Nights at the Circus (28 page)

It was the Princess who burst out laughing, this time, while Mignon shook her head: ‘No! Never a clown!’

The Strong Man brightened up at that, and managed to get his tea down.

The word ‘iron’ was crudely inscribed on the knuckles of his right hand, and ‘steel’ on his left: the tattoos had a miserably self-inflicted look, as if carved with a penknife then filled in with ink during a deprived, self-mutilatory childhood. All of his bulk was muscle and simplicity, there was no flesh nor flab nor wit on him. He had a good, snub nose and, as he left off snivelling, his face once again took on its habitual expression of baffled innocence, of perpetual wonder at the ways of the world.

The Strong Man was naive and knew no tricks. During the gaps between the acts, while the cage or the trapeze went up, as the clowns mugged, Samson would strut round the ring holding a horse above his head.

Yes; he was very strong, and, as he knew deep down, a spiritual weakling. But, and this is what he did
not
know about himself, he was a great sentimentalist, so that, all the time he was poking the Ape-Man’s woman, he never thought much about her, except that she was easy, but, as soon as she went off with the clown – or so he thought – and took a bath, had her hair done, put on a pretty dress, turned into a star, his heart turned over like a pancake whenever he thought how he’d get his huge tool in her no more. But don’t think great loves haven’t sprung from less likely sources than that in the history of the world. If, when the Strong Man watched the tiger waltz Mignon out of his reach for ever, he thought his heart was breaking, sentimental he might have been but break it did. Out of the fracture, sensibility might poke a moist, new-born head.

As all sat inconclusively around the cat-house, came a dragging, bumping sound; the Professor entered, backwards, through the open door to the courtyard, pulling the insensible Ape-Man along by his feet. The Professor was making heavy weather of it, panting, blowing and wheezing, clearly painfully conscious of the indignity of his task. The Ape-Man’s head thudded against the cobbles at each tug the Professor gave his boots but the smile on his insensible features did not lift.

‘Mein husband!’ said Mignon.

‘Here, Samson, me old duck, you go and give that poor hairy fellow a hand before he has a heart attack,’ said Fevvers. The Strong Man rose obediently, tucking the ends of his towel round his waist. He carted the Ape-Man off to his bunk, the Professor trotting along beside him chattering to himself with annoyance.

Fevvers dropped some remark in German that made Mignon smile, another in French that made the Princess smile, too, but they did not smile at Fevvers, they smiled at one another and one white hand and one brown one reached out and clasped together.

‘That’s that, then.’ At last she addressed Walser. ‘You cop hold of your duds and come along with me, me old China. Leave the love-birds together.’

Love-birds, was it? Of course it was!

Hand in hand, the girls now went back into the cage, where the tigers slept the afternoon away, for the Princess was teaching Mignon more lieder. So she would not sing in the ring; well and good. So much the better, in fact! They would cherish in loving privacy the music that was their language, in which they’d found the way to one another.

When the Strong Man came running back from the apes, he, love locked out, shook the bars that kept him from his beloved but the musical lovers did not hear, so wrapt were they.

Left alone, the Professor went through the pockets of the Ape-Man. He withdrew his flat wallet, found what he was looking for – Monsieur Lamarck’s contract with the Colonel – read it through and tore it up. He pierced the unconscious Ape-Man with a regard of pure simian contempt. He seized the Ape-Man’s greatcoat from the foot of his bunk in order to pass unnoticed in the crowd and sped off.

In the courtyard he discovered Walser sluicing his face for the second time that day, getting rid of blood and muddied make-up. The Professor caught his bad arm, making him jump and, after a tetchy display of contrition, drew Walser with him into the alley; although Walser, wearing only a towel, protested fiercely, he made it apparent he wished the clown to hail a cab for him.

Since the Colonel proposed to entertain his star to dinner that night, a date of which he nourished great hopes, he returned to his hotel early, in order to treat his blue jowls to a shave. In his rolled shirtsleeves, humming ‘Casey Jones’ to himself around his clenched cigar, he was attacking his cheeks with a cut-throat razor in the bathroom of his suite when the Professor, in too much of a hurry to fuss with the front desk, shinned up a drain-pipe and knocked peremptorily at the frosted glass window. The Colonel, after a few exclamations of Kentuckian astonishment, let the Professor in and ushered him to the drawing-room, to wait while he wiped the suds from his cheeks. When he returned, the Professor was seated at the writing desk, penning rapidly on hotel notepaper.

‘Nature did not give me vocal cords but left the brain out of Monsieur Lamarck. He is a hopeless drunk with no business sense. I therefore propose to take over all the business management of the “Educated Apes” and demand the salary and expenses formerly payable to Monsieur Lamarck now be paid to me.’

‘Well, here’s a do, Sybil.’ Colonel Kearney addressed his pig. ‘The madmen take over the lunatic asylum.’

Undeterred, the chimp jotted down the sum he considered appropriate for the services of himself and his colleagues, which caused the Colonel’s eyebrows to rise when he saw it and offer the Professor a friendly glass, hardly the most tactful hospitality, in the circumstances, which the Professor angrily refused. Uncorking a fresh bottle of bourbon with his teeth, the Colonel stroked a chin still stiff with soap and observed amusedly:

‘Aw, shoot, Professor! If there ain’t a man in the ring with you, people’ll think you’re just a bunch of high-school kids in monkey suits!’

The Professor uttered an indescribable noise that did not need vocal cords to express its meaning.

‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Professor! Well, sir, you know what I always say – let us consult the oracle.’

With a grunt, Sybil launched herself to the carpet as he spilled out the alphabet cards.

‘“Cheap at the price”,’ pondered the Colonel. ‘Well, I hate to disagree with you, Sybil, but this gentleman certainly strikes a mighty hard bargain. Are you
convinced
he’s irreplaceable? You are? I’ll be darned . . .’

He squinted at Sybil ruminatively, assailed by the first doubts of her integrity: that there might be some solidarity amongst the dumb beasts, that they could form a pact of some kind against him, was a disturbing possibility that, hitherto, never entered his mind. Finally he grudgingly extended his hand to the Professor.

‘Gentleman’s handshake is his bond where I come from. Oh. I see. Not where you come from. Well –’

Reluctantly he sat down at the desk and wrote out a new contract, but, even so, he was forced to strike out a brace of clauses and allow the Professor to attach a codicil before the chimp would sign. Refusing so much as a bite of one of Sybil’s apples to clinch the deal, the Professor roared off, by the door this time, leaving the Colonel much vexed.

‘Pork and beans,’ he threatened Sybil. ‘Spare-ribs. Hickory-smoked ham.’

But she jumped back upon her cushion and closed her eyes purposefully, brooking no further discussion, although the Colonel might have concluded his shave with even less equanimity had he known that, in the foyer, on his way out, the Professor had enlisted the aid of a passing Lizzie in obtaining from the desk clerk a copy of Cook’s International Rail Timetable.

NINE

To wash down the caviare-stuffed pancakes and sour cream, the jellied carp, marinated mushrooms and smoked salmon, the Colonel preferred bourbon to vodka. After that, he found bourbon made the borsht go down better. Fevvers had some white burgundy with the first course, red burgundy with the soup, and plied her silverware with a will. An old hand at seduction dinners, she believed in making a hearty meal and the Colonel spared no expense. Roast goose with red cabbage and apples? She passed on that, however, choosing venison, instead, and changed to a chateau-bottled claret. The Colonel stuck to bourbon, and now confined his eating to crumbs from the bread rolls which he agitated with nervous fingers. Fevvers, however, found room for ice-cream, to finish up, plus a glass of Chateau d’Yquem, belched com-panionably and nodded when he, red-faced and already over-primed for the occasion, offered her a goodnight night-cap in his suite.

She enjoyed well-chilled champagne while the impresario lapsed into slumber on the couch beside her. Removing the bourbon bottle from his fist, she poked curiously into the aperture of his fly, which he’d just fumbled open before he passed out, and withdrew a string of little silk American flags. Sybil gave a reproachful grunt.

‘How did it go?’ enquired Lizzie in their own drawing-room, thick with the scent of hot-house flowers and the smell of the melted wax which the old woman was carefully dripping from a candle. She looked as if she were performing a witchcraft ritual but such was far from the case.

‘Couldn’t get ’is star-spangled banner up,’ replied Fevvers. ‘Britannia’s revenge for the War of 1812. I say, our Liz, ain’t you done with your invisible writing yet?’

‘It’ll be ready for his next consignment,’ said Lizzie equably.

Fevvers drew back the brocade curtain and looked out at a frozen little crescent moon that lay on its back in the vast sky. She sighed.

‘Seems a shame to play a trick like that on such a nice young man . . .’

‘Not hatched out, yet,’ Lizzie summed him up. ‘The clowns may pelt him with eggs as if eggs cost nothing but his own shell don’t break, yet. He is too
young
for you, my girl. He’s living proof that travel don’t broaden the mind; instead, it renders a man
banal
.’

‘Not his mind as interests me,’ said Fevvers.

‘Oh, Sophie, you’re a devil for a pretty face.’

‘Not his
face
as interests me –’

A rap on the door interrupted her. A yawning bell-boy delivered a fragrant, precious mound of out-of-season Parma violets; her lucky flower! She exclaimed with surprise; how did the unknown sender know that? Lizzie snatched the card that came with them, read it, compressed the corners of her mouth and tossed it into the fire but Fevvers greedily investigated the moist, ribbon-wrapped stalks of the flowers with her capable nurse’s hands and discovered a shagreen box. Inside the box, to Lizzie’s further displeasure, glittered a diamond bracelet, like a cold bandage.

‘A pretty face is one thing, our Liz,’ opined Fevvers, trying on the bracelet at once, ‘but diamonds is another, ’ere’s a punter good for a touch.’

Her pupils narrowed down to the shape of £ signs.

TEN

After the dizzy triumph of the Grand Gala Opening, Fevvers grew sick of flowers, even violets, and told the doorman of the Hotel de l’Europe to redirect her floral tributes to the lying-in hospital. Deluged with invitations, she permitted herself to accept only one single supper, and that for the final night of the engagement. This invitation came accompanied by a shagreen box, twin of the one that brought the diamond bracelet, containing a pair of diamond earrings the size of hazelnuts and a note promising a necklace to match on the evening in question. Therefore she concluded this punter was prepared to put his money where his mouth was – or, rather, where his mouth hoped to be.

On the final night, as it happened, Buffo the Great, having harkened to the voice of drunken Russia, went out to celebrate his departure from the Capital of Vodka together with the Ape-Man. The saturnine Frenchman, the first casualty of the party, succumbed in a low dram-shop, was piled to one side like so much lumber and there abandoned. Little Ivan it was, anxiously searching the back-alley bars, who found Buffo still on his feet, though wavering, and led him back to Clown Alley, there to settle him on an upturned stool before a rectangle of cracked mirrors, where Buffo flailed about, wriggled, moaned and struggled to prevent Grik and Grok repairing the ravages his debauch had made upon his make-up.

For he presented a deplorable sight. His natural skin showed through his matte white in ghastly streaks and runnels and, in the course of his peripatetic carousing, he had mislaid his bald piece so that a mean fringe of coarse, greying hair, spiked with sweat, surmounted a piebald face that seemed, rather than its customary mask-like inhumanity, now hideously partly human. Grik and Grok clucked, gibbered and wrung their hands at the state into which the master clown had got himself but Buffo was well away and bellowed like a bull:

‘Tonight shall be my Cavalry! God, we’ll make ’em split their sides!’

He had the air of a revenant back from the grave in flapping cerements stained with dung, mire and vomit, but he was stubbornly, indeed, dementedly, still bent upon a spree. He drained a bottle from his pocket as he swayed before the mirror. Grik and Grok ferreted out another bald piece for him and cocked a fresh conical hat at a rakish angle. That pleased him, for some reason, and he puckered up his rouged lips at himself in the mirror, pouted like a young girl, and then, all at once, his bowels opened and Grik and Grok ran squeaking off for water and scrubbing brush and a fresh pair of drawers but, at the great clown’s request, Little Ivan trotted away in the other direction to fetch another pint of vodka.

The Colonel, in the box office, counting out the takings, pooh-poohed Walser’s account of Buffo’s obscene and perilous condition. ‘Drunker he is, the funnier he is.’ He stuffed a last handful of rainbow-coloured banknotes in the cash-box and locked it up with a pleased expression on his face, for it was ‘house full’ and ‘standing room only’ tonight, once again, and there were more grand-dukes, archduchesses, princes and princesses in the audience that night of nights than the Colonel himself had consumed fried chicken dinners in his entire life.