Read Nights at the Circus for Free Online

to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. Impressed, Walser waited with the stubborn docility of his profession until at last her enormous appetite was satisfied; she wiped her lips on her sleeve and belched. She gave him another queer look, as if she half hoped the spectacle of her gluttony would drive him away, but, since he remained, notebook on knee, pencil in hand, sitting on her sofa, she sighed, belched again, and continued:
    ‘In a brothel bred, sir, and proud of it, if it comes to the point, for never a bad word nor an unkindness did I have from my mothers but I was given the best of everything and always tucked up in my little bed in the attic by eight o’clock of the evening before the big spenders who broke the glasses arrived.
    ‘So there I was –’
    ‘– there she was, the little innocent, with her yellow pigtails that I used to tie up with blue ribbons, to match her big blue eyes –’
    ‘– there I was and so I grew, and the little downy buds on my shoulders grew with me, until, one day, when I was seven years old, Nelson –’
    ‘Nelson?’ queried Walser.
    Fevvers and Lizzie raised their eyes reverently in unison to the ceiling.
    ‘Nelson, rest her soul, yes. Wasn’t she the madame! And always called Nelson, on account of her one eye, a sailor having put the other out with a broken bottle the year of the Great Exhibition, poor thing. Now Nelson ran a seemly, decent house and never thought of putting me to the trade while I was still in short petticoats, as others might have. But, one evening, when she and my Lizzie were giving me my bath in front of the fire, as she was soaping my little feathery buds very tenderly, she cries out: “Cupid! Why, here’s our very own Cupid in the living flesh!” And that was how I first earned my crust, for my Lizzie made me a little wreath of pink cotton roses and put it on my head and gave me a toy bow and arrow –’
    ‘– that I gilded up for her,’ said Lizzie. ‘Real gold leaf, it was. You put the leaf on the palm of your hand. Then you blow it ever so lightly onto the surface of whatever it is you want gilded. Gently does it. Blow it. Gawd, it was a bother.’
    ‘So, with my wreath of roses, my baby bow of smouldering gilt and my arrows of unfledged desire, it was my job to sit in the alcove of the drawing-room in which the ladies introduced themselves to the gentlemen. Cupid, I was.’
    ‘With her baby winglets. Reigning over all.’
    The women exchanged a nostalgic smile. Lizzie reached behind the screen for another bottle.
    ‘Let’s drink to little Cupid.’
    ‘I won’t say no,’ said Fevvers, proffering her glass.
    ‘So there I was,’ she went on, after an invigorating gulp, ‘I was a tableau vivant from the age of seven on. There I sat above the company –’
    ‘– as if she were the guardian cherub of the house –’
    ‘– and for seven long years, sir, I was nought but the painted, gilded sign of love, and you might say, that so it was I served my apprenticeship in being looked at – at being the object of the eye of the beholder. Until the time came when my, pardon me, woman’s bleeding started up along with the beginnings of great goings on in, as you might put it, the bosom department. But, though, like any young girl, I was much possessed with the marvellous blossoming of my until then reticent and undemanding flesh –’
    ‘– flat as an ironing board on both sides till thirteen and a ’arf, sir –’
    ‘– yet, startled as I was by all that , I was yet more moved and strangely puzzled by what, at first, manifested itself as no more than an infernal itching in my back.
    ‘At first, but a small, indeed, an almost pleasurable irritation, a kind of physical buzzing, sir, so that I’d rub my back against the legs of the chairs, as cats do, or else I’d get my Lizzie or another of the girls to scrub my back with a pumice stone or a nail brush whilst I was in the tub, for the itch was situated