‘How,’ asked Fevvers, carefully, ‘have you reached this conclusion?’
‘It’s a fool’s errand, Sophie. From that fleeting glimpse we caught of your fancy boy mounted on a reindeer and wearing a frock, it would seem he is not the man he was. Nothing left, Sophia! Nothing there . . . But it’s me who is the bigger fool than you, because at least you’re going off after him of your own free will while I tag along behind you through the middle of nowhere only because of the bonds of old affection.
‘I am,’ she added sourly, ‘the slave of your freedom.’
Fevvers had listened to all this in increasingly angry silence and now burst forth.
‘I never asked you to adopt me in the first place, you miserable old witch! There I was, unique and parentless, unshackled, unfettered by the past, and the minute you clapped eyes on me you turned me into a contingent being, enslaved me as your daughter who was born nobody’s daughter –’
But there she stopped short, for the notion that nobody’s daughter walked across nowhere in the direction of nothing produced in her such vertigo she was forced to pause and take a few deep breaths, which coldly seared her lungs. Seized with such anguish of the void that surrounds us, she could have wept and only restrained herself from doing so because of the satisfaction tears would give her foster-mother.
‘There, there,’ said Lizzie more gently, noting the girl’s distress from the corner of her eye. ‘I don’t begrudge you my company, my darling. We must all make do with what rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.’
But this notion filled Fevvers with further gloom. She wanted more from life than that! Besides, she felt like a scarecrow herself, at the moment. She hunched up her shoulders miserably.
‘But, oh, my dear,’ Lzzie went on, oblivious of Fevvers’ cavernous silence. ‘Love is one thing and fancy another. Haven’t you noticed there is bad feeling come between us since Mr Walser made his appearance? Misfortune has dogged our steps since you first set eyes on him. You’re half the girl you were – look at you! Lost your weapon in the Grand Duke’s house. Then you broke your pinion. Accidents? Too many accidents in a row to be altogether accidental. Every little accident has taken you one step down the road away from singularity. You’re fading away, as if it was only always nothing but the discipline of the audience that kept you in trim. You’re hardly even a blonde any more.
‘And, when you do find the young American, what the ’ell will you do, then? Don’t you know the customary endings of the old comedies of separated lovers, misfortune overcome, adventures among outlaws and savage tribes? True lovers’ reunions always end in a marriage.’
Fevvers came to a halt.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Orlando takes his Rosalind. She says: “To you I give myself, for I am yours.” And that,’ she added, a low thrust, ‘goes for a girl’s bank account, too.’
‘But it is not possible that I should give myself,’ said Fevvers. Her diction was exceedingly precise. ‘My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or in the expectation of pleasure – and pleasure alone is my expectation from the young American. But the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?’
‘Precisely,’ said Lizzie, with mournful satisfaction.
‘Besides,’ added Fevvers urgently, ‘here we are far away from churches and priests, who’ll speak of marriage –’
‘Oh, I dare say you’ll find these woodsmen amongst whom your young man has found refuge uphold the institution of marriage as enthusiastically as other men do, although they may celebrate it differently. The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they’re likely to have amongst themselves to keep them all in order. They’ll have churches, here; and vicars, too, even if the vicars have weird cassocks and perform outrageous sacraments.’
‘I’ll snatch him away. We’ll elope!’
‘What if he doesn’t want to come?’
‘You’re jealous!’
‘I never thought,’ said Lizzie stiffly, ‘I’d live to hear my girl say such a thing.’
Ashamed, Fevvers strode more slowly. She turned Lizzie’s words over and over in her mind.
‘Marriage!’ she exclaimed.
‘The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon’s lair is always forced to marry her, whether they’ve taken a liking to one another or not. That’s the custom. And I don’t doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a “happy ending”.’
‘Marriage,’ repeated Fevvers, in a murmur of awed distaste. But, after a moment, she perked up.
‘Oh, but Liz – think of his malleable look. As if a girl could mould him any way she wanted. Surely he’ll have the decency to give himself to me, when we meet again, not expect the vice versa! Let him hand himself over into my safekeeping, and I will transform him. You said yourself he was unhatched, Lizzie; very well – I’ll sit on him, I’ll hatch him out, I’ll make a new man of him. I’ll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we’ll march hand in hand into the New Century –’
Lizzie detected a note of rising hysteria in the girl’s voice.
‘Perhaps so, perhaps not,’ she said, putting a damper on things. ‘Perhaps safer not to plan ahead.’
Fevvers thought her foster-mother’s conversation was as dour as the empty landscape around them. She whistled, to keep her spirits up: ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Something pathetic about her little whistle piping away in the middle of Siberia, but she persevered. After a short pause, Lizzie took another tack.
‘However, I will say this for you; unless you propose to sell your story to the newspaper, my dear, and steal a march on Colonel Kearney –’
Fevvers, hoping to change the subject, stopped whistling to interject:
‘– whom, Liz, we could pillory in the press for his business practice and his treatment of employees –’
‘Unless you plan to sell yourself in print, I can’t see any profit in all this, try as I might. And perhaps it is a sign of moral growth in you, my girl –’
Fevvers began whistling again, but Lizzie pressed on:
‘– that you pursue this fellow only for his body, not for what he’ll pay you. Inconvenient as your acute attack of morality might prove in the long term, should it become chronic, as far as the financing of the struggle is concerned.’
‘Have you finished? Have you quite finished? Why d’you come with me, if all you can do is carp?’
‘You don’t know the first thing about the human heart,’ said Liz dolefully. ‘The heart is a treacherous organ and you’re nothing if not impetuous. I fear for you, Sophie. Selling yourself is one thing and giving yourself away is quite another but, oh, Sophie! what if you rashly throw yourself away? Then what happens to that unique “me-ness” of yours? On the scrap-heap, that’s what happens to it! I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!’
‘Eggs? What have eggs got to do with it?’
And they would have immediately started to quarrel again, if, just at that moment, they had not seen, first sign of humanity for miles, a frail little shelter built of branches propped against a pine of grandfatherly dimensions. At first, you might not have noticed the shelter, for there were no doors, no windows nor apertures of any kind in it, so that it looked more like a wood-pile than a primitive hut, but, in the wilderness, a wood-pile was as out of place as an ocean-going yacht and, besides, as they drew nearer, they heard from within some muffled groans and sobs.
Liz motioned to Fevvers to remain behind, for the little woman was lighter on her feet by far than the heavy-treading aerialiste, and crept up to the shelter softly enough to surprise whatever lurked within. But the woman who lay there on a pile of filthy straw was in no condition to be surprised.
Removin
g a log, Lizzie peered in at her. It was the grey light of the end of the short day, outside, and there was no light or fire inside, so Lizzie made haste to find matches she’d stolen from the Maestro. By the little light, she saw the prone woman, in spite of the bitter chill of the approaching night, wore nothing but an old, fringed, buckskin dress, which had been slit up the middle to expose her still-bulging belly. Perhaps she had thrown off the bedclothes, for she seemed feverish, even delirious; at any rate, no bedclothes covered her, although there were a few cured skins lying here and there. A crude wooden container beside her proved itself to be a cradle when the baby inside it woke up and began to cry.
Lizzie carefully removed a couple more logs and stepped through the hole. She found a stub of candle in her bag and lit that. At first she thought the baby, with its rosy cheeks, looked very healthy; then, when she picked it up to soothe it, she saw that what disguised its waxen look was blood, smeared on like rouge, an old practice of the tribe. The mother opened her eyes. If she thought a bear had invaded the privacy of her postpartural ritual, she took it in her stride. Another bear dismantled yet more of the wall of her shelter and lumbered in. The mother’s expression did not change. Lizzie felt her forehead with the back of her hand. It was very hot.
‘Tuck her up,’ said Liz to Fevvers, taking charge of the baby.
‘What the ’ell is going on?’ demanded Fevvers as she did as she was bid.
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ said Lizzie. ‘Unless this tableau of a woman in bondage to her reproductive system, a woman tied hand and foot to that Nature which your physiology denies, Sophie, has been set here on purpose to make you think twice about turning from a freak into a woman.’
Lizzie held the baby to the young mother’s breast but either the young mother’s milk had not yet come or she had none, for the baby grasped the nipple in its mouth and sucked furiously, then, with a sharp cry of disappointment, let go, and, face crumpling, began to bellow and shake its fists. At that, the mother wept as much as her exhaustion and fever permitted her. Fevvers rubbed the cold hands in her warm ones while Lizzie tucked the baby snugly inside her fur.
‘I’m not leaving this little babe out here and that’s flat,’ she announced. ‘Poor little scrap’ll catch its death as well as starve.’
‘You always was partial to a foundling,’ said Fevvers with an acid edge but also with renewed affection. ‘What about its poor old mum, though? Ain’t she a foundling, too?’
‘You can manage her, ducks.’
‘She’s not much of a weight,’ acknowledged Fevvers, heaving. The woman came to herself, briefly, and smiled. If she had realised Fevvers was not a bear but a woman, she would have complained bitterly because the taboos surrounding childbirth had been broken. As it was, she let herself be carried off with a good grace to, as she thought, the land of the dead. She was pleased to hear the babble of little cries as her baby set off in the same direction.
They kicked aside the walls of the shelter, the easiest way of returning to the open air. As Fevvers stepped over the scattered branches with the well-wrapped young mother in her arms, she glimpsed something in the disturbed snow that made her cry out.
‘Oh, Liz!’
A miracle of frail violets, frost-nipped and pale, the colour of tired eyelids, yet big with perfume and optimism, were in full bloom among the sheltered roots of the big pine. Violets!
‘Violets,’ said Lizzie, ‘on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Look at ’em, the little darlings,’ bubbled Fevvers. ‘Like a message from little Violetta, to say we’re not forgotten. Here, did you say it’s New Year’s Eve?’
Liz nodded. ‘I’ve been keeping count. By my count, it’s New Year’s Eve; we’re on the cusp, my dear, tomorrow is another time-scheme.’
Fevvers hoisted the young mother over her shoulder and stooped but Liz adjured:
‘Don’t pick ’em, leave ’em to seed theirselves. Snow violets. Must be rare as rare.’
Beneath her apparent indifference, she, too, was moved, and the two women smiled at one another, knowing a truce, or even peace, had been declared again.
‘I spy.’ And Lizzie pointed. There was a footprint in the snow beside the violets; they had not been the first to stop and admire them. Print of a soft-soled boot. One footprint only, like Man Friday’s, just as mysterious, just as ominous.
‘Over there!’ Fevvers turned to point. A rag of red ribbon was caught on the twig of a tree. The magic midwife took care to hide the tracks she made when she came to tend her hidden patient; but not sufficient care. Had not the bears come and kidnapped mother and child? A few yards beyond the red ribbon they came across a little tin bell lying at the side of a dissolving track of beaten snow. Now they were on the high road to somewhere, and strode along in better spirits than they’d known for days.
Soon they saw before them lights, faintly gleaming through thick windows paned with horn, and the roof of long, low, wooden houses, and smoke rising from chimneys, and a rich, strange smell of unfamiliar suppers cooking on unfamiliar hearths, and it was evening.
Fevvers’ heart, already stirred by the surprise of the violets, warmed still further at these homely sights and odours. A village! Homes! The signs of the human hand keeping the wilderness at bay! Life seemed to her to have been held in suspension during their wanderings in the solitude; now the solitude existed no longer and things were about to pick up again. She might even find bleach or dye in this village, might she not, and start to put herself back together again.
And surely he was here; one of the wooden houses must shelter the young American. And she would see, once again, the wonder in the eyes of the beloved and become whole. Already she felt more blonde.
‘Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe, as an amanuensis,’ she said to Lizzie. ‘And not of my trajectory, alone, but of yours, too, Lizzie; of your long history of exile and cunning which you’ve scarcely hinted to him, which will fill up ten times more of his notebooks than my story ever did. Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been, so that he, too, will put his poor shoulder to the wheel and help to give the world a little turn into the new era that begins tomorrow.
‘And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I. This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of ritual, will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind forg’d manacles, will rise up and fly away. The dolls’ house doors will open, the brothels will spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the transformed –’
‘It’s going to be more complicated than that,’ interpolated Lizzie. ‘This old witch sees storms ahead, my girl. When I look to the future, I see through a glass, darkly. You improve your analysis, girl, and then we’ll discuss it.’
But her daughter swept on, regardless, as if intoxicated with vision.
‘On that bright day, when I am no more a singular being but, warts and all the female paradigm, no longer an imagined fiction but a plain fact – then he will slap down his notebooks, bear witness to me and my prophetic role. Think of him, Lizzie, as one who carries the evidence –’
‘Cushie-cushie-coo,’ said Lizzie to the restless baby.
There were no streets or squares or alleys in this village; the houses were set sometimes close to, sometimes far apart, as if the arrangement had been copied from the random way cows lie down in fields. No sign of any inhabitants, all indoors at this hour, but a reindeer or two raised its antlered head to peer at the newcomers, then settled back to scratching for moss. Bells and ribbons were attached to a larch tree outside the longest, lowest, somehow most official-looking building in the village, giving it a festive air. Lizzie knocked o
n the door, noting how the frame was decorated with more red ribbons, feathers and (h’m) bones. When she knocked, came a muffled growl from inside, a flurry and a thump and a man’s voice raised in an unfamiliar tongue.
‘Does that mean “come in”?’
Fevvers shrugged.
‘Open up. I’m perishing.’
They pushed the creaking door. No sign of life, inside, as far as could be seen – which wasn’t much, for the draughty interior was lit only fitfully by a primitive lamp consisting of a tinware-saucer filled with melted beargrease in which the wick floated in imminent danger of shipwreck. This lamp hung by cords from the cross-beam and moved in the draughts, so that the shadows came and went with eerie unpredictability, offering unprepossessing glimpses of strange-shaped, oddly coloured objects against the walls and in the corners, hinting at lumpish, silent occupants crouched hither and thither, but covering up everything with darkness again almost immediately.
Below the lamp stood a long table marked with one or two odd-looking stains, on which lay a big wooden platter, hollowed out not with a chisel but by the application of fire, and a stone knife of antique shape but very finely honed as to the blade. Spattered on the beaten earth floor around the table were traces of old blood, of fur and of feathers, trodden into the ground by, presumably, the feet of priests and worshippers. The smell was hideous, as of incense mingled with death, and it was very cold.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Lizzie. ‘One of their churches. Typical church atmosphere.’
Something – the wind in the rafters; a rat; a concealed priest – rustled when she spoke. And the place was so ill-lit the entire population of the village might have been concealed in the thick, haunted dark. There was a nightmarish sense of claustrophobia about the place, that was yet tense with expectancy, as if something hideous had been prevented from happening by their arrival, but the actors in the interrupted rite were patient, and could wait, were waiting and seeing what these beings who’d brought the mother and child back to the village were up to. Custom-built for holy, arcane, archaic practices, for revelations, for consultations with the dead, for sacrifices, the wild church was intended to impress, and was impressive.