‘Hark!’ said Fevvers, raising her hand.
On the soundless air of night came the ripple of Big Ben. Lizzie slammed the door as she came back to put the kettle on the hissing stove; the mauve and orange flames dipped and swayed.
Big Ben concluded the run-up, struck – and went on striking.
Walser relapsed on the sofa, dislodging not only a slithering mass of silken underthings but also the concealed layer of pamphlets and newspapers that lay beneath them. Muttering apologies, he bundled together the musky garments, but Lizzie, chattering with rage, snatched the papers from him and stuffed them away in the corner cupboard. Odd, that – that she did not want him to examine her old newspaper.
But, odder still – Big Ben had once again struck midnight. The time outside still corresponded to that registered by the stopped gilt clock, inside. Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong.
H’m.
He rejected a bacon sandwich; the strips of rusty meat slapped between the doorsteps of white bread seemed to him for dire extremities of hunger only, but Fevvers tucked in with relish, a vigorous mastication of large teeth, a smacking of plump lips smeared with grease. Lizzie passed him a fresh mug of black tea for him to burn his gullet with. Everything aggressively normal about all this, except the hour.
The food put fresh heart into the
aerialiste.
Her backbone firmed up and she began to glow, again, quite brightly, as she wiped her mouth once more on her sleeve, leaving behind shining traces of bacon fat on the grubby satin.
‘As I was saying,’ she resumed, ‘we lived for a while at Isotta’s in Battersea amid all the joys of home. And, an especial joy – we were just a hop and a skip and a jump away from the good Old Vic at Waterloo where, at very reasonable prices, we perched up in the gods and wept at Romeo and Juliet, booed and hissed at Crookback Dick, laughed ourselves silly at Malvolio’s yellow stockings –’
‘We dearly love the Bard, sir,’ said Lizzie briskly. ‘What spiritual sustenance he offers!’
‘And we’d take in a bit of opera, too – our favourites, sir? Why –’
‘
Marriage of Figaro
, for the class analysis,’ offered Lizzie, deadpan. Fevvers’ hearty laughter did not quite conceal her irritation.
‘Oh, Liz, you are a one! As for me, sir, I’ve a special fondness for Bizet’s
Carmen
, due to the spirit of the heroine.’
She subjected Walser to a blue bombardment from her eyes, challenge and attack at once, before she took up the narrative again.
‘So there we were, in Battersea; happy days! but a fearful cold winter came on with very little call for ice-cream and Gianni –’
‘– Isotta’s husband, my brother-in-law –’
‘– Gianni’s chest got very bad. They having the five little ones and another in the pot, with trade going so bad, we were hard put to manage, I can tell you. Then the baby fell sick and would take no nourishment and we was all crazed with worry.’
‘One morning, the elder kiddies at school, Gianni out on business in the freezing November fog, poor soul, with his cough, Isotta upstairs grieving over the baby, myself in the kitchen chopping candied peel, Fevvers in the room behind the shop teaching the four-year-old her letters –’
‘Though I know I should have no favourites among them, and truly, I love them all as if they was my own, well, my Violetta . . .’
She reached out to caress the bunch of Parma violets on her dressing-table with a smile that, for once, was not meant for Walser to see.
‘My Violetta on my knee, we explore together the adventures of A and B and C when comes a jangle on the bell and there in the shop is the strangest old lady that ever I saw, dressed up in the clothes of her youth, that is to say, some fifty years behind the times, a dress of black chiffon that looked like rags hung over such a mass of taffeta petticoats you couldn’t see at first how thin she was, that she was a lady all skin and bone. On her head she wore an old-fashioned poke bonnet of dull black satin with jet ornaments at either side and a black spotted veil hanging down in the front, so thick you could not see her face.
‘“Let me through into the back room, Winged Victory,” she said and she had a voice like the wind in telegraph wires.
‘Violetta burst out crying at the sight of my visitor and I hustled her off into the kitchen to get a treat of nuts and citron off Lizzie but I was a good deal discomposed by this apparition, too, and set her by the fire on the best chair – for you could tell she was a perfect gentlewoman – with stammerings and nervous fussings, quite unlike myself. She stretched her hand towards the flames; she had those great-auntish black lace mittens on, that go no further than the first joint of the fingers and thumbs, so all you could see of her hands was bone and nail.
‘“I reckon you’ve fallen on hard times since Nelson went,” she says.
‘“I won’t say things are rosy,” says I, although her very presence made me shudder and throughout our interview she never lifts her veil.
‘“Well, Fevvers,” she says, “I’ve a proposition for you.” And with that names me a figure that takes my breath away.
‘“And never any need to do the thing, oh, rest assured!” she tells me. “Not ’til you want to, that is.” So I realise she has heard all about me, how I was Ma Nelson’s flagship but always kept out of the battle, that Nelson never brought me to the block so I was known to all the netherside of London as the Virgin Whore.
‘“I want you for my museum of woman monsters,” she says. “Take your time about making up your mind.” Rising, she leaves her card on the mantelpiece and departs, and, looking after her out of the shop door, I see her little, old-fashioned carriage, all closed in, drawn by a little black pony and, on the box, a black man with this mournful peculiarity, he had been born without a mouth. Then the sour, brown fog rising from the river swallowed them up but I heard the hooves trotting towards Chelsea Bridge, although the wheels I could not hear since they were solid rubber.’
‘It was the famous Madame Schreck,’ said Lizzie tonelessly, as if the mention of the name were sufficient bad news in itself.
Famous, indeed; Walser knew of her already, vague rumours in men’s clubs, over brandy and cigars, the name never accompanied by guffaws, leers, nudges in the ribs, but by bare, hinted whispers of the profoundly strange, of curious revelations that greeted you behind Our Lady of Terror’s triple-locked doors, doors that opened reluctantly, with a great rattling of bolts and chains, and then swung to with a long groan as of despair.
‘Madame Schreck,’ wrote Walser. The story was about to take a grisly turn.
‘Oh, my poor girl!’ exclaimed Lizzie on a sigh. ‘If only . . . if only the baby had not taken a turn for the worse; oh, and if only Gianni’s cough had not turned septic, so he had to take to his bed; if only Isotta never took such a tumble down the stairs that the doctor swore she must spend the last three months of her time flat on her back on the kitchen sofa . . . Oh, Mr Walser, the dolorous litany of the misfortunes of the poor is a string of “if onlys”.’
‘Had not the doctor’s bills, that winter, swallowed up all our savings and as for the activities of the Special Branch –’
This time it was Lizzie who kicked furiously at Fevvers’ ankle and the girl never missed a beat of her narrative but went smoothly on a different tack.
‘And the little ones staring starvation in the face; oh! if our household had not been overwhelmed by an accumulation of those unpredictable catastrophes that precipitate poor folk such as we into the abyss of poverty through no fault of their own –’
‘“Don’t do it, Fevvers,” our Gianni begged her, but then he coughed up blood.’
‘So, rising early one morning, before the house was awake, when nobody could stop me, leaving Lizzie sleeping in our bed, I hastily packed a few things in a carpet bag, and not forgetting my pet talisman, Ma Nelson’s toy sword, to give me courage, I left a scribbled message on the kitchen table and trudged over Chelsea Bridge just as the moon was setting. It was bitter, bitter cold and even at Nelson’s funeral was my heart never so heavy. As I reached the last lamp-post on the bridge, out it blinked, and I lost sight of Battersea in the darkness before dawn.’
FOUR
‘You’ve filled up your notebook,’ observed Lizzie. Walser reversed it in order to give himself a fresh set of blank pages. He sharpened his pencil with the razor blade he always carried in an inner pocket for the purpose. He flexed his aching wrist. Lizzie, as if rewarding him for these activities, refilled his mug and Fevvers held out her mug for more tea, too. ‘Thirsty work, this autobiography,’ she said. Her exuberant hair was beginning to escape from Lizzie’s hairpins and frolic here and there along her bullish nape.
‘Mr Walser,’ she went on earnestly, spinning on her stool towards him. ‘You must understand this: Nelson’s Academy accommodated those who were perturbed in their bodies and wished to verify that, however equivocal, however much they cost, the pleasures of the flesh were, at bottom, splendid. But, as for Madame Schreck, she catered for those who were troubled in their . . . souls.’
Darkly she turned her attention for a moment to her treacly tea.
‘It was a gloomy pile in Kensington, in a square with a melancholy garden in the middle full of worn grass and leafless trees. The façade of her house was blackened by the London soot as if the very stucco were in mourning. A louring portico over the front door, sir, and all the inner shutters tightly barred. And the door knocker most ominously bandaged up in crepe.
‘That self-same fellow with no mouth, poor thing, opens the door to me after a good deal of unbolting from the inside, and bids me come in with eloquent gestures of his hands. I never saw eyes so full of sorrow as his were, sorrow of exile and of abandonment; his eyes said, clear as his lips could have, “Oh, girl! go home! save yourself while there is yet time!” even while he takes away my hat and shawl, but I am the same poor creature of necessity as he, and, as he must stay, then so needs I.
‘Early as it was in the morning for a house of pleasure – it was not yet seven – Madame Schreck, it seems, was wide awake but still in bed, taking her chocolate. She had me sit meself down and have a cup with her, which I did willingly enough, in spite of my trepidation, for that long walk had worn me out and I was starving hungry. The shutters were up, the blinds down, her heavy curtains drawn across and the only light in her bedroom a little nightlight or corpse light on the mantel so I was hard put to it to see what witches’ broth there is in my cup and she’s laid out in an old four-poster with the embroidered hangings pulled almost together so I can’t make out the face or shape of her, and all cold as hell.
‘“I’m glad to see
you
, Fevvers,” she says, and her voice was like wind in graveyards. “Toussaint will show you to your quarters, presently, and you can take a rest until dinner-time, after which we shall measure you for your costume.” From the way she said it, you’d think that costume was to be a winding sheet.
‘As my eyes grew used to the penumbra, I saw the only furniture in the room, besides her bed and my chair, was a safe the size of a wardrobe with the biggest brass combination lock on it that I ever did see, and a desk with a roll-top all locked up.
‘That was all she spoke to me. I made haste to finish my chocolate, I can tell you. Then the manservant, Toussaint, with the tenderest gesture, covers my eyes up with his hand, and, when he uncovers, Madame Schreck is up and dressed and stood there before me in her black dress and a thick veil such as a Spanish widow wears that comes down to her knees, and her mittens on, all complete.
‘Now, Mr Walser, do not think I am a faint-hearted woman but although I knew very well it was all so much show, the black carriage, the mute, the prison chill, all the same she had some quality of the uncanny about her, over and above the illusion, so you did think that under those lugubrious garments of hers you might find nothing but some kind of wicked puppet that pulled its own strings.
‘“Be off with you!” she says. But I thought of my little nephews and nieces who, that very minute, would be plaguing Lizzie for a bite of breakfast when we’d shared the last crust in the house at last night’s supper, and I sang out: “How about a bit on account, Madame Schreck? Or else I fly straight up the chimney, you won’t see me again.” And I swept over to the fireplace, that ain’t never seen a burned stock in its life, shoved aside the firescreen, ready to make good my promise.
‘“Toussaint!” she says. “Get in a man to block up all the chimneys immediately!” But when I started to toss the fire-irons furiously this way and that way, she says reluctantly: “Oh, very well,” feels under her pillow for a key, takes good care to put herself fair and square between me and the safe so I can’t read the combination, and, in a trice, the door swings open. Aladdin’s cave, inside! the contents shone with their own light, pile upon pile of golden sovereigns, a queen’s ransom of diamond necklaces and pearls and rubies and emeralds piled hugger-mugger among bankers’ drafts, bills of exchange, foreclosed mortgages etc. etc. etc. With a display of the greatest reluctance, she selects five sovereigns, counts ’em out again and, with as much painful hesitation as if they were drops of her dear heart’s blood, she hands ’em over.
‘What a shock I got when I felt the rasp of her fingertips on my palm, for they were indeed hard, as if there were no flesh on ’em. Afterwards, when I was free again, Esmeralda’s old man, the Human Eel, told me how this Madame Schreck, as she called herself, had indeed started out in life as a Living Skeleton, touring the sideshows, and always was a bony woman.
‘As I goes out the bedroom, I glances over my shoulder, to see what the old hag’s up to, now, and, bugger me, if she hasn’t precipitated herself bodily into that safe, and is hugging the riches it contains to her skinny bosom with the most vehement display of passion, making faint, whinnying sounds the while.