Fanny was a pillar of strength. From Madame Schreck’s open safe she took the money that was owed on Fevvers’ account, and then, after some computations, a sufficient sum to recompense all the remaining five, including the Beauty, for the labour they had expended in that miserable place – not a penny more, not a penny less. Having dealt honestly with Madame Schreck’s estate; ‘now,’ she said, ‘let’s be off, sharpish, or else we’ll be accessories to the fact.’
‘What fact?’ I asked myself, gripped with fear. But we could do nothing except pray that Fevvers’ wit and ingenuity would keep her from harm. As to a place of refuge for we friendless ones, all I could think of was the address Fevvers herself once gave me, where I took the first and only cash Madame Schreck ever gave her. We must be gone, and quickly – before the first clients of the night arrived.
I carried the Beauty out to Madame Schreck’s carriage in the mews myself. I would take that carriage and the pony as the portion due to me; did not the slave deserve to inherit the means of escape? We arrived at Battersea just after midnight and those kind folk rose from their beds to give us a hospitable welcome, in spite of their distress at hearing of our beloved girl’s disappearance, and Isotta found couches, mattresses and blankets for us all.
The next day seemed interminable as, in a state of agitation that increased hourly, we waited for news of our lovely friend. Only after a long night’s watch had the house settled down for a few hours uneasy slumber when she miraculously returned.
Walser read this document, noted the scholarly handwriting, the firm signature, the all too checkable address. He handed it back to Lizzie humbly. She stowed it away again, with a pleased nod.
‘That Toussaint!’ she said. ‘He’s a lovely way with words.’
‘What has become of them all, sir?’ demanded Fevvers: and immediately answering herself, ‘Why, gone their ways! Isotta and Gianni, most loving parents themselves, persuaded the Wonder that no child can fall so far a mother nor father will not stoop to lift it up, again, so she presented herself again to her adopteds, who wept with joy to have her restored to the bosom of the family after so many years, when all their other fledglings had long left the nest. Albert/Albertina got a post as ladies’ maid with our Jenny and though s/he says s/he is much confined by female garments all the time, Jenny would not be without her treasure. Fanny returned to her native Yorkshire where, with the aid of her savings at Madame Schreck’s, she established an orphanage in a mill-town for the children of operatives killed in accidents on the looms, so now she has twenty lovely babies to call her “mama”. Happily, since I came into my good fortune, I have been able to interest a good friend, the academician, Sir R—. F—. in Cobwebs. He perceived her unique quality of vision and trained her hand to match her sight. Now she had a fine reputation as a painter in chiaroscuro, so you could say that, though she had not come out of the shadows, all the same, she had made the shadows work for her. As for the Beauty –’
‘– she is with us, still.’
Pause of three heartbeats.
‘She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movements under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she leads in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interruption of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those few necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate – a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world.
‘And, sir,’ concluded Fevvers, in a voice that now took on the sombre, majestic tones of a great organ, ‘we do believe . . . her dream will be the coming century.
‘And, oh God . . . how frequently she weeps!’
Followed a profound silence, as the women clutched hands, as if for comfort, and Walser shivered, for the dressing-room had grown cold as death.
Then, on the soundless air of night, now drifted to them the sound of Big Ben once again, but the wind must have changed direction a little for the first chimes were faint with distance, as if they came from very far away, and, when she heard them, Fevvers froze and ‘pointed’, just like a huge golden retriever. She thrust up her muzzle as if snuffing the air and the muscles in her neck bunched and clenched. One, two, three, four, five . . . six . . .
During the less-than-a-blink of time it took the last chime to die there came a vertiginous sensation, as if Walser and his companions and the very dressing-room itself were all at once precipitated down a vast chute. It took his breath away. As if the room that had, in some way, without his knowledge, been plucked out of its everyday, temporal continuum, had been held for a while above the spinning world and was now – dropped back into place.
‘Six o’clock! As late as that!’ cried Lizzie, springing to her feet with refreshed energy. But Fevvers seemed as if utterly overcome, exhausted to the point of collapse, quite suddenly, as if by the relaxation of tremendous amounts of energy. Her breast fluttered as if her heart wanted to fly out. Her heavy head hung down like a bell that has ceased tolling. She even seemed to have diminished in size, to have shrunk to proportions only a little more colossal than human. She closed her eyes and let out a long exhalation of breath. The colour left her cheeks and she looked haggard and very much aged in the colourless light of morning that gave the mauve glow of the gas mantles a lifeless and unnatural look. It was left to Lizzie to conclude the story, which she did with despatch.
‘After our joyful reunion,’ stated Lizzie briskly, ‘as we all sat lingering over breakfast, who should call in on us but Esmeralda and the Human Eel pushing an elver in a perambulator. “Tell you what, Fevvers,” she says. “You ever thought of the high trapeze?”’
Then Lizzie bounded up and began to fold and tidy the lingerie on the sofa, tacitly dismissing Walser. But Fevvers stirred a little, eyed Walser in the glass, wearily added a coda.
‘The rest is history. Esmeralda secured me that first engagement at the Cirque d’Hiver. No sooner did I venture on the high trapeze than I triumphed. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna . . . and now my own, beloved London. The first night here, at the Alhambra, after I’d climbed off-stage over a Snowdon of Bouquets, when Lizzie was taking off my make-up just as we were when you found us, comes a knocking on the door. And there’s a man in a billycock hat with a big paunch covered with a waistcoat made of Stars and Stripes, the jolly Old Glory itself, sir, and, right over his bellybutton, a bloody great dollar sign.
‘“Hi there, my feathered friend,” he says. “I’ve come to make your fortune.’”
She yawned, not like a whale, not like a lioness, but like a girl who has stayed up too long.
‘So I don’t doubt I’ll soon triumph in St Petersburg, in Tokyo, in Seattle, in San Francisco, Chicago, New York – wherever there’s a roofbeam high enough for my trapeze, sir. Now, if you’ve quite finished –’
Walser snapped his notebook shut. There was no room in it for one more word.
‘Yes, indeed. That’s fine, Miss Sophie, just fine.’
‘Fevvers,’ she correctly sharply. ‘Call me Fevvers. Now me and Liz must get home to bed.’
‘Can I call you a cab?’
‘Gracious, no! Waste good money on a cab? We always walks home after the show.’
But she tottered a little as she got up. The night had taken a heavy toll. She exchanged a last, inscrutable grimace with her warped reflection in the mirror.
‘Excuse me, sir, while I get some clothes on.’
‘I’ll wait at the stage door, ma’am,’ said Walser, stowing away his book. ‘Perhaps you ladies will allow me to escort you?’
They looked at each other.
‘Oh . . . he can come as far as the bridge, can’t he?’
The stage doorkeeper in his creaking leather coat was brewing tea on his
oil stove, stewing up tealeaves, milk and sugar all together, Indian style. Walser accepted a boiling jam-jar full of the stuff. The October morning grew lighter every moment but no brighter; it was a grey day of low cloud. The discarded orts of pleasure littered the pavement outside.
‘Spent all night with Fevvers, ’ave you?’ said the stage doorkeeper with a wink and a nudge. ‘Go on – don’t take offence, guv’nor. That Lizzie guards her like a watchdog. Besides, she’s a perfect lady, is our Fevvers.’
Yet, rolled up in a rusty black shawl, the big bones sticking through her face, dark stains under those blue eyes, her long hair roughly pinned up again, she looked like any street girl making her way home after an unsuccessful night, or even some girl rag-and-bone merchant, taking home a night’s dolorous scavenging in a sack on her back – the enormous burden, jutting out between her shoulders, that seemed to weigh her down. She sparked into a semblance of theatrical vivacity for the sake of the stage doorkeeper: ‘I’ll see you later, me old cock!’ but refused Walser’s offered arm, and they walked through Piccadilly in silence, among early risers on their way to work. They skirted Nelson’s Column, went down Whitehall. The cold air was not freshened by morning; there was an oppressive odour of soot and horseshit.
At the end of Whitehall, along the wide road, past the Mother of Parliaments, there came at a brisk trot a coal cart pulled by clattering, jingling drays, and, behind, an impromptu procession of women of the poorest class, without coats or wraps, in cotton pinafores, in draggled underskirts, worn carpet slippers on their bare feet, and there were shoeless little children too, running, scrambling after the carts, the girls and women with their pinafores outstretched to catch every little fragment of coal that might bounce out.
‘Oh, my lovely London!’ said Fevvers. ‘The shining city! The new Jerusalem!’
She spoke so flatly he could not tell whether she spoke ironically. She said nothing else. Walser was intrigued by such silence after such loquacity. It was as though she had taken him as far as she could go on the brazen trajectory of her voice, yarned him in knots, and then – stopped short. Dropped him.
Atop the sparkling tracery of the House, the gilt hands of Big Ben pointed to five minutes to seven. Both women looked up at the clock face and smiled a single, small smile of complicity of which Walser received the faded aftermath as she turned to shake his hand. A strong, firm, masculine grip. No gloves.
‘It’s been a pleasure, Mr Walser,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ve got enough to do your piece. If you have any further questions, you know where to find me. We can easily make our way home by ourselves from here.’
‘It’s been a pleasure,’ agreed Lizzie with an odd little ducking bow, proffering a glacé kid glove.
‘My pleasure, entirely,’ said Walser.
The minute hand of the great clock above them inched over the face. The women set out for the smoky south over Westminster Bridge against the clattering traffic that now streamed into town. Because of the difference in their heights, they could not walk arm in arm, so they held hands and, from a distance, looked like a blonde, heroic mother taking her little daughter home from some ill-fated expedition up west, their ages obscured, their relationship inverted. Their feet dragged slow as poverty yet that, too, was an illusion; pelted with diamonds, assaulted by pearls, she was too mean to take a cab.
The clock coughed up the prolegomena to its chime and then rang out the prelude to the hour. When the wind suddenly seized hold of Fevvers’ hair, tugged it from its pin and sent it flying over the sullen river in a wide, flaxen arc, he half expected her to unfurl too, all scarlet, crimson plumage, and clasping her tiny charge, her daughter, her mother, to her bosom, to whirl away up through the low ceiling of cloud, up and off. He shook his head, to clear away idle fancies.
Seven struck. Now the size of one big doll, one small doll, they reached the end of the bridge and looked back; he saw the pale wedges of their faces. Then traffic obscured them.
‘Cab, sir?’ The waiting horse blew a plume of oats over the top of the nosebag.
At his lodgings in Clerkenwell, Walser washed, shaved, changed his shirt and found, this morning, he preferred his landlady’s ingratiating if inept attempt at American coffee to the tea he usually drank; Lizzie had marinated his insides in strong tea, that night, until his oesophagus must be the colour of mahogany . . . He flicked through his notes. What a performance! Such style! Such vigour! And just how had the two women pulled off that piece of sleight-of-hand, or ear, rather, with the clocks? When he took out his own pocket-watch, he found, to his unsurprise, it had stopped short precisely at midnight.
But how had she done – or known – that?
Curiouser and curiouser.
A war correspondent between wars and a passionate amateur of the tall tale, he dropped in at his London office later that morning to find his chief brooding behind a green eyeshadow over the latest from South Africa.
‘How did you find the Cockney Venus?’
‘It’s the ambition,’ said Walser, ‘of every red-blooded American kid to run away with the circus.’
‘So?’ said his London chief.
‘I don’t think you realise just how much I’d like a break from hard news, chief. That last touch of yellow fever in Panama took more out of me than I thought. Keep me away from the battlefield for a while! I need to be refreshed. I need to have my sense of wonder polished up again. What would you say to a series of inside stories of the exotic, of the marvellous, of laughter and tears and thrills and all? What if, incognito, your correspondent follows the great confidence artiste in the history of the world to the world’s most fabulous cities? Through the trackless wastes of Siberia and then . . . even unto the Land of the Rising Sun?
‘Better still . . . why doesn’t your correspondent, incognito, sign up with Fevvers on Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour itself? The story straight from the Ringbark! Chief, let me invite you to spend a few nights at the circus!’
2
PETERSBURG
ONE
‘There was a pig,’ said the baboushka to Little Ivan, who perched, round-eyed, on a three-legged stool beside her in the kitchen as she blew on the charcoal underneath the samovar with a big pair of wooden bellows brightly painted with folk-art motifs of scrolls and flowers.
The toil-misshapen back of the baboushka humbly bowed before the bubbling urn in the impotently submissive obeisance of one who pleads for a respite or a mercy she knows in advance will not be forthcoming, and her hands, those worn, veiny hands that had involuntarily burnished the handles of the bellows over decades of use, those immemorial hands of hers slowly parted and came together again just as slowly, in a hypnotically reiterated gesture that was as if she were about to join her hands in prayer.
About to join her hands in prayer. But always, at the very last moment, as if it came to her there was something about the house that must be done first, she would start to part her hands again. Then Martha would turn back into Mary and protest to the Martha within her: what can be more important than praying? Nevertheless, when her hands were once more almost joined, that inner Martha recalled the Mary to the indeed perhaps more important thing, whatever it was . . . And so on. Had the bellows been invisible, such would have been the drama of the constantly repeated interruption of the sequence, so that, when the old woman blew on the charcoal with the bellows, it could have been, if a wind had come and whipped away the bellows, a little paradigm of the tension between the flesh and the spirit, although ‘tension’ would have been altogether too energetic a word for it, since her weariness modified the pace of this imaginary indecision to such an extent that, if you did not know her, you would think that she was lazy.
And more than this, her work suggested a kind of infinite incompletion – that a woman’s work is never done; how the work of all the Marthas, and all the Marys, too, all the work, both temporal and spiritual, in this world, and in preparation for the next, will never be over – always some conflicting demand
will occur to postpone indefinitely any and every task. So . . . there was no need to hurry!
Which was just as well, because she was . . . almost . . . worn out.
All Russia was contained within the thwarted circumscription of her movements; and much of the essence of her abused and withered femaleness. Symbol and woman, or symbolic woman, she crouched before the samovar.
The charcoal grew red, grew black, blackened and reddened to the rhythm of wheezing sighs that might just as well have come from the worn-out lungs of the baboushka as from her bellows. Her slow, sombre movements, her sombre, slow speech, were filled with the dignity of the hopeless.
‘There was . . .’ puff! . . . ‘a pig . . .’ puff! . . . ‘went to Petersburg . . .’
Petersburg! At that, the charcoal glowed and sizzled; Petersburg – the very name, enough to perk you up, even when you lived there; even the exhausted soul of Mother Russia stirred, a little.
St Petersburg, a beautiful city that does not exist any more. Today, another beautiful city of a different name bestrides the mighty Neva; on its site, St Petersburg once stood.
Russia is a sphinx. You grand immobility, antique, hieratic, one haunch squatting on Asia, the other on Europe, what exemplary destiny are you knitting out of the blood and sinew of history in your sleeping womb?
She does not answer. Riddles bounce off her sides, as gaily painted as those of a peasant troika.
Russia is a sphinx; St Petersburg, the beautiful smile of her face. Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations, the shimmering mirage in the Northern wilderness glimpsed for a breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea.