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

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.
    ‘These were the kind old buffers who would extend a father’s indulgence in the shape of the odd half-sovereign or string of seed pearls to the half-woman, half-statue they had known in those earliest days when she had played Cupid and, sometimes, out of childish fun, sprung off her toy arrows amongst them, hitting, in play, sometimes an ear, sometimes a buttock, sometimes a ballock.
    ‘But with their sons and grandsons it was a different matter. When the time came for them to meet La Nelson and her girls, in they’d trot, timorous yet defiant, blushing to the tops of their Eton collars, aquiver with nervous anticipation and dread, and then their eyes would fall on the sword I held and Louisa or Emily would have the devil’s own job with them, thereafter.
    ‘I put it down to the influence of Baudelaire , sir.’
    ‘What’s this?’ cried Walser, amazed enough to drop his professional imperturbability.
    ‘The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but damned souls who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do . . . Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for “Votes for Women”, I can tell you!’
    ‘Does that seem strange to you? That the caged bird should want to see the end of cages, sir?’ queried Lizzie, with an edge of steel in her voice.
    ‘Let me tell you that it was a wholly female world within Ma Nelson’s door. Even the dog who guarded it was a bitch and all the cats were females, one or the other of ’em always in kitten, or newly given birth, so that a sub-text of fertility underwrote the glittering sterility of the pleasure of the flesh available within the academy. Life within those walls was governed by a sweet and loving reason. I never saw a single blow exchanged between any of the sisterhood who reared me, nor heard a cross word or a voice raised in anger. Until the hour of eight, when work began and Lizzie stationed herself behind the peephole in the front door, the girls kept to their rooms and the benign silence might be interrupted only by the staccato rattle of the typewriter as Grace practised her stenography or the lyric ripple of the flute upon which Esmeralda was proving to be something of a virtuoso.
    ‘But what followed after they put away their books was only poor girls earning a living, for, though some of the customers would swear that whores do it for pleasure, that is only to ease their own consciences, so that they will feel less foolish when they fork out hard cash for pleasure that has no real existence unless given freely – oh, indeed! we knew we only sold the simulacra. No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity, sir.
    ‘As for myself, I worked my passage on Ma Nelson’s ship as living statue, and, during my blossoming years, from fourteen to seventeen, I existed only as an object in men’s eyes after the night-time knocking on the door began. Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our voyage through the world? I was as if closed up in a shell, for the wet white would harden on my face and torso like a death mask that covered me all over, yet, inside this appearance of marble, nothing could have been more vibrant with potentiality than I! Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I