Nights at the Circus (30 page)

‘Cheer up, Colonel,’ she said. ‘I’ll make them forget. They ain’t seen nothing like
me
before.’

When she dropped her wrap and donned her plumed topknot, it was as though a huge, not altogether friendly bird appeared among them. She cast a glance at the opulence reflected in the mirror, admired her own bosoms. In the auditorium, they demanded her. She cocked an ear.

‘Suckers,’ she said.

Lizzie morosely flung the feather cloak over her young friend’s shoulders and the
aerialiste
stumped out, slamming the door behind her to open it again for a parting shaft.

‘I’ll expect a bonus for this.’

This time, the slam made the gas-jets tremble.

‘She’s in a filthy mood,’ said Lizzie. ‘She must and will have supper with this Grand Duke. She won’t take a word of advice. Headstrong. And mercenary. Headstrong and mercenary. A real tartar, she is. Here, my love –’ suddenly crooning to the pig ‘– does it want a bit of choccy, then?’

While she was rummaging in her handbag, the Colonel recovered himself sufficiently to pitch headlong out of the door after Fevvers. Having lost two of his star turns already that night, he dared not let his eyes off the Cockney Venus for a second. Sybil, thwarted of her chocolate, protested shrilly from his arms. The plangent strains of ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ drifted over from the auditorium as if all were going exactly to plan, as if the circus could absorb madness and slaughter into itself with the enthusiasm of a boa constrictor and so, continue.

Walser cast his quick, reporter’s eye over the room, caught sight of a note tucked into a mirror, picked out two words – ‘alone’, and ‘unaccompanied’ – before Lizzie pressed her bundle of papers into his hand, adjuring him to make all haste to catch the diplomatic bag with them, to run and see to it this minute.

Had it not been for the sudden sting of jealousy that struck him when he thought of Fevvers, ‘alone’, ‘unaccompanied’, in her gaudy dress in the Grand Duke’s arms, he would, out of sheer curiosity, have stopped to check out Lizzie’s letters, that she was so anxious to despatch to London before the circus train pulled out of Petersburg. Might even have spotted the code; the secret writing. Have found a story, there, that would have turned him back into a journalist, again. As it was, he was too full of misery to care, and let Lizzie, careless of his hurt, push him irritably from the room.

As she stowed the bottles and boxes of eyeblack, rouge and powder away in straw hampers, packed rug and hairpins, rolled up the autographed poster, she bubbled with ill humour like a boiling pot and, when Fevvers blew back, incandescent with applause, she opened her mouth –

‘No, no, no!’ snapped the enormous girl. ‘Once and for all, you’re
not
to come with me, hobbling along like a rotten old procuress the way you do, you old cow.’

‘Well, you just watch yourself,’ said Lizzie darkly. ‘Fucking aristos. Can’t trust fucking aristos.’

Make-up off unaided, evening dress on, Fevvers leaned forward to greet her real face in the mirror with a brilliant smile.

‘Here, today; gone, tomorrow. In actual fact, our Lizzie, we’re not even gone tomorrow, but gone to-bloody-night. Train leaves at midnight, doesn’t it. Can’t miss that, can I, not if it were ever so.’

She cast a meaningful glance at the stopped clock and giggled.

‘Pshaw!’ said Lizzie. ‘If you think I’d lift a finger to help you, you’ve got another think coming, my girl. Sheer
greed
, that’s what it is.’

‘What harm can a touch of sham with a grand duke do, our Liz? Not when the carriage awaits without, me old duck! Hasn’t he said he’ll give me the diamond rivière to match, tonight? Just so long as I go by myself. Don’t want you along to cramp my style, you rancid old bawd. Can you just fasten up my hair?’

Lizzie grouched towards the mirror but could not help herself depositing a kiss on her foster-daughter’s defenceless nape as she pinned up her curls.

‘Well, you just watch it.’

‘You’d chuck a hand grenade at the poor old fellow, if you got half a chance. For myself, I prefer finesse.’

With a conjurer’s flourish, she drew out a toy gilt sword from her corset and made some fencer’s passes with it.

‘Remember I go
armed
into combat, Lizzie! Call it, the Nelson touch. D’you think I’d leave my weapon off, tonight, of all nights?’

Lizzie reached out to test the blade with her thumb.

‘Go for the ballocks, if needs must,’ she advised, satisfied.

In her red and black lace, it hurt the eyes to look at Fevvers and she was, besides, flushed and resplendent with the way she’d just snatched victory from disaster, erased the memory of the madman and the carnivore by the winged miracle of her presence. She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to
eat
diamonds.

At the courtyard gate, a glamorous droshky stood ready to receive her, behind the melancholy van from the knacker’s yard. As a befurred footman handed Fevvers into the one, the Strong Man pitched the carcass into the other.

Amid all the bustle and hurry of the dismantling, roustabouts and stable-lads dashing this way and that, horses neighing, the refreshed jingling of the elephants’ chains as the bull-hands slid the great feet into leather boots against the cold, the Professor now made an appearance.

He carried a bulging carpetbag in one hand and a shiny new briefcase in the other. His colleagues came marching behind. All wore sturdy greatcoats and one or two had donned the wide sheepskin hats or
chapkas
of the peasants, bought in the markets to keep their ears warm. All were loaded up with bags, cardboard suitcases and hat-boxes, or carried small trunks on their shoulders. One bore a folded-up blackboard. They were hotly pursued by the agitated Colonel; Sybil, under her own steam for once, accompanied him, showing a fair turn of porcine speed.

The Colonel caught up with the Professor, grasped him by the shoulders and shook him so that he dropped his briefcase. That made the Professor terribly angry, he shrieked and gibbered, and the Colonel thereupon adopted a conciliatory tone, evidently begging and pleading with him. Sybil got up on her hind legs, at one point, and laid a beseeching trotter on the Professor’s forearm. The Professor absent-mindedly patted her but did not stop shaking his head emphatically at the Colonel and produced a piece of paper clotted with sealing wax stamps from his inner pocket. He jabbed a stubby finger at a clause in the contract outlined in red ink and marked in the margin with several exclamation marks. One by one, the stable-lads knocked off work to enjoy the argument.

The Colonel attempted to reason with the Professor. The stable-lads watched with interest. The Professor lost his temper completely, crumpled his paper into a ball and thrust it down the Colonel’s throat. The stable-lads greeted this action with a burst of ironic cheering and scattered applause. The Professor, newly aware of his audience, granted it a jerky little bow. He stroked Sybil’s ears, apparently in farewell; then he and his entire troupe precipitated themselves outdoors, leaving the Colonel choking. Though one chimp, a green hair-ribbon peeking from beneath her smart tam, looked behind her, even wistfully, perhaps for a last glimpse of Walser, but Walser was off running Lizzie’s messages.

When he spat out the contract, the Colonel said: ‘They’re booked in on the night train to Helsinki. “No Siberia for us,” he says. Or, rather, scribbles. Come up to me, bold as brass, after the show – informs me – scrawls a note, dreadful handwriting, dreadful! – informs me they’ve earned a bonus on account of the applause at the end of their act lasted longer’n five minutes. Wrote the clause in ’isself. I signed it, to my shame.
My
watch put the applause at four minutes ninety-nine seconds precisely. Darned ape won’t listen to reason. Darned ape.’

The Colonel opened his arms to Sybil and pressed his disconsolate face into the pig’s neck, for comfort, although Sybil, loyalties somewhat torn, snorted thoughtfully to herself.

And the apes were by no means the only defectors that night. Many a stable-lad, already sufficiently glutted with adventure, went under the net, using his earnings to purchase a ticket at the Finland Station and roll off through the pine forests, on the way home. Buffo the Great was incarcerated in a Russian madhouse. The tigress lay in a Petersburg knackers’ yard. It was a depleted company the Colonel would take across the tundra, towards the islands where the sun was already rising.

And, that night, he almost lost his star as well.

ELEVEN

Amidst a fine, masculine smell of leather upholstery, lapped to the eyes in a rug of sables, Fevvers rolled through the beautiful city as the snow came whirling down in huge, soft flakes. The old woman, the big baboushka in the sky, was shaking her mattress overhead, shaking it with great abandon as if preparing a feather bed for a gargantuan coupling. Snow whirled down on to the Neva, there to dissolve upon the ice-thickened water; some snow clung to the crowns and folded forearms of the civic monuments, to the carved cornices of pediment and portico, to the mane and tail of the mount of the stone horseman, a white, transforming fall – the first touch of winter, a visitation that arrives with such a magical caress you can scarcely believe, at first, how the winter of these latitudes will kill you at its vast leisure – if it gets the chance.

But Fevvers saw no death in the snow. All she saw was that festive sparkle of the frosty lights that made her think of diamonds.

She hugged the sable rug about her as she climbed the skidding steps to his front door under an umbrella the coachmen held above her head. A couple of capripede caryatids looked after the door and there was a coat of arms above it, a unicorn goring a knight. The street was deserted. Yellow streetlamps sifted the inexorable snow. The coachman bowed and vanished, leaving Fevvers to tug on the melodious doorbell by herself. The Grand Duke did her the honour of letting her in. (So all the servants had been sent away for the night, had they? H’m.)

‘I want the carriage back at eleven thirty p.m. precisely,’ she informed him crisply, dropping his sables on the floor. Let him pick them up hisself, if he wanted.

His house was the realm of minerals, of metals, of vitrification – of gold, marble and crystal; pale halls and endless mirrors and glittering chandeliers that clanged like wind-bells in the draught from the front door . . . and a sense of frigidity, of sterility, almost palpable, almost tangible in the hard, chill surfaces and empty spaces.

Always the same! thought Fevvers censoriously. Money is wasted on the rich. For herself, if she’d been as Croesus-wealthy as her host, she’d have fancied something like the Brighton Pavilion to call home, something to make each passer-by smile, a reciprocal gift to those from whom the wealth had come.

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke’s palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can’t handle their cash just like the rich can’t, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.

Let me tell you something about Fevvers, if you haven’t noticed it for yourself already; she is a girl of philosophical bent.

Since
money
it is that makes us rich or poor, why, then: abolish money! she sometimes said to Lizzie. For all that money is, is a symbolic means of facilitating exchanges that should, by rights, be freely made or not at all.

But Lizzie would whistle through her moustache at Fevvers’ naivety and reply: the baker can’t make a loaf out of your privates, duckie, and that’s all you’d have to offer him in exchange for a crust if nature hadn’t made you the kind of spectacle people pay good money to see. All you can do to earn your living is to make a show of yourself. You’re doomed to that. You must give pleasure of the eye, or else you’re good for nothing. For you, it’s always a symbolic exchange in the marketplace; you couldn’t say you were engaged in productive labour, now, could you, girl?

But neither does
this
one toil nor spin, thought Fevvers in the Grand Duke’s palace. Yet he is so rich that money hasn’t any
meaning
for him. The sums he is about to squander on this bright, pretty, useless thing, myself, have nothing to do with my value as such. If all the women in the world had wings, he’d keep his jewels to himself, to play at ducks and drakes on the icy waters of the Neva. My value to him is as a
rara avis.

In his marble halls, she smiled like a predator. Here comes Property Redistribution Inc. to take away your diamonds, Grand Duke!

She stalked up an outflung arc of marble staircase, the Grand Duke attentively behind her, his eyes fixed on the throbbing bulges at the base of her shoulders, and, as she proceeded, she priced the candle-holders, the mirrors, the oriental jars – even the hot-house blooms within them. She made the progress of an auctioneer and, with every step, added a further sum to the price she’d already put upon whatever entertainment she might be asked to provide.

His study was more ruminative, a steep-sided, oval room with a mezzanine gallery wreathed in shadow. Busts of Dante, Shakespeare and Pushkin atop the bookcases looked down upon a table laid for an intimate supper. Little glasses for vodka, funnels for champagne and, in the middle, something to make her gasp: herself, in ice. And life size! At full spread, ‘styling’ and smiling, a cold masterpiece that would have turned into a puddle of ice by the time that dawn would find her chugging across the taiga, as she again promised herself it would.

The ice-sculpture stood on the tip of one foot in a black gravel of caviare and round its neck there blazed away the thousand, thousand rainbow facets of the most magnificent parure she’d ever seen. Oh, the incendiary stones! Her fingers itched to snatch it. But she could scarcely burst out of her bodice, flutter up and make off with it before so much as the soup was served, could she! She was a well-bred girl, after all; wasn’t she? She choked on baulked greed. She felt a sulk might be coming on.