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contemplative and leisurely twenty-five, so that the packed theatre could enjoy the spectacle, as in slow motion, of every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled. Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory; if it slackens its speed in mid-air, down it falls. But Fevvers, apparently, pottered along the invisible gangway between her trapezes with the portly dignity of a Trafalgar Square pigeon flapping from one proffered handful of corn to another, and then she turned head over heels three times, lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum.
    (But surely, pondered Walser, a real bird would have too much sense to think of performing a triple somersault in the first place.)
    Yet, apart from this disconcerting pact with gravity, which surely she made in the same way the Nepali fakir had made his, Walser observed that the girl went no further than any other trapeze artiste. She neither attempted nor achieved anything a wingless biped could not have performed, although she did it in a different way, and, as the Valkyries at last approached Valhalla, he was astonished to discover that it was the limitations of her act in themselves that made him briefly contemplate the unimaginable – that is, the absolute suspension of disbelief.
    For, in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman – in the implausible event that such a thing existed – have to pretend she was an artificial one?
    He smiled to himself at the paradox: in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. But – and Walser smiled to himself again, as he remembered his flutter of conviction that seeing was believing – what about her belly button ? Hasn’t she just this minute told me she was hatched from an egg , not gestated in utero ? The oviparous species are not, by definition, nourished by the placenta; therefore they feel no need of the umbilical cord . . . and, therefore, don’t bear the scar of its loss! Why isn’t the whole of London asking: does Fevvers have a belly button?
    It was impossible to make out whether or not she had a navel during her act; Walser could recall, of her belly, only a pink, featureless expanse of stockinette fleshing. Whatever her wings were, her nakedness was certainly a stage illusion.
    After she’d pulled off the triple somersault, the band performed the coup de grâce on Wagner, and stopped. Fevvers hung by one hand, waving and blowing kisses with the other, those famous wings of hers now drawn up behind her. Then she jumped right down to the ground, just dropped, just plummeted down, hitting the stage squarely on her enormous feet with an all too human thump only partially muffled by the roar of applause and cheers.
    Bouquets pelt the stage. Since there is no second-hand market for flowers, she takes no notice of them. Her face, thickly coated with rouge and powder so that you can see how beautiful she is from the back row of the gallery, is wreathed in triumphant smiles; her white teeth are big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
    She kisses her free hand to all. She folds up her quivering wings with a number of shivers, moues and grimaces as if she were putting away a naughty book. Some chorus boy or other trips on and hands her into her feather cloak that is as frail and vivid as those the natives of Florida used to make. Fevvers curtsies to the conductor with gigantic aplomb and goes on kissing her hand to the tumultuous applause as the curtain falls and the band strikes up ‘God save the Queen’. God save the mother of the obese and bearded princeling who has taken his place in the royal box twice nightly since Fevvers’ first night at the Alhambra, stroking his beard and meditating upon the erotic possibilities of her ability to hover and the problematic of his paunch vis-à-vis the missionary