Nights at the Circus (7 page)

‘As I hurtled past the windows of the attic in which I passed those precious white nights of girlhood, so the wind came up beneath my outspread wings and, with a jolt, I found myself hanging in mid-air and the garden lay beneath me like the board of a marvellous game and
stayed where it was.
The earth did
not
rise up to meet me. I was secure in the arms of my invisible lover!

‘But the wind did not relish my wondering inactivity for long. Slowly, slowly, while I depended from him, numb with amazement, he, as if affronted by my passivity, started to let me slip through his fingers and I commenced once more upon the fearful fall . . . until my lessons came back to me! And I kicked up with my heels, that I had learned from the birds to keep tight together to form a rudder for this little boat, my body, this little boat that could cast anchor in the clouds.

‘So I kicked up with my heels and then, as if I were a swimmer, brought the longest and most flexible of my wing-tip feathers together over my head; then, with long, increasingly confident strokes, I parted them and brought them back together – yes! that was the way to do it! Yes! I clapped my wing-tips together again, again, again, and the wind loved that and clasped me to his bosom once more so I found I could progress in tandem with him just as I pleased, and so cut a corridor through the invisible liquidity of the air.

‘Is there another bottle left, Lizzie?’

Lizzie scraped off fresh foil and filled up all their glasses. Fevvers drank thirstily and poured herself another with a not altogether steady hand.

‘Don’t excite yourself, gel,’ said Lizzie gently. Fevvers’ chin jerked up at that, almost pettishly.

‘Oh, Lizzie, the gentleman must know the truth!’

And she fixed Walser with a piercing, judging regard, as if to ascertain just how far she could go with him. Her face, in its Brobdingnagian symmetry, might have been hacked from wood and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds or figureheads for sailing ships. It flickered through his mind: is she really a man?

A creaking and wheezing outside the door heralded a bang upon it – the old nightwatchman in his leather cape.

‘Wot, still ’ere, Miss Fevvers? ’Scuse me . . . saw the light under the crack, see . . .’

‘We’re entertaining the press,’ said Fevvers. ‘Won’t be long, now, me old duck. Have a drop of bubbly.’

She overflowed her glass and shoved it across to him; he downed it at a gulp and smacked his lips.

‘Just the job. You know where to find me if there’s any trouble, miss – ’

Fevvers darted Walser an ironic glance under her lashes and smiled at the departing nightwatchman as if to say: ‘Don’t you think I’d be a match for him?’

Lizzie continued:

‘Imagine with what joy, pride and wonder I watched my darling, naked as a star, vanish round the corner of the house! And, to tell the truth, I was most heartily relieved, too, for, in our hearts, we both knew it was a do or die attempt.’

‘But hadn’t I dared and done, sir!’ Fevvers broke in. ‘For this first flight of mine, I did no more than circle the house at a level that just topped the cherry tree in Nelson’s garden, which was some thirty feet high. And, in spite of the great perturbation of my senses and the excess of mental concentration the practice of my new-found skill required, I did not neglect to pick my Lizzie a handful of the fruit that had just reached perfect ripeness upon the topmost branches, fruit that customarily we were forced to leave as a little tribute for the thrushes. No person in the deserted street to see me or think I was some hallucination or waking dream or phantom of the gin-shop fumes. I successfully made the circumnavigation of the house and then, aglow with triumph, I soared upwards to the roof again to rejoin my friend.

‘But, now, unused as they were to so much exercise, my wings began . . . oh, God! to
give out
! For going up involves an altogether different set of cogs and pulleys than coming
down
, sir, although I did not know that, then. Our studies in comparative physiology were yet to come.

‘So I leaps up, much as a dolphin leaps – which I now know is
not
the way to do it – and have already misjudged how high I should leap, in the first place, my weary wings already folding up beneath me. My heart misses. I think my first flight will be my last and I shall pay with my life the price of my hubris.

‘Scattering the cherries I had gathered in a soft, black hail over the garden, I grabbed at the guttering and – oh! and, ah! the guttering gave way beneath me! The old lead parted company with the eaves with a groaning sigh and there I dangled, all complete woman, again, my wings having seized up in perfect terror of a human fate –’

‘– but I reached out and grips her by the arms. Only love, great love, could have given me such strength, sir, to permit me to haul her in onto the roof against the pull of gravity as you might haul in, against the tide, a drowning person.’

‘And there we huddled on the roof in one another’s arms, sobbing together with mingled joy and relief, as dawn rose over London and gilded the great dome of St Paul’s until it looked like the divine pap of the city which, for want of any other, I needs must call my natural mother.

‘London, with the one breast, the Amazon queen.’

She fell silent. Some object within the room, perhaps the hot-water pipes, gave out a metallic tinkle. Lizzie, on her creaking handbag, shifted from one buttock to the other and coughed. Fevvers remained sunk in introspection for a while and the wind blew Big Ben, striking midnight, so lost, so lonely a sound it seemed to Walser the clock might be striking in a deserted city and they the only inhabitants left alive. Although he was not an imaginative man, even he was sensitive to that aghast time of the night when the dark dwarfs us.

The final reverberation of the chimes died away. Fevvers heaved a sigh that rocked the surface of her satin bosom, and came out of her lapse of vivacity.

‘Let me tell you a little more about my working life at this time – what it was I got up to when I was
not
flitting about the sky like a bat, sir! You will recall how I stood in for the Winged Victory each night in the parlour and may have wondered how this might have been, since I have arms –’ and she stretched them out, spanning half the dressing-room in the process ‘– and the Winged Victory has none.’

‘Well, Ma Nelson put it out that I was the perfection of, the original of, the very model for that statue which, in its broken and incomplete state, has teased the imagination of a brace of millennia with its promise of perfect, active beauty that has been, as it were, mutilated by history. Ma Nelson, contemplating the existence of my two arms, all complete, now puts her mind to the question: what might the Winged Victory have been holding in ’em when the forgotten master first released her from the marble that had contained her inexhaustible spirit? And Ma Nelson soon came up with the answer:
a sword.

‘So she equipped me with the very gilt ceremonial sword that come with her Admiral’s uniform, that she used to wear at her side, and sometimes use as a staff with which to conduct the revels – her wand, like Prospero’s. And now I grasped that sword in my right hand, with the point downwards, to show I meant no harm unless provoked, whilst my left hand hung loosely at my side, the fist clenched.

‘How was I costumed for my part? My hair was powdered white with chalk and tied up with a ribbon and my wings were powdered white, too, so I let out a puff if touched. My face and the top half of my body was spread with the
wet white
that clowns use in the circus and I had white drapes from my navel to my knee but my shins and feet were dipped in wet white, too.’

‘And very lovely she looked,’ cried loyal Lizzie. Fevvers modestly lowered her eyelashes.

‘Lovely or not, Ma Nelson always expressed complete satisfaction with my turnout and soon took to calling me, not her “Winged Victory” but her “Victory with Wings”, the spiritual flagship of her fleet, as if a virgin with a weapon was the fittest guardian angel for a houseful of whores. Yet it may be that a
large woman
with a
sword
is not the best advertisement for a brothel. For, slow but sure, trade fell off from my fourteenth birthday on.

‘Not so much that of our faithfullest clients, those old rakes who, perhaps, Ma Nelson had herself initiated in the far-off days of their beardless and precipitously ejaculatory youth, and others who might have formed such particular attachments to Annie or to Grace that you could speak of a kind of marriage, there. No. Such gentlemen could not shift the habits of a lifetime. Ma Nelson had addicted them to those shadowless hours of noon and midnight, the clarity of
bought pleasure
, the simplicity of contract as it was celebrated in her aromatic parlour.

‘These were the kind old buffers who would extend a father’s indulgence in the shape of the odd half-sovereign or string of seed pearls to the half-woman, half-statue they had known in those earliest days when she had played Cupid and, sometimes, out of childish fun, sprung off her toy arrows amongst them, hitting, in play, sometimes an ear, sometimes a buttock, sometimes a ballock.

‘But with their sons and grandsons it was a different matter. When the time came for them to meet La Nelson and her girls, in they’d trot, timorous yet defiant, blushing to the tops of their Eton collars, aquiver with nervous anticipation and dread, and then their eyes would fall on the sword I held and Louisa or Emily would have the devil’s own job with them, thereafter.

‘I put it down to the influence of
Baudelaire
, sir.’

‘What’s this?’ cried Walser, amazed enough to drop his professional imperturbability.

‘The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the
horror
of it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but
damned souls
who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do . . . Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for “Votes for Women”, I can tell you!’

‘Does that seem strange to you? That the caged bird should want to see the end of cages, sir?’ queried Lizzie, with an edge of steel in her voice.

‘Let me tell you that it was a wholly female world within Ma Nelson’s door. Even the dog who guarded it was a bitch and all the cats were females, one or the other of ’em always in kitten, or newly given birth, so that a sub-text of fertility underwrote the glittering sterility of the pleasure of the flesh available within the academy. Life within those walls was governed by a sweet and loving reason. I never saw a single blow exchanged between any of the sisterhood who reared me, nor heard a cross word or a voice raised in anger. Until the hour of eight, when work began and Lizzie stationed herself behind the peephole in the front door, the girls kept to their rooms and the benign silence might be interrupted only by the staccato rattle of the typewriter as Grace practised her stenography or the lyric ripple of the flute upon which Esmeralda was proving to be something of a virtuoso.

‘But what followed after they put away their books was only poor girls earning a living, for, though some of the customers would swear that whores do it for pleasure, that is only to ease their own consciences, so that they will feel less foolish when they fork out hard cash for pleasure that has no real existence unless given freely – oh, indeed! we knew we only sold the
simulacra.
No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity, sir.

‘As for myself, I worked my passage on Ma Nelson’s ship as living statue, and, during my blossoming years, from fourteen to seventeen, I existed only as an object in men’s eyes after the night-time knocking on the door began. Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our voyage through the world? I was as if closed up in a shell, for the wet white would harden on my face and torso like a death mask that covered me all over, yet, inside this appearance of marble, nothing could have been more vibrant with potentiality than I! Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I waited . . . although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did
not
await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my
appearance
for ever!

‘Yet I was possessed by the idea I had been feathered out for some special fate, though what it was I could not imagine. So I waited, with lithic patience, for that destiny to manifest itself.

‘As I wait now, sir,’ she said directly to Walser, swinging round to him, ‘as the last cobwebs of the old century blow away.’

Then she swung back to the mirror and thoughtfully tucked away a straying curl.

‘However, until Liz opened the door and let the men in, when all we girls needs must jump to attention and behave like women, you might say that, in our well-ordered habitation, all was “
luxe, calme et volupté
”, though not quite as the poet imagined. We all engaged in our intellectual, artistic or political –’

Here Lizzie coughed.

‘– pursuits and, as for myself, those long hours of leisure I devoted to the study of aerodynamics and the physiology of flight, in Ma Nelson’s library, from among whose abundant store of books I gleaned whatever small store of knowledge I possess, sir.’

With that, she batted her eyelashes at Walser in the mirror. From the pale length of those eyelashes, a good three inches, he might have thought she had not taken her false ones off had he not been able to see them lolling, hairy as gooseberries, among the formidable refuse of the dressing-table. He continued to take notes in a mechanical fashion but, as the women unfolded the convolutions of their joint stories together, he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place; or a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night.