Nights at the Circus Read Online Free PDF

position.
    The greasepaint floated off Fevvers’ face as Lizzie wiped away cold cream with cotton wool, scattering the soiled balls carelessly on the floor. Fevvers reappeared, flushed, to peer at herself eagerly in the mirror as if pleased and surprised to find herself again so robustly rosy-cheeked and shiny-eyed. Walser was surprised at her wholesome look: like an Iowa cornfield.
    Lizzie dipped a velour puff in a box of bright peach-coloured powder and shook it over the girl’s face, to take off the shine. She picked up a hairbrush of yellow metal.
    ‘Can’t tell you who give ’er this,’ she announced conspiratorially waving the brush so that the small stones with which it was encrusted (in the design of the Prince of Wales’ feathers) scattered prisms of light. ‘Palace protocol. Dark secret. Comb and mirror to go with it. Solid, it is. What a shock I got when I got it valued. Fool and his money is soon parted. Goes straight into the bank tomorrow morning. She’s no fool. All the same, she can’t resist using it tonight.’
    There was a hint of censure in Lizzie’s voice, as if there was nothing that she herself would find irresistible, but Fevvers eyed her hairbrush with a complacent and proprietorial air. For just one moment, she looked less generous.
    ‘Course,’ said Fevvers, ‘ he never got nowhere.’
    Her inaccessability was also legendary, even if, as Walser had already noted on his pad, she was prepared to make certain exceptions for exigent French dwarves. The maid untied the blue ribbon that kept in check the simmering wake of the young woman’s hair, which she laid over her left arm as if displaying a length of carpet and started to belabour vigorously. It was a sufficiently startling head of hair, yellow and inexhaustible as sand, thick as cream, sizzling and whispering under the brush. Fevvers’ head went back, her eyes half closed, she sighed with pleasure. Lizzie might have been grooming a palomino; yet Fevvers was a hump-backed horse.
    That grubby dressing-gown, horribly caked with greasepaint round the neck . . . when Lizzie lifted up the armful of hair, you could see, under the splitting, rancid silk, her humps, her lumps, big as if she bore a bosom fore and aft, her conspicuous deformity, the twin hills of the growth she had put away for those hours she must spend in daylight or lamplight, out of the spotlight. So, on the street, at the soirée, at lunch in expensive restaurants with dukes, princes, captains of industry and punters of like kidney, she was always the cripple, even if she always drew the eye and people stood on chairs to see.
    ‘Who makes your frocks?’ the reporter in Walser asked percipiently. Lizzie stopped in mid-stroke; her mistress’s eyes burst open – whoosh! like blue umbrellas.
    ‘Nobody. I meself,’ said Fevvers sharply. ‘Liz helps.’
    ‘But ’er ’ats we purchase from the best modistes,’ asserted Lizzie suavely. ‘We got some lovely ’ats in Paris, didn’t we, darling? That leghorn, with the moss roses . . .’
    ‘I see his glass is empty.’
    Walser allowed himself to be refilled before Lizzie stuffed her mouth with tortoiseshell pins and gave both hands to the task of erecting Fevvers’ chignon. The sound of the music hall at closing time clanked and echoed round them, gurgle of water in a pipe, chorus girls calling their goodnights as they scampered downstairs to the waiting hansoms of the stage-door Johnnies, somewhere the rattle of an out-of-tune piano. The lightbulbs round Fevvers’ mirror threw a naked and unkind light upon her face but could flush out no flaw in the classic cast of her features, unless their very size was a fault in itself, the flaw that made her vulgar.
    It took a long time to pile up those two yards of golden hair. By the time the last pin went in, silence of night had fallen on the entire building.
    Fevvers patted her bun with a satisfied air. Lizzie shook the champagne bottle, found it was empty, tossed it