Nights at the Circus (44 page)

‘Woman, bird, star,’ babbled Walser. ‘Her name is –’

NINE

Although, from a distance, she could still pass for a blonde, there was a good inch of brown at the roots of Fevvers’ hair and brown was showing in her feathers, too, because she was moulting. Lizzie’s handbag might have contained peroxide to assist with the one growth and, perhaps, a bottle of red ink to aid the other – elementary household magic! – but the handbag was gone, irretrievably lost in the wreck of the train, and, every day, the tropic bird looked more and more like the London sparrow as which it had started out in life, as if a spell were unravelling. Fevvers felt glum and irritable when she sneaked a peek at herself in the old man’s bit of flyblown mirror with the aid of which Lizzie trimmed his white mane to maestro-length, just brushing his collar.

‘There! Doesn’t he look a treat!’

His was a simple story. When already in his middle years, he was lured away from a secure post as music instructor of a girls’ school in Novgorod by the promises of the corrupt Mayor of R., who pocketed a fat sum from the government for his project of a Transbaikalian Conservatory. What? asked the musician cautiously; teach the bears their scales and sol-fa to the ravens and the golden-eyes? No, no, no! the Mayor assured him, pouring more vodka. The little daughters of the fur-traders, the government officials, the station masters, wheeltappers and platelayers will flock to the conservatory, and, besides, what untold talent might not be discovered amongst the children of the native Siberian peasants themselves? The vodka helped him paint irresistible pictures of the untapped musical talent of the region. In front of the warm stove in faraway Novgorod, the Maestro’s idealism was fired.

But the Maestro did not have the experience to know he was not the stuff of which pioneers are made, nor did he realise that the Mayor, as soon as he’d made his ill-gotten gains, would forget him completely. Lacking so much as the fare home, the Maestro was soon destitute in the house, miles out of town, assigned him for his musical academy, with only his piano, his top-hat and his shingle to remind him of who he once had been. He was deeply sunk in despair when, like a miracle, they came.

‘It’s as though he’s found his long-lost daughter,’ said Lizzie. ‘As at the end of one of Shakespeare’s late comedies. Only he’s found
two
daughters. A happy ending, squared. Hark at ’em.’

The Maestro and the Princess were trying four hands in harmony, whilst Mignon, brow furrowed, studied the elements of counterpoint. Under the Maestro’s eager tuition, she was showing an unusual flair for composition.

Fevvers, watching the fish boil, grunted she was glad
somebody
was happy. Her fractured wing, broken again in her last attempt to fly, was now strapped securely up with the Maestro’s fishing-lines, and Lizzie firmly prescribed, for the moment, rest, nourishment and more rest. She was utterly indifferent to her foster-daughter’s protestations that they must set off forthwith to rescue the young American from the clutches of the tribespeople.

‘He looked as though he’d made himself at home. Gone native in his garments, I noticed.’

‘But it’s not a week since we all parted company! You can’t go native in a
week
!’

‘I don’t know if it
is
only a week since we lost him,’ said Lizzie. ‘Did you see the long beard he had?’

‘I saw his beard,’ assented Fevvers uncertainly. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know if it
is
only a week . . .’

Lizzie turned on the other woman a face solemn enough to have impressed even the Shaman.

‘Something’s going on. Something we
wot not of
, my dear. Remember we have lost our clock; remember Father Time has many children and I think it was his bastard offspring inherited this region for, by the length of Mr Walser’s beard and the skill with which he rode his reindeer, time has passed – or else is passing – marvellous swiftly for these woodland folk.

‘Perhaps,’ she mused, ‘their time is running out.’

Fevvers was not impressed by these speculations. She spooned fish broth, tasted, grimaced, poked in the Maestro’s cupboard and found no salt. The last straw. Lots of grub, but nothing fit to eat. Had she not been so proud, she would have broken down.

Her misery was exacerbated by the knowledge that the young American to whom she’d taken such a fancy was so near to her and yet so far away. Exacerbated, but not caused. Her gloom had other causes. Did the speed with which she was losing her looks dismay her? Was it that? She was ashamed to admit it; all the same, she felt as though her heart was breaking when she looked in the mirror and saw her brilliant colours withering away. But there was more to it than that. She knew she had truly mislaid some vital something of herself along the road that brought her to this place. When she lost her weapon to the Grand Duke in his frozen palace, she had lost some of that sense of her own magnificence which had previously sustained her trajectory. As soon as her feeling of invulnerability was gone, what happened? Why, she broke her wing. Now she was a crippled wonder. Put on as brave a face as she might, that was the long and short of it.

The Cockney Venus! she thought bitterly. Now she looks more like one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit. Helen, formerly of the High-wire, now permanently grounded. Pity the New Woman if she turns out to be as easily demolished as me.

Day by day she felt herself diminishing, as if the Grand Duke had ordered up another sculpture of ice and now, as his exquisite revenge on her flight, was engaged in melting it very, very slowly, perhaps by the judicious application of lighted cigarette ends. The young American it was who kept the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she longed for him to tell her she was true. She longed to see herself reflected in all her remembered splendour in his grey eyes. She longed; she yearned. To no avail. Time passed. She rested.

The Colonel’s hands were shaking because the liquor was all gone and he was on his last box of cigars but he was in exalted mood because he had found a captive audience in the Escapee, who gazed at him with the beginnings of a wild surmise.

‘These minor setbacks are but sent to try us, young man. I conceived the amazing feat – tuskers across the tundra! and, yes, I failed. Very well. Failure. I failed
prodigiously.
Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to
outstare
it! Failure is the hazard of every great enterprise. That’s the way the dice fall in the Ludic Game; some you win, some you lose, and to lose as I have done, to lose with such magnificence, such enormity, to lose every single little last thing, every bit, bob and button . . . yessir! that, in itself, is a kind of triumph.’

He rose up on his hind legs and flourished the stub of his last cigar.

‘Transbaikalia be warned! I shall return! Out of the ashes of my enterprise I shall arise renewed! Colonel Kearney throws down his challenge to the icy wastes, the bears, the shooting stars – he will return again, with more and bigger elephants; larger and more ferocious tigers; an en-tire army of infinitely more hilarious clowns! Yes! The Old Glory will wave once again across the tundra!

‘Colonel Kearney, the once and future impresario! Colonel Kearney salutes the New Age! Look out, Twentieth Century, here I come!’

Outside, under a sky the colour and texture of an army blanket, wild beasts, hunters, midwives, merchants, fur-traders and birds of prey went about their business in ignorance of the Colonel’s challenge. Had they heard it, they would not have understood it; had they understood it, they would have mocked. Samson let in the ironic silence of the night when he brought an armful of logs from the woodpile but the Colonel, whose pale eyes grew ever more prominent as fresh bursts of excitement gripped him, chased the night right out again.

‘Young man, make the acquaintance of ma
hawg
.’

Sybil thought of apple sauce every time she looked at the Escapee and attempted to withhold her trotter but the Colonel gave her a sharp blow at the back of the neck so she let him shake it.

‘Sybil, the mystic pig, my partner in the Ludic Game. Yessir, we’re old hands, Sybil and me. Years ago, years, down on my daddy’s farm in Lexington, Kentucky – you ever heard tell of Kentucky, the “Blue Grass State”? God’s own country, my boy; yessir, God’s own country . . . down on my daddy’s farm, I was jest a kid, then, knee-high to a ham hock when I first made the acquaintance, present company excepted, of the grandest little lady that ever drank pigswill . . .’

The Escapee was struck dumb by the Colonel’s eloquence. He had never met anybody like the Colonel. Although the Colonel looked nothing like a siren, the song he sang was just as sweet as theirs. By the time the fish was cooked and eaten, the Escapee agreed to conduct the Colonel as far as the railhead at R. and thence:

‘If necessary, I’ll ride mah hawg!’

by whatever means were available to wherever the newspaper might be alerted to the stunning fate of Colonel Kearney’s Circus and credit could be obtained to start the whole thing up again.

The resilience of the little fat Colonel! He was like one of those round-bottomed dolls that you cannot knock over, no matter how hard you push. With what missionary zeal did he confront the Escapee’s puzzled virtue! The Escapee, who believed in man’s inborn innocence and innate goodwill, had no defences whatsoever against the Colonel because, of course, the Colonel believed in both those selfsame things, although the Colonel had quite a different angle on them.

‘And this little lady, here, her great-grandma, the first of that long line of patriotic pigs, she stood up on her hind legs and taught me a lesson I never learned in school. And, young fellow-me-lad, that lesson was: “Never give a sucker an even break!”

‘Ho, ho ho!’ he chortled, having speedily assessed the Escapee as a sucker. His little eyes roved restlessly round the ascetic cabin, which the geometry of the music rapidly transformed into a high, white palace of transcendental thought. He did not like the look of it at all. He knew that Mozart had died penniless, on straw.

‘Bamboozle ’em!’ he confided to the Escapee, whose life, hitherto, had been dedicated to the project of the perfecting of mankind, whether it willed it or no. The Escapee took a little while to work out ‘bamboozlem’ and then blamed his poor English for failing to grasp what the Colonel meant, for that, surely, couldn’t be what he’d said! But the Colonel chuckled when he looked at the fresh-faced, bright-eyed Escapee and thought: if the boy proved a useful recruit to the great project of the Ludic Game, he would give him the name, Bamboozlem, to use in America. He asked Sybil as to how he might best employ the Escapee when they returned to Civilisation. She cocked her head and pondered. The oracle delivered thus:

For a pure heart becomes a cash-box best. The Escapee contemplated the prospect of a new life in the New World. It exhilarated him immensely. He wanted to be up and off at once but then it turned out that Mignon and the Princess would not budge. Not one inch! When the Colonel tried to persuade them to return with him to the bright lights, they shook their heads. The Maestro, who showed every sign of soon expiring out of pure joy at having inadvertently founded that Musical Academy of Transbaikalia of which he’d given up hope, clasped its unique pupils to his breast. Through the measureless wilderness around them roamed the savage audience for which the women must make a music never before heard on earth although it was not the music of the spheres but of blood, of flesh, of sinew, of the heart.

This music, proclaimed Mignon, they had been born to make. Had been brought together, here, as women and as lovers, solely to make – music that was at the same time a taming and a not-taming; music that sealed the pact of tranquillity between humankind and their wild brethren, their wild sistren, yet left them free.

Mignon delivered her speech with such vigour and force all were moved.

‘Can this truly be the same ragged child who came to me for charity those few short weeks ago?’ pondered Fevvers. ‘Love, true love has utterly transformed her.’ When she thought how it was the presence of the other that made Mignon so beautiful, little tears pricked the backs of her eyes for she, Fevvers, was growing uglier every day.

The Colonel hummed and hawed but did not press. Their act was progressing along lines in which he saw small profit. ‘Pearls before swine,’ he would have said, had he not such a great regard for Sybil.

What of the Strong Man? The Colonel, remembering his feats, tempted him with fame and money, reminded him that all he could expect from these women, here, was friendship. Samson cleared his throat and moved from foot to foot in an embarrassed fashion before he spoke up.

‘All my life I have been strong and simple and – a coward, concealing the frailty of my spirit behind the strength of my body. I abused women and spoke ill of them, thinking myself superior to the entire sex on account of my muscle, although in reality I was too weak to bear the burden of any woman’s love. I am not vain enough to think that, one day, either Mignon or the Princess might learn to love me as a man; perhaps, some day, they will cherish me as a brother. This hope casts out fear from my heart and I will learn to live among the tigers. I grow stronger in spirit the more I serve.’

The Princess and Mignon reached out to shake his hands when he’d finished his little speech but a look of faint embarrassment crossed his face and he ducked outside, again, for more wood.

‘“Out of the strong comes forth sweetness,” as it says on the Golden Syrup tins,’ said Lizzie. ‘Samson turns up trumps. Well, I never.’

Fevvers was kicking the fishbones on the floor the while, looking mutinous. In reply to the Colonel’s unspoken query, she announced in a raucous, angry voice:

‘As for me, I’m going in the opposite direction to you, you rotten bastard; I’m going to look for the young American you lured into the circus and now propose to abandon to his fate amongst the heathen!’