Nights at the Circus (5 page)

‘So, with my wreath of roses, my baby bow of smouldering gilt and my arrows of unfledged desire, it was my job to sit in the alcove of the drawing-room in which the ladies introduced themselves to the gentlemen. Cupid, I was.’

‘With her baby winglets. Reigning over all.’

The women exchanged a nostalgic smile. Lizzie reached behind the screen for another bottle.

‘Let’s drink to little Cupid.’

‘I won’t say no,’ said Fevvers, proffering her glass.

‘So there I was,’ she went on, after an invigorating gulp, ‘I was a
tableau vivant
from the age of seven on. There I sat above the company –’

‘– as if she were the guardian cherub of the house –’

‘– and for seven long years, sir, I was nought but the painted, gilded
sign
of love, and you might say, that so it was I served my apprenticeship in
being looked at
– at being the object of the eye of the beholder. Until the time came when my, pardon me, woman’s bleeding started up along with the beginnings of great goings on in, as you might put it, the bosom department. But, though, like any young girl, I was much possessed with the marvellous blossoming of my until then reticent and undemanding flesh –’

‘– flat as an ironing board on both sides till thirteen and a ’arf, sir –’

‘– yet, startled as I was by
all that
, I was yet more moved and strangely puzzled by what, at first, manifested itself as no more than an infernal itching in my back.

‘At first, but a small, indeed, an almost pleasurable irritation, a kind of physical buzzing, sir, so that I’d rub my back against the legs of the chairs, as cats do, or else I’d get my Lizzie or another of the girls to scrub my back with a pumice stone or a nail brush whilst I was in the tub, for the itch was situated in the most inconvenient location just between my shoulder blades and I couldn’t get my fingers to it, no matter what.

‘And the itch increased. If it started in small ways, soon it was as if my back was all on fire and they covered me with soothing lotions and cooling powders and I would lie down to sleep with an ice-bag on my back but still nothing could calm the fearful storm in my erupting skin.

‘But all this was but the herald to the breaking out of my wings, you understand; although I did not know that, then.

‘For, as my titties swelled before, so these feathered appendages of mine swelled behind until, one morning in my fourteenth year, rising from my truckle bed in the attic as the friendly sound of Bow Bells came in through the window while the winter sun shone coolly down on that great city outside, which, had I but known it, would one day be at my feet –’

‘She spread,’ said Lizzie.

‘I spread,’ said Fevvers. ‘I had taken off my little white nightgown in order to perform my matutinal ablutions at my little dresser when there was a great ripping in the hindquarters of my chemise and, all unwilled by me, uncalled for, involuntarily, suddenly there broke forth my peculiar inheritance – these wings of mine! Still adolescent, as yet, not half their adult size, and moist, sticky, like freshly unfurled foliage on an April tree. But, all the same, wings.

‘No. There was no pain. Only bewilderment.’

‘She lets out a great shriek,’ said Lizzie, ‘that brought me up out of a dream – for I shared the attic with her, sir – and there she stood, stark as a stone, her ripped chemise around her ankles, and I would have thought I was still dreaming or else have died and gone to heaven, among the blessed angels; or, that she was the Annunciation of my menopause.’

‘What a shock!’ said Fevvers modestly. She pulled a coil of hair out of her chignon and wrapped it round her finger, twisting it and biting it thoughtfully; then, suddenly, she whirled away from the mirror on her revolving stool and leaned confidentially towards Walser.

‘Now, sir, I shall let you into a great secret, for your ears alone and not for publication, because I’ve taken a liking to your face, sir.’ At that, she batted her eyelids like a flirt. She lowered her voice to a whisper, so that Walser needs must lean forward in turn to hear her; her breath, flavoured with champagne, warmed his cheek.

‘I
dye
, sir!’

‘What?’

‘My feathers, sir! I dye them! Don’t think I bore such gaudy colours from puberty! I commenced to dye my feathers at the start of my public career on the trapeze, in order to simulate more perfectly the tropic bird. In my white girlhood and earliest years, I kept my natural colour. Which is a kind of blonde, only a little darker than the hair on my head, more the colour of that on my private ahem parts.

‘Now, that’s my dreadful secret, Mr Walser, and, to tell the whole truth and nothing but, the only deception which I practise on the public!’

To emphasise the point, she brought her empty glass down with such a bang on the dressing-table that the jars of fards and lotions jumped and rattled, expelling sharp gusts of cheap scent, and a cloud of powder rose up into the air from a jogged box, catching painfully in Walser’s throat so that he broke out coughing. Lizzie thumped his back. Fevvers disregarded these proceedings.

‘Lizzie, faced with this unexpected apparition, went shrieking downstairs in her shift –

‘“Nelson, Ma Nelson, come quick; our little bird’s about to fly away!” The good woman ran up two at a time and when she saw the way that things had gone with her pet chick, she laughed for pure pleasure.

‘“To think we’ve entertained an angel unawares!” she says.

‘“Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground.” And then she wept. That night, we threw away the bow and arrow and I posed, for the first time, as the Winged Victory, for, as you can see, I am designed on the grand scale and, even at fourteen, you could have made two Lizzies out of me.

‘Oh, sir, let me indulge my heart awhile and describe for you that beloved house which, although one of ill-fame, shielded me for so long from the tempests of misfortune and kept my youthful wings from dragging in the mud.

‘It was one of those old, square, red-brick houses with a plain, sober façade and a graceful, scallop-shaped fanlight over the front door that you may still find in those parts of London so far from the tide of fashion that they were never swept away. You could not look at Mother Nelson’s house without the thought, how the Age of Reason built it; and then you almost cried, to think the Age of Reason was over before it properly begun, and this harmonious relic tucked away behind the howling of the Ratcliffe Highway, like the germ of sense left in a drunkard’s mind.

‘A little flight of steps ran up to the front door, steps that Lizzie, faithful as any housewife in London, scrubbed and whitened every morning. An air of rectitude and propriety surrounded the place, with its tall windows over which we always kept the white blinds pulled down, as if its eyes were closed, as if the house were dreaming its own dream, or as if, on entering between the plain and well-proportioned pediments of the doorway, you entered a place that, like its mistress, turned a blind eye to the horrors of the outside, for, inside, was a place of privilege in which those who visited might extend the boundaries of their experience for a not unreasonable sum. It was a place in which rational desires might be rationally gratified; it was an old-fashioned house, so much so that, in those years, it had a way of seeming almost too
modern
for its own good, as the past so often does when it outruns the present.

‘As for the drawing-room, in which I played the living statue all my girlhood, it was on the first floor and you reached it by a mighty marble staircase that went up with a flourish like, pardon me, a whore’s bum. This staircase had a marvellous banister of wrought iron, all garlands of fruit, flowers and the heads of satyrs, with a wonderfully slippery marble handrail down which, in my light-hearted childhood I was accustomed, pigtails whisking behind me, to slide. Only those games I played before opening time, because nothing put off respectable patrons like those whom Nelson preferred so much as the sight of a child in a whorehouse.

‘The drawing-room was dominated by a handsome fireplace that must have been built by the same master in marble who put up the staircase. A brace of buxom, smiling goddesses supported this mantelpiece on the flats of their upraised palms, much as we women do uphold the whole world, when all is said and done. That fireplace might have served the Romans for an altar, or a tomb, and it was our very own domestic temple to Vesta for, every afternoon, Lizzie lit there a fire of sweet-scented woods whose natural aromatics she was accustomed to augment with burning perfumes of the best quality.’

‘As for me,’ interposed Lizzie, ‘I’d never been any great shakes as a whore, due to an inconvenient habit I had of
praying
, which came to me from my family and which I never could shake off.’

This was patently incredible and Walser remained incredulous, although Lizzie’s spitting black eyes dared disbelief.

‘After I converted a score or two of regular customers to the Church of Rome, Ma Nelson called me into her office one afternoon and said:

‘“Our Liz, all this will never do! You’ll make our poor girls redundant if you go on so!” She took me off regular duties and set me to work as housekeeper, which suited me very well, for the girls saw to it I got my share of the gratuities. And, every evening, as dusk came on, I lit the fire and tended it, until, by eight or nine in the evening, the drawing-room was snug as a groin –’

‘– and sweet as the room where burns the pyre of the Arabian bird, sweet and mauvish with smoke as hallucination itself, sir.

‘Now, Mr Walser, the day I first spread found me, as you might expect, much perplexed as to my own nature. Ma Nelson wrapped me up in a cashmere shawl off her own back, since I’d busted me shift, and Lizzie must needs ply her needle now, to alter my dress to fit my altered figure. As I sat on my bed in the attic waiting for a garment to be ready, I fell to contemplating the mystery of these soft, feathery growths that were already pulling my shoulders backwards with the weight and urgency of an invisible lover. Outside my window, in the cool sunlight, I saw the skirling seagulls who follow the winding course of the mighty Thames riding upon the currents of the air like spirits of the wind and so it came to me: if I have wings, then I must fly!

‘It was about the early afternoon and all quiet in the house, each woman in her own room busy with the various pastimes with which they occupied themselves before their labour began. I threw off that cashmere shawl and, spreading my new-fledged wings, I jumped into the air, hup.

‘But nothing came of it, sir, not even a
hover
, for I’d not got the knack of it, by any means, knew nothing of the theory of flight nor of the launch nor of the descent. I jumped up – and came down. Thump. And that was that.

‘So then I thought: there’s that marble fireplace down below, with a mantel some six feet off the ground upheld on either side by straining marble caryatids! And down to the parlour I forthwith softly trotted, for I thought, if I jumped off the mantelpiece whilst in full spread, sir, the air I trapped in my feathers would itself sustain me off the ground.

‘At first sight, you’d have thought this drawing-room was the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club of the utmost exclusivity, for Nelson encouraged an almost lugubrious degree of masculine good behaviour amongst her clients. She went in for leather armchairs and tables with
The Times
on them that Liz ironed every morning and the walls, covered with wine-red, figured damask, were hung with oil paintings of mythological subjects so crusted with age that the painted scenes within the heavy golden frames seemed full of the honey of ancient sunlight and it had crystallised to form a sweet scab. All these pictures, some of the Venetian school and no doubt very choice, were long since destroyed, along with Ma Nelson’s house itself, but there was one picture I shall always remember, for it is as if engraved upon my heart. It hung above the mantelpiece and I need hardly tell you that its subject was Leda and the Swan.

‘All those who saw her picture gallery wondered, but Nelson would never have her pictures cleaned. She always said, didn’t she, Liz, that Time himself, the father of transfigurations, was the greatest of artists, and his invisible hand must be respected at all costs, since it was in anonymous complicity with that of every human painter, so I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what might have been my own primal scene, my own conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty of feathers descending with imperious desire upon the half-stunned and yet herself impassioned girl.

‘When I asked Ma Nelson what this picture meant, she told me it was a demonstration of the blinding access of the grace of flesh.’

With this remarkable statement, she gave Walser a sideways, cunning glance from under eyelashes a little darker than her hair.

Curiouser and curiouser, thought Walser; a one-eyed, metaphysical madame, in Whitechapel, in possession of a Titian? Shall I believe it? Shall I pretend to believe in it?

‘Some bloke whose name I misremember give ’er the pictures,’ said Lizzie. ‘He liked her on account of how she shaved her pubes.’

Fevvers gave Lizzie a disapproving glance but spoiled the effect by giggling. Lizzie now crouched at Fevvers’ feet using her own handbag as a footstool, her huge handbag, an affair of cracked leather with catches of discoloured brass. Her hooked chin rested on the knees she clasped with liver-spotted hands. She crackled quietly with her own static; she missed nothing. The watchdog. Or . . . might it be possible, could it be . . . And Walser found himself asking himself: are they, in reality, mother and daughter?

Yet, if this were so, what Nordic giant feathered the one upon the swarthy, tiny other? And who or where in all this business was the Svengali who turned the girl into a piece of artifice, who had made of her a marvellous machine and equipped her with her story? Had the one-eyed whore, if she existed, been the first business manager of these weird accomplices?