Nights at the Circus Read Online Free PDF Page B

into a corner, took another from a crate stored behind the screen, popped it, refilled all glasses. Fevvers sipped and shuddered.
    ‘Warm.’
    Lizzie peered in the toilet jug and tipped the melted contents into the bathwater.
    ‘No more ice,’ she said to Walser accusingly, as if it were his fault.
    Perhaps, perhaps . . . my brain is turning to bubbles already, thought Walser, but I could almost swear I saw a fish, a little one, a herring, a sprat, a minnow, but wriggling, alive-oh, go into the bath when she tipped the jug. But he had no time to think about how his eyes were deceiving him because Fevvers now solemnly took up the interview shortly before the point where she’d left off.
    ‘Hatched,’ she said.

TWO
    ‘Hatched; by whom, I do not know. Who laid me is as much a mystery to me, sir, as the nature of my conception, my father and my mother both utterly unknown to me, and, some would say, unknown to nature, what’s more. But hatch out I did, and put in that basket of broken shells and straw in Whitechapel at the door of a certain house , know what I mean?’
    As she reached for her glass, the dirty satin sleeve fell away from an arm as finely turned as the leg of the sofa on which Walser sat. Her hand shook slightly, as if with suppressed emotion.
    ‘And, as I told you, who was it but my Lizzie over there who stumbled over the mewing scrap of life that then I was whilst she’s assisting some customer off the premises and she brings me indoors and there I was reared by these kind women as if I was the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers. And that is the whole truth and nothing but, sir.
    ‘And never have I told it to a living man before.’
    As Walser scribbled away, Fevvers squinted at his notebook in the mirror, as if attempting to interpret his shorthand by some magic means. Her composure seemed a little ruffled by his silence.
    ‘Come on, sir, now, will they let you print that in your newspapers? For these were women of the worst class and defiled .’
    ‘Manners in the New World are considerably more elastic than they are in the old, as you’ll be pleased to find, ma’am,’ said Walser evenly. ‘And I myself have known some pretty decent whores, some damn’ fine women, indeed, whom any man might have been proud to marry.’
    ‘Marriage? Pah!’ snapped Lizzie in a pet. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! D’you think a decent whore’d be proud to marry you , young man? Eh?’
    ‘Never mind, Lizzie, ’e means well. Here, is the boy still on? I’m starved to death, I’d pawn me gold hairbrush for some eel pies and a saveloy.’ She turned to Walser with gigantic coquetry. ‘Could you fancy an eel pie and a bit of mash, sir?’
    The call-boy was rung for, proved to be still on duty and instantly despatched to the pie shop in the Strand by a Lizzie still stiff with affront. But she was soon mollified by the spread that arrived in a covered basket ten minutes later – hot meat pies with a glutinous ladleful of eel gravy on each; a Fujiyama of mashed potatoes; a swamp of dried peas cooked up again and served swimming in greenish liquor. Fevvers paid off the call-boy, waited for her change and tipped him with a kiss on his peachy, beardless cheek that left it blushing and a little greasy. The women fell to with a clatter of rented cutlery but Walser himself opted for another glass of tepid champagne.
    ‘English food . . . waaall, I find it’s an acquired taste; I account your native cuisine to be the eighth wonder of the world, ma’am.’
    She gave him a queer look, as if she suspected he were teasing and, sooner or later, she would remember to pay him back for it, but her mouth was too full for a ripost as she tucked into this earthiest, coarsest cabbies’ fare with gargantuan enthusiasm. She gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she had a gullet