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

waited, I waited . . . although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance for ever!
    ‘Yet I was possessed by the idea I had been feathered out for some special fate, though what it was I could not imagine. So I waited, with lithic patience, for that destiny to manifest itself.
    ‘As I wait now, sir,’ she said directly to Walser, swinging round to him, ‘as the last cobwebs of the old century blow away.’
    Then she swung back to the mirror and thoughtfully tucked away a straying curl.
    ‘However, until Liz opened the door and let the men in, when all we girls needs must jump to attention and behave like women, you might say that, in our well-ordered habitation, all was “ luxe, calme et volupté ”, though not quite as the poet imagined. We all engaged in our intellectual, artistic or political –’
    Here Lizzie coughed.
    ‘– pursuits and, as for myself, those long hours of leisure I devoted to the study of aerodynamics and the physiology of flight, in Ma Nelson’s library, from among whose abundant store of books I gleaned whatever small store of knowledge I possess, sir.’
    With that, she batted her eyelashes at Walser in the mirror. From the pale length of those eyelashes, a good three inches, he might have thought she had not taken her false ones off had he not been able to see them lolling, hairy as gooseberries, among the formidable refuse of the dressing-table. He continued to take notes in a mechanical fashion but, as the women unfolded the convolutions of their joint stories together, he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place; or a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night.
    ‘Library?’ he queried indefatigably, if a touch wearily.
    ‘’ E left it to ’er,’ said Lizzie.
    ‘Who left what to whom?’
    ‘This old geyser. Left Nelson ’is library. On account of she was the only woman in London who could get it up for him –’
    ‘ Lizzie! You know I abhor coarse language!’
    ‘– and that in spite of, or, perhaps, because of, her black eye patch and her travestie. Oh, her little plump thighs like chicken cutlets in her doeskin britches! What a quaint figure she cut! He was a Scottish gentleman with a big beard. I remember him well. Never give ’is name, of course. Left her his library. Our Fevvers was always rooting about in it, nose in a book, nothing but a poke of humbugs for company.’
    Humbugs, noted Walser with renewed enthusiasm. In England, a kind of candy; in America –
    ‘As to my flight,’ continued Fevvers inexorably, ‘you must realise that my size, weight and general construction were not such as to make flying come easy to me, although there is ample room in my chest for lungs of the size required. But the bones of birds are filled with air and mine are filled with solid marrow and if the remarkable development of my thorax forms the same kind of windbreak as does that of a pigeon, the resemblance stops abruptly there and problems of balance and of elementary negotiations with the wind – who is a fickle lover – absorbed me for a long time.
    ‘Have you observed my legs, sir?’
    She thrust her right leg through the flap of her dressing-gown. Its foot wore a down-at-heel pink velvet slipper trimmed with grubby swansdown. The leg itself, perfectly bare, was admirably long and lean.
    ‘My legs don’t tally with the upper part of my body from the point of view of pure aesthetics, d’you see. Were I to be the true copy of Venus, one built on my scale ought to have legs like tree-trunks, sir; these flimsy little underpinnings of mine have more than once buckled up under the top-heavy distribution of weight upon my torso, have let me down with a bump and left me