He squinted at Sybil ruminatively, assailed by the first doubts of her integrity: that there might be some solidarity amongst the dumb beasts, that they could form a pact of some kind against him, was a disturbing possibility that, hitherto, never entered his mind. Finally he grudgingly extended his hand to the Professor.
‘Gentleman’s handshake is his bond where I come from. Oh. I see. Not where you come from. Well –’
Reluctantly he sat down at the desk and wrote out a new contract, but, even so, he was forced to strike out a brace of clauses and allow the Professor to attach a codicil before the chimp would sign. Refusing so much as a bite of one of Sybil’s apples to clinch the deal, the Professor roared off, by the door this time, leaving the Colonel much vexed.
‘Pork and beans,’ he threatened Sybil. ‘Spare-ribs. Hickory-smoked ham.’
But she jumped back upon her cushion and closed her eyes purposefully, brooking no further discussion, although the Colonel might have concluded his shave with even less equanimity had he known that, in the foyer, on his way out, the Professor had enlisted the aid of a passing Lizzie in obtaining from the desk clerk a copy of Cook’s International Rail Timetable.
NINE
To wash down the caviare-stuffed pancakes and sour cream, the jellied carp, marinated mushrooms and smoked salmon, the Colonel preferred bourbon to vodka. After that, he found bourbon made the borsht go down better. Fevvers had some white burgundy with the first course, red burgundy with the soup, and plied her silverware with a will. An old hand at seduction dinners, she believed in making a hearty meal and the Colonel spared no expense. Roast goose with red cabbage and apples? She passed on that, however, choosing venison, instead, and changed to a chateau-bottled claret. The Colonel stuck to bourbon, and now confined his eating to crumbs from the bread rolls which he agitated with nervous fingers. Fevvers, however, found room for ice-cream, to finish up, plus a glass of Chateau d’Yquem, belched com-panionably and nodded when he, red-faced and already over-primed for the occasion, offered her a goodnight night-cap in his suite.
She enjoyed well-chilled champagne while the impresario lapsed into slumber on the couch beside her. Removing the bourbon bottle from his fist, she poked curiously into the aperture of his fly, which he’d just fumbled open before he passed out, and withdrew a string of little silk American flags. Sybil gave a reproachful grunt.
‘How did it go?’ enquired Lizzie in their own drawing-room, thick with the scent of hot-house flowers and the smell of the melted wax which the old woman was carefully dripping from a candle. She looked as if she were performing a witchcraft ritual but such was far from the case.
‘Couldn’t get ’is star-spangled banner up,’ replied Fevvers. ‘Britannia’s revenge for the War of 1812. I say, our Liz, ain’t you done with your invisible writing yet?’
‘It’ll be ready for his next consignment,’ said Lizzie equably.
Fevvers drew back the brocade curtain and looked out at a frozen little crescent moon that lay on its back in the vast sky. She sighed.
‘Seems a shame to play a trick like that on such a nice young man . . .’
‘Not hatched out, yet,’ Lizzie summed him up. ‘The clowns may pelt him with eggs as if eggs cost nothing but his own shell don’t break, yet. He is too young for you, my girl. He’s living proof that travel don’t broaden the mind; instead, it renders a man banal.’
‘Not his mind as interests me,’ said Fevvers.
‘Oh, Sophie, you’re a devil for a pretty face.’
‘Not his face as interests me –’
A rap on the door interrupted her. A yawning bell-boy delivered a fragrant, precious mound of out-of-season Parma violets; her lucky flower! She exclaimed with surprise; how did the unknown sender know that? Lizzie snatched the card that came with them, read it, compressed the corners of her mouth and tossed it into the fire but Fevvers greedily investigated the moist, ribbon-wrapped stalks of the flowers with her capable nurse’s hands and discovered a shagreen box. Inside the box, to Lizzie’s further displeasure, glittered a diamond bracelet, like a cold bandage.
‘A pretty face is one thing, our Liz,’ opined Fevvers, trying on the bracelet at once, ‘but diamonds is another, ’ere’s a punter good for a touch.’
Her pupils narrowed down to the shape of £ signs.
TEN
After the dizzy triumph of the Grand Gala Opening, Fevvers grew sick of flowers, even violets, and told the doorman of the Hotel de l’Europe to redirect her floral tributes to the lying-in hospital. Deluged with invitations, she permitted herself to accept only one single supper, and that for the final night of the engagement. This invitation came accompanied by a shagreen box, twin of the one that brought the diamond bracelet, containing a pair of diamond earrings the size of hazelnuts and a note promising a necklace to match on the evening in question. Therefore she concluded this punter was prepared to put his money where his mouth was – or, rather, where his mouth hoped to be.
On the final night, as it happened, Buffo the Great, having harkened to the voice of drunken Russia, went out to celebrate his departure from the Capital of Vodka together with the Ape-Man. The saturnine Frenchman, the first casualty of the party, succumbed in a low dram-shop, was piled to one side like so much lumber and there abandoned. Little Ivan it was, anxiously searching the back-alley bars, who found Buffo still on his feet, though wavering, and led him back to Clown Alley, there to settle him on an upturned stool before a rectangle of cracked mirrors, where Buffo flailed about, wriggled, moaned and struggled to prevent Grik and Grok repairing the ravages his debauch had made upon his make-up.
For he presented a deplorable sight. His natural skin showed through his matte white in ghastly streaks and runnels and, in the course of his peripatetic carousing, he had mislaid his bald piece so that a mean fringe of coarse, greying hair, spiked with sweat, surmounted a piebald face that seemed, rather than its customary mask-like inhumanity, now hideously partly human. Grik and Grok clucked, gibbered and wrung their hands at the state into which the master clown had got himself but Buffo was well away and bellowed like a bull:
‘Tonight shall be my Cavalry! God, we’ll make ’em split their sides!’
He had the air of a revenant back from the grave in flapping cerements stained with dung, mire and vomit, but he was stubbornly, indeed, dementedly, still bent upon a spree. He drained a bottle from his pocket as he swayed before the mirror. Grik and Grok ferreted out another bald piece for him and cocked a fresh conical hat at a rakish angle. That pleased him, for some reason, and he puckered up his rouged lips at himself in the mirror, pouted like a young girl, and then, all at once, his bowels opened and Grik and Grok ran squeaking off for water and scrubbing brush and a fresh pair of drawers but, at the great clown’s request, Little Ivan trotted away in the other direction to fetch another pint of vodka.
The Colonel, in the box office, counting out the takings, pooh-poohed Walser’s account of Buffo’s obscene and perilous condition. ‘Drunker he is, the funnier he is.’ He stuffed a last handful of rainbow-coloured banknotes in the cash-box and locked it up with a pleased expression on his face, for it was ‘house full’ and ‘standing room only’ tonight, once again, and there were more grand-dukes, archduchesses, princes and princesses in the audience that night of nights than the Colonel himself had consumed fried chicken dinners in his entire life.
As the band started in on ‘The March of the Gladiators’, the Colonel’s heart filled with a kind of holy awe, to have provided for such an illustrious gathering so rich a banquet of astonishment, and to have coined so much profit from it. He felt himself both to be glorified and also the entrepreneur of glory; above his scrubby head floated an invisible halo composed of dollar bills.
The circus parade passed off without any untoward occurrence. Buffo’s lurching gait and uncoordinated gesticulations of arms and legs went unnoticed among the antics of the other clowns, who were so concerned to ‘cover’ for him that each excelled himself in outlan
dish capers, leaps and pratfalls. When Buffo tripped over a poodle, it was the work of a moment for Grik and Grok to seize either end of his disarticulated carcass and go into an improvised version of the ‘Clown’s Funeral’, wiping imaginary tears from their eyes with lavish gestures of their flowing sleeves. Buffo kept rearing and bucking away between his pallbearer’s shoulders as if he were having so much fun in his death throes that he simply couldn’t bear to stop, while his shrill, ear-splitting voice stuttered out imprecations that, so long as you did not understand them, were funnier than you could have believed possible: such thwarted fury, such incomprehensible rage! The clowns carried Buffo round the ring and off, behind a section of high-stepping and contemptuous horses, who could spot a Yahoo when they saw one, while Buffo cursed the world and all who dwelled therein, to the uncomprehending delight of all observers.
They dumped him down in the menagerie, to await the clowns’ last cue. He sent Little Ivan running for another pint of vodka and, when it was time for the Feast of Fools, the Clowns’ Christmas Dinner, the Lord of Misrule himself, possessed as he was by the spirits in the bottle, went out of his mind.
They bore the trestle table into the ring and, with their customary wealth of by-play, spread it with its white dustsheet and laid it with the rubber knives and forks and plates, prodding, stabbing and poking at each other the while sufficient to procure gales of mirth. They took their places round the table, tucking their napkins into their neckbands, and the audience took time out to catch its breath.
Buffo, in the wings, emptied the fresh bottle and tossed it aside. When he saw the glare of the arc lights, he covered his eyes with his hands and screamed. ‘Oh, don’t you see!’ he cried to Little Ivan. ‘The moon has turned to blood!’ But Little Ivan spoke no English and understood only Buffo’s scream. Into the ring he staggered, the child tagging anxiously at his heels.
His fresh make-up was already flaking and his bald piece wrinkling up until it threatened to dislodge his cap. He picked up the carving knife and flourished it most horribly; from the tip floated an ominous knot of red ribbons. Little Ivan had the job of getting the blue butcher’s apron on him and skipped round and round the teetering colossus, now on one side, now the other, in order to push him back on his unstable balance each time he threatened to lose it. The audience burst its lungs when it saw him, as if not to laugh would have provoked the most savage punishment. Buffo the Great! Nobody like Buffo the Great!
Little Ivan steered and tugged him to the head of the table, and Buffo collapsed on his collapsing chair. If his ensuing wrestling bout with the chair had all the defiance and bravado of Jacob’s with the angel, only the clowns suspected that, tonight, the harmless chair had indeed assumed in Buffo’s imagination the shape and form of some far from angelic adversary and, as he and the chair grappled with one another, the company around the table grew a little closer together, their tatterdemalion garments rustling as a wind of consternation blew through them, and then they, too, along with every child in the house, broke out in a great shout of pleasure and relief when Buffo finally, miraculously, got the chair down unprotesting on its four feet, smashed the seat flat with a crashing thwack of his palm, and, at long last, planted his bum thereon.
Backstage, Walser, the Human Chicken, his pants’ seat crammed with sausage links, crouched in a Japanese obeisance upon a silver platter amid a circle of papier-mâché roast potatoes. Grik tucked a sprig of parsley into his cockscomb.
‘Grab for the carvers,’ said Grik. ‘Grab the carvers off him, if you get the chance.’
‘Why’s that?’ demanded Walser uneasily.
‘In ’is cups, ’e can be homicidal.’
Then the domed silver dish-cover descended upon Walser, plunging him into a metal-smelling, resonant darkness, around which shushed and hissed, like the sound of waves inside a shell, the echoes of the old clown’s whisper: ‘Homicidal . . . homicidal . . .’
‘Here goes,’ said Grik to Grok. They picked up the roast between them and tottered with it into the ring.
Buffo peered at the great silver dish set down before him with mild surprise. For a moment, just one moment, the heaving, writhing horrors around him settled down in a kind of turbulent tranquillity. The roar of the crowd, the stench of greasepaint and naphtha, the weird company of acolytes who surrounded him, raising their faces towards him, comforted him and warned him and though, at any moment, a cock might crow, thrice, he was, for just this last space of a few heartbeats – ten; or, fifteen – again the loving father about to divide meat between his children. A last touch of grace passed over him; indeed, was he not the very Christ, presiding at the white board, at supper, with his disciples?
But, where was the bread? And, above all, where were they hiding the wine? He looked round for loaf and bottle but could see none. An immense suspicion wakened in his red-rimmed eyes. He recalled the carvers in his hands and lightly clashed the fork against the knife, agitating the bloody streamers in the air.
The elastic moment stretched, and stretched further, and stretched too far to sustain its comic tension. The laughter died away. A querulous ripple ran through the crowd. Although Walser, in the dish, could see and hear nothing, he had already acquired enough of the instinct of the trouper to know that, if Buffo were too far gone to unveil the entrée, the entrée must unveil itself.
Walser flexed his muscles with pleasure since his position was exceedingly cramped and uncomfortable and let out a rousing ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’. The dish-cover went bounding and rebounding down the table, sending the rubber settings bouncing this way and that way. Up Walser rose out of his garnish like Venus from the foam, spraying parsley and roast potatoes around him, spewing sausages from his trouser vent, and, flapping his arms, he sang out again:
‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’
Buffo screamed most horribly and brought the carving knife smashing down.
‘Oh, my gahd!’ said the Colonel, at the back of the auditorium, clutching Sybil so tight she squealed, champing down so hard on his cigar he bit it in two. ‘My gahd!’ He saw his glory depart, his halo fly away.
But Walser, his reflexes exquisitely refined by fear, took a gigantic leap into the air the very moment when, reflected in the dreadful mirror of the eye, he saw the great clown’s reason snap.
Buffo brought down the carving knife upon only the debris in the silver dish; the bird had flown.
Howls of delight!
The halo fluttered back to hover over the Colonel’s head, again, although now it had an uncertain, impermanent look. Troubled, he spat out the destroyed cigar, fumbled for another and, prompted by a furious convulsion from Sybil, scuttled out to the foyer to summon a doctor.
No sooner was the Human Chicken on its feet again than it took to its heels and sprinted the length of the board. Buffo was detained, for a moment, as he tugged the carving knife out of the table – for such was the force of his blow the blade had pierced the dish to the wood beneath – and then, with a high, whinnying scream, he was after him.
All present agreed it was a fitting climax to the great clown’s career, that chase after the Human Chicken, round and round the great ring, round as the apple of an eye, of the Imperial Circus in the Imperial City of St Petersburg. How the little dogs enjoyed the fun, snapping and nipping the ankles of hunter and prey, running away with links of sausages, playing football with the roast potatoes, getting under everybody’s feet while the other clowns dashed hither and thither, at a loss as to what to do, concerned only to give the illusion of intentional Bedlam, for the show must go on. And, even if Buffo at last had contrived to plunge his carving knife into the viscera of the Human Chicken, nobody in that vast gathering of merry folk would ever have been permitted to believe it was real manslaughter; it would have seemed, instead, the cream of the jest.
And now Buffo, in his delirium, began to shake, to shake and shiver most horribly, to most horribly grimace and to convulse himself in such a way that his immense form seemed to be everywhere at onc
e, dissolving into a dozen Buffos, armed with a dozen murderous knives all streaming rags of blood, and leap and tumble as he might, Walser could find no place in the ring where Buffo was not and gave up hope for himself.
Why didn’t Walser run out of the ring the way he’d been carried into it? Because the exit was blocked already by the iron paraphernalia of the Princess’s cage, and the cats, sniffing blood and madness on the air, were growling uneasily, pacing to and fro swishing their tails while the two girls stared from between the bars, distraught, until the Princess took matters into her own hands and stepped out of the cage, with the nozzle of the hosepipe in her hand.
The shock of water blasted Buffo back into one single form, blasted him off his feet, blasted him up into the air in the final somersault of his career, and then flattened him on his back. A few moments later, as the crowd held its aching sides and mopped its eyes, Samson the Strong Man hauled prone, soaked, semi-conscious, fearfully hallucinating Buffo off up the gangway that led to the foyer as little children gave him one last tittering poke for luck before he vanished as from the face of the earth, while the clowns ran round and round the tiers of seats, kissing babies, distributing bonbons and laughing, laughing, laughing to hide their broken hearts.
The frock-coated doctor waited in the champagne bar accompanied by two stern-faced Mongolian giants who held a strait-jacket invitingly open between them. As the Princess lifted the lid of her white piano in the ring while Mignon flounced her lacy skirts, Buffo, babbling obscenities, was loaded into a waiting cab, leaving the circus for the last time, as he had never done before, in the way that gentlemen did, by the front entrance.
Farewell, old man. And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.