Nights at the Circus (24 page)

A knock at the door announced the arrival of the waiter with the flutes. Fevvers irritably gestured him to be silent.

Then came the rushing roar of water let out of the bath.

‘She doesn’t understand the words,’ repeated Fevvers. Her face was wet with tears. When he saw that, Walser felt an extraordinary sensation within his breast: his heart dissolved. He reached out his hand towards the woman and sparked off a sharp pain in his mauled shoulder; exclaimed; discovered he, too, was crying. She looked towards him, her night-dark eyes brimming, and for once, there was no irony, malice or suspicion within them. His molten heart spilled out of his bosom and flowed towards her, just as one drop of mercury flows towards another drop of mercury.

At that moment, Mignon came back through the bathroom door.

She was wrapped up in a spotless, fleecy, towelling robe and her freshly washed hair was bundled in a white towel. Now she was sparkling clean and wreathed in smiles, though greenish with bruises. She still clutched the drum of chocolates under her arm but all that was left of the top layer was a mass of chirruping papers. She looked a mite aggrieved when Fevvers, after blowing her nose rather disgustingly between her fingers, served her a nursery bowl of bread and milk, but she perked up when she saw the champagne, sat down at the table with lamb-like obedience and tucked in willingly enough.

Fevvers now held a rapid communication with the waiter, at the conclusion of which she reached in her reticule for another complimentary ticket to opening night and must have already learned enough Russian to make jokes for the man abruptly guffawed before he bowed out again. Lizzie was already ripping the foil on the bottle. Fevvers clinked glasses all round. Her eyes were quite dry now, and had turned strangely pale. There was a hard, bright, dangerous quality to her, suddenly.

‘We’ll make an honest whore of her yet!’ she toasted her visitor in a voice that rasped like the tongue of a tiger and Walser, with nervous glee, perceived that she believed Mignon to be his mistress and was – heaven be praised! – consumed with jealousy. Fevvers drained her glass in a gulp, belched and tossed it into a corner, where it smashed. This gesture seemed more a display of temper than one in accordance with the custom of the country.

‘Come ’ere,’ she ordered Walser peremptorily. ‘Liz – the cold cream.’

‘Kneel, Mr Walser.’

Prepared for anything, Walser knelt at her feet, to find himself firmly grasped between thighs accustomed to gripping hold of the trapeze. He suffered a sudden access of erotic vertigo and attempted to engage her eyes in another exchange but she looked steadfastly away from him as she ripped off his wig and ruffled up his flattened blond hair with a large nurse’s hand, competent, impersonal, tetchy. Then she smothered him in cold cream.

‘Make you pretty,’ she said. When he tried to speak, she stuffed a handful of cold cream in his mouth. She seized a napkin from the trolley and scrubbed his matte white off with such vigour he emerged brick red and polished like a floor. Mignon, already giggling with champagne, was helping herself to seconds of bread and milk. Lizzie, for some reason tense with disapproval, abstracted herself from this scene, drew some pamphlet or other from her bag and immersed herself in it. Fevvers straightened Walser’s tie and eyed his costume with displeasure.

‘Gawd, the poor girl! Out of the Monkey House into Clown Alley! Talk about the frying pan and the fire! Don’t you know how I hate clowns, young man? I truly think they are a crime against humanity.’

The waiter now returned and stood expectantly by the door. Lizzie turned a page with a rustle of crisp disaffection. Mignon, having finished her supper, looked round with curiosity to see what would happen next.

‘Well, get on with it,’ said Fevvers. ‘Up on your feet and sweep her off hers. I’ve booked you the bridal suite, haven’t I.’

The tittering waiter bowed and opened the door. Walser rose to his feet with as much dignity as he could muster, cracked Fevvers his whitest grin and offered Mignon his good arm with a show of old-fashioned courtesy that made the giantess drum her fingers on the arm of her chair. Mignon ducked back to pick up the box of chocolates she had almost forgotten in this sudden turn of events; a dithering trail of paper wrappers scattered behind their exit. As they left the two women alone, Lizzie flung aside her paper and announced mirthlessly: ‘Laugh! you’ll be the death of me.’

In the bridal suite, a predictable nest of rosy satin and gilded mirrors, the waiter drew Mignon’s attention with a lordly wave to a stiff, scentless bouquet of florist’s red roses by the bed, obviously a special touch ordered by Fevvers, then, beaming, chortling even, he withdrew.

Walser’s first, deplorable impulse was to throw himself on the poor child and force her, to teach somebody or other – he was not quite sure whom – a lesson. But he was a fair man and the fierce pain in his wounded arm when he seized Mignon by the shoulder reminded him it would be unjust, so he let her be.

If Mignon’s day had started badly, it was ending well. It was ending like a girlish dream come true in fact, especially when Walser backed off. And she could not get over those roses! She cooed to them, caressed them, made soft, loving passes at them, hovered and purred around them with such heart-breaking, unknowing grace that Walser, by no means an insensitive man, let out an almost sob of touched perplexity.

‘Oh, Mignon, what am I to do with you?’

To be addressed directly in the English language struck some chord in that peculiar and selective organ, her memory. She pulled the towel off her head and her Gretchen yellow hair sprayed out in all directions. She smiled. This smile contained her entire history and was scarcely to be borne.

‘God save the Queen,’ she said.

Walser could stand no more and rushed from the room.

SIX

Two things, so far, have conspired together to throw Walser off his equilibrium. One: his right arm is injured and, although healing well, he cannot write or type until it is better, so he is deprived of his profession. Therefore, for the moment, his disguise disguises – nothing. He is no longer a journalist masquerading as a clown; willy-nilly, force of circumstance has turned him into a
real
clown, for all practical purposes, and, what’s more, a clown with his arm in a sling – type of the ‘wounded warrior’ clown.

Two: he has fallen in love, a condition that causes him anxiety because he has not experienced it before. Hitherto, conquests came easily and were disregarded. But no woman ever tried to humiliate him before, to his knowledge, and Fevvers has both tried and succeeded. This has set up a conflict between his own hitherto impregnable sense of self-esteem and the lack of esteem with which the woman treats him. He suffers a sense, not so much that she and her companion have duped him – he remains convinced they are confidence tricksters, so that would be no more than part of the story – but that he has been made their dupe.

In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on the dark waters of the Neva, now peering at the great horseman on his plinth with a vague terror, as though the horseman were not the effigy of the city’s founder but the herald of four yet more mythic horsemen who are, indeed, on their way to confound Petersburg forever, though they won’t arrive yet, not quite yet.

SEVEN

Brisk, bright, wintry morning, under a sky that mimics a bell of blue glass so well it looks as if it would ring out glad tidings at the lightest blow of a fingernail. A thick rime of frost everywhere, giving things a festive, tinsel trim. The rare Northern sunlight makes up in brilliance for what it lacks in warmth, like certain nervous temperaments. Today the Stars and Stripes billow out bravely, as if they meant it, above the courtyard of the Imperial Circus, where the courtyard is as full of folk and bustle as a Breughel – all in motion, all hustle-bustle!

Amid laughter, horse-play and snatches of song, rosy-cheeked, whistling stable-boys stamp their feet, blow on their fingers, dash hither and thither with bales of hay and oats on their shoulders, sacks of vegetables for the elephants, hands of bananas for the apes, or heave stomach-churning pitch-forkfuls of dung on to a stack of soiled straw. Well-mittened and mufflered, the little Charivaris practise their familial occupation along the Princess’s washing-line, teetering along with much hilarity while the washing-line’s owner, a sack over her habitual morning
deshabille
to keep out the cold, oversees the unloading of a hideous cargo of bleeding meat from a knackers’ van drawn by a gaunt, restive hack an inch away from horseflesh itself.

Noisy vendors from the town invade the Colonel’s peripatetic empire to hawk hot jam pies and kvass from wheeled barrels. A lugubrious gypsy strays into the courtyard to add the wailing of his fiddle to the clatter of boot-heels on cobbles, the babel of tongues, the perpetual, soft jangle as the elephants within the building agitate their chains, the sound that reminds the Colonel, always with a shock of pleasure, of the outrageous daring of his entire enterprise. (‘Tuskers across the tundra!’)

For Colonel Kearney, up betimes, presides over the carnival-like proceedings; how he loves hurry-scurry, loves it purely, loves it passionately, for its own sake! He feels about bustle like Russians feel about sloth. He sticks his fingers in either pocket of the starry waistcoat that swells as if his paunch were pregnant with profit as he struts about on his bandy little legs in their striped trousers, bright and twisty as candy sticks. He has just shone up his dollar sign belt-buckle. He is the living image of the entrepreneur.

He dodges back and forth amongst his employees as they fly about their business, fending off the native salespersons with quick flips of the elbow under which Sybil, squealing intelligently, has been stowed, a moving cloud of blue cigar-smoke round his head and an affable and optimistic smile on his well-satisfied visage as he tosses a cheery word to one and all.

That morning, the newspapers carry an anonymous letter which claims that Fevvers is not a woman at all but a cunningly constructed automaton made up of whalebone, india-rubber and springs. The Colonel beams with pleasure at the consternation this ploy will provoke, at the way the box-office tills will clang in the delicious rising tide of rumour: ‘Is she fiction or is she fact?’ His motto is: ‘The bigger the humbug, the better the public likes it.’ That’s the way to play the Ludic Game! With no holds barred! Another motto, in one word: ‘Bamboozlem.’ Play the game to win!

Yessir!

He plots a news item, tomorrow, inserted in the foreign news by his contacts. This, contradicting the vicious ‘clockwork’ rumour, will proclaim that Fevvers, all woman as she is, is, back home in England, secretly engaged to
the Prince of Wales.

Yessirree!

The apes had already emptied their chamber-pots on to the dung-heap and rinsed them out under the pump. Back in their quarters, they swept up, laid down fresh straw and made up their bunk beds. They composed themselves in silent groups, heads bent over books. Now and then, one would gesticulate in that measured, urgent fashion of theirs and another would nod or shake its well-brushed head or answer with a little dance of fingers. Monsieur Lamarck, the Ape-Man, was nowhere to be seen, slumped in drunken slumber on the sawdust of a low bar.

A casual observer might have thought the apes, dedicated little troupers or well-programmed organisms that they were, could not leave off their act for even one moment and now were rehearsing for the ‘apes at school’ routine. In fact, it was their dedication to self-improvement that was boundless. Even the absence of Mignon, for whom they felt disinterested pity, did not interfere with their studies. The female with the green ribbon spared a thought for the wounded clown, however.

If all was quiet on the monkey front, fearful sounds erupted from the cages of the cats as they prowled their confined space. The tigers roared, first one, then another, then all at once: Where is our breakfast? We never got delicious clown, yesterday! Now we want our beef, our horseflesh, our legs and ribs of goat!

When she heard their imperatives rise above the clamour, the Princess filled her arms with bleeding meat.

The Princess of Abyssinia had never visited, even on business, the country whose royal title she usurped, nor did she come from any other part of Africa. Her mother, a native of Guadeloupe in the Windward Islands, taught the piano for a living until she upped and ran away with a man who visited her sleepy town with a travelling fair. This man kept a mangy, toothless lion in a cage, for a sideshow, and called himself an Ethiopian, although he hailed, in fact, from Rio de Janeiro. The impetus of their elopement took them as far as Marseilles, where their daughter was born. Her parents were devoted to each other. Her mother sat in the cage and played Mozart sonatas. They prospered. Her father crowned himself King and went into tigers; if tigers are not native to the Horn of Africa, then neither was he. When her parents died, the Princess inherited piano and cats. She polished the act to its present splendour. So much for her history, which was only mysterious in that she told it to nobody because she never spoke.

In the ring, she looked like a member of the graduating class at a provincial conservatoire, in a white frock with starched flounces, white cotton stockings, flat, strapped shoes of the kind called Mary Janes, and a butterfly bow of white satin in the crisp hair that stuck out halfway down her back. In this garb, she played the piano and the tigers danced.

At the beginning of the act, the cats bounced into the ring, roaring to illustrate their own ferocity, while the grooms ran round the caged arena firing off blank shots from guns. She came after, in her good girl’s dress, and sat down at the Bechstein grand.