Nights at the Circus (6 page)

He turned a page in his notebook.

‘Imagine me, sir, tripping in nothing but Ma Nelson’s shawl into that drawing-room where the shutters were bolted tight, the crimson velvet curtains drawn, all still simulating the dark night of pleasure although the candles were burnt out in the crystal sconces. Last night’s fragrant fire was but charred sticks in the hearth and glasses in which remained only the flat dregs of dissipation lay where they had fallen on the Bokhara carpet. The flimsy light of the farthing dip I carried with me touched the majesty of the swan-god on the wall and made me dream, dream and dare.

‘Well grown though I was, yet I had to pull a chair to the mantelpiece in order to climb up and take down the French gilt clock that stood there in a glass case. This clock was, you might say, the sign, or signifier of Ma Nelson’s little private realm. It was a figure of Father Time with a scythe in one hand and a skull in the other above a face on which the hands stood always at either midnight or noon, the minute hand and the hour hand folded perpetually together as if in prayer, for Ma Nelson said the clock in her reception room must show the dead centre of the day or night, the shadowless hour, the hour of vision and revelation, the still hour in the centre of the storm of time.

‘She was a strange one, Ma Nelson.’

Walser could well believe it.

‘I picked up the old clock to give me room to move and set it down with care by the disordered hearth. As I did so, the antique, defunct mechanism let out a faint, melodious twang, as if resounding with clockwork encouragement. Then I climbed up and stood where Father Time had stood and, like a man about to hang himself, I kicked away the chair so that I would not be tempted to jump down upon it.

‘What a long way down the floor looked! It was only a few feet below, you understand, no great distance in itself – yet it yawned before me like a chasm, and, indeed, you might say that this gulf now before me represented the grand abyss, the poignant divide, that would henceforth separate me from common humanity.’

At that, she turned her immense eyes upon him, those eyes ‘made for the stage’ whose messages could be read from standing room in the gods. Night had darkened their colour; their irises were now purple, matching the Parma violets in front of her mirror, and the pupils had grown so fat on darkness that the entire dressing-room and all those within it could have vanished without trace inside those compelling voids. Walser felt the strangest sensation, as if these eyes of the
aerialiste
were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold.

Surprised by his own confusion, he gave his mind a quick shake to refresh its pragmatism. She lowered her eyelids, as if she knew enough was enough, and took a sip of now flat champagne before she continued. Her eyes reverted once again to the simple condition of a pair of blue eyes.

‘I stood upon the mantelpiece and I gave a little shiver, for it was perishing cold in there before Lizzie lit the fire and the carpet looked further away than ever. But then, thinks I, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And behind me, truly, sir, upon the wall, I could have sworn I heard, caught in time’s cobweb but, all the same, audible, the strenuous beating of great, white wings. So I spread. And, closing my eyes, I precipitated myself forward, throwing myself entirely on the mercy of gravity.’

She fell silent for a moment and runnelled the dirty satin stretched over her knees with her fingernail.

‘And, sir – I fell.

‘Like Lucifer, I fell. Down, down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the Persian rug below me, flat on my face amongst those blooms and beasts that never graced no natural forest, those creatures of dream and abstraction not unlike myself, Mr Walser. And then I knew I was not yet ready to bear on my back the great burden of my unnaturalness.’

She paused for precisely three heartbeats.

‘I fell . . . and give my poor nose such a whack on the brass fireguard –’

‘– and so I found her, when I come in to make up the fire, bum in the air and her little blonde wings still fluttering, poor duck, and though she’d taken such a tumble and near busted her nose in half and oh! how it was bleeding, not one cry did she utter, not one, brave little thing that she was; nor did she shed a single tear.’

‘What did I care about my bloody nose, sir?’ cried Fevvers passionately. ‘For, for one brief moment – one lapse or stutter of time so fleeting that the old French clock, had it been in motion, could never have recorded it on its clumsy cogs and springs, for just the smallest instant no longer than the briefest flutter of a butterfly . . . I’d hovered.

‘Yes. Hovered. Only for so short a while I could almost have thought I’d imagined it, for it was that sensation that comes to us, sometimes, on the edge of sleep . . . and yet, sir, for however short a while, the air had risen up beneath my adolescent wings and denied to me the downward pull of the great, round world, to which, hitherto, all human things had necessarily clung.’

‘Since I was the housekeeper,’ interjected Lizzie, ‘happily I carried all the keys of the house in a ring on my belt and when I comes chinking into the parlour with my armful of sandalwood, I had the remedy for her bloody nose to hand, I slapped the front door key between her wings, it was a foot long and cold as hell. The flow stopped from shock. Then I mops her up with my apron and takes her down to the kitchen, in the warm, wraps her up in a blanket and anoints her abrasions with Germoline, slaps on a bit of sticking plaster here and there and, when she’s as good as new, she tells her Lizzie all about the peculiar sensations she felt when she launched herself off the mantelpiece.

‘And I was full of wonder, sir.’

‘But, though now I knew I could mount on the air and it would hold me up, the method of the act of flight itself was unknown to me. As babies needs must learn to walk so must I needs learn to conquer the alien element and not only did I need to know the powers of the limitations of my feathery limbs but I must study, too, the airy medium that was henceforth to be my second home as he who would a mariner be needs to construe the mighty currents, the tides and whirlpools, all the whims and moods and conflicting temperaments of the watery parts of the world.

‘I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds.

‘All this took place in the first part of spring, towards the end of the month of February, when the birds were just waking from their winter lethargy. As spring brought out the buds on the daffodils in our window-boxes, so the London pigeons started up their courtships, the male puffing out his bosom and strutting after the female in his comic fashion. And it so happened that the pigeons built a nest upon the pediment outside our attic window and laid their eggs in it. When the wee pidgies hatched out, Lizzie and I watched them with more care than you can conceive of. We saw how the mother pigeon taught her babies to totter along the edge of the wall, observed in the minutest detail how she gave them mute instructions to use those
aerial arms
of theirs, their joints, their wrists, their elbows, to imitate those actions of her own which were, in fact, I realised, not dissimilar to those of a human swimmer. But do not think I carried out these studies on my own; although she was flightless herself, my Lizzie took it upon herself the role of bird-mother.

‘In those quiet hours of the afternoon, while the friends and sisters that we lived with bent over their books, Lizzie constructed a graph on squared paper in order to account for the great difference in weight between a well-formed human female in her fourteenth year and a tiny pigeonlet, so that we should know to what height I might soar without tempting the fate of Icarus. All this while, as the months passed, I grew bigger and stronger, stronger and bigger, until Liz was forced to put aside her mathematics in order to make me an entire new set of dresses to accommodate the remarkable development of my upper body.’

‘I’ll say this for Ma Nelson, she paid up all expenses on the nail, out of pure love of our little kiddie and what’s more, she thought up the scheme, how we should put it round she was a ’unchback. Yes.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir. Every night, I mimicked the Winged Victory in the drawing-room niche and was the cynosure of all eyes but Nelson made it known that those shining golden wings of mine were stuck over a hump with a strong adhesive and did not belong to me at all so I was spared the indignity of curiosity. And though I now began to receive many, many offers for first bite at the cherry, offers running into four figures, sir, yet Nelson refused them all for fear of letting the cat out of the bag.’

‘She was a proper lady,’ said Lizzie. ‘Nelson was a good ’un, she was.’

‘She was,’ concurred Fevvers. ‘She had the one peculiarity, sir; due to her soubriquet, or nickname, she always dressed in the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. Not that she ever missed a trick, her one eye sharp as a needle, and always used to say, “I keep a tight little ship.” Her ship, her ship of battle though sometimes she’d laugh and say, “It was a pirate ship, and went under false colours,” her barque of pleasure that was moored, of all unlikely places, in the sluggish Thames.’

Lizzie fixed Walser with her glittering eye and seized the narrative between her teeth.

‘It was from the, as it were, top-sail or crows’ nest of this barge that my girl made her first ascent. And this is how it came about: –

‘Imagine my surprise, one bright June morning, as I watched my pigeon family with my customary diligence, to see, as one of the little creatures teetered on the brink of the pediment looking for all the world like a swimmer debating with himself as to whether the water was warm enough for him – why, as it dithered there, its loving mother came right up behind it and shoved it clean off the edge!

‘First it dropped like a stone, so that my heart sank with it, and I let out a mournful cry, but, almost before that cry left my lips, all its lessons must have rushed back into its little head at once for suddenly it soared upwards towards the sun with a flash of white, unfurled wing, and was never seen no more.

‘So I says to Fevvers: “Nothing to it, my dear, but your Liz must shove you off the roof.”’

‘To me,’ said Fevvers, ‘it seemed that Lizzie, by proposing thus to thrust me into the free embrace of the whirling air, was arranging my marriage to the wind itself.’

She swung round on her piano stool and presented Walser with a face of such bridal radiance that he blinked.

‘Yes! I must be the bride of that wild, sightless, fleshless rover, or else could not exist, sir.

‘Nelson’s house was some five storeys high and there was a neat little garden at the back of it that went down to the river. There was a trapdoor leading to a loft in the ceiling of our attic, and another trapdoor in the ceiling of the loft that gave directly on the roof itself. So, one night in June, or, rather, early morning, about four or five, a night without a moon – for, like sorceresses, we required the dark and privacy for our doings – out on the tiles crawls Lizzie and her apprentice.’

‘Midsummer,’ said Lizzie. ‘Either Midsummer’s Night, or else very early on Midsummer Morning. Don’t you remember, darling?’

‘Midsummer, yes. The year’s green hinge. Yes, Liz, I remember.’

Pause of a single heartbeat.

‘The business of the house was over. The last cab had rolled away with the last customer too poor to stay the night and all behind the drawn curtains were at long last sleeping. Even those thieves, cut-throats and night-prowlers who stalked the mean streets about us had gone home to their beds, either pleased with their prey or not, depending on their luck.

‘It seemed a hush of expectation filled the city, that all was waiting in an exquisite tension of silence for some unparalleled event.’

‘She, although it was a chilly night, had not a stitch on her for we feared that any item of clothing might impede the lively movement of the body. Out on to the tiles we crawled and the little wind that lives in high places came and prowled around the chimneys; it was soft, cool weather and my pretty one came out in gooseflesh, didn’t you, such shivering. The roof had only a gentle slope on it so we crawled down to the gutter, from which side of the house we could see Old Father Thames, shining like black oilcloth wherever the bobbing mooring lights of the watermen touched him.’

‘Now it came to it, I was seized with a great fear, not only a fear that we might discover the hard way that my wings were as those of the hen, or as the vestigial appendages of the ostrich, that these wings were in themselves a kind of physical deceit, intended for show and not for use, like beauty in some women, sir. No; I was not afraid only because the morning light already poking up the skirt of the sky might find me, when its fingers tickled the house, lying only a bag of broken bone in Ma Nelson’s garden. Mingled with the simple fear of physical harm, there was a strange terror in my bosom that made me cling, at the last gasp of time, to Lizzie’s skirts and beg her to abandon our project – for I suffered the greatest conceivable terror of the irreparable
difference
with which success in the attempt would mark me.

‘I feared a wound not of the body but the soul, sir, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind.

‘I feared the proof of my own singularity.’

‘Yet, if it could speak, would not any wise child cry out from the womb: “Keep me in the darkness here! keep me warm! keep me in contingency!” But nature will not be denied. So this young creature cried out to me, that she would not be what she must become, and, though her pleading moved me until tears blinded my own eyes, I knew that what will be, must be and so – I pushed.’

‘The transparent arms of the wind received the virgin.