The Winter Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

with an air of apology.
    With another bow, the man turned back to his womenfolk. He seemed to be explaining something to the girls, speaking with expansive gestures and many loud flourishes. ‘Ah-Tah-Dahhh!’ he boomed, spreading his arms wide. ‘Bamm-Bamm!’ They nodded, very serious. He dropped down on to his back on a canvas pad spread on the floor and the two girls – heavens, they were tiny! – each grasped one of his hands and hopped up until they were sitting on his feet. Their mother caught the ends of the ropes attached to her daughters’ waists and began beating time against her leg with a short stick. The little girls, curled into balls, began to revolve. The baby retreated to a safe distance, clapping her hands.
    ‘They really don’t mind us watching?’ I said to Ina.
    ‘Not at all,’ she replied, not shifting her gaze from the ring. ‘Privilege of the tober-omey’s donah, Mrs Cooke told me. The ground-owner’s wife,’ she explained. ‘And anyway, as she said, the more distraction the better, at least as far as the animal acts are concerned.’
    ‘Did you believe the story about the runaway donkey, then?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Ina, turning to me briefly, although her eyes soon went back to the act, where one of the girls was now balanced in a handstand on her father’s feet and was repeatedly curling up into a ball and straightening out again while he bent and locked his knees in time. Her mother, who now had the rope looped firmly around herself like a belt with the end gripped in her hand, stepped close and spread her other arm wide. They must be about to attempt ‘the flick-flack’. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away. ‘I mean,’ said Ina, ‘if you had lived all your life in a circus, with camels and elephants and Russian relations, you’d hardly need to make stories up, would you? Gosh! Oh, jolly good try! What a brave girl you are!’
    I looked back to see the child swinging inelegantly on the harness, while her mother let the rope out slowly, hand over hand, and lowered her to the floor.
    ‘That woman must have nerves of iron,’ I said. ‘Oh Lord, now the other one. I can’t watch.’
    I felt quite wrung out by the time we left them. It was perhaps only that, whenever I had watched a circus before, the acts appeared effortless, the performers boneless and weightless, the tricks just that: tricks to fool us into believing what we saw. Witnessing the Prebrezhenskys’ rehearsal put the lie to that, for if practice makes perfect then necessarily anyone at practice is not quite perfect yet and those little girls were made of soft flesh and delicate bone, with no trick to brush simple gravity away.
    Outside, Bunty was curled asleep with her lead tied to a caravan wheel and her trainer nowhere to be seen since, judging from the savoury smells wafting from several open doors, it was now teatime. She rose, stretching and giving her eerie moaning yawn, what Alec calls her Baskerville yawn, and was content to leave the campground trotting at my heels on a limp lead as though she did so every day.
    ‘Oh dear!’ said Ina, her tone caught between wryness and real concern, as we neared the castle again. She pointed to one of the many turrets where a yellow duster had been hung out of a window. ‘Albert’s back early,’ she said, pulling on her gloves and buttoning her coat to the neck. ‘You know the drill, Dandy, don’t you?’ I nodded and veered to the other edge of the path so that I was quite eight feet from her. ‘And we’ve been for a short turn around the grounds keeping to the gravel, not walking on the grass, and I sat for ten minutes resting before we came back again.’
    ‘What if he’s been home for ages?’ I asked.
    ‘He hasn’t,’ Ina said, looking sheepish. ‘One duster is less than half an hour. Two is up to an hour and the plan is if it ever goes over the hour someone will slip out and come to find me. But it never has: Albert is a man of regular