‘In Paris, they called me l’Ange Anglaise, the English Angel, “not English but an angel”, as the old saint said,’ she’d told him, jerking her head at that favourite poster which, she’d remarked off-handedly, had been scrawled on the stone by ‘some Frog dwarf who asked me to piddle on his thingy before he’d get his crayons so much as out sparing your blushes’. Then – ‘a touch of sham?’ – she’d popped the cork of a chilled magnum of champagne between her teeth. A hissing flute of bubbly stood beside her own elbow on the dressing-table, the still-crepitating bottle lodged negligently in the toilet jug, packed in ice that must have come from a fishmonger’s for a shiny scale or two stayed trapped within the chunks. And this twice-used ice must surely be the source of the marine aroma – something fishy about the Cockney Venus – that underlay the hot, solid composite of perfume, sweat, greasepaint and raw, leaking gas that made you feel you breathed the air in Fevvers’ dressing-room in lumps.
One lash off, one lash on, Fevvers leaned back a little to scan the asymmetric splendour reflected in her mirror with impersonal gratification.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘after my conquests on the continent’ (which she pronounced, ‘congtinong’) ‘here’s the prodigal daughter home again to London, my lovely London that I love so much. London – as dear old Dan Leno calls it, “a little village on the Thames of which the principal industries are the music hall and the confidence trick”.’
She tipped the young reporter a huge wink in the ambiguity of the mirror and briskly stripped the other set of false eyelashes.
Her native city welcomed her home with such delirium that the Illustrated London News dubbed the phenomenon, ‘Fevvermania’. Everywhere you saw her picture; the shops were crammed with ‘Fevvers’ garters, stockings, fans, cigars, shaving soap . . . She even lent it to a brand of baking powder; if you added a spoonful of the stuff, up in the air went your sponge cake, just as she did. Heroine of the hour, object of learned discussion and profane surmise, this Helen launched a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side. (‘Have you heard the one about how Fevvers got it up for the travelling salesman . . .’) Her name was on the lips of all, from duchess to costermonger: ‘Have you seen Fevvers?’ And then: ‘How does she do it?’ And then: ‘Do you think she’s real?’
The young reporter wanted to keep his wits about him so he juggled with glass, notebook and pencil, surreptitiously looking for a place to stow the glass where she could not keep filling it – perhaps on that black iron mantelpiece whose brutal corner, jutting out over his perch on the horsehair sofa, promised to brain him if he made a sudden movement. His quarry had him effectively trapped. His attempts to get rid of the damn’ glass only succeeded in dislodging a noisy torrent of concealed billets doux, bringing with them from the mantelpiece a writhing snakes’ nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet, black, that introduced a powerful note of stale feet, final ingredient in the highly personal aroma, ‘essence of Fevvers’, that clogged the room. When she got round to it, she might well bottle the smell, and sell it. She never missed a chance.
Fevvers ignored his discomfiture.
Perhaps the stockings had descended in order to make common cause with the other elaborately intimate garments, wormy with ribbons, carious with lace, redolent of use, that she hurled round the room apparently at random during the course of the many dressings and undressings which her profession demanded. A large pair of frilly drawers, evidently fallen where they had light-heartedly been tossed, draped some object, clock or marble bust or funerary urn, anything was possible since it was obscured completely. A redoubtable corset of the kind called an Iron Maiden poked out of the empty coalscuttle like the pink husk of a giant prawn emerging from its den, trailing long laces like several sets of legs. The room, in all, was a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor, sufficient, in its homely way, to intimidate a young man who had led a less sheltered life than this one.
His name was Jack Walser. Himself, he hailed from California, from the other side of a world all of whose four corners he had knocked about for most of his five-and-twenty summers – a picaresque career which rubbed off his own rough edges; now he boasts the smoothest of manners and you would see in his appearance nothing of the scapegrace urchin who, long ago, stowed away on a steamer bound from ’Frisco to Shanghai. In the course of his adventuring, he discovered in himself a talent with words, and an even greater aptitude for finding himself in the right place at the right time. So he stumbled upon his profession, and, at this time in his life, he filed copy to a New York newspaper for a living, so he could travel wherever he pleased whilst retaining the privileged irresponsibility of the journalist, the professional necessity to see all and believe nothing which cheerfully combined, in Walser’s personality, with a characteristically American generosity towards the brazen lie. His avocation suited him right down to the ground on which he took good care to keep his feet. Call him Ishmael; but Ishmael with an expense account, and, besides, a thatch of unruly flaxen hair, a ruddy, pleasant, square-jawed face and eyes the cool grey of scepticism.
Yet there remained something a little unfinished about him, still. He was like a handsome house that has been let, furnished. There were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal touches to his personality, as if his habit of suspending belief extended even unto his own being. I say he had a propensity for ‘finding himself in the right place at the right time’; yet it was almost as if he himself were an objet trouvé, for, subjectively, himself he never found, since it was not his self which he sought.
He would have called himself a ‘man of action’. He subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his bones rattle. That was how he knew he was alive.
So Walser survived the plague in Setzuan, the assegai in Africa, a sharp dose of buggery in a bedouin tent beside the Damascus road and much more, yet none of this had altered to any great degree the invisible child inside the man, who indeed remained the same dauntless lad who used to haunt Fisherman’s Wharf hungrily eyeing the tangled sails upon the water until at last he, too, went off with the tide towards an endless promise. Walser had not experienced his experience as experience; sandpaper his outsides as experience might, his inwardness had been left untouched. In all his young life, he had not felt so much as one single quiver of introspection. If he was afraid of nothing, it was not because he was brave; like the boy in the fairy story who does not know how to shiver, Walser did not know how to be afraid. So his habitual disengagement was involuntary; it was not the result of judgment, since judgment involves the positives and negatives of belief.
He was a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness. That was why he was a good reporter. And yet the kaleidoscope was growing a little weary with all the spinning; war and disaster had not quite succeeded in fulfilling that promise which the future once seemed to hold, and, for the moment, still shaky from a recent tussle with yellow fever, he was taking it a little easy, concentrating on those ‘human interest’ angles that, hitherto, had eluded him.
Since he was a good reporter, he was necessarily a connoisseur of the tall tale. So now he was in London he went to talk to Fevvers, for a series of interviews tentatively entitled: ‘Great Humbugs of the World’.
Free and easy as his American manners were, they met their match in those of the aerialiste, who now shifted from one buttock to the other and – ‘better out than in, sir’ – let a ripping fart ring round the room. She peered across her shoulder, again, to see how he took that. Under the screen of her bonhomerie – bonnefemmerie? – he noted she was wary. He cracked her a white grin. He relished this commission!
On that European tour of hers, Parisians shot themselves in droves for her sake; not just Lautrec but all the post-impressionists vied to paint her; Willy gave her supper and she gave Colette some good advice. Alfred Jarry proposed marriage. When she arrived at the railway station in Cologne, a cheering bevy of students unhitched her horses and pulled her carriage to the hot
el themselves. In Berlin, her photograph was displayed everywhere in the newsagents’ windows next to that of the Kaiser. In Vienna, she deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves wholeheartedly to psychoanalysis. Everywhere she went, rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported in the press and the King of Portugal gave her a skipping rope of egg-shaped pearls, which she banked.
Now all London lies beneath her flying feet; and, the very morning of this self-same October’s day, in this very dressing-room, here, in the Alhambra Music Hall, among her dirty underwear, has she not signed a six-figure contract for a Grand Imperial Tour, to Russia and then Japan, during which she will astonish a brace of emperors? And, from Yokohama, she will then ship to Seattle, for the start of a Grand Democratic Tour of the United States of America.
All across the Union, audiences clamour for her arrival, which will coincide with that of the new century.
For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history. It is the final, waning, season of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine. And Fevvers has all the éclat of a new era about to take off.
Walser is here, ostensibly, to ‘puff’ her; and, if it is humanly possible, to explode her, either as well as, or instead of. Though do not think the revelation she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it. If she isn’t suspect, where’s the controversy? What’s the news?
‘Ready for another snifter?’ She pulled the dripping bottle from the scaly ice.
At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel. At six feet two in her stockings, she would have to give Walser a couple of inches in order to match him and, though they said she was ‘divinely tall’, there was, off-stage, not much of the divine about her unless there were gin palaces in heaven where she might preside behind the bar. Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish, had been thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal, which was just as well if she were to function as the democratically elected divinity of the imminent century of the Common Man.
She invitingly shook the bottle until it ejaculated afresh. ‘Put hairs on your chest!’ Walser, smiling, covered his glass up with his hand. ‘I’ve hairs on my chest already, ma’am.’
She chuckled with appreciation and topped herself up with such a lavish hand that foam spilled into her pot of dry rouge, there to hiss and splutter in a bloody froth. It was impossible to imagine any gesture of hers that did not have that kind of grand, vulgar, careless generosity about it; there was enough of her to go round, and some to spare. You did not think of calculation when you saw her, so finely judged was her performance. You’d never think she dreamed, at nights, of bank accounts, or that, to her, the music of the spheres was the jingling of cash registers. Even Walser did not guess that.
‘About your name . . .’ Walser hinted, pencil at the ready.
She fortified herself with a gulp of champagne.
‘When I was a baby, you could have distinguished me in a crowd of foundlings only by just this little bit of down, of yellow fluff, on my back, on top of both my shoulder blades. Just like the fluff on a chick, it was. And she who found me on the steps at Wapping, me in the laundry basket in which persons unknown left me, a little babe most lovingly packed up in new straw sweetly sleeping among a litter of broken eggshells, she who stumbled over this poor, abandoned creature clasped me at that moment in her arms out of the abundant goodness of her heart and took me in.
‘Where, indoors, unpacking me, unwrapping my shawl, witnessing the sleepy, milky, silky fledgling, all the girls said: “Looks like the little thing’s going to sprout Fevvers!” Ain’t that so, Lizzie,’ she appealed to her dresser.
Hitherto, this woman had taken no part in the interview but stood stiffly beside the mirror holding a glass of wine like a weapon, eyeing Jack Walser as scrupulously as if she were attempting to assess to the last farthing just how much money he had in his wallet. Now Lizzie chimed in, in a dark brown voice and a curious accent, unfamiliar to Walser, that was, had he known it, that of London-born Italians, with its double-barrelled diphthongs and glottal stops.
‘That is so, indeed, sir, for wasn’t I myself the one that found her? “Fevvers”, we named her, and so she will be till the end of the chapter, though when we took her down to Clement Dane’s to have her christened, the vicar said he’d never heard of such a name as Fevvers, so Sophie suffices for her legal handle.
‘Let’s get your make-up off, love.’
Lizzie was a tiny, wizened, gnome-like apparition who might have been any age between thirty and fifty; snapping, black eyes, sallow skin, an incipient moustache on the upper lip and a close-cropped frizzle of tri-coloured hair – bright grey at the roots, stark grey in between, burnt with henna at the tips. The shoulders of her skimpy, decent, black dress were white with dandruff. She had a brisk air of bristle, like a terrier bitch. There was ex-whore written all over her. Excavating a glass jar from the rubble on the dressing-table, she dug out a handful of cold cream with her crooked claw and slapped it, splat! on Fevvers’ face.
‘You ’ave a spot more wine, ducky, while you’re waiting,’ she offered Walser, scouring away at her charge with a wad of cotton wool. ‘It didn’t cost us nothing. Some jook give it you, didn’t ’e. There, darling . . .’ wiping off the cold cream, suddenly, disconcertingly, tenderly caressing the aerialiste with the endearment.
‘It was that French jook,’ said Fevvers, emerging beefsteak red and gleaming. ‘Only the one crate, the mean bastard. Have a drop more, for Gawd’s sake, young feller, we’re leaving you behind! Can’t have the ladies pissed on their lonesome, can we? What kind of a gent are you?’
Extraordinarily raucous and metallic voice; clanging of contralto or even baritone dustbins. She submerged beneath another fistful of cold cream and there was a lengthy pause.
Oddly enough, in spite of the mess, which resembled the aftermath of an explosion in a corsetière’s Fevvers’ dressing-room was notable for its anonymity. Only the huge poster with the scrawled message in charcoal: Toujours, Toulouse, and that was only self-advertisement, a reminder to the visitor of that part of herself which, off-stage, she kept concealed. Apart from that, not even a framed photograph propped amongst the unguents on her dressing-table, just a bunch of Parma violets stuck in a jam-jar, presumably floral overspill from the mantelpiece. No lucky mascots, no black china cats nor pots of white heather. Neither personal luxuries such as armchairs or rugs. Nothing to give her away. A star’s dressing-room, mean as a kitchenmaid’s attic. The only bits of herself she’d impressed on her surroundings were those few blonde hairs striating the cake of Pears transparent soap in the cracked saucer on the deal washstand.
The blunt end of an enamelled hip bath full of suds of earlier ablutions stuck out from behind a canvas screen, over which was thrown a dangling set of pink fleshings so that at first glance you might have thought Fevvers had just flayed herself. If her towering headdress of dyed ostrich plumes were unceremoniously shoved into the grate, Lizzie had treated the other garment in which her mistress made her first appearance before her audience with more respect, had shaken out the robe of red and purple feathers, put it on a wooden hanger and hung it from a nail at the back of the dressing-room door, where its ciliate fringes shivered continually in the draught from the ill-fitting windows.
On the stage of the Alhambra, when the curtain went up, there she was, prone in a feathery heap under this garment, behind tinsel bars, while the band in the pit sawed and brayed away at ‘Only a bird in a gilded cage’. How kitsch, how apt the melody; it pointed up the element of the meretricious in the spectacle, reminded you the girl was rumoured to have started her career in freak shows. (Check, noted Walser.) While the band played on, slowly, slowly, she got to her knees, then to her feet, still muffled up in her voluminous cape, that cre
sted helmet of red and purple plumes on her head; she began to twist the shiny strings of her frail cage in a perfunctory way, mewing faintly to be let out.
A breath of stale night air rippled the pile on the red plush banquettes of the Alhambra, stroked the cheeks of the plaster cherubs that upheld the monumental swags above the stage.
From aloft, they lowered her trapezes.
As if a glimpse of the things inspired her to a fresh access of energy, she seized hold of the bars in a firm grip and, to the accompaniment of a drum-roll, parted them. She stepped through the gap with elaborate and uncharacteristic daintiness. The gilded cage whisked up into the flies, tangling for a moment with the trapeze.
She flung off her mantle and cast it aside. There she was.
In her pink fleshings, her breastbone stuck out like the prow of a ship; the Iron Maiden cantilevered her bosom whilst paring down her waist to almost nothing, so she looked as if she might snap in two at any careless movement. The leotard was adorned with a spangle of sequins on her crotch and nipples, nothing else. Her hair was hidden away under the dyed plumes that added a good eighteen inches to her already immense height. On her back she bore an airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo. On her red mouth there was an artificial smile.
Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch.
She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen, not handled. Look! Hands off!
LOOK AT ME!
She rose up on tiptoe and slowly twirled round, giving the spectators a comprehensive view of her back: seeing is believing. Then she spread out her superb, heavy arms in a backwards gesture of benediction and, as she did so, her wings spread, too, a polychromatic unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess on the same diet that makes flamingoes pink.