‘Well, who am I supposed to be like, then, if not meself,’ I snap bad-temperedly, lying on my belly like Miss O’Malley as needs must, on the seat they make up into my bed at nights.
‘That’s another question, innit,’ she replies, unperturbed as ever. ‘You never existed before. There’s nobody to say what you should do or how to do it. You are Year One. You haven’t any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create. But when you come a cropper, Gawd – you really come a cropper, don’t you. You flirt with the adversary, as if he’ll put by his wiles if you pretend to be an ordinary gal. I’m afraid for you. That’s why I don’t like leaving you alone. Remember that bloody Grand Duke. Broke your mascot you set such store by, didn’t he!’
She knows how to hurt. Find the sore point, then probe it – that’s Liz’s style.
‘Broke your mascot and could have broken you. He nearly did for you once and for all, and then, no future, no Year Two nor any more years. Nix, nought, nothing.’
Nothing.
The train now ground to a halt with an exhausted sigh. The engine wailed softly, the locking wheels clicked and groaned but nothing in sight, not even one of those frilly little wooden stations like gingerbread houses they put up in these parts, mocking the wilderness with their suggestion of the fairy tale. Nothing but streaks of snow standing out unnaturally white against the purple horizon, miles away. We are in the middle of nowhere.
‘Nowhere’, one of those words, like ‘nothing’, that opens itself inside you like a void. And were we not progressing through the vastness of nothing to the extremities of nowhere?
Sometimes the lengths to which I’ll go for money appal me.
In the sudden, almost supernatural silence, we could hear the rumble of a tiger’s roar and the ting-a-ling of the chains of the elephants, which never ceases.
Tuskers through Siberia! The hubris of the little fat Colonel!
Often the train made these incomprehensible halts. Out of the taiga like imps conjured from air children would spring up and run along the side of the track holding out little offerings – a baked potato; a paper cone of frost-bitten berries; sour milk in a bottle too precious to be sold, so you fill up your own cut-glass water-flask with its contents. But, by tonight, we’ve rolled far too far away from any peasant homestead or settlement. The tow-headed, filthy hawkers never venture here, where wild things are.
A cold wind began to get up a bit, and whine.
‘I say, our Liz, can’t we . . . hurry things up a bit?’
Lizzie, at her cards, shook her old grizzled head. No tricks. Why not? For the things my foster-mother can pull off when she sets her mind to it, you’d not believe! Shrinkings and swellings and clocks running ahead or behind you like frisky dogs; but there’s a logic to it, some logic of scale and dimension that won’t be meddled with, which she alone keeps the key of, like she keeps the key of Nelson’s timepiece stowed away in her handbag and won’t let me touch.
Her ‘household’ magic, she calls it. What would you think, when you saw the bread rise, if you didn’t know what yeast was? Think old Liz was a witch, wouldn’t you! And, then, again, consider matches! Lucifers; the little wooden soldiers of the angel of light, with whom you’d think she was in complicity if you’d never heard of phosphorus.
And when I think I once sucked milk from those flat old, dry old dugs under your black silk bodice, Lizzie, oh, yes! I know what you mean by ‘magic’.
Now, down the train, in the ‘wagon salon’, there’s the Princess trying out the parlour organ there. Grunt, grunt, grunt. Oh, such ecstasies of boredom I experienced on the Great Siberian Railway!
Not that the ‘wagon salon’ isn’t very pleasant, if it don’t give you the willies to travel through this wilderness as of the pre-Adamite world in a repro Empire drawing-room done up in white lacquer and enough plate-glass mirrors for a mobile bordello.
I hate it.
We have no right to be here, in all this gemütlich comfort, stuck on our fat bums down this straight track from which we never deviate, like tightrope walkers in a dream traversing an unacknowledged abyss in five-star comfort, through the deep core of winter and this inimical terrain.
‘Feel like a bird in a gilded cage, do you?’ enquired Lizzie, noting her foster-daughter’s fidgeting. ‘Then how would you prefer to travel?’
Fevvers, thus pushed, could think of no reply. The springs twanged beneath her as she rearranged herself in order to squat on her haunches with her sulky chin on her knees and her muscular hands clenched round her femurs. How long have we been grinding through Limbo? One week? Two weeks? A month? A year?
The Princess at last had her way with the parlour organ and produced from it a Bach fugue that hushed the tigers while the world tilted away from the sun towards night, winter and the new century.
‘Think of your bank account, dearie,’ Lizzie ironically advised her sullen foster-child. ‘You know it always cheers you up.’
Fevvers, in her petticoat, stockingless, corsetless, dug in Lizzie’s handbag for a pair of little scissors and began to clip her toenails for want of anything better to do. She presented a squalid spectacle, a dark half-inch at the roots of her uncombed hair which tangled with the dishevelled plumage that had already assumed a dusty look. Confinement did not suit her.
Then, as she clipped away at her toenails, just as the train had stopped for no reason, so, for no reason, she began to grizzle.
How can I tell why I began to blubber away like that? Who hasn’t cried since Ma Nelson died. But to think of Ma Nelson’s funeral only made me bellow more, as if the enormous anguish that I felt, this anguish of the solitude of our abandoned state in this world that is perfectly sufficient to itself without us – as if my sudden and irrational despair hooked itself on to a rational grief and clung there for dear life.
‘Cry away!’ said Lizzie, and, by the echoes in her voice, her foster-daughter knew a prescient fit had seized her. ‘Cry all you like! We don’t know if you’ll get enough time to cry later on.’
Inexplicably as it had halted, the train now moved off again. In the hard class, the clowns played cards under a mauve canopy of cigarette smoke, or slept. A heavy somnolence was upon them; they seemed in a state of suspended animation, here and yet not here. Now and then, one or another of them would remark they’d have to work out a whole set of new routines now that Buffo was gone. ‘Time enough for that,’ came the reply. Yet the days passed and they did no more than shuffle and reshuffle the cards. The rocking-horse rhythm of the train lulled them into a state of passive acquiescence in which they waited, though none would admit it, for their Christ to rise again. So there was no need of new routines, no need. Pass the bottle, deal out the pack again. He will come back. Or else . . . we shall return to Him.
The Colonel, however, trotted up and down the corridors a-bubble with the excitement of the pathfinder, a striking figure in his striped leotards and starry vest – ‘showing the flag’, he called it. He’d brought ample supplies of bourbon with him and soon taught the steward in the restaurant car to fix a passable julep using sprigs from a pot of mint he’d had the forethought to pick up from a Petersburg horticulturalist.
He soon acquired the reputation of a ‘character’. He and his pig often rode in the cabin with the engineer. The engineer leant back with the papirosse glued to his nether lip and let the Colonel frolic at the controls. But, most of all, the Colonel enjoyed visiting the elephants, feeding them buns he bought by the hamperful from kerchiefed peasant women at the wayside halts and contemplating the dazzling occurrence; that he, this good old boy from Kentucky, had bested Hannibal, the Carthaginian, classical hero of antiquity, for, if Hannibal had taken his jumbos over the Alps, had he not himself taken his bulls over the Urals?
Yet, even to his always optimistic eye, it was apparent the bulls were taking the trip badly. They were housed comfortably enough, lapped in straw in a cattle truck that usually took immigrants across the steppes, and, a
special measure for the pachyderms’ comfort, this truck had been equipped with a stove. But the elephants no longer resembled the pillars of the world, capable of supporting the sky on their broad foreheads. Their little eyes were filled with rheum and sometimes they coughed. The train took them further and further into bitter weather that would penetrate their leather boots and freeze their feet, invade and devastate their lungs. Far north, much further north, in the extreme, unimaginable north of which this terrain was the, comparatively speaking, temperate margin, their cousins, the mammoths, lay locked in ice; so it seemed that ice was already overcoming these caryatids of the world and the Colonel, for all the Polyanna in his soul, was yet seized by isolated and wounding moments of doubt when he saw the bulls were weakening, succumbing. Then he would urge the conductor to feed more charcoal to the stove; surely they suffered just a chill . . . and, as to their depression, why, a few buns would cheer them up!
He bit down upon his doubts as upon an aching tooth and refused to believe his eyes.
These days, the tigers watched the Princess in the same way their little cousins who live amongst us watch a bird in a tree too high to climb. The Princess petitioned the Colonel, via the medium of Mignon, who now spoke for her and was roughly translated by Fevvers, to let her commandeer the ‘wagon salon’, and the Colonel, after much cigar mastication, permitted her to do so on the advice of Sybil, who thought a change of scene would distract them all. None of the conductors dared enter the ‘wagon salon’ thereafter but the tigers appreciated their new quarters in their own way. They ripped open the pale brocade with which the armchairs were upholstered, made nests of the stuffing and cuffed at their reflections in the mirrors that took up their stripes and multiplied them while Mignon leant against the Princess’s shoulder and they tried out a whole new repertoire to suit the organ, sentimental parlour songs, Bach chorales, the Methodist hymn-book, anything that might calm the tigers’ spirits. But the Princess knew the cats no longer trusted her and, worst of all, nor did she trust them. She was consumed with guilt and despair because she had used her gun.
The Colonel did not like to hear the parlour organ since, when he thought of the corpse of the tigress, the fatal last night at Petersburg came back to him in a fugue of failure. Indeed, his constant excitement had something febrile and desperate about it, for the apes had left him in the lurch, his master clown had somersaulted out of the ring into the madhouse – the Princess’s loss wasn’t the half of it. And, in his heart, although his head hotly denied it, he knew the elephants grew each day more feeble. It was a singularly depleted Grand Circus he would present before the God Emperor of Japan unless he could acquire, on the way, a performing bear or two, perhaps. Siberia could afford no other kind of recruit.
He knew full well that those who play the Ludic Game sometimes win but sometimes . . . lose. (Oh, those humiliating headlines in Variety!) His heart missed a beat when Mignon sang: ‘Oh, sacred head, sore wounded’, and he imagined his own scrubby pate buffeted by fortune.
Outside the ‘wagon salon’, the Strong Man stood with folded arms. He was the watchdog.
If Samson’s heart still knocked in his chest like a bird in a box when he saw the frail shape of Mignon, he’d learned to subdue himself sufficiently to fetch and carry humbly for the girls, to muck out for them, assist them with all the tasks to which his muscles condemned him.
Unrequited love was performing a peculiar alchemy within the Strong Man and yet the object of his love was changing its nature. Stark lust for lost Mignon slowly resolved itself, out of sheer propinquity, into an awed veneration for these beings who seemed, as a pair, to transcend their individualities. He knew he could not love the one without the other as he could not love the singer without her song, and must love both without touching either, so, by degrees, he grew less physical. He’d taken to wearing clothes, a visible sign of his changing sense of himself, had bought himself a stout, belted Russian shirt and in it looked already less of a hulk. He nourished his sensibility, which was still at the stripling stage, by standing guard over them.
He let the Colonel pass with a curt nod.
The Colonel counted his blessings over fish soup in the dining car: thank God! he retained exclusive use of the Cockney Venus!
The mellow pink shade of the table lamp soothed the hysterical brilliance of the rouge with which she had concealed the traces of her fit of tears. Although a corset was too much to contemplate, tonight, she had made a token effort to dress up to first-class standards, put on a tea-gown of cream lace and pinned up her hair so that you did not notice her dark parting, but the tea-gown, cut to drape over her bosom, was unbecoming, giving her a middle-aged, thickening look, and her pinned-up curls were drooping, already. The ‘lucky’ violets bravely pinned on her shoulder were unconvincing imitations, cheap, tatty things, a child’s birthday present, perhaps.
The waiter watched with fascination as the Colonel tied a napkin round Sybil’s neck.
‘Pigs eat everything a man eats,’ he informed the table. ‘That’s why a man tastes same as a pig. That’s why cannibals called roasted homo sapiens “long pig”, yessir! Omnivores, see; mixed feedin’! Gives us both that gamey taste.’
As if the notion of cannibalism refreshed his appetite, he attacked a veal cutlet with gusto, although, by its texture, the cutlet had been cooked in the station buffet at Irkutsk several days before, loaded on the train and reheated in a gravy far too bright a brown for authenticity.
As for me, I slipped the nasty thing on my own plate across to Sybil, who speedily despatched it just as the Colonel said she would. I’d a great affection for the clever little pig, I must say, and she looked well on travel, far better than I did. Her ruff was as pristine as the day we left Petersburg, more so; who did the Colonel get to goffer it for him? The girl who looked after the samovar? The steward? And she shone with the oilings the Colonel was never too far gone in his cups to give her and I thought, I could do with a massage meself, if it was young Jack-me-lad give it to me.
Here he, comes.
What is it this young man reminds me of? A piece of music composed for one instrument and played on another. An oil sketch for a great canvas. Oh, yes; he’s unfinished, just as Lizzie says, but all the same – his sun-burned bones! His sun-bleached hair! Underneath his make-up, that face like a beloved face known long ago, and lost, and now returned, although I never knew him before, although he is a stranger, still that face which I have always loved before I ever saw it so that to see him is to remember, although I do not know who it is I then remember, except it might be the vague, imaginary face of desire.
Absentmindedly she bit into a chunk of bread that had the colour and texture of devil’s food cake. As the Colonel took Sybil on his lap to make hospitable room for Walser, the young man felt the hungry eyes upon him and it seemed to him her teeth closed on his flesh with the most voluptuous lack of harm.
All she had done was to define the necessary innocence of the adventurer and to take advantage of it.
Spoon chinked upon soup-plate; knife ground against cutlet; the fringed pink lamps swayed this way and that, reflected in the dark windows as if they might be blooms upon the branches of the enfilades of trees through which they now were passing; the waiters rolled suavely to and fro as if on invisible wheels with dishes lined along their arms; from the invisible kitchen came the clatter of pans. There was a macedonia of fruit for dessert.
Then, just as the Princess and Mignon arrived in the restaurant car in bloody aprons, Samson dogging their footsteps, on the way to the kitchen to collect the tigers’ dinners, there came a thunderous boom. And, as if at the command of the biggest drum-roll in the entire history of the circus, the dining-car rose up in the air.
For a split second, everything levitated – lamps, tables, tablecloths. The waiters rose, and the plates rose from their arms. Sybil was lifted up, as was the chunk of canned pineapple on which her jaws were just about to close. The feet of the dark girl and the fair girl in the do
orway were propelled upwards from the rising floor. Then, before shock or consternation could cross their faces, the whole lot fell down again and, with a rending crash, flew apart in a multitude of fragments.
The train immediately ceased to be a train and turned into so many splinters of wood, so much twisted metal, so many screams and cries, while the forest on either side of the devastated track burst aflame, ignited by the burning logs cast far and wide from the fire-box of the now demolished engine.
The giantess found herself trapped under the collapsed table at which she’d been engaged in picking pale maraschino cherries from her macedonia and spooning them into the dish of the pet pig. Her first emotions were surprise and indignation. Nearby in the dark, her foster-mother expostulated eloquently in her native dialect but none of Lizzie’s tricks could get them out of this hole. Only the strength of the muscles Fevvers now stretched to their fullest extent would shift the wreckage and let them and their bruises scramble out into the open air which in itself was hazardous, filled with flame and flying debris. The wind, now risen to a gale, scorched them.
I have broken my right wing. As the first shock passes, I feel the pain. It hurts. Hurts as much as a clean fracture in the forearm. But no more. A lot to be thankful for. I can still keep the use of my right arm, even though the wing is broken. God, it hurts. Could be worse. Keep a stiff upper lip, girl; keep on telling yourself how it could be worse!
Indeed, it seems all we in the restaurant car were fortunate. Here’s Mignon surfaced! Having sustained a black eye from the blow of a flying brandy bottle but otherwise unhurt, she’s dragging the Princess out from under a cascade of crockery and silverware that has cut and scratched and concussed her. Lizzie gives a quick check, no bones broken, but she can’t wake up the Princess, who has passed out . . . As for the Colonel, it must be he who’s made of india-rubber, not I, for here he comes bouncing out of the rubble with his pig safe in the bosom of his jacket. Did Sybil foresee this fix, for all her talent as a seer? Did she, hell! Her ruff is a casualty, though; flat as a pancake. The Colonel strips her off, from now on this little pig will go naked.