Nights at the Circus (11 page)

‘I trust Toussaint, to whom I have taken an immediate liking, to get these sovereigns straight to Battersea, lay my head on my hard, flat pillow, and take immediate refuge in sleep, to wake hours later, as night approaches. It was the barest, plainest chamber you ever saw, with a little iron bedstead, a deal washstand and iron bars across the window from which I can see the barren trees in the deserted garden and a few lights in the houses over the square. To see those lights in happy homes brought the tears to my eyes, sir, for I am in a house that shows no lights, no lights.

‘Then it comes to me how I might never leave this place, now I have come here of my own free will; that I have voluntarily incarcerated myself among the damned, for the sake of money, even if from the best of motives; that my doom has come upon me.

‘At this apocalyptic moment, the door opens, I see a shadow behind a kerosene lamp, I start up from the bed, crying out – and the shadow speaks, in broad Yorkshire: “It’s nobbut old Fanny, luv, don’t be afeared!”

‘And I will find the companionship of the damned my only solace.

‘Who worked for Madame Schreck, sir? Why, prodigies of nature, such as I. Dear old Fanny Four-Eyes; and the Sleeping Beauty; and the Wiltshire Wonder, who was not three foot high; and Albert/Albertina, who was bipartite, that is to say, half and half and neither of either; and the girl we called Cobwebs. During the time I stayed at Madame Schreck’s, such was the full complement, and though she begged Toussaint to join in some of the
tableaux vivants
, he never would, being a man of great dignity. All he did was play the organ.

‘And there was a drunk cook in the basement, but we never saw much of her.’

‘This Toussaint,’ said Walser, tapping his pencil against his teeth. ‘How did he –’

‘Eat, sir? Through a tube up his nose, sir. Liquids only but sufficient to sustain life. I’m happy to say that, since I began to prosper on the halls and started to frequent the company of men of science, I was able to interest Sir S—. J—. in Toussaint’s case and he was successfully operated upon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital two years ago last February. And now Toussaint has a mouth as good as yours or mine! You’ll find a full account of the operation in
The Lancet
for June, 1898, sir.’

She gave him this scientific verification of Toussaint’s existence with a dazzling smile.

It was true that Fevvers had won the friendship of many men of science. Walser recalled how the young woman had entertained the curiosity of the entire Royal College of Surgeons for three hours without so much as unbuttoning her bodice for them, and discussed navigation in birds with a full meeting of the Royal Society with such infernal assurance and so great a wealth of scientific terminology that not one single professor had dared be rude enough to question her on the extent of her personal experience.

‘Oh, that Toussaint!’ said Lizzie. ‘How he can move a crowd! Such eloquence, the man has! Oh, if all those with such things to say had mouths! And yet it is the lot of those who toil and suffer to be dumb. But, consider the dialectic of it, sir,’ she continued with freshly crackling vigour, ‘how it was, as it were, the
white hand
of the
oppressor
who carved open the aperture of speech in the very throat you could say that it had, in the first place, rendered dumb, and –’

Fevvers shot Lizzie a look of such glazing fury that the witch hushed, suddenly as she’d started. Walser raised his mental eyebrows. More to the chaperone than met the eye! But Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her before he’d had a chance to ask Lizzie if –

‘Before he met up with Madame Schreck, sir, Toussaint used to work the shows at fairs, what they call on your side of the herring-pond the Ten-in-Ones, sir. So he was a connoisseur of degradation and always maintained it was those fine gentlemen who paid down their sovereigns to poke and pry at us who were the unnatural ones, not we. For what is “natural” and “unnatural”, sir? The mould in which the human form is cast is exceedingly fragile. Give it the slightest tap with your fingers and it breaks. And God alone knows why, Mr Walser, but the men who came to Madame Schreck’s were one and all quite remarkable for their ugliness; their faces suggested that he who cast the human form in the first place did not have his mind on the job.

‘Toussaint could hear
us
perfectly well, of course, and often jotted down encouraging words and sometimes little maxims on the pad he always carried with him and he was as great a comfort and an inspiration to us in our confinement as now he will be to a greater world.’

Lizzie nodded emphatically. Fevvers went smoothly forward.

‘Madame Schreck organised her museum, thus: downstairs, in what had used to be the wine cellar, she’d had a sort of vault or crypt constructed, with wormy beams overhead and nasty damp flagstones underfoot, and this place was known as “Down Below”, or else, “The Abyss”. The girls was all made to stand in stone niches cut out of the slimy walls, except for the Sleeping Beauty, who remained prone, since proneness was her speciality. And there were little curtains in front and, in front of the curtains, a little lamp burning. These were her “profane altars”, as she used to call them.

‘Some gent would knock at the front door, thumpetythump, a soft, deathly thunder due to that crepe muffler on the knocker. Toussaint would unbolt and let him in, relieve him of his topcoat and topper and put him in the little receiving-room, where the punter would rummage among the clobber in the big wardrobe and rig himself out in a cassock, or a ballet-dancer’s frock, or whatever he fancied. But the one I liked least was the executioner’s hood; there was a judge who come regular who always fancied that. Yet all he ever wanted was a weeping girl to spit at him. And he’d pay a hundred guineas for the privilege! Except, on those days when he’d put on the black cap himself, then he’d take himself off upstairs, to what Madame Schreck called the “Black Theatre”, and there, Albert/Albertina put a noose around his neck and give it a bit of a pull but not enough to hurt, whereupon he’d ejaculate and give him/her a fiver tip, but La Schreck always took charge of
that.

‘When the client had donned the garments of his choice, the lights dimmed. Toussaint would scurry down below and take his place at the harmonium, which was concealed behind a pierced Gothic fold-screen. He’d start pumping out some heartening tune such as a nice
Kyrie
from some requiem. That was our cue to off with the shawls and jackets we’d bundled ourselves in, to keep out the cold, and give over the games of bezique or backgammon with which we passed the time, climb up on our pedestals and pull the curtains shut. Then the old hag herself comes tottering down the cellar like Lady Macbeth, ushering the happy client. There’d be a lot of clanking of chains, there being several doors to open, and it was all dark but for her lantern, which was a penny candle in a skull.

‘So, we all stood to attention at our posts and the last door opens and in she comes like Virgil in Hell, with her little Dante trotting after, whickering to himself with deliciously scarified anticipation, and the candle-lantern throwing all manner of shadows on the sweating walls.

‘She’d stop at random in front of one niche or another and she’d say: “Shall I open the curtain? Who knows what spectacle of the freakish and unnatural lies behind it!” And they’d say, “yes”, or, “no”, depending on whether they’d been before, for if they’d been before, they’d got their fancies picked out. And if it was, “yes”, she’d pull back the curtain while Toussaint wheezed out a shocking discord on the old harmonium.

‘And there she’d be.

‘It cost another hundred guineas to have the Wiltshire Wonder suck you off and a cool two fifty to take Albert/Albertina upstairs because s/he was one of each and then as much again, while the tariff soared by leaps and bounds if you wanted anything out of the ordinary. But, as for me and the Sleeping Beauty, it was: “look, don’t touch”, since Madame Schreck chose to dispose of us in a series of tableaux.

‘After the door clanged shut again, I’d go and turn the light on, throw a blanket over the Sleeping Beauty, lift the Wonder off the perch from which it was too high for her to jump, and Toussaint would bring us a hot pot of coffee with a bit of brandy in it, or tea with rum, for it was perishing down there. Oh, it was easy work, all right, especially for me and the Beauty. But what I never could get used to was the sight of their eyes, for there was no terror in the house our customers did not bring with them.

‘We were
supposed
to get a tenner a week each, basic, with bonuses per trick, those that turned ’em, but, out of that, she kept back a fiver each for our keep, which was scanty enough, boiled beef and carrots, spotted dog; and, as to the rest, which was riches beyond the dreams of most working girls, why, we never saw a penny of it. She “put it away for us in her safe”, ha! ha! What a joke. Those five sovereigns I got out of her the first day I arrived in the house was the only cash I got in my hand all the time I worked there.

‘For, the moment that her front door shut behind you, you were her prisoner; indeed, you were her slave.’

Lizzie, once again crouched at Fevvers’ feet, tugged the hem of the
aerialiste
’s dressing-gown.

‘Tell ’im about the Sleeping Beauty,’ she prompted.

‘Oh, what a tragic case, sir! She was a country curate’s daughter and bright and merry as a grig, until, one morning in her fourteenth year, the very day her menses started, she never wakened, not until noon; and the day after, not until teatime; and the day after that, her grieving parents watching and praying beside her bed, she opened her eyes at suppertime and said: “I think I could fancy a little bowl of bread and milk.”

‘So they propped her up on her pillows and fed her with a spoon and when she’d eaten it all up, she says: “I couldn’t keep my eyes open if I tried,” and falls back asleep. And so it went on. After a week of it, then a month of it, then a year of it, Madame Schreck, chancing to hear of this great marvel, came to her village and let on she was a philanthropic gentlewoman who would take care of the poor girl and let the best doctors visit her, and Beauty’s parents, getting on in years, could hardly believe their luck.

‘She was loaded on a stretcher into the guard’s van of the London train and so to Kensington, where her life went on as it had done before. She always woke at sunset, like night-scented stock; she ate, she filled a bedpan, and then she slept again. This difference, only: now, each night, at midnight, Toussaint gathered her dreaming body in his arms and took her to the crypt. She would have been about twenty-one when I first knew her, pretty as a picture, although a mite emaciated. Her female flow grew less and less the time she slept, until at last it scarcely stained the rag and then dried up altogether but her hair kept on growing, until it was as long as she was herself. Fanny it was who undertook the task of combing it and brushing it for old Four-Eyes was a tender woman with a loving heart. The Beauty’s fingernails and toenails kept on growing too, and it was the Wiltshire Wonder’s task to trim them, owing to the marvellous dexterity of her tiny fingers.

‘Because the Sleeping Beauty’s face had grown so thin, her eyes were especially prominent, and her closed eyelids were dark as the under-skins of mushrooms and must have grown very heavy during those long, slumbering years, for, every evening, when she opened her little windows at the approach of the dark, it cost her a greater, even greater effort, as if it took all the feeble strength that remained to her to open up shop.

‘And, every time, we who watched and waited with her supper were afraid that, this time, it might be the last time she would so valiantly strive to wake, that the vast, unknown ocean of sleep, on which she drifted like sea-wrack, had, that night, finally taken her so far from shore on its mysterious currents that she would not return. But, whilst I was at Madame Schreck’s, the Sleeping Beauty always
did
wake up long enough to take a little minced chicken or a spoonful of junket, and she would evacuate a small, semi-liquid motion into the bedpan Fanny held under her, and then, with a short sigh, she would sink down again under the soft weight of her dreams.

‘For do not think she was a dreamless sleeper. Under those soft, veined webs, her eyeballs moved continually this way and that, as if she were watching shapes of antic ballets playing themselves out upon the insides of her eyelids. And sometimes her toes and fingers would convulse and twitch, as a dog’s paws do when it dreams of rabbits. Or she might softly moan or cry out, and sometimes, very softly, laugh, which was most strange.

‘And once, when Fanny and I were at backgammon one night when trade was slow, the Wonder, giving this dreamer a manicure, cries out of a sudden: “Oh, unendurable!”

‘For, beneath those lashes, oozed out a few fat tears.

‘“And I had thought,” the Wonder said, “she was beyond all pain.”

‘Though so diminutive in stature, the Wonder was as perfectly formed as any of those avatars of hers, such as Good Queen Bess’s pretty little confidante, Mrs Tomysen; or that Anne Gibson who married the little fellow who painted miniatures; or the beautiful Anastasia Borculaski, who was small enough to stand under her brother’s arm, and her brother was a small man, himself. Besides, the Wonder was a most accomplished dancer and could do high kicks that was just like opening up a pair of embroidery scissors.

‘So I says to her: “Wonder, why do you degrade yourself by working in this house, which is truly a house of shame, when you could earn a good living on the boards?” “Ah, Fevvers,” she replies, “I’d rather show myself to one man at a time than to an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things, and, here, I’m well protected from the dark, foul throng of the world, in which I suffered so much. Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

‘“Let me tell you that I was conceived in the following manner. My mother was a merry milkmaid who loved nothing better than a prank. There was, near our village, a hill, quite round, and, though overgrown with grass, it was well-nigh hollow, since it was burrowed through and through with tunnels like runs of generations of mice. Though I have heard it said this hill was no work of nature but a gigantic tomb, a place that those who lived in Wiltshire before us, before the Normans, before the Saxons, before even the Romans came, laid out their dead, the common people of the village called it the Fairy Mound and steered clear of it at nights for they believed it was, if not a place accursed, then certainly one in which we human beings might suffer curious fates and transformations.