Nights at the Circus (4 page)

What made her remarkable as an
aerialiste
, however, was the speed – or, rather the lack of it – with which she performed even the climactic triple somersault. When the hack
aerialiste
, the everyday, wingless variety, performs the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool sixty miles an hour; Fevvers, however, contrived a contemplative and leisurely twenty-five, so that the packed theatre could enjoy the spectacle, as in slow motion, of every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled. Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot
mooch
along its trajectory; if it slackens its speed in mid-air, down it falls. But Fevvers, apparently, pottered along the invisible gangway between her trapezes with the portly dignity of a Trafalgar Square pigeon flapping from one proffered handful of corn to another, and then she turned head over heels three times, lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum.

(But surely, pondered Walser, a
real
bird would have too much sense to think of performing a triple somersault in the first place.)

Yet, apart from this disconcerting pact with gravity, which surely she made in the same way the Nepali fakir had made his, Walser observed that the girl went no further than any other trapeze artiste. She neither attempted nor achieved anything a wingless biped could not have performed, although she did it in a different way, and, as the Valkyries at last approached Valhalla, he was astonished to discover that it was the limitations of her act in themselves that made him briefly contemplate the unimaginable – that is, the absolute suspension of disbelief.

For, in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman – in the implausible event that such a thing existed – have to pretend she was an artificial one?

He smiled to himself at the paradox: in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. But – and Walser smiled to himself again, as he remembered his flutter of conviction that seeing was believing – what about her
belly button
? Hasn’t she just this minute told me she was hatched from an
egg
, not gestated
in utero
? The oviparous species are not, by definition, nourished by the placenta; therefore they feel no need of the umbilical cord . . . and, therefore, don’t bear the scar of its loss! Why isn’t the whole of London asking: does Fevvers have a belly button?

It was impossible to make out whether or not she had a navel during her act; Walser could recall, of her belly, only a pink, featureless expanse of stockinette fleshing. Whatever her wings were, her nakedness was certainly a stage illusion.

After she’d pulled off the triple somersault, the band performed the
coup de grâce
on Wagner, and stopped. Fevvers hung by one hand, waving and blowing kisses with the other, those famous wings of hers now drawn up behind her. Then she jumped right down to the ground, just dropped, just plummeted down, hitting the stage squarely on her enormous feet with an all too human thump only partially muffled by the roar of applause and cheers.

Bouquets pelt the stage. Since there is no second-hand market for flowers, she takes no notice of them. Her face, thickly coated with rouge and powder so that you can see how beautiful she is from the back row of the gallery, is wreathed in triumphant smiles; her white teeth are big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

She kisses her free hand to all. She folds up her quivering wings with a number of shivers, moues and grimaces as if she were putting away a naughty book. Some chorus boy or other trips on and hands her into her feather cloak that is as frail and vivid as those the natives of Florida used to make. Fevvers curtsies to the conductor with gigantic aplomb and goes on kissing her hand to the tumultuous applause as the curtain falls and the band strikes up ‘God save the Queen’. God save the mother of the obese and bearded princeling who has taken his place in the royal box twice nightly since Fevvers’ first night at the Alhambra, stroking his beard and meditating upon the erotic possibilities of her ability to hover and the problematic of his paunch vis-à-vis the missionary position.

The greasepaint floated off Fevvers’ face as Lizzie wiped away cold cream with cotton wool, scattering the soiled balls carelessly on the floor. Fevvers reappeared, flushed, to peer at herself eagerly in the mirror as if pleased and surprised to find herself again so robustly rosy-cheeked and shiny-eyed. Walser was surprised at her wholesome look: like an Iowa cornfield.

Lizzie dipped a velour puff in a box of bright peach-coloured powder and shook it over the girl’s face, to take off the shine. She picked up a hairbrush of yellow metal.

‘Can’t tell you who give ’er this,’ she announced conspiratorially waving the brush so that the small stones with which it was encrusted (in the design of the Prince of Wales’ feathers) scattered prisms of light. ‘Palace protocol. Dark secret. Comb and mirror to go with it. Solid, it is. What a shock I got when I got it valued. Fool and his money is soon parted. Goes straight into the bank tomorrow morning.
She’s
no fool. All the same, she can’t resist using it tonight.’

There was a hint of censure in Lizzie’s voice, as if there was nothing that she herself would find irresistible, but Fevvers eyed her hairbrush with a complacent and proprietorial air. For just one moment, she looked less generous.

‘Course,’ said Fevvers, ‘
he
never got nowhere.’

Her inaccessability was also legendary, even if, as Walser had already noted on his pad, she was prepared to make certain exceptions for exigent French dwarves. The maid untied the blue ribbon that kept in check the simmering wake of the young woman’s hair, which she laid over her left arm as if displaying a length of carpet and started to belabour vigorously. It was a sufficiently startling head of hair, yellow and inexhaustible as sand, thick as cream, sizzling and whispering under the brush. Fevvers’ head went back, her eyes half closed, she sighed with pleasure. Lizzie might have been grooming a palomino; yet Fevvers was a hump-backed horse.

That grubby dressing-gown, horribly caked with greasepaint round the neck . . . when Lizzie lifted up the armful of hair, you could see, under the splitting, rancid silk, her humps, her lumps, big as if she bore a bosom fore and aft, her conspicuous deformity, the twin hills of the growth she had put away for those hours she must spend in daylight or lamplight, out of the spotlight. So, on the street, at the soirée, at lunch in expensive restaurants with dukes, princes, captains of industry and punters of like kidney, she was always the cripple, even if she always drew the eye and people stood on chairs to see.

‘Who makes your frocks?’ the reporter in Walser asked percipiently. Lizzie stopped in mid-stroke; her mistress’s eyes burst open – whoosh! like blue umbrellas.

‘Nobody. I meself,’ said Fevvers sharply. ‘Liz helps.’

‘But ’er ’ats we purchase from the best modistes,’ asserted Lizzie suavely. ‘We got some lovely ’ats in Paris, didn’t we, darling? That leghorn, with the moss roses . . .’

‘I see his glass is empty.’

Walser allowed himself to be refilled before Lizzie stuffed her mouth with tortoiseshell pins and gave both hands to the task of erecting Fevvers’ chignon. The sound of the music hall at closing time clanked and echoed round them, gurgle of water in a pipe, chorus girls calling their goodnights as they scampered downstairs to the waiting hansoms of the stage-door Johnnies, somewhere the rattle of an out-of-tune piano. The lightbulbs round Fevvers’ mirror threw a naked and unkind light upon her face but could flush out no flaw in the classic cast of her features, unless their very size was a fault in itself, the flaw that made her vulgar.

It took a long time to pile up those two yards of golden hair. By the time the last pin went in, silence of night had fallen on the entire building.

Fevvers patted her bun with a satisfied air. Lizzie shook the champagne bottle, found it was empty, tossed it into a corner, took another from a crate stored behind the screen, popped it, refilled all glasses. Fevvers sipped and shuddered.

‘Warm.’

Lizzie peered in the toilet jug and tipped the melted contents into the bathwater.

‘No more ice,’ she said to Walser accusingly, as if it were his fault.

Perhaps, perhaps . . . my brain is turning to bubbles already, thought Walser, but I could almost swear I saw a fish, a little one, a herring, a sprat, a minnow, but wriggling, alive-oh, go into the bath when she tipped the jug. But he had no time to think about how his eyes were deceiving him because Fevvers now solemnly took up the interview shortly before the point where she’d left off.

‘Hatched,’ she said.

TWO

‘Hatched; by whom, I do not know. Who
laid
me is as much a mystery to me, sir, as the nature of my conception, my father and my mother both utterly unknown to me, and, some would say, unknown to nature, what’s more. But hatch out I did, and put in that basket of broken shells and straw in Whitechapel at the door of a certain
house
, know what I mean?’

As she reached for her glass, the dirty satin sleeve fell away from an arm as finely turned as the leg of the sofa on which Walser sat. Her hand shook slightly, as if with suppressed emotion.

‘And, as I told you, who was it but my Lizzie over there who stumbled over the mewing scrap of life that then I was whilst she’s assisting some customer off the premises and she brings me indoors and there I was reared by these kind women as if I was the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers. And that is the whole truth and nothing but, sir.

‘And never have I told it to a living man before.’

As Walser scribbled away, Fevvers squinted at his notebook in the mirror, as if attempting to interpret his shorthand by some magic means. Her composure seemed a little ruffled by his silence.

‘Come on, sir, now, will they let you print
that
in your newspapers? For these were women of the
worst class
and
defiled
.’

‘Manners in the New World are considerably more elastic than they are in the old, as you’ll be pleased to find, ma’am,’ said Walser evenly. ‘And I myself have known some pretty decent whores, some damn’ fine women, indeed, whom any man might have been proud to marry.’

‘Marriage? Pah!’ snapped Lizzie in a pet. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! D’you think a decent whore’d be proud to marry
you
, young man? Eh?’

‘Never mind, Lizzie, ’e means well. Here, is the boy still on? I’m starved to death, I’d pawn me gold hairbrush for some eel pies and a saveloy.’ She turned to Walser with gigantic coquetry. ‘Could you fancy an eel pie and a bit of mash, sir?’

The call-boy was rung for, proved to be still on duty and instantly despatched to the pie shop in the Strand by a Lizzie still stiff with affront. But she was soon mollified by the spread that arrived in a covered basket ten minutes later – hot meat pies with a glutinous ladleful of eel gravy on each; a Fujiyama of mashed potatoes; a swamp of dried peas cooked up again and served swimming in greenish liquor. Fevvers paid off the call-boy, waited for her change and tipped him with a kiss on his peachy, beardless cheek that left it blushing and a little greasy. The women fell to with a clatter of rented cutlery but Walser himself opted for another glass of tepid champagne.

‘English food . . . waaall, I find it’s an acquired taste; I account your native cuisine to be the eighth wonder of the world, ma’am.’

She gave him a queer look, as if she suspected he were teasing and, sooner or later, she would remember to pay him back for it, but her mouth was too full for a ripost as she tucked into this earthiest, coarsest cabbies’ fare with gargantuan enthusiasm. She gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she had a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. Impressed, Walser waited with the stubborn docility of his profession until at last her enormous appetite was satisfied; she wiped her lips on her sleeve and belched. She gave him another queer look, as if she half hoped the spectacle of her gluttony would drive him away, but, since he remained, notebook on knee, pencil in hand, sitting on her sofa, she sighed, belched again, and continued:

‘In a brothel bred, sir, and proud of it, if it comes to the point, for never a bad word nor an unkindness did I have from my mothers but I was given the best of everything and always tucked up in my little bed in the attic by eight o’clock of the evening before the big spenders who broke the glasses arrived.

‘So there I was –’

‘– there she was, the little innocent, with her yellow pigtails that I used to tie up with blue ribbons, to match her big blue eyes –’

‘– there I was and so I grew, and the little downy buds on my shoulders grew with me, until, one day, when I was seven years old, Nelson –’

‘Nelson?’ queried Walser.

Fevvers and Lizzie raised their eyes reverently in unison to the ceiling.

‘Nelson, rest her soul, yes. Wasn’t she the madame! And always called Nelson, on account of her one eye, a sailor having put the other out with a broken bottle the year of the Great Exhibition, poor thing. Now Nelson ran a seemly, decent house and never thought of putting me to the trade while I was still in short petticoats, as others might have. But, one evening, when she and my Lizzie were giving me my bath in front of the fire, as she was soaping my little feathery buds very tenderly, she cries out: “Cupid! Why, here’s our very own Cupid in the living flesh!” And that was how I first earned my crust, for my Lizzie made me a little wreath of pink cotton roses and put it on my head and gave me a toy bow and arrow –’

‘– that I gilded up for her,’ said Lizzie. ‘Real gold leaf, it was. You put the leaf on the palm of your hand. Then you blow it ever so lightly onto the surface of whatever it is you want gilded. Gently does it. Blow it. Gawd, it was a bother.’