Nights at the Circus (26 page)

The Princess set the sleeping cub among the straw and took its place. She softly fingered the keys, as if the piano might suggest appropriate music of its own accord.

Mignon stuck close to the piano but soon grew so enchanted at the sight of the Princess’s black fingers on the white keys that she forgot to be afraid. Fevvers, watching intently, absently stripped off her kid glove so that she could bite her nails. Lizzie, squatting on her handbag, muttered rapidly to herself in some language that was not quite Italian.

When the piano told the Princess what she should play, she pushed her hair back behind her ears with a bravura gesture and attacked the keyboard in earnest. Mignon started in recognition.

Do not think the English schoolboy whom her husband murdered omitted to teach Mignon the song that was written for her before she was born; how could he have resisted it, once he learned her name? He hesitated deliciously between Liszt’s setting and Schubert’s. However odd the accompaniment sounded on his wheezing harmonica, he made sure Mignon knew her own song although she did not understand the words, even though they were in her own language.

To speak is one thing. To sing is quite another.

Here and there among the cats, an eyelid flickered.

Almost as if she awed herself at her daring, Mignon’s voice quavered as she asked them if they knew that land.

The cats stirred in the straw.

No. No, it’s too early in the morning.

Do you know the land where the lemon trees grow?

Oh! let us sleep a little longer. We’ve only just eaten!

Do you know that land where the lemon trees grow, asked, implored Mignon, as she saw their eyes open, their eyes like precious fruit.

They stirred and rustled. For might not this land be the Eden of our first beginnings, where innocent beasts and wise children play together under the lovely lemon trees, the tiger abnegates its ferocity, the child her cunning? Is it, is it?

The cats all lifted their huge heads and their eyes dropped amber tears as if for their own dumb fates. Slowly, slowly, all the beasts dragged themselves towards the source of music, softly beating their tails against the straw. At the end of the first verse, a soft, ecstatic purring rose up from them all until the entire menagerie sounded like the interior of a huge hive of bees.

And then, there are the mountains . . .

As Mignon’s voice, at first a little uncertain, gathered certainty and strength and floated through the menagerie, the apes looked up from their books with unanswerable questions in their eyes; even the clowns grew still and hushed; the elephants, for just as long as the song lasted, ceased to rattle their chains.

The Princess knew the problem of the pause of terror was solved.

When the song was over, the tranced cats sighed and shifted a little on their haunches but the cue for the dance never came; the Princess was kissing Mignon.

Fevvers and Lizzie let out great breaths of relief and likewise kissed each other.

‘The cruel sex threw her away like a soiled glove,’ said Fevvers.

‘– but us girls ’ave gone and sent her to the cleaner’s!’ Lizzie concluded triumphantly.

That appeared to conclude the hiring. The Princess made Mignon curtsey to the cats. The girls came out of the cage hand in hand. The cats dropped back their noses on their paws. The Princess kissed Fevvers on both cheeks, in thanks.

‘A real class act,’ congratulated Fevvers. They left them commencing to rehearse the waltz.

And now the courtyard had emptied itself like an unplugged bath, its morning business done. The Colonel was gone to the box office to check the till; the cookhouse counter shuttered up; roustabouts and stable-boys off to the odorous warmth of the menagerie to play cards and imbibe vodka. The little Charivaris, seized with dreadful stomach pains from gobbling down the secret policeman’s pies, were tucked up in their bunks with hot-water bottles on their bellies. Mama blamed Fevvers. In the deserted silence, the birds returned, to peck at the refuse, and there was a young man in comedy suspenders stooping to sluice his face under the water-pump as well as he could with one arm.

‘It’s your beau,’ said Lizzie without pleasure. ‘It’s Hank the Yank, the reporter Johnny.’

Fevvers advanced upon Walser from behind and, judging her moment, slapped her hands over his eyes as soon as his face emerged from the stream of water.

‘Boo!’

Unaccustomed to love, he diagnosed the effects of a sleepless night when his heart banged at the sight of her. She eyed him with reluctant speculation, swaying back and forth on high heels that gave her a couple of inches advantage over him in height, an advantage she enjoyed.

‘How’s the wonky arm?’ she enquired.

He showed his sling.

‘You take care of it. Scratch of a tiger, can fester something rotten, that can.’

She dropped her voice a couple of decibels, until it sounded lubricious.

‘I hear . . .’ she said, ‘you walked out on Death-warmed-up, last night, after all that. Seems like I got it wrong, love. Seems like you weren’t knocking her off, after all.’

Walser hid his face, polishing away the last of the egg-stains with his sleeve. Fevvers giggled and struck him lightly with her gloves, the moodiness of the previous night quite gone, replaced by a mysterious coquettishness.

‘I must say, Mr Walser,’ she added in a provocative tone, ‘it’s very flattering you should pursue me thus, to the ends of the earth, you might say. Eh?’

Before Walser could reply, Lizzie, as if she could wait no longer for this courtship ritual to reach its consummation, tugged impatiently at the sleeve of his good arm.

‘Oh, Mr Walser, there’s a question of some
letters home
 . . . we, that is, Fevvers and me, was just wondering whether – oh? you’re not despatching at the moment, due to your wound? Well, then, all the more room for
our
stuff!’

From her enormous handbag she withdrew a cornucopia of papers and thrust them at him.

EIGHT

Since the star had not worked circuses before, there was a good deal of animosity towards her in the company, especially amongst the Charivaris, high-wire dancers themselves for centuries, who were engaged in the same debate with gravity as she – except that she was cheating! They were sure of it: they knew it in their bones; they needed no proof. And the cheat had nudged them out of their customary place at the top of the bill with the aid of mechanical contrivances. They even held, a little, to the ‘gutta-percha’ theory concerning Fevvers’ anatomy. That very morning, over breakfast coffee and milk, the children suggested perhaps there was some way she might be dropped from heaven – ‘to see if she would bounce’. Mama remonstrated: ‘Naughty, naughty!’ but she and Papa exchanged thoughtful looks. When Fevvers turned the children’s stomachs with her gift of poisoned pies, it was the last straw.

They resentfully arrived to witness Fevvers’ band rehearsal, dozen upon dozen of them, Papa, Mama, brothers, sisters, cousins. They possessed in full measure that Italian knack of making a crowd, so the Charivaris
en masse
seemed far more than the sum of their parts, even without the little children who stayed home in their bunks, groaning. As if by right, the Charivaris occupied the Imperial Box, for the family had entertained every European emperor of note since Nero. Indeed, they felt themselves to be a vital part of circus history, and it was at such a rich tradition they thought that Fevvers thumbed her nose. All bore fixed expressions of hostility and contempt upon their faces. Little people, delicately made but wiry, in leotards. The women left curling rags in their hair in order to show contempt.

It is a phenomenon of the trapeze that its practitioners always look larger upon it than they are in life. Little and lithe is, therefore, the rule for the air (as it is, as the Charivaris well knew, for the wire); a big flyer looks a clumsy flyer, no matter how great the art. The ideal female flyer turns the scale at, say, a hundred pounds and stands no higher in her slippers than five feet two. Her male partner might give her, perhaps, ten more pounds and three more inches but still he will be a small man on the ground though he might look like a Greek god as he hurtles through the air at those speeds of theirs in excess of sixty miles an hour. Fevvers, remember, was six feet two in her stockinged feet and turned the scale at fourteen English stone.

God, she looked
huge.
Her crimson, purple wings, in flight, obscured the roof-tree of the Imperial Circus. Yet those marmoreal, immense arms and legs of hers, as they made leisurely, swimming movements through the air, looked palely unconvincing, as if arbitrarily tacked on to the bird attire.

Walser, drawn to the ring like a moth to a flame, thought, as he had before: ‘She looks wonderful, but she doesn’t look
right
.’

Yet he could not put his finger on what was wrong, could not identify in quite what way the proportions seemed distorted, since there existed no correct proportions to compare hers with; or, was the trouble this: there was an air about her that suggested, whilst convincing others, she herself remained unconvinced about the precise nature of her own illusion.

The slowness of her trajectory, her modest chug at twenty-five m.p.h. was the whole trick. It made the Charivaris huff.

With her right hand, she caught hold of the rung of the trapeze.

There was a clean, twanging snap.

A rope broke.

The Colonel, watching her, now, in besotted terror, as, a moment before, he’d gazed in besotted ecstasy, had judged it a publicity coup to use, not hack musicians, but the cream of the Petersburg Conservatoire for the pit band at this booking. The snag was, these longhairs did not know the first rule of the spectacle – that the show must go on. And now ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ (superbly played) broke down on an aghast discord as the trapeze dropped Fevvers a dozen feet and left her swinging to and fro like a pendulum above the tiny eye of sawdust, the vortex of gravity, down there, down below.

Her wings quivered and the little feathers round the edges nervously whipped the air. But she showed no fear, even if she felt it. She twisted round and, with her free hand, waved, or, as they say in the circus, ‘styled’ at the Imperial Box in an ironic gesture. She even poked out her tongue. Musicians, horns and fiddles dangling from their hands, the Colonel, Walser, watched, helpless, hearts in mouths, for an endless minute; the Charivaris, on edge, watched.

Only in her own good time did she agitate her pendulum. She swung upon it, faster and faster, and, when she gained enough momentum, only then did she let go, and launched herself off, again, to arrive at the other side of the big top, where she landed upon her other trapeze, abruptly sat, briskly furled, folded her arms like a furious washerwoman and, vast, immobile, sulking, ignored the commotion that broke out below.

A confused murmur issued from the Imperial Box, in which sound it was possible to discern disappointment.

‘Bastards!’ cried Lizzie and repeated and augmented her abuse in several dialects of Italian. The Charivaris energetically fired back. The Colonel lit a fresh cigar and appeared to be imploring his pig for advice. Aloft, Fevvers hunched in a pet.

No. She won’t come down. She’s safer up here, isn’t she. Why did nobody test the rope? What murderous fuckers have been tinkering with the rig?

High as she was, you could hear every word.

A roustabout discovered the rope which snapped had been neatly sawn half-through.

A plot!

Suspicion instantly falls upon the Charivaris. The Charivaris expostulate tumultuously, rising up and running back and forth along the ledges of the boxes. Lizzie hurls a torrent of quick, angry speech at the Colonel while the gesticulating Charivaris put forward whatever cases of their own they feel might hold water. The Colonel champs at his cigar and tickles his pig’s ears and knows, in his heart, when Sybil squeals and nods, there will be nothing for it but to send the Charivaris packing. Give them a bonus on top of their unearned pay, strike them off the bill, send them back to Milan on the next train.

Either that, or he loses Fevvers. Which is not to be imagined. Especially since Fevvers has consented to dine with him that night, on condition he auditions Mignon.

Not, of course, that this
will
be the last of it, as far as the Charivaris are concerned. For the rest of their professional careers, the entire family will suffer from footrot, boils on the bum, headaches, indigestion . . . all the small, irritating, painful ailments that poison life for you but do you no lasting harm, that don’t kill you but keep you permanently off-colour. Nothing in itself bad enough to keep any one of them from the high-wire; only, henceforth, upon it all will perform less well.

Off form. Their collective destiny is always to be off form. The children who wanted to see if Fevvers bounced will never quite recover from the secret policeman’s pies. They will suffer the fate of never equalling their parents, even when those parents are off form. In the future, if ever Lizzie so much as thinks of the Charivaris, one or other of the clan will suffer an undiagnosable twinge. The historic tribe, who rope-danced before Nero, Charlemagne, the Borgias, Napoleon . . . the Charivaris will now enter a long, slow eclipse. Finally, forced to emigrate, two millennia of circus art will peter out in a pizza concession on Mott Street.

Good night.

When the Colonel reluctantly consented to sack the Charivaris, Fevvers came down to earth, again, although she did not jump, as she’d jumped down at the Alhambra, but, like any other trapeze artiste, used the rope ladder provided. Her grumblings grew louder as she approached terra firma.

Walser, half-laughing, half-wondering, almost, yet not quite, convinced himself the woman had been in no more danger than a parrot might be if you pushed it off its perch. And though he was altogether unwilling to believe this might be so, still he was enchanted by the paradox: if she were indeed a
lusus naturae
, a prodigy, then – she was no longer a wonder.