Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

effect by giggling. Lizzie now crouched at Fevvers’ feet using her own handbag as a footstool, her huge handbag, an affair of cracked leather with catches of discoloured brass. Her hooked chin rested on the knees she clasped with liver-spotted hands. She crackled quietly with her own static; she missed nothing. The watchdog. Or . . . might it be possible, could it be . . . And Walser found himself asking himself: are they, in reality, mother and daughter?
    Yet, if this were so, what Nordic giant feathered the one upon the swarthy, tiny other? And who or where in all this business was the Svengali who turned the girl into a piece of artifice, who had made of her a marvellous machine and equipped her with her story? Had the one-eyed whore, if she existed, been the first business manager of these weird accomplices?
    He turned a page in his notebook.
    ‘Imagine me, sir, tripping in nothing but Ma Nelson’s shawl into that drawing-room where the shutters were bolted tight, the crimson velvet curtains drawn, all still simulating the dark night of pleasure although the candles were burnt out in the crystal sconces. Last night’s fragrant fire was but charred sticks in the hearth and glasses in which remained only the flat dregs of dissipation lay where they had fallen on the Bokhara carpet. The flimsy light of the farthing dip I carried with me touched the majesty of the swan-god on the wall and made me dream, dream and dare.
    ‘Well grown though I was, yet I had to pull a chair to the mantelpiece in order to climb up and take down the French gilt clock that stood there in a glass case. This clock was, you might say, the sign, or signifier of Ma Nelson’s little private realm. It was a figure of Father Time with a scythe in one hand and a skull in the other above a face on which the hands stood always at either midnight or noon, the minute hand and the hour hand folded perpetually together as if in prayer, for Ma Nelson said the clock in her reception room must show the dead centre of the day or night, the shadowless hour, the hour of vision and revelation, the still hour in the centre of the storm of time.
    ‘She was a strange one, Ma Nelson.’
    Walser could well believe it.
    ‘I picked up the old clock to give me room to move and set it down with care by the disordered hearth. As I did so, the antique, defunct mechanism let out a faint, melodious twang, as if resounding with clockwork encouragement. Then I climbed up and stood where Father Time had stood and, like a man about to hang himself, I kicked away the chair so that I would not be tempted to jump down upon it.
    ‘What a long way down the floor looked! It was only a few feet below, you understand, no great distance in itself – yet it yawned before me like a chasm, and, indeed, you might say that this gulf now before me represented the grand abyss, the poignant divide, that would henceforth separate me from common humanity.’
    At that, she turned her immense eyes upon him, those eyes ‘made for the stage’ whose messages could be read from standing room in the gods. Night had darkened their colour; their irises were now purple, matching the Parma violets in front of her mirror, and the pupils had grown so fat on darkness that the entire dressing-room and all those within it could have vanished without trace inside those compelling voids. Walser felt the strangest sensation, as if these eyes of the aerialiste were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold.
    Surprised by his own confusion, he gave his mind a quick shake to refresh its pragmatism. She lowered her eyelids, as if she knew enough was enough, and took a sip of now flat champagne before she continued. Her eyes reverted once again to the simple condition of a