Nights at the Circus (45 page)

The Colonel ground out that last stub of the last cigar on the sole of his shoe, cast a look of infinite regret at the shredded remains and, for want of a fresh cigar, rolled a strip of manuscript paper into a tube and chewed on that. He eyed his former star askance. The Feathered Frump.

Freed from the confines of her corset, her once-startling shape sagged, as if the sand were seeping out of the hour-glass and
that
was why time, in these parts, could not control itself. She lacked the heart to wash her face and so there were still curds of rouge lodged in her pores and she was breaking out in spots and rashes. She had screwed up her mostly mousy hair on top of her head all anyhow and pinned it securely in place with the backbone of a carp. Since she had stopped bothering to hide her wings, the others had grown so accustomed to the sight it no longer seemed remarkable. Besides, one wing had lost all its glamorous colours and the other was bandaged and useless. How long would it be before she flew again? Where was that silent demand to be
looked
at that had once made her stand out? Vanished; and, under the circumstances, it was a good thing she’d lost it – these days, she would do better to plead to be ignored. She was so shabby that she looked like a fraud and, so it seemed to the Colonel, a cheap fraud. Nevertheless, he gleefully exclaimed:

‘Breaking your contract?’

Fevvers’ head snapped up.

‘Wot, no cash?’

‘No cash,’ stated the Colonel with spiteful joy. ‘And, according to the small print, if you break your contract now, before we get to Yokohama, let alone Seattle, you forfeit the en-tire sum due for your performances in Petersburg.

‘Ho, ho, ho!’ he boomed, his spirits quite restored. He removed a string of flags from Sybil’s ear, ignoring the pig’s eyes, which reproached him for sharp practice.

‘You’ve got to get up early in the mornin’ to put one over on Colonel Kearney!’ he cried, waving his streamers.

‘You’ll hear from my solicitors!’ said Fevvers with a pathetic attempt at defiance.

‘Send me the writ by
elk
.’

Upon this friendly exchange, the Colonel set off towards the railway with his guide bouncing enthusiastically ahead of him. Lizzie went as far as the gate to dispatch them with as much bad feeling as she could muster. Her eyes spoke volumes but she was mute with fury because she could no longer avenge herself with anything concrete, such as piles or athlete’s foot. Fevvers might have mislaid her magnificence along the road from London but Lizzie had fared much worse – she’d lost her knack of wreaking small-scale, domestic havoc; she’d kept it (where else?) in her handbag.

She consoled herself; she would not have needed to inflict baldness on the Colonel, because he was bald already.

She felt no malice towards Sybil, however, and was touched to see how the little pig hid her face behind her ears, embarrassed by her protector, snuffling with displeasure, tempted to jump right out of his arms and throw in her lot with those whom the Colonel left behind. But Sybil knew which side her bed was buttered and, disgruntled as she might be, she thought it best to stay with the Colonel, who always knew where the best butter might be obtained. The Colonel advertised his already buoyant spirits with a rendition of ‘Yankee-doodle-dandy’, and the Escapee added his heavy accent to the chorus, hesitantly at first, then with more and more conviction.

‘There’s a little soldier lost to free enterprise,’ grieved Lizzie. Then shouted back to Fevvers, inside the house: ‘See what a fine mess you’ve got us into now!’

TEN

The two women, heavily furred, committed themselves to the landscape. Soon they lost sight of the Maestro’s house and then they were quite alone.

‘Don’t you remember what a motley crew we were when we first set out from England?’ said Lizzie, formal as if addressing a public meeting, so that Fevvers tensed in the expectation of a reprimand that had, as yet, been delayed.

‘A motley crew, indeed – a gaggle of strangers drawn from many diverse countries. Why, you might have said we constituted a microcosm of humanity, that we were an emblematic company, each signifying a different proposition in the great syllogism of life. The hazards of the journey reduced us to a little band of pilgrims abandoned in the wilderness upon whom the wilderness acted like a moral magnifying glass, exaggerating the blemishes of some and bringing out the finer points in those whom we thought had none. Those of us who learned the lessons of experience have ended their journeys already. Some who’ll never learn are tumbling back to civilisation as fast as they can as blissfully unenlightened as they ever were. But, as for you, Sophie, you seem to have adopted the motto: to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’

‘How,’ asked Fevvers, carefully, ‘have you reached this conclusion?’

‘It’s a fool’s errand, Sophie. From that fleeting glimpse we caught of your fancy boy mounted on a reindeer and wearing a frock, it would seem he is not the man he was. Nothing left, Sophia! Nothing there . . . But it’s me who is the bigger fool than you, because at least you’re going off after him of your own free will while I tag along behind you through the middle of nowhere only because of the bonds of old affection.

‘I am,’ she added sourly, ‘the slave of your freedom.’

Fevvers had listened to all this in increasingly angry silence and now burst forth.

‘I never asked you to adopt me in the first place, you miserable old witch! There I was, unique and parentless, unshackled, unfettered by the past, and the minute you clapped eyes on me you turned
me
into a contingent being, enslaved me as your daughter who was born nobody’s daughter –’

But there she stopped short, for the notion that nobody’s daughter walked across nowhere in the direction of nothing produced in her such vertigo she was forced to pause and take a few deep breaths, which coldly seared her lungs. Seized with such anguish of the void that surrounds us, she could have wept and only restrained herself from doing so because of the satisfaction tears would give her foster-mother.

‘There, there,’ said Lizzie more gently, noting the girl’s distress from the corner of her eye. ‘I don’t begrudge you my company, my darling. We must all make do with what rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.’

But this notion filled Fevvers with further gloom. She wanted more from life than that! Besides, she felt like a scarecrow herself, at the moment. She hunched up her shoulders miserably.

‘But, oh, my dear,’ Lzzie went on, oblivious of Fevvers’ cavernous silence. ‘Love is one thing and fancy another. Haven’t you noticed there is bad feeling come between us since Mr Walser made his appearance? Misfortune has dogged our steps since you first set eyes on him. You’re half the girl you were – look at you! Lost your weapon in the Grand Duke’s house. Then you broke your pinion. Accidents? Too many accidents in a row to be altogether accidental. Every little accident has taken you one step down the road away from singularity. You’re fading away, as if it was only always nothing but the discipline of the audience that kept you in trim. You’re hardly even a blonde any more.

‘And, when you
do
find the young American, what the ’ell will you do, then? Don’t you know the customary endings of the old comedies of separated lovers, misfortune overcome, adventures among outlaws and savage tribes? True lovers’ reunions always end in a marriage.’

Fevvers came to a halt.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Orlando takes his Rosalind. She says: “To you I give myself, for I am yours.” And that,’ she added, a low thrust, ‘goes for a girl’s bank account, too.’

‘But it is not possible that I should give myself,’ said Fevvers. Her diction was exceedingly precise. ‘My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or in the expectation of pleasure – and pleasure alone is my expectation from the young American. But the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?’

‘Precisely,’ said Lizzie, with mournful satisfaction.

‘Besides,’ added Fevvers urgently, ‘here we are far away from churches and priests, who’ll speak of marriage –’

‘Oh, I dare say you’ll find these woodsmen amongst whom your young man has found refuge uphold the institution of marriage as enthusiastically as other men do, although they may celebrate it differently. The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they’re likely to have amongst themselves to keep them all in order. They’ll have churches, here; and vicars, too, even if the vicars have weird cassocks and perform outrageous sacraments.’

‘I’ll snatch him away. We’ll elope!’

‘What if he doesn’t want to come?’

‘You’re jealous!’

‘I never thought,’ said Lizzie stiffly, ‘I’d live to hear my girl say such a thing.’

Ashamed, Fevvers strode more slowly. She turned Lizzie’s words over and over in her mind.

‘Marriage!’ she exclaimed.

‘The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon’s lair is always forced to marry her, whether they’ve taken a liking to one another or not. That’s the custom. And I don’t doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a “happy ending”.’

‘Marriage,’ repeated Fevvers, in a murmur of awed distaste. But, after a moment, she perked up.

‘Oh, but Liz – think of his malleable look. As if a girl could mould him any way she wanted. Surely he’ll have the decency to give himself to me, when we meet again, not expect the vice versa! Let him hand himself over into my safekeeping, and I will transform him. You said yourself he was unhatched, Lizzie; very well – I’ll
sit
on him, I’ll hatch him out, I’ll make a new man of him. I’ll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we’ll march hand in hand into the New Century –’

Lizzie detected a note of rising hysteria in the girl’s voice.

‘Perhaps so, perhaps not,’ she said, putting a damper on things. ‘Perhaps safer not to plan ahead.’

Fevvers thought her foster-mother’s conversation was as dour as the empty landscape around them. She whistled, to keep her spirits up: ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Something pathetic about her little whistle piping away in the middle of Siberia, but she persevered. After a short pause, Lizzie took another tack.

‘However, I will say this for you; unless you propose to sell your story to the newspaper, my dear, and steal a march on Colonel Kearney –’

Fevvers, hoping to change the subject, stopped whistling to interject:

‘– whom, Liz, we could pillory in the press for his business practice and his treatment of employees –’

‘Unless you plan to sell yourself in print, I can’t see any profit in all this, try as I might. And perhaps it is a sign of moral growth in you, my girl –’

Fevvers began whistling again, but Lizzie pressed on:

‘– that you pursue this fellow only for his body, not for what he’ll pay you. Inconvenient as your acute attack of morality might prove in the long term, should it become chronic, as far as the financing of the struggle is concerned.’

‘Have you finished? Have you quite finished? Why d’you come with me, if all you can do is carp?’

‘You don’t know the first thing about the human heart,’ said Liz dolefully. ‘The heart is a treacherous organ and you’re nothing if not impetuous. I fear for you, Sophie. Selling yourself is one thing and giving yourself away is quite another but, oh, Sophie! what if you rashly
throw yourself
away? Then what happens to that unique “me-ness” of yours? On the scrap-heap, that’s what happens to it! I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!’

‘Eggs? What have eggs got to do with it?’

And they would have immediately started to quarrel again, if, just at that moment, they had not seen, first sign of humanity for miles, a frail little shelter built of branches propped against a pine of grandfatherly dimensions. At first, you might not have noticed the shelter, for there were no doors, no windows nor apertures of any kind in it, so that it looked more like a wood-pile than a primitive hut, but, in the wilderness, a wood-pile was as out of place as an ocean-going yacht and, besides, as they drew nearer, they heard from within some muffled groans and sobs.

Liz motioned to Fevvers to remain behind, for the little woman was lighter on her feet by far than the heavy-treading
aerialiste
, and crept up to the shelter softly enough to surprise whatever lurked within. But the woman who lay there on a pile of filthy straw was in no condition to be surprised.

Removing a log, Lizzie peered in at her. It was the grey light of the end of the short day, outside, and there was no light or fire inside, so Lizzie made haste to find matches she’d stolen from the Maestro. By the little light, she saw the prone woman, in spite of the bitter chill of the approaching night, wore nothing but an old, fringed, buckskin dress, which had been slit up the middle to expose her still-bulging belly. Perhaps she had thrown off the bedclothes, for she seemed feverish, even delirious; at any rate, no bedclothes covered her, although there were a few cured skins lying here and there. A crude wooden container beside her proved itself to be a cradle when the baby inside it woke up and began to cry.

Lizzie carefully removed a couple more logs and stepped through the hole. She found a stub of candle in her bag and lit that. At first she thought the baby, with its rosy cheeks, looked very healthy; then, when she picked it up to soothe it, she saw that what disguised its waxen look was blood, smeared on like rouge, an old practice of the tribe. The mother opened her eyes. If she thought a bear had invaded the privacy of her postpartural ritual, she took it in her stride. Another bear dismantled yet more of the wall of her shelter and lumbered in. The mother’s expression did not change. Lizzie felt her forehead with the back of her hand. It was very hot.