney ain’t gonna run away with the circus, not for a few years yet!’

The train slid slowly past a platform thickly piled with freshly fallen snow. Lizzie let down the window, letting in a gust of cold air, and Walser dropped the howling child outside, inside a snowdrift.

‘Now pick yourself up and run straight home to granny!’

‘And give her
these
!’ cried Fevvers.

Little Ivan rolled in the snow, pelted with diamonds. Through our children we might be saved, perhaps.

The train picked up a little speed. Walser hung out of the stateroom window until he was quite sure that Little Ivan had not jumped back on board further down the train, then hauled the window up again on its thick leather strap. When all was secure, he turned back to the occupants of the carriage and was struck dumb to see Fevvers, raddled with tears, hair coming down, again, gypsy dress ripped and clotted with semen, trying as best she could to cover her bare breasts with a filthy but incontrovertible tangle of pin feathers.

3

SIBERIA

ONE

How do they live, here? How do they cope with it? Or aren’t I the right one to pop the question, I’m basically out of sympathy with landscape, I get the shivers on Hampstead bloody Heath. As soon as I’m out of sight of the abodes of humanity, my heart gives way beneath me like rotten floorboards, my courage fails. Now parks, I love, and gardens. And small fields with hedges and ditches round ’em and useful cows in ’em. But if you
must
have a wild hillside, let there be at least a sheep or two posed picturesquely on an outcrop of rock, ready to have its wool wound off, something like that . . . I hate to be where the hand of Man has badly wrought and, here, we are on that broad forehead of the world that had the mark of Cain branded on it when the world began, just as the old man at the station who came selling us the bears he’d carved had ‘convict’ branded on his cheek.

I bought all the bears he had, to send home to the children when we reach Vladivostok and a post-office. You couldn’t call it a ‘cheap’ gesture, he charged enough for the things, I’m sorry to say.
And
I got an earful along with it, for Lizzie swore I ‘did it for posterity’, meaning, for the young American to take note of.

‘Since he made himself known to us in Petersburg, you’ve been acting more and more
like
yourself,’ she says.

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.

The rasp of charcoal in the corridor means they’re stoking up the samovar for tea. How cosy we are.

Brass monkey weather, outside, but, in our carriage, snug and warm – there’s a little stove. And a round table with a velvet cover, blue to match the curtains, and an easy chair upholstered likewise in which our Lizzie sits, dealing out a game of patience for herself.

Patience. Give me patience.

‘What I mean is, you grow more and more like your own publicity,’ says Lizzie. ‘Ever the golden-hearted Cockney who don’t stand on ceremony. Huh.’

‘Well, who
am
I supposed to be like, then, if not meself,’ I snap bad-temperedly, lying on my belly like Miss O’Malley as needs must, on the seat they make up into my bed at nights.

‘That’s another question, innit,’ she replies, unperturbed as ever. ‘You never existed before. There’s nobody to say what you should do or how to do it. You are Year One. You haven’t any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create. But when you come a cropper, Gawd – you
really
come a cropper, don’t you. You
flirt
with the adversary, as if he’ll put by his wiles if you pretend to be an ordinary gal. I’m afraid for you. That’s why I don’t like leaving you alone. Remember that bloody Grand Duke. Broke your mascot you set such store by, didn’t he!’

She knows how to hurt. Find the sore point, then probe it – that’s Liz’s style.

‘Broke your mascot and could have broken
you.
He nearly did for you once and for all, and then, no future, no Year Two nor any more years. Nix, nought, nothing.’

Nothing.

The train now ground to a halt with an exhausted sigh. The engine wailed softly, the locking wheels clicked and groaned but nothing in sight, not even one of those frilly little wooden stations like gingerbread houses they put up in these parts, mocking the wilderness with their suggestion of the fairy tale. Nothing but streaks of snow standing out unnaturally white against the purple horizon, miles away. We are in the middle of nowhere.

‘Nowhere’, one of those words, like ‘nothing’, that opens itself inside you like a void. And were we not progressing through the vastness of nothing to the extremities of nowhere?

Sometimes the lengths to which I’ll go for money appal me.

In the sudden, almost supernatural silence, we could hear the rumble of a tiger’s roar and the ting-a-ling of the chains of the elephants, which never ceases.

Tuskers through Siberia! The hubris of the little fat Colonel!

Often the train made these incomprehensible halts. Out of the taiga like imps conjured from air children would spring up and run along the side of the track holding out little offerings – a baked potato; a paper cone of frost-bitten berries; sour milk in a bottle too precious to be sold, so you fill up your own cut-glass water-flask with its contents. But, by tonight, we’ve rolled far too far away from any peasant homestead or settlement. The tow-headed, filthy hawkers never venture here, where wild things are.

A cold wind began to get up a bit, and whine.

‘I say, our Liz, can’t we . . . hurry things up a bit?’

Lizzie, at her cards, shook her old grizzled head. No tricks. Why not? For the things my foster-mother can pull off when she sets her mind to it, you’d not believe! Shrinkings and swellings and clocks running ahead or behind you like frisky dogs; but there’s a logic to it, some logic of scale and dimension that won’t be meddled with, which she alone keeps the key of, like she keeps the key of Nelson’s timepiece stowed away in her handbag and won’t let me touch.

Her ‘household’ magic, she calls it. What would you think, when you saw the bread rise, if you didn’t know what yeast was? Think old Liz was a witch, wouldn’t you! And, then, again, consider matches! Lucifers; the little wooden soldiers of the angel of light, with whom you’d think she was in complicity if you’d never heard of phosphorus.

And when I think I once sucked milk from those flat old, dry old dugs under your black silk bodice, Lizzie, oh, yes! I know what you mean by ‘magic’.

Now, down the train, in the ‘wagon salon’, there’s the Princess trying out the parlour organ there. Grunt, grunt, grunt. Oh, such ecstasies of boredom I experienced on the Great Siberian Railway!

Not that the ‘wagon salon’ isn’t very pleasant, if it don’t give you the willies to travel through this wilderness as of the pre-Adamite world in a repro Empire drawing-room done up in white lacquer and enough plate-glass mirrors for a mobile bordello.

I hate it.

We have no right to be here, in all this
gemütlich
comfort, stuck on our fat bums down this straight track from which we never deviate, like tightrope walkers in a dream traversing an unacknowledged abyss in five-star comfort, through the deep core of winter and this inimical terrain.

‘Feel like a bird in a gilded cage, do you?’ enquired Lizzie, noting her foster-daughter’s fidgeting. ‘Then how would you prefer to travel?’

Fevvers, thus pushed, could think of no reply. The springs twanged beneath her as she rearranged herself in order to squat on her haunches with her sulky chin on her knees and her muscular hands clenched round her femurs. How long have we been grinding through Limbo? One week? Two weeks? A month? A year?

The Princess at last had her way with the parlour organ and produced from it a Bach fugue that hushed the tigers while the world tilted away from the sun towards night, winter and the new century.

‘Think of your bank account, dearie,’ Lizzie ironically advised her sullen foster-child. ‘You know it always cheers you up.’

Fevvers, in her petticoat, stockingless, corsetless, dug in Lizzie’s handbag for a pair of little scissors and began to clip her toenails for want of anything better to do. She presented a squalid spectacle, a dark half-inch at the roots of her uncombed hair which tangled with the dishevelled plumage that had already assumed a dusty look. Confinement did not suit her.

Then, as she clipped away at her toenails, just as the train had stopped for no reason, so, for no reason, she began to grizzle.

How can I tell why I began to blubber away like that? Who hasn’t cried since Ma Nelson died. But to think of Ma Nelson’s funeral only made me bellow more, as if the enormous anguish that I felt, this anguish of the solitude of our abandoned state in this world that is perfectly sufficient to itself without us – as if my sudden and irrational despair hooked itself on to a rational grief and clung there for dear life.

‘Cry away!’ said Lizzie, and, by the echoes in her voice, her foster-daughter knew a prescient fit had seized her. ‘Cry all you like! We don’t know if you’ll get enough time to cry later on.’

Inexplicably as it had halted, the train now moved off again. In the hard class, the clowns played cards under a mauve canopy of cigarette smoke, or slept. A heavy somnolence was upon them; they seemed in a state of suspended animation, here and yet not here. Now and then, one or another of them would remark they’d have to work out a whole set of new routines now that Buffo was gone. ‘Time enough for that,’ came the reply. Yet the days passed and they did no more than shuffle and reshuffle the cards. The rocking-horse rhythm of the train lulled them into a state of passive acquiescence in which they waited, though none would admit it, for their Christ to rise again. So there was no need of new routines, no need. Pass the bottle, deal out the pack again. He will come back. Or else . . . we shall return to Him.

The Colonel, however, trotted up and down the corridors a-bubble with the excitement of the pathfinder, a striking figure in his striped leotards and starry vest – ‘showing the flag’, he called it. He’d brought ample supplies of bourbon with him and soon taught the steward in the restaurant car to fix a passable julep using sprigs from a pot of mint he’d had the forethought to pick up from a Petersburg horticulturalist.

He soon acquired the reputation of a ‘character’. He and his pig often rode in the cabin with the engineer. The engineer leant back with the papirosse glued to his nether lip and let the Colonel frolic at the controls. But, most of all, the Colonel enjoyed visiting the elephants, feeding them buns he bought by the hamperful from kerchiefed peasant women at the wayside halts and contemplating the dazzling occurrence; that he, this good old boy from Kentucky, had bested Hannibal, the Carthaginian, classical hero of antiquity, for, if Hannibal had taken his jumbos over the Alps, had he not himself taken his bulls over the Urals?

Yet, even to his always optimistic eye, it was apparent the bulls were taking the trip badly. They were housed comfortably enough, lapped in straw in a cattle truck that usually took immigrants across the steppes, and, a special measure for the pachyderms’ comfort, this truck had been equipped with a stove. But the elephants no longer resembled the pillars of the world, capable of supporting the sky on their broad foreheads. Their little eyes were filled with rheum and sometimes they coughed. The train took them further and further into bitter weather that would penetrate their leather boots and freeze their feet, invade and devastate their lungs. Far north, much further north, in the extreme, unimaginable north of which this terrain was the, comparatively speaking, temperate margin, their cousins, the mammoths, lay locked in ice; so it seemed that ice was already overcoming these caryatids of the world and the Colonel, for all the Polyanna in his soul, was yet seized by isolated and wounding moments of doubt when he saw the bulls were weakening, succumbing. Then he would urge the conductor to feed more charcoal to the stove; surely they suffered just a chill . . . and, as to their depression, why, a few buns would cheer them up!