Read Nights at the Circus for Free Online Page B

wept. That night, we threw away the bow and arrow and I posed, for the first time, as the Winged Victory, for, as you can see, I am designed on the grand scale and, even at fourteen, you could have made two Lizzies out of me.
    ‘Oh, sir, let me indulge my heart awhile and describe for you that beloved house which, although one of ill-fame, shielded me for so long from the tempests of misfortune and kept my youthful wings from dragging in the mud.
    ‘It was one of those old, square, red-brick houses with a plain, sober façade and a graceful, scallop-shaped fanlight over the front door that you may still find in those parts of London so far from the tide of fashion that they were never swept away. You could not look at Mother Nelson’s house without the thought, how the Age of Reason built it; and then you almost cried, to think the Age of Reason was over before it properly begun, and this harmonious relic tucked away behind the howling of the Ratcliffe Highway, like the germ of sense left in a drunkard’s mind.
    ‘A little flight of steps ran up to the front door, steps that Lizzie, faithful as any housewife in London, scrubbed and whitened every morning. An air of rectitude and propriety surrounded the place, with its tall windows over which we always kept the white blinds pulled down, as if its eyes were closed, as if the house were dreaming its own dream, or as if, on entering between the plain and well-proportioned pediments of the doorway, you entered a place that, like its mistress, turned a blind eye to the horrors of the outside, for, inside, was a place of privilege in which those who visited might extend the boundaries of their experience for a not unreasonable sum. It was a place in which rational desires might be rationally gratified; it was an old-fashioned house, so much so that, in those years, it had a way of seeming almost too modern for its own good, as the past so often does when it outruns the present.
    ‘As for the drawing-room, in which I played the living statue all my girlhood, it was on the first floor and you reached it by a mighty marble staircase that went up with a flourish like, pardon me, a whore’s bum. This staircase had a marvellous banister of wrought iron, all garlands of fruit, flowers and the heads of satyrs, with a wonderfully slippery marble handrail down which, in my light-hearted childhood I was accustomed, pigtails whisking behind me, to slide. Only those games I played before opening time, because nothing put off respectable patrons like those whom Nelson preferred so much as the sight of a child in a whorehouse.
    ‘The drawing-room was dominated by a handsome fireplace that must have been built by the same master in marble who put up the staircase. A brace of buxom, smiling goddesses supported this mantelpiece on the flats of their upraised palms, much as we women do uphold the whole world, when all is said and done. That fireplace might have served the Romans for an altar, or a tomb, and it was our very own domestic temple to Vesta for, every afternoon, Lizzie lit there a fire of sweet-scented woods whose natural aromatics she was accustomed to augment with burning perfumes of the best quality.’
    ‘As for me,’ interposed Lizzie, ‘I’d never been any great shakes as a whore, due to an inconvenient habit I had of praying , which came to me from my family and which I never could shake off.’
    This was patently incredible and Walser remained incredulous, although Lizzie’s spitting black eyes dared disbelief.
    ‘After I converted a score or two of regular customers to the Church of Rome, Ma Nelson called me into her office one afternoon and said:
    ‘“Our Liz, all this will never do! You’ll make our poor girls redundant if you go on so!” She took me off regular duties and set me to work as housekeeper, which suited me very well, for the girls saw to it I got my share of the gratuities. And, every evening, as dusk came on, I lit the fire and tended it, until, by