Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online

eight or nine in the evening, the drawing-room was snug as a groin –’
    ‘– and sweet as the room where burns the pyre of the Arabian bird, sweet and mauvish with smoke as hallucination itself, sir.
    ‘Now, Mr Walser, the day I first spread found me, as you might expect, much perplexed as to my own nature. Ma Nelson wrapped me up in a cashmere shawl off her own back, since I’d busted me shift, and Lizzie must needs ply her needle now, to alter my dress to fit my altered figure. As I sat on my bed in the attic waiting for a garment to be ready, I fell to contemplating the mystery of these soft, feathery growths that were already pulling my shoulders backwards with the weight and urgency of an invisible lover. Outside my window, in the cool sunlight, I saw the skirling seagulls who follow the winding course of the mighty Thames riding upon the currents of the air like spirits of the wind and so it came to me: if I have wings, then I must fly!
    ‘It was about the early afternoon and all quiet in the house, each woman in her own room busy with the various pastimes with which they occupied themselves before their labour began. I threw off that cashmere shawl and, spreading my new-fledged wings, I jumped into the air, hup.
    ‘But nothing came of it, sir, not even a hover , for I’d not got the knack of it, by any means, knew nothing of the theory of flight nor of the launch nor of the descent. I jumped up – and came down. Thump. And that was that.
    ‘So then I thought: there’s that marble fireplace down below, with a mantel some six feet off the ground upheld on either side by straining marble caryatids! And down to the parlour I forthwith softly trotted, for I thought, if I jumped off the mantelpiece whilst in full spread, sir, the air I trapped in my feathers would itself sustain me off the ground.
    ‘At first sight, you’d have thought this drawing-room was the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club of the utmost exclusivity, for Nelson encouraged an almost lugubrious degree of masculine good behaviour amongst her clients. She went in for leather armchairs and tables with The Times on them that Liz ironed every morning and the walls, covered with wine-red, figured damask, were hung with oil paintings of mythological subjects so crusted with age that the painted scenes within the heavy golden frames seemed full of the honey of ancient sunlight and it had crystallised to form a sweet scab. All these pictures, some of the Venetian school and no doubt very choice, were long since destroyed, along with Ma Nelson’s house itself, but there was one picture I shall always remember, for it is as if engraved upon my heart. It hung above the mantelpiece and I need hardly tell you that its subject was Leda and the Swan.
    ‘All those who saw her picture gallery wondered, but Nelson would never have her pictures cleaned. She always said, didn’t she, Liz, that Time himself, the father of transfigurations, was the greatest of artists, and his invisible hand must be respected at all costs, since it was in anonymous complicity with that of every human painter, so I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what might have been my own primal scene, my own conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty of feathers descending with imperious desire upon the half-stunned and yet herself impassioned girl.
    ‘When I asked Ma Nelson what this picture meant, she told me it was a demonstration of the blinding access of the grace of flesh.’
    With this remarkable statement, she gave Walser a sideways, cunning glance from under eyelashes a little darker than her hair.
    Curiouser and curiouser, thought Walser; a one-eyed, metaphysical madame, in Whitechapel, in possession of a Titian? Shall I believe it? Shall I pretend to believe in it?
    ‘Some bloke whose name I misremember give ’er the pictures,’ said Lizzie. ‘He liked her on account of how she shaved her pubes.’
    Fevvers gave Lizzie a disapproving glance but spoiled the