‘What did I care about my bloody nose, sir?’ cried Fevvers passionately. ‘For, for one brief moment – one lapse or stutter of time so fleeting that the old French clock, had it been in motion, could never have recorded it on its clumsy cogs and springs, for just the smallest instant no longer than the briefest flutter of a butterfly . . . I’d hovered.
‘Yes. Hovered. Only for so short a while I could almost have thought I’d imagined it, for it was that sensation that comes to us, sometimes, on the edge of sleep . . . and yet, sir, for however short a while, the air had risen up beneath my adolescent wings and denied to me the downward pull of the great, round world, to which, hitherto, all human things had necessarily clung.’
‘Since I was the housekeeper,’ interjected Lizzie, ‘happily I carried all the keys of the house in a ring on my belt and when I comes chinking into the parlour with my armful of sandalwood, I had the remedy for her bloody nose to hand, I slapped the front door key between her wings, it was a foot long and cold as hell. The flow stopped from shock. Then I mops her up with my apron and takes her down to the kitchen, in the warm, wraps her up in a blanket and anoints her abrasions with Germoline, slaps on a bit of sticking plaster here and there and, when she’s as good as new, she tells her Lizzie all about the peculiar sensations she felt when she launched herself off the mantelpiece.
‘And I was full of wonder, sir.’
‘But, though now I knew I could mount on the air and it would hold me up, the method of the act of flight itself was unknown to me. As babies needs must learn to walk so must I needs learn to conquer the alien element and not only did I need to know the powers of the limitations of my feathery limbs but I must study, too, the airy medium that was henceforth to be my second home as he who would a mariner be needs to construe the mighty currents, the tides and whirlpools, all the whims and moods and conflicting temperaments of the watery parts of the world.
‘I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds.
‘All this took place in the first part of spring, towards the end of the month of February, when the birds were just waking from their winter lethargy. As spring brought out the buds on the daffodils in our window-boxes, so the London pigeons started up their courtships, the male puffing out his bosom and strutting after the female in his comic fashion. And it so happened that the pigeons built a nest upon the pediment outside our attic window and laid their eggs in it. When the wee pidgies hatched out, Lizzie and I watched them with more care than you can conceive of. We saw how the mother pigeon taught her babies to totter along the edge of the wall, observed in the minutest detail how she gave them mute instructions to use those aerial arms of theirs, their joints, their wrists, their elbows, to imitate those actions of her own which were, in fact, I realised, not dissimilar to those of a human swimmer. But do not think I carried out these studies on my own; although she was flightless herself, my Lizzie took it upon herself the role of bird-mother.
‘In those quiet hours of the afternoon, while the friends and sisters that we lived with bent over their books, Lizzie constructed a graph on squared paper in order to account for the great difference in weight between a well-formed human female in her fourteenth year and a tiny pigeonlet, so that we should know to what height I might soar without tempting the fate of Icarus. All this while, as the months passed, I grew bigger and stronger, stronger and bigger, until Liz was forced to put aside her mathematics in order to make me an entire new set of dresses to accommodate the remarkable development of my upper body.’
‘I’ll say this for Ma Nelson, she paid up all expenses on the nail, out of pure love of our little kiddie and what’s more, she thought up the scheme, how we should put it round she was a ’unchback. Yes.’
‘Yes, indeed, sir. Every night, I mimicked the Winged Victory in the drawing-room niche and was the cynosure of all eyes but Nelson made it known that those shining golden wings of mine were stuck over a hump with a strong adhesive and did not belong to me at all so I was spared the indignity of curiosity. And though I now began to receive many, many offers for first bite at the cherry, offers running into four figures, sir, yet Nelson refused them all for fear of letting the cat out of the bag.’
‘She was a proper lady,’ said Lizzie. ‘Nelson was a good ’un, she was.’
‘She was,’ concurred Fevvers. ‘She had the one peculiarity, sir; due to her soubriquet, or nickname, she always dressed in the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. Not that she ever missed a trick, her one eye sharp as a needle, and always used to say, “I keep a tight little ship.” Her ship, her ship of battle though sometimes she’d laugh and say, “It was a pirate ship, and went under false colours,” her barque of pleasure that was moored, of all unlikely places, in the sluggish Thames.’
Lizzie fixed Walser with her glittering eye and seized the narrative between her teeth.
‘It was from the, as it were, top-sail or crows’ nest of this barge that my girl made her first ascent. And this is how it came about: –
‘Imagine my surprise, one bright June morning, as I watched my pigeon family with my customary diligence, to see, as one of the little creatures teetered on the brink of the pediment looking for all the world like a swimmer debating with himself as to whether the water was warm enough for him – why, as it dithered there, its loving mother came right up behind it and shoved it clean off the edge!
‘First it dropped like a stone, so that my heart sank with it, and I let out a mournful cry, but, almost before that cry left my lips, all its lessons must have rushed back into its little head at once for suddenly it soared upwards towards the sun with a flash of white, unfurled wing, and was never seen no more.
‘So I says to Fevvers: “Nothing to it, my dear, but your Liz must shove you off the roof.”’
‘To me,’ said Fevvers, ‘it seemed that Lizzie, by proposing thus to thrust me into the free embrace of the whirling air, was arranging my marriage to the wind itself.’
She swung round on her piano stool and presented Walser with a face of such bridal radiance that he blinked.
‘Yes! I must be the bride of that wild, sightless, fleshless rover, or else could not exist, sir.
‘Nelson’s house was some five storeys high and there was a neat little garden at the back of it that went down to the river. There was a trapdoor leading to a loft in the ceiling of our attic, and another trapdoor in the ceiling of the loft that gave directly on the roof itself. So, one night in June, or, rather, early morning, about four or five, a night without a moon – for, like sorceresses, we required the dark and privacy for our doings – out on the tiles crawls Lizzie and her apprentice.’
‘Midsummer,’ said Lizzie. ‘Either Midsummer’s Night, or else very early on Midsummer Morning. Don’t you remember, darling?’
‘Midsummer, yes. The year’s green hinge. Yes, Liz, I remember.’
Pause of a single heartbeat.
‘The business of the house was over. The last cab had rolled away with the last customer too poor to stay the night and all behind the drawn curtains were at long last sleeping. Even those thieves, cut-throats and night-prowlers who stalked the mean streets about us had gone home to their beds, either pleased with their prey or not, depending on their luck.
‘It seemed a hush of expectation filled the city, that all was waiting in an exquisite tension of silence for some unparalleled event.’
‘She, although it was a chilly night, had not a stitch on her for we feared that any item of clothing might impede the lively movement of the body. Out on to the tiles we crawled and the little wind that lives in high places came and prowled around the chimneys; it was soft, cool weather and my pretty one came out in gooseflesh, didn’t you, such shivering. The roof had only a gentle slope on it so we crawled down to the gutter, from which side of the house we could see Old Father Thames, shining like black oilcloth wherever the bobbing mooring lights of the watermen touched him.’
‘Now it came to it, I was seized with a great fear, not only
a fear that we might discover the hard way that my wings were as those of the hen, or as the vestigial appendages of the ostrich, that these wings were in themselves a kind of physical deceit, intended for show and not for use, like beauty in some women, sir. No; I was not afraid only because the morning light already poking up the skirt of the sky might find me, when its fingers tickled the house, lying only a bag of broken bone in Ma Nelson’s garden. Mingled with the simple fear of physical harm, there was a strange terror in my bosom that made me cling, at the last gasp of time, to Lizzie’s skirts and beg her to abandon our project – for I suffered the greatest conceivable terror of the irreparable difference with which success in the attempt would mark me.
‘I feared a wound not of the body but the soul, sir, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind.
‘I feared the proof of my own singularity.’
‘Yet, if it could speak, would not any wise child cry out from the womb: “Keep me in the darkness here! keep me warm! keep me in contingency!” But nature will not be denied. So this young creature cried out to me, that she would not be what she must become, and, though her pleading moved me until tears blinded my own eyes, I knew that what will be, must be and so – I pushed.’
‘The transparent arms of the wind received the virgin.
‘As I hurtled past the windows of the attic in which I passed those precious white nights of girlhood, so the wind came up beneath my outspread wings and, with a jolt, I found myself hanging in mid-air and the garden lay beneath me like the board of a marvellous game and stayed where it was. The earth did not rise up to meet me. I was secure in the arms of my invisible lover!
‘But the wind did not relish my wondering inactivity for long. Slowly, slowly, while I depended from him, numb with amazement, he, as if affronted by my passivity, started to let me slip through his fingers and I commenced once more upon the fearful fall . . . until my lessons came back to me! And I kicked up with my heels, that I had learned from the birds to keep tight together to form a rudder for this little boat, my body, this little boat that could cast anchor in the clouds.
‘So I kicked up with my heels and then, as if I were a swimmer, brought the longest and most flexible of my wing-tip feathers together over my head; then, with long, increasingly confident strokes, I parted them and brought them back together – yes! that was the way to do it! Yes! I clapped my wing-tips together again, again, again, and the wind loved that and clasped me to his bosom once more so I found I could progress in tandem with him just as I pleased, and so cut a corridor through the invisible liquidity of the air.
‘Is there another bottle left, Lizzie?’
Lizzie scraped off fresh foil and filled up all their glasses. Fevvers drank thirstily and poured herself another with a not altogether steady hand.
‘Don’t excite yourself, gel,’ said Lizzie gently. Fevvers’ chin jerked up at that, almost pettishly.
‘Oh, Lizzie, the gentleman must know the truth!’
And she fixed Walser with a piercing, judging regard, as if to ascertain just how far she could go with him. Her face, in its Brobdingnagian symmetry, might have been hacked from wood and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds or figureheads for sailing ships. It flickered through his mind: is she really a man?
A creaking and wheezing outside the door heralded a bang upon it – the old nightwatchman in his leather cape.
‘Wot, still ’ere, Miss Fevvers? ’Scuse me . . . saw the light under the crack, see . . .’
‘We’re entertaining the press,’ said Fevvers. ‘Won’t be long, now, me old duck. Have a drop of bubbly.’
She overflowed her glass and shoved it across to him; he downed it at a gulp and smacked his lips.
‘Just the job. You know where to find me if there’s any trouble, miss – ’
Fevvers darted Walser an ironic glance under her lashes and smiled at the departing nightwatchman as if to say: ‘Don’t you think I’d be a match for him?’
Lizzie continued:
‘Imagine with what joy, pride and wonder I watched my darling, naked as a star, vanish round the corner of the house! And, to tell the truth, I was most heartily relieved, too, for, in our hearts, we both knew it was a do or die attempt.’
‘But hadn’t I dared and done, sir!’ Fevvers broke in. ‘For this first flight of mine, I did no more than circle the house at a level that just topped the cherry tree in Nelson’s garden, which was some thirty feet high. And, in spite of the great perturbation of my senses and the excess of mental concentration the practice of my new-found skill required, I did not neglect to pick my Lizzie a handful of the fruit that had just reached perfect ripeness upon the topmost branches, fruit that customarily we were forced to leave as a little tribute for the thrushes. No person in the deserted street to see me or think I was some hallucination or waking dream or phantom of the gin-shop fumes. I successfully made the circumnavigation of the house and then, aglow with triumph, I soared upwards to the roof again to rejoin my friend.
‘But, now, unused as they were to so much exercise, my wings began . . . oh, God! to give out! For going up involves an altogether different set of cogs and pulleys than coming down, sir, although I did not know that, then. Our studies in comparative physiology were yet to come.
‘So I leaps up, much as a dolphin leaps – which I now know is not the way to do it – and have already misjudged how high I should leap, in the first place, my weary wings already folding up beneath me. My heart misses. I think my first flight will be my last and I shall pay with my life the price of my hubris.
‘Scattering the cherries I had gathered in a soft, black hail over the garden, I grabbed at the guttering and – oh! and, ah! the guttering gave way beneath me! The old lead parted company with the eaves with a groaning sigh and there I dangled, all complete woman, again, my wings having seized up in perfect terror of a human fate –’
‘– but I reached out and grips her by the arms. Only love, great love, could have given me such strength, sir, to permit me to haul her in onto the roof against the pull of gravity as you might haul in, against the tide, a drowning person.’
‘And there we huddled on the roof in one another’s arms, sobbing together with mingled joy and relief, as dawn rose over London and gilded the great dome of St Paul’s until it looked like the divine pap of the city which, for want of any other, I needs must call my natural mother.
‘London, with the one breast, the Amazon queen.’
She fell silent. Some object within the room, perhaps the hot-water pipes, gave out a metallic tinkle. Lizzie, on her creaking handbag, shifted from one buttock to the other and coughed. Fevvers remained sunk in introspection for a while and the wind blew Big Ben, striking midnight, so lost, so lonely a sound it seemed to Walser the clock might be striking in a deserted city and they the only inhabitants left alive. Although he was not an imaginative man, even he was sensitive to that aghast time of the night when the dark dwarfs us.
The final reverberation of the chimes died away. Fevvers heaved a sigh that rocked the surface of her satin bosom, and came out of her lapse of vivacity.
‘Let me tell you a little more about my working life at this time – what it was I got up to when I was not flitting about the sky like a bat, sir! You will recall how I stood in for the Winged Victory each night in the parlour and may have wondered how this might have been, since I have arms –’ and she stretched them out, spanning half the dressing-room in the process ‘– and the Winged Victory has none.’
‘Well, Ma Nelson put it out that I was the perfection of, the original of, the very model for that statue which, in its broken and incomplete state, has teased the imagination of a brace of millennia with its promise of perfect, active beauty that has been, as it were, mutilated by history. Ma Nelson, contemplating the existence of my two arms, all complete, now puts her mind to the question: what might the Winged Victory have been holding in ’em when the forgotten master firs
t released her from the marble that had contained her inexhaustible spirit? And Ma Nelson soon came up with the answer: a sword.
‘So she equipped me with the very gilt ceremonial sword that come with her Admiral’s uniform, that she used to wear at her side, and sometimes use as a staff with which to conduct the revels – her wand, like Prospero’s. And now I grasped that sword in my right hand, with the point downwards, to show I meant no harm unless provoked, whilst my left hand hung loosely at my side, the fist clenched.
‘How was I costumed for my part? My hair was powdered white with chalk and tied up with a ribbon and my wings were powdered white, too, so I let out a puff if touched. My face and the top half of my body was spread with the wet white that clowns use in the circus and I had white drapes from my navel to my knee but my shins and feet were dipped in wet white, too.’
‘And very lovely she looked,’ cried loyal Lizzie. Fevvers modestly lowered her eyelashes.
‘Lovely or not, Ma Nelson always expressed complete satisfaction with my turnout and soon took to calling me, not her “Winged Victory” but her “Victory with Wings”, the spiritual flagship of her fleet, as if a virgin with a weapon was the fittest guardian angel for a houseful of whores. Yet it may be that a large woman with a sword is not the best advertisement for a brothel. For, slow but sure, trade fell off from my fourteenth birthday on.
‘Not so much that of our faithfullest clients, those old rakes who, perhaps, Ma Nelson had herself initiated in the far-off days of their beardless and precipitously ejaculatory youth, and others who might have formed such particular attachments to Annie or to Grace that you could speak of a kind of marriage, there. No. Such gentlemen could not shift the habits of a lifetime. Ma Nelson had addicted them to those shadowless hours of noon and midnight, the clarity of bought pleasure, the simplicity of contract as it was celebrated in her aromatic parlour.