Orphans of the Carnival

~ ~ ~

It was Theo and Julia, not Mr Lent and Miss Pastrana. From the very first, he insisted. She was his sole client. She was all he needed, he said.

They toured the east coast while he made arrangements. First London, he said. Then Paris, Berlin.

He talked. Oh, how he talked. On a train rattling through the night, everything out there peculiar and dreamlike, the dark land. He’d been in the business since he was in the crib. His father and mother had run a house for those of the human curiosity class, the wondrous, the strange, the nondescript in every sense of the word. That’s what she was, he said. The singularity, the truly one and only. Cursed? Come on! You’re a bloody marvel! Blessed, more like. It had all gone, he said, everything he’d had. Father, mother, the house. Let me tell you this, Julia, what I haven’t seen doesn’t exist, believe me, been broke as it’s possible to be, down in a pit but got back up again, up now, nice and steady. Got a good nose, see. Read the market. Up and up and up, and now I am a wealthy man. I have ideas. I’ve been all over Europe. You’d love it, Julia. There’s so much, there’s just so much.

‘You’ll be a rich woman,’ he said, ‘because I’ll be a rich man.’

She began to wonder, as the cities and the miles and the time flew by, if this was what it was like to be married. Of course not. They never touched, apart from her hand on his arm, his cupping her elbow, touching her fingers as he helped her down from a coach. But there was coupledom in all those travelling hours, the daily life of the circuit jogging on, she and he the only constants. She could talk to him, tell him about it all, home, New Orleans, everything. At first it felt odd to travel alone with a man, but that soon passed. More and more he took on the role of lady’s maid, bringing hot water first thing, combing her hair out after a show, the touch of his hand on the back of her neck sharp and startling. His quick triple rap on her door was familiar. The more he did, the more he kept the others away. She missed those old days of company, Myrtle and Delia, Cato, the dancing in the yard, the breakfasts. When she was not onstage or practising, she read books and played her guitar. Rooms. Rooms that looked out on streets and streets and yet other streets, sometimes an alleyway or wall, or rooftops reflecting morning sun that crept through thin curtains onto her eyelids, waking her early. But it wouldn’t be for long. In Europe, the circuses were bigger and grander, he said. There the great circus performers were fêted, adored. The ball in Baltimore, he said, was nothing compared to the glittering evenings that awaited. And anyway, wasn’t life good? He had money. She had new clothes, new boots — she hadn’t worn her red ones since they’d got her into trouble — new kid gloves, new white petticoats, a collection of veils in different colours to match her several outfits, and when he came back from wherever he went when he was gone, he liked to talk, on and on, rambling along in the most intimate way, almost as if he was talking to himself, so that even though she hardly saw a soul apart from him it didn’t seem to matter so much.

‘You put the same things in the booklet,’ she said, ‘I took a look, and some of those things are still there, all that about the Diggers eating out of a trough.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, raising his thin black eyebrows, ‘but the whole thrust is different. It’s a matter of emphasis. Look, I make it quite clear how vastly superior you are to the Digger Indians. And of course I deliberately leave a question mark over your origins.’

‘But that whole story…’ she said.

‘See here.’ He pulled a crumpled copy of the booklet out of his pocket. ‘Listen to how I phrase it. I deliberately say— Where is it? Oh, here— Yes— “It is generally credited”. Take note of that. “Generally credited.” That says nothing about truth.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘What is truth, after all? We make our own.’

‘Do we?’

‘And see here.’ He flicked over a page. ‘I’ve been extremely careful with the language. Here. “The statement that is generally credited concerning her is as follows.” That’s the way I put it.’

‘And the baboons,’ she said, ‘and the bears.’

‘Julia,’ he said, dropping the booklet, leaning forward and taking her hands in both of his, a gesture that both moved and scared her, for no one had ever done it before. ‘This is a throw-away. This is not the truth. Nobody wants the truth. What they want is a story. A good one. You could be anything. Your “loop garou”. Your demon baby. That is a piece of paper. Pah! This is you! This!’ He turned her hands over in his, staring fiercely down into her palms as if in wonder. ‘God!’ he whispered, then let go of her hands and drew back. ‘Never forget,’ he said, ‘that words on a piece of paper are nothing more than paper. They have nothing to do with your own self.’

They sailed from New York on a mail ship to Liverpool. She walked covered through the raucous crowds of sailors and nervy passengers in knots and scatters, seeing little of the teeming wharf but aware of incessant noise and a hectic press of bodies. Theo held her tightly by the hand, keeping her close to him as if she was a child, up the gangway and onto the great ship. It was top-notch, he said, the only way to cross. ‘Look at that, the size of those wheels! Safe as houses. And I got you the best, Julia. The best I could.’

Her cabin was small but comfortable. For most of the eleven-day voyage she stayed in it, taking her meals in there alone. It was just easier. ‘All that gawking,’ Theo said. ‘Don’t you get sick of it all? Gawk gawk gawk.’ It was hard to be on board ship, to hear the waves and smell the sea and not have freedom of the decks.

He’d knock on the door. ‘Julia,’ he’d say, ‘I brought you some wine.’

‘Oh, thank you, Theo,’ she’d say, and with a wink he’d set it down on the tiny table in her tiny cabin, and off he’d go. Other times, he’d cram himself in, sit down with his hands behind his head and laugh, tell her about the lovely dining room and make fun of the other passengers to keep her amused. When the sun was beginning to fade, he’d come for her, and she’d put on her veil and gloves, and they’d go for a walk about the deck. If the sea was calm it was heavenly, a lovely time of day. The moon would come up and make the water oily black, and the stars would remind her of home. There was fog off the Grand Banks, and a few rough days towards the end, but mostly the weather was fine. She enjoyed the rough times, in any case. She never got sick. Theo did. One particularly bad day when the sea threw up walls of water and heaved them creaking in and out of great troughs and valleys, she went up on deck and walked about holding onto things. It was wonderful. They’d told the passengers to stay below and everyone was hunkered down calling for sick bowls, but she went up in her veil, folding it back from her face when she saw the emptiness of the deck, letting the wind whip tears backwards from her eyes. The weather scoured her face. She was an ant on a bobbing cork. If she let go, the sky would whip her away like a bit of old paper. She walked about for ten minutes before dropping the veil once more and going down to see how Theo was.

‘Do you need more water?’ she asked, putting her head round the door.

Theo was lying on his side with a white face and his hair greasing up the pillow.

‘No thank you,’ he said weakly. He’d not been sick for the past two hours but the faint smell of vomit lingered.

‘They’re saying it’ll be better tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Uh.’ His closed eyelids flickered.

‘That pillow needs turning,’ she said. ‘Move your head.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘No, move your head.’

‘Julia,’ he said, ‘I’m trying not to move my head.’

‘Won’t take a second. Here. Let’s slip this under, there. Better?’

Just like the old days, nursing Solana. He turned onto his back and frowned, swallowing loudly, his throat convulsing, opened his eyes and looked at her, focusing slowly like a child waking up. She had an urge to stroke his high white forehead, could have done so easily, just wiping the sweat away, but she fought it down.

‘I’ve been up on deck,’ she said quickly.

‘In this? Are you mad?’

‘It’s lovely. There’s no one up there. I can walk about without my veil.’

‘Do be careful, Julia.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. You don’t need to tell me.’

‘Sit down for a minute,’ he said. ‘I’m bored stiff.’

‘Someone recognised me by my boots once,’ she said, sitting down on the end of the bed.

‘There you are.’ He swiped sweat from his forehead. ‘You can’t be too careful.’

‘It was horrible.’ She looked away, suddenly awkward to be this close with him, all sick and tousled as he was in his pyjamas.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘They threw stones at me. Children.’

He waited a moment, and it seemed to her that the air between them charged like a battery. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Beach came and chased them all away.’ She looked at him and smiled, dispelling the charge. ‘Have you ever been really scared?’

He thought.

‘I mean really scared like you were going to die or something was going to hurt very badly?’

He thought some more then said, ‘I don’t think I have. Not like that.’

‘I was scared then. One boy had a knife and he kept coming really close with it. And I got this scar. From a stone. Look.’ She leaned a little forward and parted some of the hair on her cheek.

‘My God, I never noticed that,’ he said.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t. It’s a small thing, but at the time…’

‘Children are cruel,’ he said. ‘Here’s what you do.’ He raised himself up a little and put his hands behind his head. ‘You step outside yourself. Don’t react.’ He put on his half smile of non-concern. ‘They don’t exist.’

‘A stone exists when it hits you in the face,’ she said.

‘Well, you could probably debate that with a philosopher.’

‘Don’t think I’ll bother.’

He smiled.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘When have you had to do that?’

‘Do what, chick?’

She softened at the ease of his tone.

‘Pretend you didn’t care.’

‘Oh.’ He sniggered. ‘Everyone has to do it sometimes.’

‘Hm!’ she said, looking away, slightly annoyed, he thought, for some reason. So he went on talking. ‘You know, you don’t own the monopoly, Julia. I had to stay at my uncle’s up in Westchester County. My cousins were pigs.’

‘What did they do?’ She looked back, interested.

‘What they… it wasn’t so much what they did as…’

He was beginning to look bilious again.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I think I’ll sleep some more.’

She left him to rest, closing the door quietly and going back to her cabin, where she lay down on her own bunk and thought about him for a long time, feeling sorry for the poor boy in Westchester County with his horrible cousins, and wondering what it was they’d done to him.

She tried to go on deck again next day but too many of the crew were about, and then it was too late because the sea calmed down, the screaming wind died away to a mumble, and the weather turned to a grey drizzle that accompanied them all the way to Liverpool, where they disembarked in a solid downpour.

The docks went on forever, huge piers and basins, massive buildings lining the river. The sky above them was bunched and black, and rain put a gleam and a polish on the stones of the quay. They got a bus straight to the station, through rough old streets, narrow and crowded. Packs of hungry-looking boys roamed and the cobbles shone. At the station the waiting rooms were full. On the platforms the people pushed so close to the edge with their suitcases and trunks it was a wonder they didn’t spill over onto the line. They waited two hours for the London train. Babies screamed, one striking up as another subsided. She thought she’d die of weariness. Theo made her a place to sit, next to a wall and shielded from view by a tower of trunks, but she became hot and started sweating under the veil. Her hands itched and she longed to take off her gloves and give them a good scratch.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you can have a sleep on the train.’

They were travelling first class; they’d be in London by nightfall.

‘So soon?’ she said.

‘This is a small country, Julia.’ He sat down on an upturned suitcase and smiled. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

And after the vast American distances she’d covered, after the Atlantic Ocean, England was indeed tiny. It took them only seven hours to get to London. They reached the hotel in Covent Garden just before eight. It was a beautiful place, Julia thought, much nicer than any she’d stayed in before. The window boxes on the front were full of red geraniums, and there were flowers in the lobby and more in her room, a huge spray of tall spearlike plants in all shades of pink and purple that gave off a heavy, heady scent. The proprietress was a short round affable woman with carrot-red hair and thin black crescent eyebrows, who greeted them personally, introducing herself as Mrs Dellow, and showed them to their rooms. The staff had been well prepared, she said. The garden at the back was for the use of guests (Ha ha, if we ever get a fine day!), though I would suggest that the lady wears her veil if any of our other patrons happen to be there. Oh, of course. Shall you unveil now, Madame? Or would you rather wait? It’s all the same.

She unveiled.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Dellow. ‘There you are.’

Well warned. Julia smiled.

They ate privately in a room downstairs, served by a young waiter who stole discreet glances at Julia as he set down the dishes. The food was bland and needed salt. She had not managed to sleep on the train after all. Things were bigger than they should be, brighter, because she was so tired.

‘I’m not sure whether I’m awake or asleep,’ she said, pushing her plate aside.

Theo smiled, lighting a cigar. ‘Then you must go to your room and sleep,’ he said. ‘And I have someone to meet.’

‘Aren’t you tired?’

‘Never,’ he said.

It was about the German tour, he said. He saw her to her room, touched her fingers briefly and was gone. She changed into her white nightie. So tired, yet where was sleep? Two comfy chairs were set in the alcove, and in the large bay window overlooking the square was a table, where she placed her books. An hour later she was still looking out of the window, wide awake, Yatzi lying across her knees. London, said her muddled head. The strange square with its moonlit railings, the black outline of the buildings on the other side of the square sharp against the deep blue skyline. I have crossed the sea. With a man. With dark eyes, and hair with a big wave in it licking backwards from his brow.

Morning brought sunshine and a clean wet smell from the leaves outside the window. A pigeon crooned on the sill. Julia had managed a few hours’ sleep but was wide awake again by six, sitting in her nightie on a cane-backed chair watching sunlight through gauzy white curtains, lost in thought. In two days they opened on Regent Street. Her best show dress was hanging on the screen, white, frilly, ribboned. Once, in Cincinnati she thought it might have been, she’d seen a boy and girl perform a sweet pas de deux outside the big tent, so beautiful, their pink costumes fluttering in a growing wet breeze. Neither could have been more than fifteen. The dance she was perfecting now was growing ever more balletic. That’s what she wanted — something to give her that feeling she got when she saw those two lovely butterflies dance. The dress was too bulky. Pretty though, a light sea foam froth about the hem. These days the clothes she wore were so much more beautiful than those she’d made and altered for Marta. Remember her? Running in and out every half an hour or less and putting on a new dress, each with its own particular pair of shoes and stockings, its own particular necklace or mantilla. If she could see me now. She’d have been married to young whatsisname three or four years now. And the boys? They were becoming dim, receding into the strange fog of memory. Poor Marta. Poor young whatsisname. Poor boys. They’re not seeing the world.

And look at me.

Her back was to the door, so she didn’t notice when the maid opened it and came silently in with a fresh towel over one arm. Their eyes met in the mirror and the girl screamed, a horrible high curdling sound. The pigeon launched itself from the windowsill with a loud batting of wings. Julia screamed too, jumping up, heart hammering. It was too sudden, the scream nightmarish. The girl had a long white face, oblong, big-chinned. With her staring eyes and weirdly gaping mouth, she seemed like a vision from a fever.

And then because Julia screamed, the girl screamed more, and they both stood with their hands up by their faces, frozen, screeching at each other like demons.

People came running.

‘For heaven’s sake, girl, there’s no need for that!’ Mrs Dellow came strutting in like a hen. ‘Pull yourself together!’ she hissed, then turning to Julia with a look of practised concern, said, ‘Miss Pastrana, I do apologise, Marjorie’s been away, she didn’t know.’

Theo’s worried face appeared behind Mrs Dellow’s shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Julia?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ she said too quickly, but her heart was pounding in a sickly way. ‘I’m sorry, I was just startled.’

‘Of course you were.’ Mrs Dellow gave Marjorie a little push on the arm. ‘Screaming like that, you stupid girl!’

The girl shook and stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, Ma’am!’ Fat tears welled in her eyes. Poor girl was mortified.

‘It’s all right,’ said Julia.

‘I’ve been off sick, Ma’am,’ the girl said, stealing a look, ‘I didn’t know… nobody told me… I thought the room was empty. I’m so sorry.’

‘Please,’ Julia said, ‘it really doesn’t matter.’

‘It would be a good idea to lock the door, I think,’ said Theo.

‘Not at all, Mr Lent.’ Mrs Dellow shooed the girl from the room. ‘Why on earth should she? Marjorie. Did you go in without knocking?’

‘I thought it was empty, Ma’am.’

‘Please,’ said Julia, ‘really, it’s nothing. This kind of thing happens sometimes.’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ Mrs Dellow fussed, ‘I can’t apologise enough…’

Theo took control. ‘No harm done,’ he said smoothly, ushering the woman before him towards the dithering girl in the corridor, ‘none at all. Let’s all just calm down, shall we?’

‘You never enter a room without knocking.’

‘I’m sorry, Ma’am.’

Theo closed the door on them but they could still be heard.

‘It’s your own fault!’

‘I know.’

‘Making such a fuss! She’s a guest!’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry—’

They faded away down the stairs.

Julia grabbed a yellow shawl, threw it round her shoulders, and sat down on the bed. ‘That’s made me feel quite strange,’ she said. ‘Shaky.’

‘You must not, you must not let yourself get upset,’ he said. ‘Remember what I told you. Step back. Look on.’ He sat down beside her, smiling smugly, but she stood up again immediately and paced up and down the room.

‘I hate it,’ she said in a strangled voice, standing by the window. ‘Hate it!’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t! No one knows.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What a stupid thing for me to say.’

Her eyes were dry, but she stared at him with a hard look he’d never seen before. Don’t you talk down to me, she thought. The long white curtain, sprigged with violets and pansies, was behind her. Very deliberately, hot and shaking with fury, she turned her face into it, opened her mouth, sank her crazy teeth in and tore with all the clenched might of her jaw. It was thin stuff and ripped loudly. A long ragged rent appeared.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Julia! Oh no!’

She burst into tears. ‘Yes yes, you always know what to do,’ she said. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to frighten people.’

‘Of course not.’ Theo got up and stood about uselessly. ‘Damn it, look at this curtain,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘You were doing some sewing and your scissors fell against it.’

‘Sometimes I just…’ She wiped her face and pulled her shawl close. ‘I feel horrible,’ she said. ‘Horrible, horrible.’

‘I’ll have to pay her for it,’ he said.

‘HORRIBLE.’

He flinched. ‘Julia please, sit down,’ he said. ‘Take it easy this morning. Go back to bed if you like.’

‘I will,’ she said shortly, turning her back on him.

‘Good.’

He worked on his smile.

‘I’ll tell them to bring you your breakfast.’

She brushed her hair, embarrassed now, keeping her face vacant. She didn’t know him well enough to lose control.

‘Fine,’ she said.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re not the only one who needs armour sometimes.’

She closed her eyes. She didn’t know him well enough for this either. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, speaking quietly, as if someone else was in the room. ‘If it was possible to die of ridicule, I would have died in childhood.’

She wanted him to leave. She wanted to go back to bed and have a good long cry, then have breakfast. ‘It’s not the same,’ she said, laying down her brush, turning and eyeing the slightly tousled bed, calling there like a womb.

‘I didn’t say it was.’ Theo was at the door, his hand on the handle. ‘But think Julia, if every word that came out of your mouth, every move you made, every time you made a point or ventured an opinion or asked a question, you were greeted with absolute and utter ridicule, with laughter. Would you not need armour?’

‘Your cousins,’ she said, getting sick of waiting for him to go and climbing into bed anyway, still with the yellow shawl wrapped tightly round her shoulders.

His smile had not faltered.

‘Why were you staying at your uncle’s, Theo?’ She closed her eyes and all was calming.

‘I was at school up there,’ he said, opening the door, ‘after my mother died. My uncle thought I needed an education.’ His smile lost its glibness.

‘You’re falling asleep,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long journey.’

But as soon as she was alone, the restlessness returned, and she got up and sat down in front of the mirror and looked at herself. Same old face, following her through life. Now that it was over, she was more sorry for the girl than for herself. Hope she doesn’t get the sack, she thought. She wasn’t like those others, she didn’t mean harm. It must have been a shock. First, she’d have seen the back of my head. Pretty white nightie, black hair. Then the eyes, suddenly, so big and black, and the ape jaw. If they saw more of it, no one would notice, no one would stare or scream or faint. When you see it every day it’s nothing, you’re just Julia, always there, as you were in the Sanchez house. You face them. Hold the head up, meet it all straight on.

He wasn’t angry, she thought. Rates and Beach would have gone mad about a thing like this.

She took down the show dress and held it against herself in front of the mirror. Broad brown hairy shoulders. Short thick hairy neck. Full womanly breasts, covered in jet-black down. Why should they not wear pearls?

She got her sewing kit out of the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe.

‘You won’t stop me,’ she told the children gathering in the shadows.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Theo, coming in with her chocolate.

‘What I need, Theo,’ she said, wide awake, cutting away at the hem, ‘is something to lie just here,’ touching herself on the chest, ‘something very graceful, of the same colour as the bodice.’

‘This is the most wonderful chocolate,’ Theo said, ‘Where do you want it?’ He sat down. ‘Sorry, you were saying?’

‘Just here on the hollow. Something terribly elegant.’

‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘I’ll sniff something out.’

‘Not just anything,’ she said, ‘I know what I want.’

‘Of course.’ Theo had a smile in the way that other people had an eye colour. ‘Isn’t that your show dress?’ he asked, realising what it was she was cutting.

‘I’m making it better.’

He frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘I very much hope so.’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Will it be ready in time?’ He nodded at the heap of cloth on her lap.

‘I think so,’ she said, ‘and if not I’ll wear the blue.’

‘Ah yes, the blue,’ he said, as if he had the slightest inkling what she was talking about.

London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, the hairy, the legless, the armless, the noseless, London had seen it all. In the Hall of Ugliness the competition was stiff. But no one had ever seen anything quite like Julia.

She was the Baboon Lady now, appearing apart from the mass in high style, at a gallery. She was the Grand and Novel Attraction, the Nondescript, the Wonder of the World, a scientific marvel. The little book with the drawing of her on the cover, the one done in New York, showed her poised and carefree, her wondrous wild hairy head adorned with a head-dress of feathers and white roses. Inside, Theo had quoted in full from her certificates: ‘ pronounced by the most eminent Naturalists and Physicians to be a true hybrid wherein the nature of woman presides over that of the brute.’ He had added: ‘ She is a perfect woman — a rational creature, endowed with speech which no monster has ever possessed.’

He’d done a marvellous job; the place was mobbed. Like a clerk he’d gathered all the information handed on to him by Rates and Beach, pored over dates, questioned her again about her early memories, which were so vague. The papers had blazoned the story he’d put together, and the crowds caused hold-ups on Regent Street to get a glimpse of the mysterious veiled figure, small as a child, who was rushed from the carriage to a side door by her manager while the bobbing hordes were kept at a distance. She had a small dressing room with oak walls and a smell of polish, where she got herself ready, following a practised routine. First she stripped down to her corset and jewellery then lightly dusted the cleavage of her large dusky breasts with orris root, so that the heady iris scent would rise into her nostrils as she danced. She put a drop of lemon juice in each eye for the brightness, then dressed. She’d cut her show dress to just below the knee so that she felt like a ballerina. When she’d showed Theo he’d laughed and clapped his hands.

‘Wonderful!’ he’d said. ‘This is exactly what they want. As much of you as possible, Julia.’ Her pearl cross lay at the hollow of her throat, and pearls twined through her hair, gleaming on the tight bodice. The dress was cut very wide and low, and she wasn’t sure if she trembled from nerves or the cold on her shoulders. It didn’t matter, because as soon as she stepped out onto the raised platform and the pianist began to play, she knew it would all be fine. A sixth sense told her. She sang ‘Ah, Perdona al Primo Affetto’ and ‘Voi Che Sapete’, and at the end of each, the audience first drew in a tiny collective breath, held it for a silent moment then exploded in a riot of applause that needed only fireworks to complete the sense of occasion. She danced the solo from ‘La Sylphide’, then went down among them, letting them shake her hand and stroke her whiskers.

‘Miss Pastrana,’ they asked her, ‘Are you happy?’

‘I am very happy,’ she replied.

‘Where did you learn to speak English?’

‘A long time ago, when I was a child in Mexico. That is also where I learned to speak French.’

‘Have you ever been in love?’

‘I’m waiting for the right man.’

That brought a laugh, with which she went along.

‘None of them were rich enough,’ she said.

Another laugh. And she laughed when a toddler stretched out his arm to her, saying, ‘Dadda!’

‘Can I touch your hand?’

‘What a beautiful dress!’

‘Miss Pastrana, you’re a lovely singer.’

‘Do you mind being different?’

‘No. Not at all.’

She returned to the platform and sang one more song, this time with her guitar.

Good God, this is it, thought Theo, standing with folded arms at the back because he liked to see things from the audience’s perspective, blinking rapidly and smiling like an imbecile. Sweet little thing, a true artiste, the real thing. He could have cried. She was the most extraordinary being that had ever existed on the face of this ridiculous earth. The papers said so. Everyone said so. They wanted to see her, they wanted to meet her, everyone came, the great, the good, the scared, bewitched, bewildered, the willing and unwilling. And they paid.

Please God now, let this be my golden coach at last, whispered Theo, raising his eyes to heaven as smiling, clutching the flowers they gave her, she took her third bow.

Please, this time.

His career had been down snakes, up ladders, all those years on the road, the dwarfs, the strongman, the knife-thrower, the magicians and mind-readers, the man with the parakeet orchestra. A hazardous life, hanging around on the fringes of the business while the other side of the family made killings as far west as Iowa. God, wouldn’t he just love to pass them by now, those Westchester cousins, not bother to call, say sorry, too busy, far too many important people waiting. Tossing him their crumbs. Uncle Ben put in a word with Barnum, and the upshot was the trip to Europe, where he met the Gatti Twins, two brothers from Swansea who juggled with knives and did ridiculous feats of balancing. Up the ladder he’d gone, his big chance, four years, four European tours, till one morning in Leipzig when he woke up with a splitting hangover and there were no Gatti Twins and no money, and he realised with a start that he had no idea what day it was, only that he must have been drinking for a very long time. A period of dream and illness followed. He was imprisoned as a vagrant. He stuck it for a week then got a letter to his father in New York, and after another couple of weeks funds had been sent, and he went back to the States in shame on his uncle’s money, back to the old house in the Bowery.

This was where he’d been born, in the back room downstairs, where his mother had been alive, and every room had been full of the show people who came to board. It was in a dire state. Dogs still roamed the stairs and yard, but these were leaner and wilder than those old ones he remembered, and the whole place stank of them. He remembered when the house had always smelled of cooking and drying laundry, when the lobster girls and dog boys had come down for breakfast in the parlour. And he remembered it later when the lobster girls and dog boys had given way to card-sharps and fortune-tellers, and it was just him and the old man, and everything was going downhill.

Now the rooms were empty, and his father was sitting in his vest in the kitchen drinking alternately from a Knickerbocker Soda bottle and a bottle of whisky. He’d been addicted to both for years. A massive collection of empties gathered dust on a shelf above the dresser.

‘What the hell have you done to this place?’ Theo demanded, summoning all that he’d learned in the years away from home, the voice, the smile, the suave man he’d groomed himself into. ‘You’ve let the whole thing go.’

‘Look who’s talking,’ his father said. ‘Look at you.’

A failure.

Bailed out again. He looked with despair at the filthy walls and the spit in the corners of the old man’s mouth and vowed again: I will not go down. He’d vowed before. No more pillar-to-post up and down the west coast, he’d said, no more being small and slight and looking young and being overlooked and disrespected and always getting the shitty jobs, roustabout, lackey, ticket-man. He’d vowed it and look where he’d ended up. In jail. But not this time. He’d worked too hard for that. No more poor Theo. I’m as good as the lot of you. I’ll show them.

I showed them, he thought, applauding wildly in the wings. I did, I showed them.

Barnum was in town with Tom Thumb. Theo met him in the lobby of Arthur’s, where he’d been buttering up a contact about a possible German tour.

‘Theo!’ came the moneyed voice, though the money wasn’t flowing so well these days, or so he’d heard.

‘Hello, Taylor.’ Looking his age, thought Theo. Jowls resting on his collar.

Barnum lodged his thumbs behind his wide lapels. ‘Have I or have I not been hearing things about you?’

‘I’m damn sure you have,’ said Theo.

‘And the hairy maiden? She’s well, I hope?’

‘Very well.’

‘Have you met Van Hare, Lent?’

‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’

Van Hare was a craggy circus man with long hair and a huge moustache. ‘Horses,’ he said lugubriously, as if it was his first name. ‘Are you the Lent who’s in the elephant line?’

‘That’s his namesake,’ Barnum said. ‘Damn inconvenient, two Lents in one business. You should change your name, Theo.’

Theo scowled. ‘Damned if I’m changing my name,’ he said.

‘It’s business,’ Barnum said, ‘not a test of family pride. You don’t need people confusing you with someone else.’

Theo smiled, slightly strained. ‘I’m not elephants,’ he told Van Hare. ‘That’s another branch of the family.’

‘The successful branch,’ added Barnum with a laugh and a hand placed on Theo’s shoulder to show it was all in fun. ‘Theo was a twig somewhere down the tree. Isn’t that so, Lent? But not any more.’

Theo blushed. ‘I manage Miss Julia Pastrana,’ he said.

Van Hare was impressed. You could see it in his eyes, that look they got when they had to meet her. But he merely nodded. Jealous. Ha! Theo’s smile widened. A feeling of madcap joy rose in his breast. They have nothing I want, he realised. But they want to see her. They’re desperate to. So he asked after General Tom Thumb, and scarcely waiting for an answer, graciously invited both Barnum and Van Hare to call upon Miss Julia the next afternoon at the hotel, and they happily accepted and all parted on good terms.

Mrs Dellow led them to the lounge. ‘Mr Lent will be along in a moment,’ she said, ‘if you would care to wait. Miss Pastrana will receive you. Oh sir, she’s such a nice lady! Very sweet-natured.’

Julia was by the window, a small woman in an elegant grey gown with lace at the throat and wrists, and a lace cap trimmed with pale blue ribbons. Her veil was blue as well, multi-layered and shaded and very pretty, covering her entire face so that no more than a hint of eyeshine could be discerned through it. She came forward and offered a small gloved hand.

‘Mr Barnum, I’m delighted,’ she said.

Barnum beamed, took her hand and held onto it. She has a big head, he thought. ‘The pleasure is all mine, my dear Miss Pastrana. May I introduce my good friend and colleague, Mr Van Hare.’

‘How do you do, Mr Van Hare.’

‘I am well, thank you, Miss. And you?’

‘I’m very well too. Thank you.’

Gently, she disengaged her hand from Barnum’s hold and gave it to Van Hare, who shook it solemnly. ‘Do sit down, gentlemen,’ she said. But then Theo came in all smiles, and there were more pleasantries and the brisk opening of a bottle of bourbon.

‘No no,’ said Barnum, with a wave of the hand.

‘Will you take lemonade, sir?’ asked Julia.

‘Lemonade would be most welcome.’

‘Of course!’ Theo yanked on the bell pull.

She sat very still and straight in her chair with her hands crossed in her lap studying her visitors from beneath the veil. Barnum was a grand sort of man with an air of gravitas, richly dressed, with curly hair receding from his face. Van Hare looked like an artist. She could see him in a smock in front of an easel. A maid appeared, the one who’d screamed.

‘Lemonade please, Sally,’ Theo said. He got on first name terms with everyone, fast. ‘Lemonade for Mr Barnum.’

Sally bobbed an ill-at-ease curtsey, snatching a look at Julia as she backed out of the door.

‘Sherry for you, Julia?’ Theo was already pouring.

‘Yes. Thank you, Theo.’

He set down a small sherry on the table beside her. ‘My dear,’ he said softly, stepping back. She lifted the veil, setting it back over her head with a practised gesture, nodded her head forward gracefully with a gentle smile, then took a sip of sherry. Theo, his high forehead furrowed, looked at Barnum looking at Julia. Then he looked at Julia herself. Now there’s a sight. Her sipping daintily from a small crystal sherry glass with those huge horrible lips. Even now he could be struck anew with amazement when he looked at her, as if she was a ghost, something walking that should not.

‘Tell me, Miss Pastrana,’ said Barnum, ‘how are you enjoying the life of an entertainer?’

‘It suits me very well for now,’ she said. ‘I do like to see all the different places.’

‘And how do you like England?’

They’d been in London a few days and she’d seen very little but the gallery, her room in the hotel and the streets between Covent Garden and Regent Street from a carriage window. England was porridge and geraniums and bacon and those streets rolling by, there and back, avidly studied from behind the veil and the window. ‘I like the porridge,’ she said.

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Barnum chuckled. ‘Well— I’ve heard wonderful things about your talent.’

‘Why don’t you come to one of the shows?’ she said.

‘I for one certainly will,’ said Van Hare enthusiastically.

‘So will I, if I can.’ Barnum shifted heavily about in his chair, the cuffs of his wide black trousers perfectly pressed, a gold chain straining across his stomach. ‘We’re preparing to leave for Paris very shortly,’ he said, ‘but I shall try and make time.’

‘Oh, I’m looking forward to seeing Paris. We’re going to Paris, aren’t we, Theo?’

‘Of course.’ Tough year the old boy’s had, he was thinking. Money troubles. Wonder if he read the piece in the Gazette? Go see Julia Pastrana and wonder at the ways of God. Or some such. Does he know we’re sold out every night? ‘Paris will be pleasant this time of year,’ he said.

‘Do you think so?’ Barnum looked doubtful. ‘Damn hot and scratchy, I would say.’

‘I like hot weather,’ said Julia, ‘reminds me of home.’

There was a knock on the door, and Sally came in with a huge jug of lemonade and four glasses on a tray.

‘We don’t need all that,’ Theo said.

The girl looked confused. ‘I thought—’

‘If you drink all that, Taylor, you’ll get hell from your bladder all night.’

‘I very well might.’ Barnum appeared unconcerned.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl, ‘I thought—’

‘It’s such a warm day,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll have some too. Thank you, Sally. Put it down here on this little table and I’ll pour.’

Sally looked even more confused but set down the tray quickly and left. Julia got up, poured lemonade and handed a glass to Barnum.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘Excellent.’

‘When we go to Paris,’ she said, sitting down again, ‘I want to go to the ballet.’

‘The ballet?’

‘Something grand,’ she said, ‘something magnificent.’

‘Paris is the place for the ballet,’ said Theo. ‘Paris or Vienna. You’ll see both.’

‘We should whisk you off to Paris!’ Barnum smiled paternally. ‘This very second!’

Theo knocked back his drink. Look at him. All over her with his eyes. And the other one. He poured some more and spoke. ‘Business has been, I think I can say, pretty damn marvellous—’ regretting the sound of his own voice immediately, thinking it high and nervous, but ploughing on as if compelled by a man holding a gun to his head, boasting with eyes downcast and nose turning up, how so-and-so had said, and they’d had to turn away, and everyone’s saying, and the newspapers, as I’m sure you’ve seen, have talked of little else…

‘What you need, Lent, is an elephant,’ said Van Hare.

‘What are you blabbing on about?’ Barnum asked, turning ponderously to his friend.

‘An elephant.’ Van Hare accepted another drink. ‘Walk it round town with a sign saying…’

‘I’m afraid I’m not in the menagerie business,’ Theo said.

‘You should be. Put the lady on a horse.’ Van Hare winked at Julia. ‘That’ll pull ’em in. A horse or an elephant.’

Theo laughed.

‘I’m already pulling ’em in,’ she said.

‘Would you like to work with animals?’ Barnum asked her.

‘I’ve never thought of it.’

‘You enjoy travelling, you say?’

‘Oh yes!’

‘Wish I could say the same.’ Barnum’s brow was shiny and he took out a large white handkerchief to dab at it. ‘I have been far too much upon the road in my lifetime. Do you ever think of Mexico?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. But Mr Barnum, there’s something I’d like to ask you. What was Jenny Lind like?’

‘Jenny Lind! Oh, a very pleasant woman indeed. Wonderful voice. And shrewd. Very shrewd woman. Nice eyes.’

‘I’d love to have seen her,’ Julia said. ‘I heard she gives a lot away to the poor.’

‘Remember Jenny?’ said Van Hare. ‘Not Jenny Lind, Jenny the elephant. Walked the tightrope. Beautiful creature.’

‘That’s Lalla,’ said Barnum.

‘Aha, but she started out called Jenny Lind. They changed her name three times.’ Van Hare turned to Julia. ‘You ought to have seen that superb elephant walk the tightrope.’

She laughed. Her laugh could be alarming, the protruding crooked confusion of teeth suddenly appearing. But Barnum and Van Hare were pros and never flinched. ‘How does an elephant walk the tightrope?’ she asked.

‘Very carefully, I should imagine,’ said Theo.

‘She could do anything, old Lalla,’ Van Hare said. ‘Stand on her head. Steady as a rock. Marvellous animal and gentle as a babe. Have you ever worked with elephants, Lent?’

‘No.’

Theo was watching Barnum. He’s interested, he thought. If he offers… but no, let him want.

‘Lent, was it your uncle had a share in Old Bet?’ Van Hare persisted. ‘Or your…’

‘Uncle,’ Theo said. ‘Two uncles in fact.’

‘Now,’ said Van Hare, ‘Old Bet you can see to this very day, and she looks just as good as new.’

‘What are you whiffling on about elephants for, Van?’ said Barnum, ‘Miss Pastrana doesn’t want to talk about elephants.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Julia.

‘Now horses,’ Barnum said. ‘I could see Miss Pastrana on horseback.’

‘Do you ride, Miss Pastrana?’ Van Hare asked.

‘I have ridden,’ she said, ‘but not for a long time.’

‘Imagine,’ Barnum said, ‘Miss Pastrana on a white horse. White plumes, a partner, someone like Tom Neville…’

‘Oh but I couldn’t do all the clever things,’ she said. ‘Standing up, riding two at a time—’

‘You wouldn’t need to.’ Barnum drained his glass. ‘Come and see me in New York when you get back from Europe.’ She wasn’t sure if this last bit was for her or Theo so she said nothing.

‘Who knows when we’ll be back in New York,’ said Theo genially. ‘If business turns out as good elsewhere as it is here… Now— gentlemen. Miss Pastrana needs some rest before tonight’s event.’

I end the viewing, he thought. Not you, Barnum. I do.

When they’d gone, he poured them both another drink.

‘Now that I have so much money,’ she said, ‘I think I should give some of it away. I’d like to do that, Theo. It’s a nice thing to do when you’ve got such a lot of money. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’

Hasn’t got a clue about money, he thought. Only knows she’s got it. No idea. Good thing she’s with me. Some of these vultures—

‘Can you get me an atlas, Theo?’

‘Of course.’

‘So that I can mark out all the places I’ve seen.’

‘Good idea.’ He was scarcely listening. ‘Funny Van Hare mentioning Old Bet,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about her only the other day. Did you ever hear of Old Bet, Julia?’

‘Not till now.’

He stood with his legs apart on the rug, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘My Uncle Ben took me to see her in the American Theatre. No higher than this.’ He patted the air. ‘Can’t have been more than six but I’ve never forgotten it because my Uncle Ben burst into tears when he saw her.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, by this time she’d been dead ten years or so, you see.’

‘Oh!’

‘And they’d had her stuffed. And he’d been very fond of her, you see.’ He smiled. His eyes were far away. ‘“Marvellous beast!” he used to say,’ imitating his uncle: ‘“Should’ve seen Old Bet drink a bottle of beer. Sucked the cork right out and tossed it away, then up with it and down in one. Marvellous!”’ He laughed.

‘Did she get drunk?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He shook his head and focused. ‘Oh yes, Old Bet. She was by all accounts a very clever animal.’

Clear as day. Standing with his uncle in front of the beautiful stuffed beast. They were all down for his mother’s funeral, because he remembered that she’d not been long gone. He didn’t know she’d drunk poison then. It’s only stuff, he thought, trying to put this dead thing together with the images of his mother so recently here, cooking in the kitchen with his Aunt Losey, hiding in corners, giggling behind her hands, asking if he could see the man with purple eyes who stood in the corner.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘a legend, Old Bet.’

‘Let’s go out tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘Isn’t there anything we can go and see?’

‘Won’t you be tired?’

‘Not at all.’

‘There’s a horse show,’ he said, ‘as it happens.’

‘Ooh, a horse show! Oh, let’s go!’

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do. But all the best seats may have gone by now, and I’m not having you down with the mob.’

‘Of course not. I wouldn’t be able to see a thing.’

‘It’s not that, but it can get rough. What if you lost your veil?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

She was trembling very slightly, he thought, but maybe it was his imagination. Not a full shivering, more of an unseen taut humming within the bone. It struck him that he had it too.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asked.

‘I feel excited.’

‘Well, that’s good.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘when you’re excited, it feels like fear.’

He got them a box for the second performance. Someone he knew. It was always the way; he knew many many people, mostly on first-name terms, but no one close and no one for very long. She was beginning to see that he had no real friends. But he could usually pull a string, call in a favour. They went to the show, and she wore bangles that jangled up and down and attracted far too much attention, he thought. But no one cottoned on and they had a good time. A man rode four horses at once, standing up as if in a chariot, and a beautiful girl danced and leaped back and forth between eight black stallions as they cantered round the ring.

Going home in the carriage, Julia said, ‘Mr Barnum thought I should ride.’

‘So he did.’ Theo rubbed the window. ‘It’s an idea.’

‘I need to practise more,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘If you really want to ride a horse, I’m sure I could arrange it,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Why not? Not now, but soon. I know people in Berlin.’

‘You know people everywhere!’

‘Lent the Almighty,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ll buy an atlas tomorrow. You know what I’m thinking, Julia? Russia.’

‘Russia!’

‘We’ll go east. Your Russians are some of the best horsemen in the world.’

‘You’ve been there, haven’t you, Theo?’

‘Twice.’

‘Really? What’s it like?’

He gazed out of the window. ‘Spring and summer are beautiful. Winter’s freezing.’

‘Horses,’ she said happily. ‘Russia.’ As if these words were charmed. Again he noticed the barely perceptible trembling. ‘Get me a nice Russian novel to read,’ she said, ‘please.’

Theo laughed. ‘If you like.’

When they got back, someone had pushed a copy of a French theatre rag under his door, folded open at a particular page, on which someone had circled a particular item. It was accompanied by a note: ‘Lent — if you are considering Paris, you should be aware of this. Pays to be prepared — Van Hare.’ He saw Julia’s name, but couldn’t understand a word so took it to her room and asked her to read it for him.

‘Curiosities From London,’ she read. ‘It’s a review. Let me see. It’s—’ she frowned and read on. As she read, her face changed.

‘What’s the matter?’

After a moment she looked up at him but he couldn’t read her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What a horrible thing to say.’ She looked away.

‘What? What does it say?’

Her strange eyes filled with tears, which made them shine and grow enormous. For a second, he was afraid of her. He’d never seen her cry. All this time. With all that, carrying that face around with her through life, and he’d never seen her cry. But she blinked, one great swipe of those spiky lashes, and glazed over. She looked down and read: ‘for one thing is certain — that — au lieu de — instead of displaying this — this — this creature, this creature — who is an insult to all bien… bien… bienséance — to all good standards — and decency—’

She laughed and shook the paper.

‘—this creature who — oh look, Theo, look! — who creates revulsion in all who see her—’

‘Oh Julia, don’t take this kind of thing to heart.’

‘She should instead be protected from all public view.’

Shouldn’t be allowed out, said a pale unpleasant boy with a bulby face.

‘Hah!’ Theo snatched the paper from her. ‘Because they say so.’

‘That’s nasty.’ She sat down.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’

‘An insult to decency!’ she said wonderingly. ‘Why am I?’

‘You’re not. Julia…’

‘Why do they say that?’

‘Because they’re…’

Child-scarer.

‘Why am I an insult to decency?’ She got up, grabbed the paper back from him and walked about the room, holding it open. ‘I know I’m ugly,’ she said. ‘Revulsion though. Revulsion! What have I done?’

‘You haven’t done anything, Julia.’ He followed her.

‘What do they mean?’

‘They’re stupid. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyway, they don’t mean you.’

She laughed. ‘Who do they mean?’

‘They mean the show, the whole—’

‘No they don’t,’ she said, getting angry, ‘Weren’t you listening? This creature who is an insult to all good standards and decency. That’s me. This creature is me.’

‘Julia, please.’ Oh God, he wished he’d never shown her the damn thing.

‘Ugly, yes,’ she said. ‘Looks like a baboon. Yes. Oh yes, the nonpareil of ugliness, all of that, yes, true, true, but I am not indecent.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

She deflated visibly, sinking down on the bed. ‘What’s it all for?’ she demanded.

‘What?’

‘This. All this. I work very hard.’

‘I know you do.’

She wanted him to say that she was a talented dancer, a good singer. It doesn’t mean a thing to him, she thought. The music. I could be pulling pennies out of peoples’ ears for all he cares. I don’t think he’s got any musical appreciation at all. I could be telling fortunes or juggling. So what? He’s a manager, he doesn’t have to appreciate anything, he sees to all the stuff that makes my head ache. And he does it well.

He tapped his forehead. ‘Good brain, girl,’ he said. ‘That’s why you can succeed in this business. You could have stayed at home and been a skivvy forever, couldn’t you? But no, you’ve got more about you than that. You’re a performer. A natural. And because of that you’ll always make a living. You don’t have to worry about the naysayers. The more they see you, the more they’ll realise what you are.’

‘What I am?’

‘Yes?’

‘What am I? I’m the demon baby. The loup garou.’

He smiled. ‘You are Julia. And I have huge ambition for you. You have no idea. Huge ambition. You mustn’t let this upset you.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ She threw the paper down. ‘Of course it upsets me! What do you think I am? Stone?’ And then she did cry, sitting down in one of the armchairs in the alcove and hiding her face in her hands. ‘It’s like those children all over again,’ she said.

‘Those blasted children! Forget them! What d’you want to carry them around with you for?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ She looked away.

Theo stood looking about awkwardly. Poor girl, of course she’ll cry. I would. Don’t these idiots think when they write these things there’s some poor girl on the other end of it? ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said. ‘We don’t need the French. Bastards put me in jail.’

She fumbled a handkerchief from somewhere and began dabbing at her face.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s only one review. The French are like that. It’s their loss.’

She didn’t say anything. Her head was bowed, and he was momentarily touched. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘you and your dainty little hands.’

She muffled a sob. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

‘Come on, Julia,’ he said softly, ‘don’t let something as ridiculous as this spoil things for you.’

‘I won’t,’ she said into the handkerchief.

He went and sat down in the opposite chair. ‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘Not even a setback. Things are going well for us, and they’ll get better and then better again, you’ll see. Oh, for heaven’s sake! Who cares about the fool that wrote that? Who is he? No one! No one. You’re the one they want to see. You’re the special one.’

‘But I’m not,’ she said wearily, drying her face. ‘That’s the funny thing. I’m not special at all, I’m just an ordinary person.’ She stood up and started walking about the room again.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘tomorrow we’ll go to—’

‘Where’s Yatzi?’ she said sharply.

Theo sighed, suddenly very tired.

‘Where’s Yatzi?’ A rising note of panic had entered her voice.

‘Oh God,’ he whispered and set about finding the thing, and as he searched aimlessly she began crying again and stood biting her fingers like a child. He’d never seen her like this before.

‘Oh please, Julia,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the maid put it somewhere.’

‘Tonight of all nights!’ she cried, and started pulling open all the drawers. ‘Someone’s taken him!’

‘Julia.’ Theo closed his eyes. ‘Why would anyone want to take an old stick of wood with a rag wrapped round it?’

‘He’s not just an old stick of wood!’

She was in a terrible state by the time he found the doll wedged down the back of the bed a few minutes later. ‘Here,’ he said. My God, he thought. Look at it, suck marks on, disgusting. It had two large blots for eyes, a line for a nose and an upturned curve for a mouth. A ragged dress of flimsy green and red cloth was bound round and round it like a loose bandage. She grabbed it and calmed down at once, and he left her rocking in the alcove, holding onto that horrible old lump of wood.

Back in his own room, Theo stared angrily at the stupid incomprehensible French. I won’t have it, he thought. Ridiculous. Poor girl’s been measured and weighed and fingered and prodded inside and out, and taken it all. Of course she’s human. Bloody obvious. He’d been in the business all his life, and he knew. Human. All of them. But the rubes wanted monsters. And the medics, the professors, the scientists, all of them, they were rubes too. Tell you what, I’ll get her picture taken. On Piccadilly there’s a place, I’ll call in tomorrow and have a word.

Discreet. She’s just a hairy girl is all, with a weird face and a sticky-out mouth, a mouth you could hang your hat on. Nice eyes. Nice girl. Roll up roll up. And we’ll put the picture in the new booklet, and we’ll have new words. They’re not getting away with that.

And he sat down and composed a paragraph very quickly in his best florid high-minded style:

THE NONDESCRIPT, MISS JULIA PASTRANA, from Culiacán in Mexico. There is nothing in her appearance in the least calculated to offend the sensibilities of the most fastidious, whether viewed socially, morally or physically. A feeling of pity, rather than of repugnance or antipathy, is generally experienced in the bosom of all who pay her a visit. There is sufficient of the characteristics of her womanly nature to dispel anything allied to the revolting or disagreeable, and connected either with her personal appearance, or the manner in which her levees are conducted. Persons who visit her with an idea of seeing a wild beast in the cage of a menagerie will be disappointed. Those who go with the expectation of seeing some frightful monster will have such expectations changed to sentiments allied at once to awe and astonishment at the mysterious ways of Providence, while his philosophy will be puzzled amazingly to account for his share of the milk of human kindness, and the abundant juiciness of his own heart in view of the wonderful phenomenon that will irresistibly for the time being engross his attention.

He read it back to himself. Good God, man, you’ve got a way with words, he told himself.

~ ~ ~

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Absolutely not. You will not, you will not.’ Lying drunk and sleepy on the sofa, slightly tearful, playing about with that awful burnt thing, Tattoo, draping chains of silver and narrow thongs of black leather round what was left of its neck.

‘Never mind,’ said Adam, sighing and sitting down next to her, gazing around the room so he wouldn’t have to look at her. She was in something long and traily, faded violet, with her hair piled up in a big black bush of tortoiseshell combs on top of her head. Laurie had gone too far this time, she said. Who did he think he was? She’d caught him loading a massive cardboard box into the back of his car.

‘Theft,’ she said, ‘pure and simple. My things. My property.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he thought…’

‘I don’t care what he thought.’ She rolled onto her side. ‘I said, no, you can’t do that. It’s only things, Rose, he said, the idiot. Only things. As if that meant anything. Oh, he can be a bastard, you know. Roll me a cigarette, lovey. Well, that was that. You will not, I said. And do you know? He refuses to carry them back up for me. Just dumps the box by the back door and the rain’s starting. Not even a lid on the box. I made about ten journeys up and down those stairs.’

‘Oh well,’ Adam said, ‘everything seems to be back to normal now.’

She sat up, propped Tattoo comfortably against a cushion and poured more wine. ‘I’ve been really sorting things out,’ she said.

‘Have you?’ He looked round. No sign of it. Things were just a bit re-arranged. It’s like playing with Lego or building bricks, I suppose, he thought, yet still somehow wonderful, like a seriously overcrowded junk shop. Dried flowers and feathers hung from the ceiling, and the draped and carpeted walls were now scarcely visible as the growth rioted upward and outward. You had to admit she kept it clean, but surely it was a full-time job.

‘Poor old Tattoo,’ she said. ‘After all he’s been through.’

‘Ah.’ He swigged his wine. ‘He was in the box, was he?’

‘He most certainly was. Right down at the bottom as well. Must have been the first thing he threw in. And he knows how I feel about that thing. And when I got up here, he’d been tidying up. Putting things away! I couldn’t find anything. So I’ve told him, I’ve said, look, you’re the landlord, you can evict me if you want to but you don’t touch my things. You don’t live here, Laurie. I do.’

Adam smiled and shook his head, crumbling tobacco. Couldn’t live with her, he thought. Not for long. Poor old Laurie, she’s gone right off him. She doesn’t care. He’d seen Laurie crying on the stairs one night. Just turned the corner and there he was, the big dripping mess, but he tried to hide it, blowing his nose as if he had a cold. She couldn’t care less. She was drunk and sentimental now, not for Laurie but because of her poor things so nearly lost.

‘Here,’ he said, twisting the end of the roll-up and handing it to her.

‘Ta.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘we could open this place up as a museum. Charge admission. The Rose Museum.’

‘Only no one would come.’

‘They might.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You have to be famous.’

Adam slid down and sat on the floor with his back against the sofa, and they lapsed into silence. After a few minutes he said, ‘When you think about it — every person’s like a museum of their life.’

She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Only most stay uncurated. Things fade away into old cupboards and drawers that never get opened. Junk stalls. Rubbish on its way to the dump. Then they just vanish.’

‘You’re a poet, Adam,’ she said.

Adam turned his head. ‘If ever you die, Rose,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a hell of a thing for whoever gets to go through all this lot.’

She laughed. ‘And who would that be, I wonder? Probably my mother.’

She hardly ever saw her family. She’d liked her father and didn’t like her mother, that’s all he really knew. Her father was dead, and there was a brother somewhere, and they came from somewhere quite posh that he could never picture, somewhere like Welwyn Garden City or East Grinstead, those places that just looked like nothing on the map.

‘She might get my brother to do it, I suppose,’ she said, reaching for the tobacco.

Adam picked up Tattoo. ‘Now this—’ he held it at arm’s length. ‘I doubt if you’d be able to give this away.’

‘Oh don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t make me feel sad.’

‘He’s in an awful state, Rose. Look. He’s got a hole in his shoulder. What’s that? Moths?’

‘I don’t have moths.’

He put his finger in the hole, wiggled it about and pulled it out. A tuft of dirty white stuffing came out with his finger. ‘You ought to patch this up,’ he said.

‘You know,’ she rolled a cigarette, one-handed, ‘it’s kind of like he makes me feel sick now. Laurie.’

Adam put his finger in the hole again. Inside was scratchy.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘He always seemed on the edge of being beautiful, but now he’s on the edge of repulsive.’

‘So how did that happen?’ He dug deeper. Straw. Fluffy stuff.

‘I really don’t know.’

‘So is that it then?’ he said. ‘You and him? What happens now? Will you still live here?’

‘Oh yes!’

‘And he doesn’t mind?’

‘He won’t have to, will he? It’s all right. He’s got his wife.’

‘I think he’s quite upset though,’ Adam said.

‘Well, I don’t see why. We’ll still be friends. There was never a commitment. That was supposed to be the good thing about it.’

‘Ha,’ he said, ‘if only things were that simple.’

Rose shrugged. ‘You have to face reality.’

He laughed. ‘That from you!’

She licked the edge of the cigarette paper, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Look. A big hole. There’s all sorts in here.’

‘Don’t rip him to pieces,’ she said, hitting him lightly on the head.

‘I’m not.’

‘Stop it. Give him to me.’

‘Here.’ He handed her Tattoo, and the matches.

‘You can be quite hard, can’t you?’ he said.

‘I’m not hard.’

‘Yes. You are. You get all sentimental over bits of old paper but you don’t give a toss about people. You’ve got more genuine feeling for that old doll than you have for any human being.’

‘What rot,’ she said, striking a match. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

He put his hand on her hip, just to see what she’d do. She ignored it. He saw her frown as her long chipped nail examined the hole in Tattoo’s shoulder. ‘You’ve made this worse,’ she said.

‘You need to patch him up.’

She laid the just lit cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. ‘You know, I used to think this was wood,’ she said, ‘but it’s not.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

He picked up the cigarette and took a drag. ‘There’s all sorts in there,’ he said.

‘Straw. Dust,’ she said. ‘Ticking. Paper. Something lumpy.’

‘You should get some foam and block it up.’

‘Look at this.’ Out came a clump of hardened straw. ‘That’s really old.’ She laid it on the sofa and dug a little further. ‘Paper,’ she said.

He took his hand from her hip, wondering if she’d even noticed.

‘Oh look!’ She sat up straight. Leaning forward, she set about smoothing a couple of scraps of screwed up fragments on the low table.

‘What is it?’

‘And there’s more—’ fishing about inside and drawing out another strip, longer, creased into powdery near-disintegration. ‘Wow! Look at this.’

‘Writing,’ he said.

‘It says—’

They put their heads together, poring over the words that survived, the rubbed-out extremities. An old-fashioned leaf pattern, any colour long faded, coiled up one torn edge. Three scraggy scraps, soft and wrinkled, the print rubbed to grey by many years. Here and there a few letters or a word or two made it through the grey.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘this piece fits with that.’

— of Provid—

— A feeling of—

— eeing some frig—

— NDESCRIPT, MI—

— he mos—

— and Mis—

— Sanfa—

— little prin—

‘It’s an old leaflet,’ she said, ‘a handbill, playbill, something. Look.’

— dmission — doors ope—

‘That’s admission, doors open.’

— allery, Regent Stre—

— ndon—

Then one whole word: Culiacán.

‘Culiacán,’ said Rose.

‘It’s in Mexico,’ said Adam.

~ ~ ~

Flowers were heaped everywhere in the dressing room. Every show there were flowers, that’s how it was now. They’d given Paris a miss and gone straight to Berlin. Germany loved her, and suddenly life was fast and bright and swept her along — theatres, gold brocade, lights, the face of a crowd, hands touching hers, hands that stroked shyly, as if she was very rare and very wild.

When it came to being stared at, Julia was an expert. She could handle them all, the Rapt Bedazzled, the Eyestalk Gawker, the Holy Seeker, the Furious Affronted, the Scared, the Nauseous, the Shyly or Archly Flirtatious, and — most rare — the Frank Equal. Theo was a Rapt Bedazzled but now he was also turning into a Used-To-Me, like the people back home. For so long now her face had been a fascination, a honey for looks. They flew towards her like darting insects, flew away, returned, irresistibly drawn. But she knew what to do. Meet. Read. Drop or hold. Release. Don’t challenge unless challenged. Drag them away from the mouth, the whiskers, the breasts, into the eyes, and sometimes smile. You know when. You always know. If they shout, laugh, shoot hate — look away, resist. Pretend.

But never yet, after all the shows, the little towns in England, the rainy villages, the big city stages, the lowlands of Holland when the rain never stopped; after all the stares of all the people in all those places and all that went before on the far side of the sea — never once had she been more scared than when standing on this balcony, looking through her veil at the obscure mass of faces. Something was different. The crowd was rowdy. She had to act, speak a language she didn’t know, remember the cues. Her heart was beating too fast.

It seemed as if the entire city of Leipzig had turned out.

Der Curierte Meyer!

For the first time ever, after her triumphs in America and England, the Remarkable Miss Julia Pastrana in a play written specially for her.

Der Curierte Meyer — The Milkman Cured

It wasn’t a real play. It was a musical comedy, a silly little piece, but Theo was right — it pulled them in, the high and the low, and the place was bursting at the seams. German wasn’t one of her languages, but she’d learned the lines specially and knew the cues. It was really just her doing her usual songs and dances, with a few lines she had to say here and there, no long speeches or anything like that—

It didn’t feel right.

Those men. She’d heard them laughing.

Well, it was a funny play.

Better they laugh than be afraid.

When the curtain rose, a hush fell. A drum rolled.

Stage left, paper roses hung over a wall. A rustic seat by a fountain. Stage right, a garlanded balcony, on which she stood sweating under the veil. A single violin played a sweet rising air, and she ran lightly down the steps as the rest of the strings and the woodwinds came in, danced as the music swelled. If it were just the dancing, her arabesque, her plié, she could do that. Or the songs, but laughter was a different thing. She wore white flowers in her hair. She’d rubbed the love potion into her arms and shoulders. Her gris-gris bag was in a secret pocket. Smiling in expectation, the audience settled in. As the dance drew to a close, voices were heard, stage left. She ran back up the steps, white mesh, tiny white slippers, the dress bouncing and frothing around her in dusty pink and gold layers, and sat down at a small table on the balcony, taking up a large fan with gold and red tassels. Two young men entered below and began speaking in loud braying voices. One was tall and handsome, the other shorter and slightly plump, both with a dandyish air. She couldn’t understand a word they said but knew they were talking about their friend Stefan, a fool of a milkman who falls in love as easily as he falls asleep.

But wait! Who is that on the balcony!

She rises, taking up her fan.

Why, she is the remarkable Fraulein Lieselotte. In her own country she is considered a great beauty!

So graceful!

Fraulein Lieselotte! Dear lady!

Down she comes.

Up and down in the footlights, skirts swinging, one small gloved hand idling with the fan, she saunters around the stage. They dart playfully before and behind her like circling bees, calling to one another and to her in ridiculous tones, words that draw bursts of expectant laughter and a few whoops from the audience, vying with each other to praise her pretty foot, her figure, her elegance, begging her to please, for just one moment, please, dearest lady, lift up your veil.

She waits for the piccolo, and when its plaintive sound rises up from the pit, she stands still, turning fully to face the audience.

For the thousandth time, the reveal.

A great sighing groan of wonder rises from the audience. Same as ever, but the joke’s on those two silly men, now following her as she walks, always keeping her back to them and her face to the crowd. The fat one falls over. Laughter pools like smoke in the domed ceiling. She shares a smile with the crowd. We are in this together, it says. When the horns and the drum blare and she turns on the men, there are screams and disbelieving laughter. She’s impossible. My God! My God! To be that.

The young men, poor actors, step back, open-mouthed. Julia’s heart hammers madly. She smiles and they scream some more. She parades, the piccolo playing, up and down the front of the stage with her skirts seductively swaying. Something in this new laughter, a braying quality, an imp of misrule, an ugliness to square up against her own. She feels as if she’s in a pit. The uglier the air, the more gracefully she moves, a sweeping implacable presence chasing them across the stage with her face, driving them to the wall, where they stand knock-kneed and quaking, biting their nails.

She turns from them scornfully, walks centre stage and speaks. ‘You see,’ she says, raking the audience with her eyes, ‘the poor creatures are struck dumb by my beauty.’

An explosion. A howling and thumping of feet on the floor. Now the dance, while they’re going mad. Slay them. Laugh, dance with the fan, let it draw circles on the air. The more they scream the bigger the show. She throws up her big proud head with its massive crown of hair and flowers, flexes her shoulders and twitches her hips, lets drop the shawl so that the dark groomed thatch of her arms and shoulders appears, and the smooth down of heavy breasts in a low-cut dress.

A bell rings. The dance ends. With a flourish, she takes up her shawl and retreats to the balcony, seating herself elegantly and composing the thick veil before her face, while the two men gabble below: She is quite hideous! And yet and yet…

Theo, in the wings, smiles warmly at her. It’s going well. Some knockabout stuff occurs on stage. The two young men are joined by their friend Stefan, the stupidest thing ever, a clod of a dairyman with baggy breeches and an anxious whining voice. They tease and twit him. Gusts of laughter roll in from the audience as he falls headfirst into the orchestra pit and has to be pulled out by the legs.

But wait! Who is she?

The lights dim and a hush falls. She sings into the silence:

… Leise flehen meine Lieder…

Stefan falls in love on the instant, just with her voice and veiled form. She descends to the rustic seat by the fountain, and his friends abandon him, sniggering behind their hands. Confused, he whirls around.

Herr Milchmann! she cries.

He approaches, covered in sweat, breeches growing baggier by the minute, a single rose in his hand, sighing and beseeching. She flicks her fan, looks away, waggles her foot. The audience chuckles and hoots.

Fraulein, ich bitte Sie, nehmen Sie Ihren Schleier!

Oh please, put up your veil!

She rises scornfully and walks to the front of the stage. Let him sigh for a glimpse of my face, she says, looking over their heads, he’ll get none of me.

And that was it really. Just more of the same, the men clowning, she singing, dancing, delivering the odd disdainful line. Towards the end came a prolonged and frantic farce, where stupid Stefan follows her about puckering up his mouth and pleading for kisses, fluttering his closed eyelids pathetically. Oh, sweet lady, one kiss, one kiss is all I ask. Whenever he looks away or goes offstage, she lifts her veil and grins at the crowd. In and out goes Stefan, up and down goes the veil, faster and faster. The grin becomes painful, she feels her cheeks quiver. Do they know the skill that goes into this? They roll about, baying and shrieking, till she goes into her last big scene.

Alone onstage, she speaks to them directly.

What a fool this milkman is, she declares.

They roar.

What does he know of love? Nothing! What he calls love is nothing more than a few pearls — she twirls them — a pretty dress — she spreads the flounces — a little foot — she points the toe — What does he know — the music begins — of the true heart within? Into her final song, about a true simple heart being worth more than gold.

Stefan enters with his giggling friends. They haven’t seen her yet.

Such a man, she says, with a careless gesture in his direction, is a shallow well. I could never give my heart to him. With a practised movement, she veils and turns to greet him. Your patience is rewarded, she declares, behold the woman you love! Peels down the gloves from her hairy brown arms, withdraws them, tosses the veil aside.

Horror!

He runs but she gives chase as the audience roars, then: Is this what you want? she cries, kissing him full on the lips. As he faints clean away, she steps centre-stage, wets her lips — ‘Her tongue!’ someone moaned — and says, How many of you ladies can say your kiss has that kind of effect on a man?

The curtain fell.

She took the applause centre-stage, wave upon wave of thunderous stamping and cheering and whistling. Three curtain calls. Flowers landing on the stage.

Theo met her in the wings with a glass of champagne. ‘You were spectacular,’ he said. ‘Spectacular, Julia. You must meet Herr Otto, he is smitten.’

Herr Otto was an elegant, handsomely ageing man, with a raggedly pointed beard and deep lines etched either side of his face. ‘I am indeed,’ he said, bowing low so that she could study his bald spot, grabbing her ungloved hand and kissing the back of it wetly. Straightening, he looked sideways at her.

‘How do you do,’ she said, still breathless from the whole thing.

‘Come and have a drink, Hermann,’ said Theo, who’d clearly had a few himself already. His eyes had a bright, dancing, almost scared look. ‘Come and have a drink with me and Julia. Wasn’t she wonderful?’

They walked to the dressing room along an avenue of goggling faces. She didn’t know why but she felt like crying. They were still screaming and whistling out there. He had not given her his arm. She wanted it to hang onto. Something mad was in the air. ‘Theo…’ she said.

‘Extremely talented,’ Herr Otto said with a smile in his voice. ‘Fraulein Pastrana, you have a very pretty voice.’ His English was perfect.

‘Thank you.’

There was more champagne in the dressing room, more faces. A woman in a blue gown. Huber the manager, who was round and small with a black moustache and a thick black curl of hair carefully arranged above his forehead. The sound, still battering at the door, something wild in it. Theo beaming like a madman.

‘And the incomparable Cricket!’ he cried, ‘Here she is!’

Huber, his face in hers, smiling. ‘A triumph,’ he said.

‘Julia, come here.’ Theo took her hand. ‘This is Miss Friederike Gossmann,’ he said, leading the woman in the blue gown forward, ‘the great actress.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said Miss Gossmann lightly. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you, Miss Pastrana. What a marvellous performance you gave.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Mr Lent tells me we can expect to see you in Vienna.’ She was trim and pretty and assured, and spoke perfect English with a faint accent.

‘Are we?’ Julia turned to Theo. ‘Are we going to Vienna?’

‘I’m sure we will,’ he said. ‘Please, please, everybody, sit down. Miss Gossmann, for you?’

‘Only one very tiny one.’ Miss Gossmann said, holding her finger and thumb a half inch apart, and smiling warmly at Julia. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay. I just wanted to say hello and tell you how much I appreciated your performance. And to say, please, when you are in Vienna, do come and visit me.’

‘Of course.’ Theo shoved a drink in Julia’s hand. ‘Miss Gossmann is the Cricket, Julia.’

Julia had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Why would she know about that?’ said Miss Gossmann. ‘Julia — you don’t mind if I call you Julia? — Do please call me Friederike—’

‘The Cricket,’ said Theo excitedly. ‘A sensation in Hamburg. Should’ve seen the reviews.’

‘You were born to play that role, Friederike.’ Herr Otto sprawled back in his chair, looked at Julia and pulled down the skin under one of his eyes in a peculiar, slightly vulgar way.

‘Listen to them!’ Huber shook his head. He never looked at her for long. Quick little darts. Waves of cheerful savagery faded beyond the walls.

‘Stupendous,’ Otto said.

‘It scared me,’ said Julia.

Miss Gossmann leaned forward and clasped Julia’s hand. Her face, close to Julia’s, was friendly and concerned, and she betrayed no sign of unease. She might have been looking at something normal. ‘I can understand that,’ she said.

‘Scared?’ Theo, walking about waving a bottle, smiling, irrepressible. ‘What’s there to be scared of? They loved it!’

‘The way they laughed,’ said Julia.

‘It’s comedy. That’s what they’re supposed to do.’

‘The way they laugh.’

Miss Gossmann went on smiling and stroking Julia’s hand, her green eyes full of sympathy. Her face was birdlike, round and bright with a sharp little nose.

‘Just—’ Julia shrugged.

‘It’s a vulgar little thing,’ Friederike said. ‘In Vienna I hope to see you perform solo.’

‘Hermann’s going to be our man in Vienna,’ Theo said, circulating continuously with the champagne. The door was open, people wandered in and out. Julia could hear the men in front of their mirrors down the hall, sponging off their make-up. ‘You’ll love Vienna, Julia,’ Theo said. ‘You haven’t played a really big circus yet. That’s where Hermann comes in. What do you say?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her heart was calming down. ‘I’m tired, I’ll think about it later. I’d like to go to Vienna. I’d like to go everywhere.’

‘Everywhere?’ Herr Otto smiled, showing many teeth and high gums.

‘First Vienna,’ Theo said. ‘Then Warsaw. Saint Petersburg, of course. Oh Julia, wait until you see Saint Petersburg. The mysterious east! The Golden Road to Samarkand!’ He laughed, clinking glasses with Huber, chortling softly in the corner.

‘Vienna would suit you, Fraulein,’ Otto said, leaning forward elegantly, crossing his long legs. ‘There’s already talk of you there, do you realise? I can procure you a season. Perhaps at Carltheater.’

‘When?’ asked Theo.

‘I go home in a few days.’ Champagne sparkled in Otto’s thick moustache. ‘Soon, I’m sure, I’ll have news for you.’

‘I’m talking to Renz as well,’ said Theo.

‘Ah!’ said Otto, smiling at Julia, ‘They want to put you on a horse.’

‘I do believe,’ said Theo, ‘that Julia has the talent.’

‘I’m sure she does.’

‘I could learn one or two little tricks,’ Julia said, ‘but nothing fancy.’

‘One or two little tricks is all it would take,’ said Otto.

Miss Gossmann rose. ‘I wish I could stay longer,’ she said, ‘but I have to be at some silly party. You will come to my house in Vienna, Julia, and we’ll have time for a lovely talk.’

‘We certainly will!’ Theo, sparkly-eyed, kissed her hand.

Miss Gossmann left on the arm of Huber. Herr Otto and Theo lit cigars and laughed and talked for a long time, till her head spun and she realised she’d nearly fallen asleep in front of the mirror. ‘Can we go back to the rooms now, Theo?’ she asked. ‘I’m really tired.’

Otto set his glass down. ‘Indeed. You need your rest and I must be off. Fraulein Pastrana—’ He shook her hand avidly. ‘It’s been a great pleasure to meet you. I look forward to seeing you in Vienna.’

Theo walked Otto to the stage door.

‘So — two more weeks,’ said Otto. ‘Think she’ll hold up?’

‘She’s tireless,’ Theo said, ‘you wouldn’t believe. Strong as an ox.’

‘Strong, of course, but her mind, you know. What about her mind?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with her mind.’

‘Of course there isn’t. That’s not what I meant.’

‘What did you mean?’

‘I hardly know.’ Otto knotted his scarf and coughed. ‘Be careful, Lent. Someone’ll have her out from under your nose before you know it.’

‘No, they won’t.’ Theo smiled smoothly.

Returning, he heard the talk in the men’s dressing room. A door stood open. The clod of a milkman was transforming into a weary-faced man of about forty-five in front of a mirror.

‘Whatever they’re paying you,’ said the man next to him, ‘it’s not enough.’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ Stefan replied.

‘Did you see this review? The daughter of Esau. I like that. The daughter of Esau. That has a nice ring to it. It’s, you know, respectable. Yes, I like that. What do you think, Julia? Daughter of Esau?’

‘Where’s that Bible?’ she said. ‘Read it to me.’

Theo took the brown leather Bible from a drawer in the table. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘if I remember my old Sunday School days, and I do—’ He looked at her. So sweet and boyish, she thought. ‘Here it is.’ He licked his lips, looked down. ‘Now the first came forth, red all over like a hairy garment; and they named him Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob.’

‘I’m not red like Esau,’ she said.

He snapped the Bible shut and smiled. ‘You should get some rest.’

‘Will we really go to Vienna?’

‘Of course. We’ll take an apartment.’ He rubbed his hands together, standing at the door. ‘We can afford it. That’s the thing. Whatever we want, Julia, we can have.’

Suddenly there was money, a fat fruit low-hanging.

She turned away and yawned. ‘Whatever I want,’ she said, thinking he was really a bit of a fool. It made her feel strangely protective towards him, as if he was an over-excited child that needed calming down. ‘What do I want?’

He laughed. ‘Whatever it is, you can have it.’

‘I’d like a little house,’ she said. ‘So I could make it nice. And enough so I don’t have to worry and I can buy nice clothes and—’ but there she stopped because it didn’t seem real, and her eyes grew sad. Full of champagne and excitement, Theo felt sentimental, almost tearful.

‘You have nice eyes, Julia,’ he said.

She thought, does he want to make me cry?

‘Get some sleep,’ he said, and went out, closing the door. Yes, poor girl, a nice house. Nice clothes. Ask for more, girl, why not? He needed to walk. It was cold. He put up his collar and strode through dark windy streets. By the station he came upon a beggar wrapped in a blanket, a tiny thing with small hands like a child and a man’s pinched face. ‘Here, friend,’ he said.

The man took the money, folding it in his fist, saying nothing. His fingers were ice cold.

‘Money,’ said Theo and laughed, a fond and rueful little snort as if money was a much loved and indulged bad child. He walked on. Not a thing in my pockets, he remembered. Should have stopped to talk. I was once like you, my friend. It comes and goes. Oh, how it does. Should have sat right down with him, said let me tell you a story. A couple of days after my father died — pneumonia, double — I was clearing out the house. Do you know how many Knickerbocker Soda bottles I found? You wouldn’t believe it. Two hundred and thirty-three. And in every one, screwed up and stuffed in hard, money. Sitting on treasure like a drunk old dragon for years while everything fell apart around him and my uncles doled out charity. Like I said, it comes and goes. Life’s a joke.

The second night went even better. The cheers, the whistles, the thunder of feet and the storm of applause, everything the same except that when she came off-stage, instead of smiles and roses there were just gawping stage-hands and stony-faced policemen looking at her with veiled eyes. And Theo, wild-eyed, looking as if someone had just punched him in the stomach. ‘They’re closing us down,’ he said, white and furious. ‘Can you believe it? They’re closing us down.’

‘Why?’

‘Because — I don’t know — because they’re fools!’

The officer in charge was a heavy-jowled, world-weary man. ‘No need for that at all,’ he said in English. ‘We have to act. Simple as that. Nothing I can do.’

Everyone gabbled at once. Huber, the manager, pop-eyed and desperate, argued tensely in German with the police and with Theo. The other actors were worried about their pay.

‘I don’t understand you,’ Theo enunciated fiercely, as if to an idiot. ‘I don’t speak the language well.’

‘There have been complaints,’ the man said, ‘more than a few. We have to act.’

‘You see?’ said Huber in English, rounding on Theo, ‘What am I to do?’

‘What am I to do?’

She didn’t like these professionally careful stares. She, the consummate gatherer of stares. She dropped her eyes.

‘Please, gentlemen,’ Huber said, ‘this way.’

Everyone trailed into his office, forgetting her. A rearguard of stony official men remained with her in the corridor. Their eyes never left her, and she wondered if she was under arrest. But why?

‘I have permission from the authorities to stage this show,’ Theo was saying in Huber’s office, his voice loud but unsteady. ‘We’ve been through all this. It’s a play. A play, not a monster show. Miss Pastrana is a legitimate performer. Have you even read the reviews?’

‘Don’t show me that,’ the man said, ‘there’s nothing I can do. I have orders to close you down, and I have to do it.’ The sound of papers unfolding and rustling, then a crack. Theo’s hand smacking down on Huber’s desk.

‘This is outrageous!’

The policeman was unmoved. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I have to inform you, sir, that this show is accused of obscenity and immorality and has been deemed dangerous.’

‘Dangerous? Dangerous?’

She went to the door. No one stopped her. She could see the back of Theo’s head and Huber in profile picking at his lip. The policeman’s eyebrows were stoically raised, his eyes downturned. He addressed a long torrent of words in German at Huber, and the manager took out a grey silk handkerchief and dabbed his sweaty brow.

‘What’s he saying, what’s he saying?’ Theo sounded near to tears.

‘Bestiality,’ said Huber queasily. ‘He’s saying they’re calling it bestiality.’

‘What!’

Another torrent.

‘Also—’ Huber glanced quickly sideways, his eyes catching her at the door and sliding away, ‘there’s been some concern — a doctor — doctors.’

‘Doctors?’

‘These are my instructions,’ the policeman said in English, sitting down behind the desk, ‘I have no choice.’

‘They’re saying,’ said Huber, ‘that her face might be dangerous for any pregnant woman in the audience.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That her face might — cause some misfortune — to the mother — the baby—’

‘What!’

‘Miscarriage—’

Theo laughed, a hard cry of a laugh.

‘Spoil the baby,’ Huber went on, as the policeman rambled on in German, scribbling notes on a piece of paper. ‘Make it like her.’

She didn’t wait to hear more. She went back to her dressing room, closed the door and sat looking in the mirror. Someone had stuck a coloured drawing in the side of the glass. It showed a handsome round building in a grand park, with elegant people strolling about in front. Dear Miss Pastrana, the writing said, here is a picture of one of the many beautiful buildings in the glorious city of Vienna — your friend, Hermann Otto.

The scent of flowers was thick.

Theo bashed the door open. ‘Those idiots. Those beasts. They’re living in the Middle Ages.’

Julia veiled and stood up, began putting on her shawl. ‘Is it very cold outside?’ she asked.

He stalked about, venomous. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ He stopped, glaring at her. ‘Aren’t you furious?’

‘Is it snowing?’

She wouldn’t look at him.

‘How can you stand there like that?’ he said. ‘How can you be calm?’

‘So what now?’ She stood by the door.

‘How would I know?’ His hair stuck up greasily. ‘Damn Huber carrying on as if it’s my fault. How was I supposed to know these benighted peasants believe in old wives’ tales? Obscene! They’re obscene! I hate them!’

Someone came to the door and said the carriage was ready.

‘I’ve never liked Leipzig.’

The drunker Theo got, the more bullish he became, striding up and down her room with a glass in his hand, spilling pale liquid over his fingers.

‘When were you here before, Theo?’ She was sitting on the end of the bed, twisting a ribbon between her fingers. A fire blazed in the grate.

‘Ten years ago.’ He stood looking down into the fire, remembering the Gatti Twins, the awful awakening from his first great venture. ‘I’m done with this place now,’ he said, ‘it’s bad luck for me. We shouldn’t even have come. Stupid.’ He hit himself on the head. ‘Fool you are, Theo! Should have gone straight to Vienna. That’s what we’ll do, that’s what’s next. I’ll get onto old Otto first thing. Vienna!’

He walked over to the window, lifted the curtain and stood looking out at the snow falling fast across the flat white façade of the buildings opposite.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what’s next.’

Suddenly afraid, Julia began to cry.

‘Huber just standing there,’ he said, ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. Looking at me as if everything was my fault.’

A formless gloom was on her, and she felt far from home. Certain words had cut. Obscenity. Not ugly, she knew she was that. Fact was fact. Ugly was ugly and beauty was beauty, and nothing anyone could do about that. But obscene? Immoral?

‘Bestial,’ she said.

He turned sharply.

‘After all, what am I really?’ Her voice was thick.

‘Are you crying?’

‘What if I am? What am I?’ She laughed. ‘It isn’t who am I? It isn’t who am I? I know who I am, I’m Julia. It’s what I am.’

Oh God, poor creature, poor creature, he thought.

‘Julia,’ he said, striding across the room and falling on his knees in that ridiculous theatrical way she was getting used to, grabbing both her hands. ‘I will not have you bothered by ignoramuses and bigots. The words that drip out of their mouths are worth less than the spewings of a sewer. They don’t matter.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘Julia, forget them.’

‘How can I? I blight babies in the womb.’

Don’t, he thought. I can’t deal with this. ‘They’re the ugly ones,’ he said hopelessly, but she pulled her hands from his and covered her face. ‘You’re much better than them. Stronger,’ he said, but she just shook her head and turned away. He got up, sat down beside her, putting one arm around her shoulders. Touching her sent a thrill of excitement up his arm.

‘I want to go home,’ she said, stiffening.

‘Home?’

‘Mexico. Home. They’d have me back.’

‘Ssh!’

‘At least they didn’t hide their babies.’

‘We’ll go to Vienna,’ he said. His arm felt awkward.

‘It’ll be the same there.’

‘No, it won’t, I promise you.’

She started wiping her face with the ribbons.

‘Here.’ He gave her his handkerchief. ‘What do fools matter? You can’t let this stop you.’

He took his arm away.

‘You’re a wonder,’ he said. ‘A fascination. A miracle.’

Julia dried her face and composed herself.

‘The people who really count adore you,’ he said. ‘They go home and tell everyone — when they’re old, they’ll tell their grandchildren — how they saw the great Julia Pastrana on the stage, how beautifully she danced and sang, and how charming she was afterwards when they shook her hand.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘They’ll remember you all their lives.’

She turned to look at him. ‘I don’t think so. I think they just go home and say, guess what? I saw a monkey in a dress today.’

Theo said nothing. The shine of tears caught in the down on her cheek. Poor soul, he thought. ‘I’ll never put you through that again,’ he said.

‘I know you won’t.’ She sniffed, wiping her face, ‘Because I won’t do it. I’ll go home.’ She was starting to cry again.

After all, he thought, it’s only like stroking a dog. It’s only hair. ‘

You don’t want to go home,’ he said, putting his arms round her and stroking her big shaggy head. ‘You don’t want to go home, Julia. And be a servant again?’

No one had held her since she was small. Solana probably, it was hard to remember. Maybe even her mother. There had once been arms around her though, she was sure of it. ‘I wouldn’t be a servant,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘I have some money now, I could be independent.’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘in a few years, but not now. Not while everything is so perfect for you. They want you in Russia. They want you in Warsaw and Prague. In Vienna. Everyone wants you.’

The embrace had become stiff.

‘We’ll throw that stupid play aside and carry on as we were.’ His voice was strained. ‘Just you and your talent. There’s so much waiting for you, Julia.’

‘You know, Theo,’ she said, and her voice was steady again. ‘I really don’t know what I am.’

He drew back. This was the moment when in any normal circumstance there would have been a kiss, she even saw the flicker of it in his eyes, but she also saw that he simply couldn’t do it.

‘It’s all right, Theo,’ she said, and smiled, and a peculiar understanding passed between them.

‘Julia, I will never abandon you. Never. I will always look after you, I promise.’ He smiled and proclaimed with mock solemnity, ‘I will look after you in this dark, dirty little world,’ then laughed and kissed her forehead, drew her head down and stroked again. ‘You have lovely hair,’ he said.

~ ~ ~

It was all off with Laurie. Adam had hung around and hung around, till the right night came, rain, candles, her birthday cards fluttering from the mantelpiece at regular intervals, one from her mother, one from her brother, one from Auntie Irene and Uncle Bob who she hadn’t seen since 1962 when they came to her father’s funeral. A world beyond this house. He didn’t know her, he realised, didn’t know her at all. Who are these parents? These people? Oh, they were just parents, she said. You know. They were OK, I suppose. That scar? How d’you get that scar? Wouldn’t you like to know? Fought a bear.

She’d teased her hair out in a big bush and wore a red hat on top of it. Bright red lipstick too, a big wide slash of it to match the hat. This room, this house, this whole smoky moment, stuck in time, as every moment surely is. The raw rich smell of burning herb, the thick dope air. Ultra-real. She rolled and licked and lit a cigarette casually, as if her hands had done it a million times.

‘Oh Rosie, my little Rosie, my little Rose,’ Adam said, then felt a fool and didn’t know what to do.

She smiled. Then kissed him.

*

Ever since, they’d been in bed more or less all the time. The rest of life stopped. Of course lust was in it, but it was love more than anything he’d known. He thought it might kill him.

‘I’ll go down with you,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you want.’

‘Go down where?’

‘Wherever you’re going. The rabbit hole. Madness. I don’t care.’

‘What?’ She was hardly listening. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

Forget all. Forget and fall. Skyscrapers rise, grand edifices of junk, towers, a wooden cobra, teddy bears and dolls, pictures, ropes, Buddha, a horse, old jigsaws, shells, ashtrays, boxes and bottles, umbrellas, fans, books, books, books. Chewed pencil stubs among the shoelaces and discarded shopping lists, the boxes things came in.

The madness increases. The weeks roll on, four, five, six, more, forever. Getting on for six months, and he’d look at her and wonder what was real, this or some odd remembered thing, far down at the other end of a telescope, a life as unreal as the mother, the brother, the auntie and uncle, all that mysterious stuff she dragged behind her, her backdrop; only this was his backdrop, the piano in the school hall, his Uncle Tommy’s greyhound, his Grandma, his mates, the band he was in, the drawings he did all over the walls in his room. A whole existence she’d never know, just as he’d never know hers.

He started painting her.

Draped, naked, sleeping, bathing, reading, at a window, in shadow, in white like an angel, fully clothed, made up like a forties movie star, full face, close-up, profile, distorted. All in purple. Photorealist, impressionist, in miniature, on a vast canvas or on the wall, in pencil, watercolour, oils, acrylics.

He never painted anything else ever again, just her, and the funny thing was, nothing he ever painted after he met her was ever as good as his old stuff. He knew it wasn’t going to last. It was like drinking for the moment, not caring about the hangover. If he’d been wood or sad plastic, torn or fragile, worthless, she’d have put him on her shelf and kept him forever. Now and again her heart would have bled softly for him. People though — people with their mysterious pesky hearts — she couldn’t cope with that. The way she’d turned on a pin with poor old Laurie, one day all over him, the next just a friend, surprised and mildly indignant at his grief. It’d be the same with him when his time came. And in the end she’d be alone because it was the only way she could be, and he wondered what it was in that bland otherworld of mother, brother, uncle and auntie that had made her that way.

~ ~ ~

A HUMAN MONSTER

Readers will recall last week’s report concerning the furore at Leipzig’s Kroll Theatre. The outcry, which resulted in the immediate closure of Der Curierte Meyer, a lively little musical comedy, was a consequence of several impassioned complaints from both citizens and members of the medical establishment concerned about the possible harmful effects of the public’s exposure to its lead performer, the remarkable Julia Pastrana. In short, it was decided that the theatre’s aesthetic frame was harmed by association with this deformed creature.

‘What are we to make of this? Very little, one imagines. There is nothing new about the display of human oddities. The problem arises when the sideshow is brought into a respectable theatre. Yet we learn that Miss Pastrana has graced the stage of the Saint Charles in New Orleans, where once the divine Jenny Lind enchanted the cream of society. She has been guest of honour at military balls, converses ably, sings tolerably, dances prettily and speaks three languages. Unfortunately German is not one of them, as I discovered when I interviewed her in her dressing room at Wirth’s Circus. Her English, though, is fluent, so we got along remarkably well.

Miss Pastrana is a young woman of 23. By birth a Mexican Indian, she grew up in the Spanish Catholic household of the state governor of Sinaloa. I cannot begin to convey the full horror of her appearance. The accompanying pencil drawing, brilliant as it is, does not do her justice. No mere representation could. For the full effect, you must see the shine in her depthless black eyes. You must hear the voice, low and womanly, emerging from the thick-lipped mouth, catch the occasional glimpse of the lumpy muscle mass of tongue as she speaks, the veritable rampart of coral-like excrescence behind those lips. Her nostrils are vast, her nose wide-bridged and domed. Her head is very large in relation to her body, her shoulders broad, her bosom voluptuous. She is absolutely covered in thick black hair, face and all, except for the palms of her hands, which are dusky rose and delicate. There is a melancholy in the eyes, which causes pity. I do not think she is very intelligent but she does seem to be aware of her situation.

‘Miss Pastrana, life must have changed so much for you.’

‘So much!’

‘Is it tiring for you to be so constantly travelling?’

‘Of course, sometimes. But there’s good and bad in every situation. Sometimes I get tired, but if I wasn’t travelling I wouldn’t be seeing so many interesting places and meeting so many people.’

‘Would you describe yourself as a happy person?’

‘Sometimes one thing, sometimes another—’

You tell them Julia. You tell them. You show them. Theo had given her a glass of wine for confidence before he let the man in. You remember—

‘In fact,’ she said with that terrible smile, ‘the entire experience has been wonderful. I have sold out theatres in America and England. This small upset in Leipzig — that is nothing.’

She had dressed herself carefully, done her hair, thought herself back into a defiant state of mind, composed herself in dignity and made herself cheerful.

By God, you’re a tower of strength, he’d said, his lips brushing her fingertips.

‘Does it pain you, Miss Pastrana? Your condition. You are clearly a creature of…’

‘Sometimes.’

… I cannot imagine the loneliness of this woman’s life. And yet she appears content. The question of course that is never asked but is in every mind is the question of romance. How can such as she aspire to the joys of womankind? One cannot imagine she will ever marry or experience motherhood. And yet she clearly has a mind capable of understanding her situation. I would not have raised the issue had she not mentioned it herself towards the end of our interview, when the artist had done his work and was preparing to show his subject her image.

‘They all want to know the same things,’ she suddenly informed me, and affirmed that the audiences she was used to always asked, have you ever been in love? Do you have a beau? Will you ever get married? At which she laughed and said that so far she had received at least twenty proposals of marriage. When I asked why she had not blessed one of the candidates with her hand, she replied, ‘They weren’t good enough.’

Germany sold out. The circuses at Vienna and Budapest sold out.

‘You see,’ said Theo, ‘now they show some respect.’

She would fall only half asleep on a train and all the circuses and stages and sideshows of here, there and everywhere took to spinning in her head, the crowds awestruck, agape, eyes out of control. Robin Adair, Old Zip Coon, redskins, Chinamen with cues, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt’, real slave darkey slapping on his thigh, ladies, gentlemen, the eighth wonder of the world, the incredible ape-woman, ugliest in existence.

In came the money.

The circuits crossed, criss-crossed, faces came, went, reappeared, faded, loomed. She never forgot one. Some of the old ones from America turned up from time to time. She met Ted in Freiberg, Maud Sparrow and her husband in Pizen, but it was never Myrtle Dexter and Delia Mounier, Armless and Legless Dancing Wonders, or Zeo the Wild Human, and at times she still remembered with a pang the feeling of being in Madame Soulie’s yard in New Orleans: Delia wanting to comb her hair, Cato hanging round the door, Myrtle making a crimson bow of her mouth at the mirror.

I was happy then, she thought. Am I not happy now?

I’m happier, much happier, rattling along with Theo in carriages and trains, all this travelling together, a kind of peace between us. If I didn’t look like this, she thought. Theo and Julia. Julia and Theo. Everything changes, everything moves on, he’ll be gone too, like Solana, her old face, her boys long gone, turned legend. That’s what time does.

Then she’d feel as if a great wave bigger than the world was coming, the whole of the sea rearing up like a living beast, slow but sure, rolling over everything. When she got scared, she’d slip her hand under his arm. It was warm there, and he never seemed to mind. Sometimes he’d smile but go on reading his paper.

One day in Bautzen, waiting for a coach, Theo said, ‘This looks like your pinhead.’

She leaned over his arm and looked at the picture in the paper he was reading. A sawdust ring. Plumed white horses. Circus, Rakovnik. Acrobats, jugglers, rope-dancers, magicians, a boy with three legs, clowns, puppets, dancing dogs. And Zeo the Wild Human.

‘That sound like him?’

‘Oh Cato, Cato,’ she said. ‘That’s him. Oh yes! Oh Theo, can we go there? Please? Can we go there? I’d love to see Cato again.’

‘Oh, you know what it’s like, Julia,’ he said. ‘We’ll probably run into him somewhere along the line if he’s crossed the herring-pond. We can’t just go running off willy-nilly though, can we? We’re tied up for the next six weeks at least.’

Three months later they caught up with the Circus Raniello in Prague. Not a bad idea, Theo said, we should get you on a horse. Wait and see, they’ll be glad to have you. And indeed the man’s eyes bugged out of his head when she raised her veil. ‘Oh, si,’ he said, ‘si, si, si, si, si…’

His English was poor but Theo could muddle along in Italian and she caught a few words here and there. Money. Zlatkas, escudos, dollars. Laughter. Out came a bottle of wine and two glasses.

‘E per la mia signora…’ said Theo, turning and gesturing towards her. A third glass was produced.

‘You don’t have to do any fancy tricks,’ Theo said, ‘just ride into the ring and a couple of circuits. Maybe just one or two little tricks if you feel you could…’

The man had bright eyes in a square brown face. They jerked on and off her face as he poured her a drink.

‘Oh, I can ride,’ she said, ‘I used to ride Marta’s pony. Ask him where Cato and Ezra are. Zeo.’

More babble. A lot of babble. The man’s face was shiny, as if someone had spent all morning polishing it.

‘They’re in the town,’ Theo said. ‘There’s a house.’

Here in the park, the wagons made a small village along the edge of a meadow, by the trees. But some of the company were in a house nearby, Raniello said. The landlady was very good, very discreet, no trouble at all, and very reasonable. They were taken on for a two-week run till their Vienna season should begin, given two rooms in the old house, a part of a tenement, with a courtyard and many stairs and unexpected passages leading into unknown realms. The landlady lived on the ground floor with her son, and the show people kept to the second floor on the right-hand side of the courtyard.

When Ezra Porter heard from the landlady that his friend Julia Pastrana was here, he came lolloping down the passage like an enthusiastic bear. ‘What a gift, what a gift!’ he kept saying, grinning hard, shaking her vigorously by the hand over and over again. His chin looked bigger, more double. He was trying to grow whiskers but you could see it was a struggle. Apart from his head hair he was smooth like an Indian, even his chest. She knew this from seeing him wash it at the pump in Madame Soulie’s yard. Hovering with his smile and raised brows in the background, Theo was thinking, this isn’t a bad set-up, not bad at all. Wonder if he plays poker? When the girl came out, thin, very dark, sour-mouthed, with her arms folded in front of her, she stared at Julia’s heavily veiled face then looked at him but didn’t smile.

‘Theo,’ Julia said, ‘this is Ezra Porter. This is my manager, Theo, Theo Lent… oh hello Berniece… where’s Cato?’

‘Asleep,’ Berniece said.

‘Go and wake him,’ said Ezra.

‘You go and wake him.’

‘Oh no, don’t wake him!’ Julia said. ‘How is he?’

‘Oh, fine.’

‘No he isn’t,’ said Berniece, ‘he’s been having ear-ache.’

‘Yes, but it’s on the mend now.’

‘You’re not the one that’s up all night with him,’ Berniece muttered, clicking her nails.

‘Look, my room’s just here,’ said Julia.

‘Terrific! Mrs Vels! Mrs Vels!’ Ezra called down to the landlady, a worn-down, kind-faced woman who was half way up the stairs with a bowl of water. ‘You don’t mind if we change rooms with Angelo, do you?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, ‘ask him.’

Ezra rapped on the door of the room next to Julia’s, and it opened at once as if the person on the other side had been listening all the time and knew what was going on. Angelo was a beaky Italian with sad eyes. ‘You wanna move?’ he said in perfect American, ‘Fine with me, I gain.’

‘You do,’ Ezra agreed, ‘you get a view over the river and the town.’

‘Nobody asked me,’ said Berniece.

‘Oh, come on, Niece. You don’t mind.’

‘Suits me,’ said Angelo. ‘I got hardly anything to move anyway.’

‘I have,’ Berniece told his retreating back.

Mrs Vels trod heavily across the landing, spilling a little hot water as she went.

‘Let me,’ said Theo.

‘For the lady’s room,’ she said patiently, letting him take over.

‘Thank you, Mrs Vels. Julia, you should rest.’ He smiled his best gracious smile, first at Berniece then at Ezra. ‘Don’t feel you have to change anything on our account. I wouldn’t have anyone inconvenienced.’

‘Of course,’ said Ezra. ‘You must be tired. You been travelling all day? Look — after the show, I’ll bring some beer. You come to our room.’

Julia left them talking outside, closed the door, took off her boots and looked out of the window, rubbing the toes of one foot wearily against the back of her other leg. The room faced onto the high wall of a farrier’s yard, and a narrow alley that ran between one street and another. It was late afternoon. The sky above the rooftops was dove grey. She lay down as she was, under the covers. The fire in the small grate had not yet warmed the room. She was very tired but it was impossible to sleep because of the talking in the passage, the opening and closing of doors, the footsteps on the stairs.

‘Ever run into Delia and Myrtle?’ Julia asked.

‘I did once,’ said Ezra. ‘Well, Delia anyway. Myrtle’s out of the business. Had a baby. A boy. Got married.’

‘Delia’s on her own?’

‘Last I saw.’

‘You get here now, Cato, I can’t stand it.’ Berniece’s lips were set in a straight line. Cato, doing a ridiculous dance, bony knees akimbo, shrieked and squawked in his nightshirt. Wet-eyed with laughter, leaning together like schoolboys giggling at a prank, Theo and Ezra were drunk, and Cato was wild. Since six o’clock he’d been celebrating Julia’s re-appearance with mad showing-off and hysterical dances that grew ever more deranged and frantic.

‘He should have been in bed an hour ago,’ Berniece said.

‘Look, Cato,’ Julia said, ‘we can have a lovely time tomorrow. We can go and see the horses.’

Berniece made a grab for him, but he skipped away and she stumbled.

‘Woah, girl!’ Ezra grabbed her elbow.

‘You do something,’ she said, pulling away and sitting down.

Her face went completely blank, as if someone had just passed a hand in front of it, wiping out sentience.

‘Behave, Cato,’ Ezra said, reaching once more for the vodka.

Cato ran round the room drumming on the backs of the chairs, warbling in a reedy falsetto. He stopped, hunch-backed in front of Theo, leaned on his knees and pushed his face up close.

‘Hello there,’ Theo said.

Cato nasalled something.

‘Can’t understand a word you’re saying,’ said Theo, laughing.

Berniece poured a shot of vodka and knocked it back as if it was poison. ‘This room’s not as nice as our old one,’ she said.

‘It’s fine,’ said Ezra expansively.

‘All we’ve got is a wall.’ She looked at Julia. ‘We could see all the people going up and down the street.’

‘You really didn’t have to move on our account,’ Julia said.

‘We could have visited just as well in your old room.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘But this is nice,’ said Ezra. ‘I mean, think about it. He gets on so well with Julia. They’re great together. Once he’s settled down—’

‘He means he wants you to babysit,’ said Berniece, pouring herself another and twisting one leg behind the other awkwardly.

‘She don’t have to babysit if she don’t want to,’ Ezra said stoutly, ‘I never said no such thing. But Julia never used to mind watching him now and then, did you, Julia?’

‘Not at all.’

‘It’s no big thing,’ said Ezra.

‘Christ, no,’ said Theo. ‘We all help each other out.’

‘See.’

Berniece threw back her head and poured the liquor down her throat.

‘You know,’ said Julia, ‘I don’t mind looking after Cato at all.

He always behaved quite well for me.’

‘Ha!’ said Berniece.

Cato wheeled away from Theo’s knee, landed by Berniece and scrambled messily up onto her lap, pulling up her skirts with his bare feet trampling into her, arms clamping round her neck in urgent stranglehold. ‘Cato…’ she said, desperately trying to cover her legs, the white bloomers bunched at the knees. ‘Oh please…’ He kissed her, jumped down, stood in front of the fire doing funny faces, switching between a frown and a smile, on, off, on, off, getting quicker and quicker till all of them, willing or not, were laughing.

‘Don’t laugh!’ Berniece said, laughing herself, ‘it makes him worse.’

On, off, on, off, past funny to scary.

‘Stop it.’

‘How does he do that?’ Theo offered Ezra a cigar.

Julia got up. ‘Come on now,’ she said, ‘you show me where you sleep.’

‘Naah!’

‘Yes!’

‘Do as you’re told now,’ said Ezra.

‘Show me your bed, Cato. Come on.’ Julia took his hand and led him behind the screen to his cot, which had been made up very cosily with an eiderdown and bolster up against the wall.

‘Dark!’ he said.

‘Nice!’

He threw himself backwards on the bed, just missing banging the long cone of his head on the wall.

‘Well, aren’t you lucky to have such a lovely cosy bed. Get under and I’ll tuck you in.’

‘You should give him a dose of cordial,’ she heard Theo say.

‘Can’t get it down him,’ Ezra replied.

Cato got in and lay down, and she tucked him up and gave him a kiss. He was like a bird that chirped away till you put the cover on the cage. Before long, the darkness in his den had put him out.

‘Niece,’ Ezra was saying, as she emerged from behind the screen, ‘I don’t go out that much.’

‘Yes, you do.’ Berniece lit a match.

Theo winked at Julia, and she smiled. It was nice, as if they were an us like Ezra and Berniece.

‘Is he asleep?’ asked Ezra.

‘Of course he is.’ Berniece blew smoke and clanked the bottle neck on the rim of her glass. ‘She’s got the golden touch. Haven’t you, Missy?’

‘Come and sit here, Julia,’ said Theo, patting the seat beside him. ‘Have a drink. Where’s your glass?’

‘Only one more. And water please.’

‘Oh horrors! Water!’ Berniece said, head wreathed in smoke.

The drink flowed. The men guffawed like boys over stupid things, Berniece scrunched herself up small on her chair and bit her nails, swinging her slippered foot. Julia, sipping, smiled and looked around her, bright-eyed, wondering if this could be a new thing of belonging, like Madame Soulie’s yard, but the more she thought about it, the more she doubted. She thought of Myrtle married, a mother, and looked at Theo, the way when he giggled his grin made a childish slash in his face, the way the greased hair fell loose across his forehead. She could never have him. What a thing to think, even for a second. When she closed her eyes, she saw New Orleans, the carriage taking her to Bayou Road to see John Montanee, the streets sliding by, the moon full and high, a face in the sky. Her hand went into the pocket of her skirt to the little bottle with its few remaining drops of love potion.

‘Shh!’ said Berniece to the men, ‘you’ll wake him up.’

‘He never wakes once he’s gone off.’ Ezra stood up and hovered about with a soft silly look on his face.

‘What are you looking for?’ Berniece kicked him lightly.

‘I thought we had some lemons.’

‘We did. We do.’

‘Have you ever had vodka with hot water and lemon juice, Theo?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Oh let me make it,’ Julia jumped up. ‘I know how to do that.’

She stood by the window watching as Ezra lifted a pan from the hob. ‘Let me squeeze the lemons,’ she said, and when it was all done and she’d run across and taken Theo’s remaining drink from him and poured it into the steaming cup, she turned her back on the room, retrieving the bottle from her pocket and emptying the last three or four drops in with the rest.

‘Here, Theo,’ she said.

‘Listen to them,’ Berniece said, ‘listen out there.’ She’d thrown up the window and was leaning over, looking down into the alley. The sound of drunks singing their way home floated up. Suddenly she turned. ‘You can get out onto the roof,’ she said, looking at Julia. ‘Want to see?’

‘I’d love to.’ Julia had poured herself a hot drink too. She lifted the cup and let the sharp aroma swim about her nostrils.

‘My God,’ said Berniece in a low voice.

She’s looking at my nose, Julia thought. The way my nostrils move.

‘Come on.’ Berniece stood up, flounced across to the door. ‘This way, this way.’ She led along the passage and up to the attics, a long row of rooms with a long dormer window opposite looking out onto a wide flat space between the yard and the street. The tiles were warm, and they sat down side by side looking up at a sky full of stars. The moon was a wide crescent.

‘Well, said Berniece, ‘it’s nice to have someone new to talk to. You’ve been around a bit, hey?’

‘All over the place,’ said Julia.

‘Same with us. You think, oh here we go, the romance, the road, all the strange people… you been to Paris?’

‘No, not Paris. We were going to, but they wrote horrible things about me so we didn’t go.’

‘Me neither. I want to go there.’

‘I go to a lot of places,’ Julia said, ‘but I don’t really see them.

I can’t go out like other people, so it’s…’

‘I know! You think: oh! I’ve been to Amsterdam and Cologne and Berlin and what have I seen? Walls. Stuck in with Cato. It’s like having a baby. Not that I’d know.’

Berniece blew smoke at the sky.

‘Don’t you like it on the road?’ said Julia. ‘I do. I like all the new places. Everything new. Voices. Trees. Money.’

‘But you don’t see it,’ said Berniece.

‘Sometimes I go out with my veil on. But I have to be very careful.’ Julia smiled. ‘I went for a walk in New York once. I got on a trolleybus.’

‘I can’t even do that with Cato,’ said Berniece, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the sloping tiles. ‘It’s really just too much trouble taking him out. Everyone at him all the time. Can’t leave him alone, trailing after him like the Pied Piper. He likes it at first, and then he gets upset and some of them are cruel. It’s not worth it.’ She yawned and opened her eyes. ‘God, it’s just so beautiful up here,’ she said. Down below, the neighbourhood cats cried viciously at one another.

‘Listen to them,’ Julia said, thinking of the devil baby. Poor poor thing.

‘I’m run off my feet,’ said Berniece, ‘and Ezra’s not really very good with him. Just lets him do what he wants. I’m just a nurse-maid really.’

‘I once knew this girl,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t know how old she was. Her hair was going grey but I don’t think she was very old. She was unhappy all the time. She kept wanting to go home, but then she didn’t really want to when it came to it. I don’t know why she was so unhappy. Always crying, all the time like a leaky faucet. She could sit on her own head and cross her feet under her head like a bow.’

Berniece laughed.

‘Zelda.’

The cats had shut up, and the sudden silence startled them.

‘People come and go,’ said Berniece.

Julia stood up and walked a little way along the tiles. ‘You don’t want to be like her,’ she said. ‘Always wanting to be somewhere else. Even if she got to wherever it was she was wanting to get to, she’d still want to be somewhere else.’

Across the low wall, Julia saw roofs, slope after slope, all silver.

‘You’re not stupid, are you?’ said Berniece.

‘I don’t think so.’ Julia turned her head. ‘Are you?’

Berniece laughed. ‘I’ll say one thing,’ she said. ‘You sure do meet some unusual people in this line of work.’

‘You should be glad you’ve got a nice man like Ezra,’ Julia said, sitting down again. ‘He’s nice, Ezra, don’t you think?’

‘Of course he’s nice.’ Berniece looked away, and that blank look came over her again. ‘Know what I liked most about him when I met him? Cato. The way he was with Cato. I thought, here’s this poor little freak and isn’t he lucky he landed with this kind man and not some other.’ She leaned her head back against the slope of the roof. ‘Some of them out there you know,’ she said, ‘they’re terrible. You’re all right though, aren’t you, with Theo? Funny thing, you and him.’

‘Well,’ said Julia, and could think of no more to say, wondering what it was that was pressing down on her, some feeling. She got up again and walked to the low wall.

‘Certainly wasn’t Ezra’s looks I went for,’ Berniece said. ‘Looked like a cross between a three-year-old and a bear.’

There was a clattering and a clumping, and the heads of the men poked through the window.

‘Come out,’ Berniece said, ‘See how pretty it is.’

‘Julia?’ Theo’s voice.

‘I’m over here.’

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Looking.’

‘Looking at what?’

Theo materialised behind her, smelling of liquor. She sensed him swaying slightly and closed her eyes wondering what was wrong with her. A mood of roaming sadness was on her, the kind she used to get, when Solana would flick her with a cloth and say, ‘Never mind, put it behind you, whatever it is, come on, there’s all this to be washed.’ The old kitchen. The tiles. The smell of pepper. The cats in the alley were yowling at the moon again. The devil baby darted among the chimneys. She felt sad for the moment she was in, as if it had already gone, this night, the four of them drunk on this Prague rooftop.

‘Julia,’ said Theo, ‘we’ll try you on a horse tomorrow. Shall we?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said.

‘You know, he’s not a real showman, Ezra isn’t,’ he said later, saying goodnight outside her door, ‘not from way way back like me, he just sort of drifted into it from meeting someone on the line between New Orleans and Saint Louis.’

Poor Theo, she thought later, lying in bed as the cats wailed, a sound like the devil baby breaking its heart in the alley. Her sadness coalesced around Theo, the pathos of his ridiculous knowing smile, which really wasn’t sure of very much. All the time building himself up, telling himself he matters, she thought. He knew a million people and none of them really liked him. She saw that now and it made her care all the more for him, because he wasn’t a bad man and it wasn’t fair.

It took less than a week for Julia to become Circus Ranielli’s main attraction. Every night she rode into the ring on a white horse called Sister, who performed so subtly and smoothly at the merest tightening of a knee that soon the spectacle of this wild black beast-woman on what might as well have been a unicorn was pulling in crowds the like of which Ranielli had never known. He upped the money.

Hermann Otto wrote, Vienna awaited, agog. Miss Gossmann sent her warmest regards, and begged Julia’s presence at a dinner party she intended to give upon their arrival.

‘Now that,’ said Theo, ‘is something. That, I have to say, is not nothing.’ He stood in her open doorway, leaning sideways, feet crossed. ‘Do you know how famous that woman is? She knows everyone. If she’s putting the word about—’

‘Friederike,’ Julia said. ‘She was nice.’

‘She loved you.’

‘She did, didn’t she?’

‘Mad about you.’

‘She was nice. She looked at me as if I was—’

‘The Cricket,’ he said. ‘Never saw it, myself. Wildly successful. Some romantic thing.’

‘A play?’

‘With music. The woman has a voice, but not to match yours.’

Ezra came up beside him with Cato. ‘Seen Berniece?’

‘No,’ said Theo, standing aside. Cato ambled in, mumbling sleepily to himself, attached himself to Julia’s skirt with his fists and closed his eyes.

‘He’s supposed to be asleep,’ said Ezra. ‘He won’t go off without her.’

‘I heard her go out about mid-day,’ Julia said. She’d heard their voices next door, Ezra’s high and complaining, Berniece’s faintly mocking. Then Berniece had left, slamming the door behind her and whistling her way downstairs.

It was two o’clock now. The afternoon threatened rain.

‘Can I leave him here for a bit?’ said Ezra. ‘He won’t stay on his own. I’m going down to the showground, see if she’s there.’

‘Of course,’ said Julia, prising Cato’s fingers from her skirt and leading him to the bed. ‘Lie down here now,’ she said. ‘Here we are, let me move this pillow.’

He lay down, still mumbling. His fingers were wet and had left marks on her skirt. ‘Close your eyes now,’ she said. Ezra went to get his boots and Theo followed, talking excitedly about the Cricket, Vienna, opportunity. ‘Goddamn it, he’s moved my boots again,’ she heard Ezra say. She sighed. ‘I need my afternoon sleep too,’ she told Cato. Already he was beginning to snore softly. Someone came running up the stairs, much too light to be Mrs Vels, and Berniece appeared at the door, flushed and cheery.

‘Julia!’ she said, leaning in, fanning herself with a couple of letters she was holding. She crossed the room with clumsy, drunken grace. ‘And here’s my little man!’

‘He’s asleep,’ said Julia, raising a finger to her lips.

They were drinkers, Ezra and Berniece, but she’d never seen either of them this drunk this early in the day before.

‘Oh sure, sure, I’ll take him off your hands.’ Berniece leaned over the bed, an invisible cloud of ale and orris root wafting out from her. ‘There’s letters for you, Julia.’

‘Letters?’

She held them out. ‘Just arrived. Vels gave them to me as I was coming up.’

Julia looked at them, surprised. ‘Who are they from?’

Berniece hiccupped loudly and laughed, squaring her shoulders to lift Cato. ‘Well, how would I know that, darling? Ez!’ Surprisingly strong, she hauled Cato up, and he flopped over her arms, open-mouthed.

‘Here,’ she said when Ezra appeared in the doorway, ‘take him.’

Julia slipped the letters under her pillow quickly.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Ezra looked embarrassed. ‘I was just about to go and look for you.’

‘Nowhere,’ said Berniece, sinking down into a chair and swinging her legs over the side. ‘Ez!’ She pulled pins out of her hair. ‘Fetch me a drink.’

‘I’m not getting you a drink, Niece,’ said Ezra, Cato over his shoulder like a sack. ‘And Julia doesn’t want you in her room in that condition.’

‘What condition?’ Berniece threw a hairpin at him, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Give Julia some peace.’

She trailed after him, hair half up, half down. ‘You’re a pal for looking after my little beast, Julia,’ she said.

‘My pleasure,’ said Julia, closing the door gratefully and locking it. She could hear them on the landing with Theo, and knew that Berniece, drunk-silly, would be flirting with Theo. That’s what she did, He never responded, except occasionally to meet Julia’s eyes and smile and raise his eyebrows as if to say, what can I do? And Julia would feel gratified that he did so, but irritated anyway by the slender grace of Berniece as she flopped tipsily around in front of him.

Julia ripped open the first letter, read it twice in the window’s light, ripped open the second and read that too. Then she read them both again slowly. I believe your career should move away from vaudeville and into the concert hall… classical training… culture. A more refined audience than perhaps you have been used to. And this other one. Offers. More money. Numbers.

I could leave, she thought. These are good offers. I could live in Vienna. Friederike would introduce me to all her friends.

She closed the shutters and lay down. But I’m with Theo, she thought. What did I sign? I did sign something but it was ages ago.

What would Delia and Myrtle say? Got lax, girl. Get it in writing. Know your worth. He’s only a manager. Her eyes filled with tears. Only a manager like Rates or Beach. I could leave him. I’m free.

She pulled Yatzi from under the pillow. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked him.

‘I’ve had a couple of offers,’ she said next day.

They were at the circus; she’d just finished a show, and she was still veiled. It was easier veiled.

‘Offers?’ Theo had been packing her costume into a case, but he stopped and looked up.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘one looks quite interesting.’

‘What?’ he said. ‘What offers? Who said? How do you know?’

‘I got a couple of letters,’ she said casually.

‘I didn’t see any letters.’

‘Why would you, Theo?’

‘Can I see?’

‘I don’t have them on me.’

He frowned. ‘Where are they?’

‘Back in my room, of course.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He sounded hurt.

‘Didn’t seem important. I haven’t really thought about them yet.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ He snapped the case shut. ‘Didn’t you want me to look them over? I wish you’d tell me these things, Julia.’

‘Oh well,’ she said casually. ‘Sorry, Theo. I just wanted to think about them for a bit.’ She turned away, fiddling with her hair. ‘We’d have to think quite seriously about things if I decide — I mean, I need to see — what was it I signed up to? Am I obliged to work out a certain period of time?’

Theo groaned.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

He closed his eyes. ‘You’re not seriously…’

He felt as if she’d thumped him in the stomach. A wriggling clot of emotions tightened his gut, too tangled to unknot.

‘Of course not,’ she said as if it was nothing, ‘Just a possibility, that’s all. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything without a lot of careful thought.’

But he stood looking stricken. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, and she was sorry, so sorry for him, but turned away.

‘Don’t be silly, Theo,’ she said. ‘You know this business better than anyone. You know everyone moves on all the time. It’s something we have to face.’

She pushed through a flap into a tented area full of props and ropes and buckets, where Ezra sat playing cards with a couple of men. They looked sideways at her, knowing full well what was under that veil. Berniece was looking on, biting her nails, Cato next to her.

‘Damn carriage is late,’ Berniece said. She’d been drinking.

Julia nodded. They sat in silence for a while.

‘I might not stay with Theo much longer,’ she said. ‘I’m considering options.’

‘Really?’ Berniece perked up. ‘You had a fight?’

‘Of course not. Why do you say that?’

Berniece stuck out her lower lip. ‘I don’t know. Just seems sudden.’

‘I’ve had an offer. Two actually.’

Theo appeared. ‘Carriage is here,’ he said sulkily.

‘Ez!’ Berniece threw down the stub of her cigar and stamped on it, staggering sideways.

Back at the house, Julia watched the other three drink far too much. Cato was in bed. Down the corridor Angelo was entertaining a bunch of raucous acrobats in his room overlooking the street. Berniece lay on the floor.

‘Who’s for craps?’ Ezra shook a couple of dice in his fist.

‘Sure,’ said Theo, sitting down at the table. Look at him sulk, she thought. It’s not a marriage, is it? What right has he to sulk?

Ezra said, ‘Shoot.’

Theo looked straight at her, as if he could hear her thoughts.

‘Shoot,’ said Ezra.

She looked away.

‘So I hear there may be changes afoot,’ Berniece said, sitting up to pour herself another drink.

‘What?’

‘What?’ Berniece mimicked Ezra. ‘Julia is considering her options. Opportunity is knocking.’

‘Oh,’ said Ezra, ‘what’s turned up, Julia?’

‘Nothing definite.’

‘Some flash dandy creeping in sideways to take her away,’ said Theo, smiling as if it was all a great joke. ‘And she’s my bread and butter. What do I do now?’

‘Well,’ said Ezra, ‘I’m sure you’ll make the right decision, Julia. Shoot.’

Theo lost heavily.

‘If I were you,’ Ezra pulled in his winnings, ‘I’d consider all angles very carefully. I don’t know about all this chopping and changing. Enough that you’re in this business without you go changing the faces you know all the time for the ones you don’t. That’s what I think. I’m not passing Cato round like a parcel.’

There was a silence.

Theo rolled the dice.

‘What happens if we have our own baby, Ezra?’ asked Berniece.

‘Then we have that too.’

Berniece jumped up. ‘I want to go on the roof. Come on, Ezra,’ she shook his shoulder, ‘let’s go up on the roof.’

‘Later.’

‘You’re boring,’ she said. He was about to roll the dice when she punched him hard on the side of his arm, and he dropped them on the floor.

‘Christ!’ he yelled, giving her a push which wouldn’t have amounted to much under normal circumstances, but she was tottering already and her feet flew out from under her. Down she came, landing awkwardly and catching her back on the sharp edge of a drawer that had been left sticking out. She burst into tears, jerked upright and ran out of the room. They heard her stagger down the corridor, bouncing between the walls.

‘She’s going to the roof,’ said Julia. ‘She’s not safe.’

Ezra was on his knees, looking for the dice. ‘One of them’s rolled under the wardrobe,’ he said heavily.

‘Aren’t you going after her?’ asked Theo.

‘It’s gone right to the back,’ Ezra said.

‘You should go after her, Ezra,’ said Julia. ‘She might fall off the roof.’

‘Let her fall,’ said Ezra flatly.

‘You’d feel terrible now if she did,’ Theo said.

Ezra stood up, fat lower lip hanging childishly. ‘I’m not going after her,’ he said, tossing the dice onto the table.

Theo stood with a sigh and a stoic air. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, and walked out.

An embarrassed air hung in the room.

‘I think she’s too young,’ said Ezra bleakly.

‘I’m off to bed,’ said Julia, tired of them all. She left Ezra sitting forlornly in front of the abandoned crap game. Half an hour later, he tapped on her door, and she answered in her nightgown. She’d been lying awake trying to imagine Vienna, which she imagined like the pictures of Vauxhall Gardens, with nicely dressed people strolling around in a leafy parkland.

‘What the hell are they doing up there?’ Ezra said. ‘This isn’t fair.’

‘Are they still on the roof?’

‘I’m going up,’ said Ezra, ‘this is a bad way to behave. I put up with a lot.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Shall I go up?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Ezra. Maybe they’ll be down in a minute.’

‘I’m going up. I’ll go quiet and catch them at it.’

She closed the door. I don’t care, she thought, getting into bed. I’m leaving. He can do whatever he likes. She blew out the candle and closed her eyes but her mind couldn’t rest, and a few minutes later she heard voices on the landing. Theo saying, ‘Don’t involve me in this,’ the sound of his door closing, then Ezra, ‘It’s really feeble, you know, the way you’ve been throwing yourself at him.’

Berniece said, ‘So?’

Their voices went muffled into their room, and a few minutes later someone knocked on the door. Julia groaned.

It was Berniece, with white face and bloodshot eyes. ‘Can I stay here tonight?’ she said, trying to push her way into the room.

‘No,’ said Julia, pushing back.

‘Leave Julia alone.’ Ezra was there, pulling on Berniece’s arm. Julia closed the door but the scuffling about and the voices went on till the sound of someone hammering on Theo’s door brought her out again. She saw Theo’s face, half scared, half amused, peeping through the crack of his door. He’d been listening, you could tell. ‘Aren’t you making a lot out of a very little?’ he asked before anything could be said.

‘If you want her you can have her,’ Ezra said. ‘She can do what she wants.’

‘Look,’ said Theo in a shaky voice, ‘you’re jumping to ridiculous conclusions.’

Ezra marched back to his door. ‘Go on,’ he said, passing Berniece standing tearful on the landing, ‘there he is.’

‘Ezra!’ Berniece cried.

He started getting all her pathetic things together and putting them out in the passage, stony-faced. Down the hall Angelo’s door opened and faces appeared.

‘Aren’t you over-reacting a bit?’ asked Theo, trying to sound sensible.

Mrs Vels came up and stood at the head of the stairs watching with her arms folded. ‘Is there trouble in my house?’ she asked loudly.

‘Ezra!’ screamed Berniece.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Vels,’ said Ezra, ‘really really sorry. Shut up, Berniece.’

Berniece gave a little scream, put her hands on either side of her face as if she was holding her head on, and flew into Theo’s room, pushing him in and slamming the door.

‘There,’ said Ezra, ‘it’s all sorted out now, Mrs Vels. Sorry.’

‘I will not have trouble in my house,’ said Mrs Vels.

‘No trouble,’ said Ezra, in and out of the room with things.

‘No trouble, sir,’ she said, ‘or you must leave.’

‘No, no trouble, I promise. All over.’ Ezra straightened, attempting a smile. Mrs Vels retreated, Angelo’s door closed and everything was quiet again. Cato appeared, standing in his long nightie, holding onto the door frame.

‘It’s like having two babies now instead of one,’ said Ezra. ‘What’ll I do?’

Everything’s breaking up, Julia thought.

Cato didn’t want to go back to bed. She had to sit with him while Ezra got him a drink. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘if they go off together and leave us high and dry, you could come with me and Cato. We’d do all right. Me and Cato, we’re going home when all this is over and you could come with us. You could come anyway, if you wanted to. Berniece wouldn’t mind.’

The door opened quietly. Berniece came in and sat down on the chair by the abandoned crap game.

‘I’ll go now,’ said Julia.

Berniece started to sob.

Cato mewed and ran to her. As Julia left, he was wiping her face with the sleeve of his nightie.

Theo sat alone in a corner of the tavern watching the comings and goings. It wasn’t yet mid-day, but he needed the hair of the dog. Last night was crazy. This Berniece thing. Mad. There’d been a horrible moment there when he’d thought he was going to be stuck with her, when she barged into his room and threw herself down in tears on his bed. Christ, it was only a kiss. What the hell. But she’d only wanted to lie there and moan for a bit.

What now? This morning, with a sense of shame, he’d got up and sneaked out without seeing anyone, walked along the banks of the river for an hour to clear his head, stood on a bridge and looked at the sunlight jigging on the water. When he turned away, he’d been near blind and bumbled along blinking till he hit this tavern. He leaned back and smoked, dipping his finger in some spilt beer and making patterns on the surface of the table. Few more shows and they were through here. Julia was leaving him. All this stuff, offers, contracts — all getting out of hand. And if not now, then soon. Off with the highest bidder some starry night, just like he’d said. Or back home to Mexico.

And me, he thought grimly, back where I started.

Oh for God’s sake, come to your senses, Theo. You never had a fortune like her before. Never will again. He thought of himself scrabbling about the continent looking for the next thing. Wouldn’t be as good as her whatever it was. Should’ve saved more. Oh come on, what are you thinking? She’s got no one. Neither have I. She’s only a woman when all’s said and done. It wasn’t the hair. That was the least of it. It was the lips. The whole of the mouth. Not like a woman’s mouth, more like an animal’s. Not that he’d looked too closely, but her teeth were appalling. There were too many, almost, it seemed when she smiled, a whole rampart of them crowding in behind the front ones, though it was hard to tell. Who could kiss that mouth. It looked as if it would smell but it didn’t. She was always very fastidious.

The night in Leipzig, when she was so upset — he’d felt something. He reddened. God knows what. He couldn’t remember well. At the time it was just a fleeting thing he’d pushed down, horrified, as it raised its head. Till now, he’d hardly acknowledged it. But he thought that for a second he’d nearly kissed her. He’d felt sorry for her. A moment, you just want to give something a squeeze. People kiss their dogs. You see that. The moment came back to him with nervous stirrings in his loins, and then he thought of her mouth, the bulbous upper lip, the other receding, closed firmly but with a gentleness that gave her a certain serenity in repose. He pushed his mind. Suppose I’d done it? Suppose I did, suppose I kissed her. What are you thinking? No. And even if I did… No. She wouldn’t expect it. What would she expect? Not that it would make much difference in practical terms. They were almost living together anyway.

He shook himself out of it and finished his drink.

Walking back, steeling himself for any encounter (whatever it was it would not be easy), he followed trails in his mind, all of them running out in fog. A pair of young girls, arms linked, scuttled past him, each casting a glance. He could get a woman anywhere; it was just a matter of paying. That didn’t bother him. There’d been girls when he was in his twenties, a couple in particular, but nothing apart from passing encounters for the past eight years. It didn’t matter. Women always wanted to make him do things he didn’t want to do, like stay in one place or stop drinking or get up early in the morning. Julia didn’t. She was a sweet girl. They’d be like, I don’t know, he thought, like, not brother and sister exactly, not that, not… oh I don’t know. Couldn’t leave him then, could she? Don’t care how much you offer, you don’t take the wife from a man.

But then –

May I introduce my wife?

My wife.

They’d say he did, even if he didn’t. He could hear them. Christ, he does it with that. What is he?

When he returned he knocked on her door. She was playing her guitar. ‘Come in,’ she called. My God, he must have been drunker than he’d thought. Stupid stupid drinking so early. Now all he wanted was to go back to bed and lie down. But he went in and sat down.

‘That’s a pretty tune,’ he said.

‘It’s an old one.’

She looked nice, with her long hair uncurled, hanging straight to her shoulders. A wave of sympathy swept him.

‘Julia,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid.’

He didn’t know where that came from. His head spun, steadily, stupidly.

She stopped playing. He’s showing me his weakness, she thought, relief and euphoria dancing inside. It’s going to be all right. ‘Why, Theo?’ she asked calmly.

‘I don’t know.’ He slouched down, scowling.

‘Are you all right, Theo?’

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said.

‘What was all that?’

‘I kissed her. I’m so sorry.’

She looked blank. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ ‘

Last night brought me to my senses,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want to come over here, Julia?’

She didn’t move.

‘I think we should get married,’ he said.

She laughed but looked horrified. ‘Why are you saying that?’

‘Why?’ he said ‘Why does anyone say it?’

‘All sorts of reasons.’

‘Oh God,’ he said, strode across and sat down next to her, but she pulled back and her eyes were scared. ‘You fascinate me,’ he said. ‘You fascinate me more than any other person I’ve ever met. And I’ve never had a friend like you.’ She got up at once and stood with her back to him looking out of the window at the farrier’s wall. From the back with her long black hair hanging, she was just a girl.

What have I done, he thought.

‘It’s not love though, is it?’ she said. ‘Not like it is with other people. Real humans.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said, turning. ‘It’s not like loving a human, is it? You’d be lying if you said it was.’

‘Don’t put me through the mincer,’ he said, ‘you know I’m bad with words.’

‘You’re not,’ she said.

‘Of course I love you, Julia,’ he said, desperately awkward, standing up and going close to her. She turned her head. Her black eyes were unreadable. ‘Why now? Why suddenly?’ she said finally.

‘Why?’ he sighed. ‘Because you’re going to run away and leave me. And I don’t want to lose you.’

She stared at him for a while, then said, ‘That’s not enough.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to ask? I want what other people want when they get married.’

‘Julia,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t know who I was if you went away.’

Still she just looked at him. Oh hell, he thought, and kissed her on the side of the mouth, amazed, aroused and horrified.

~ ~ ~

Rose, bare, small-breasted, sat smoking on the red sofa while Adam sketched her. He was having trouble with her feet. Feet were harder than hands. He was tempted to leave them off. She was telling this story about the dolls’ island as if it was interesting. Not that it wasn’t but not in the way she meant, numinous and full of corny significance. To him it was interesting as a piece of accidental art, but for her it was a ghost story. A long time ago a hermit, once a farmer with a wife and family, lived on an island in the canals near Mexico City. A little girl had once drowned off the island. One day a doll came floating down the canal and he fished it out. Then came another, and another, then more, till he thought it was a sign that the little girl wanted dolls. He hung the dolls in the trees for her. But still more came washing up on the island, as if they wanted to be there. When word got around, people started bringing him their old dolls too, and in the end he had hundreds, then thousands.

He lived alone with the dolls for fifty years. They talked to him and sang him to sleep, he said. And after fifty years he was planting pumpkins with his nephew, and when they’d finished they went fishing off the island. He started singing. His nephew went to fetch something and when he returned the old man was floating face-down, dead. Drowned in the exact same place where the little girl died.

‘Please try and keep still, love,’ Adam said.

‘Can you imagine that sound?’ Rose closed her eyes. ‘Hundreds of old broken dolls singing in the middle of the night on an island. And you the only one there to hear them!’

‘Yes,’ said Adam, as if he was talking about an ingrown toenail, ‘I can see that it might drive you mad.’

‘We should go,’ she said.

‘To the island?’

‘Yes. Just go.’

‘Keep still.’

‘Mexico,’ she said. ‘Signs and wonders. We pull a paper from a doll, it says Mexico.’

‘OK,’ he said, ‘borrow some money from your rich family, and I’ll sell the amp and the bike and go on the building for a few months. We’ll go.’

‘I haven’t got a rich family.’

‘Well, compared to mine.’ He smudged the shadows on the page of his sketch book. ‘It’s not a ghost story though,’ he said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Rose opened her eyes. ‘I think it sort of is.’

~ ~ ~

Not since the Baltimore ball had she taken part in a real social occasion where she didn’t have to wear her veil. In the old days, at home in the Sanchez house, she’d not gone veiled — or only now and then, if there were particular visitors. And here she was, with these important clever people, sitting up just as she was with the best of them. A fire burned high in the grand fireplace. Lovely rooms, lovely mirrors, silver, chandeliers, all these delicacies she was scared to touch because everyone looked at her covertly while she ate, as if she was a mythical beast who’d appeared at the table.

The crystal sparkled. And impossibly, there sat her husband, Theo, smiling with his cigar and his dark pomaded hair. My husband, mine.

Friederike smiled at her. Her eyebrows were two perfect black curves. ‘Julia,’ she said, ‘have you tried one of these little bonbons?’

‘They look delicious,’ Julia said, ‘thank you so much, but I really can’t eat another thing.’

Friederike took one herself, raising her eyebrows as she popped it in her mouth. Every move she made was graceful. Next to her an Italian acrobat, thick-lipped and handsome, sucked sugar from his fingers. Hermann Otto, humorous, his large, heavily bracketed lips smiling automatically every few seconds, was locked in animated debate with an old professor. The conversation was a mish-mash of French and English, harder for Theo, who was missing the ease of those drunken nights in Prague. From what he gathered, the professor, an Englishman long resident in Vienna, thought they were spending too much on this new statue for the great composer. ‘A lot of poor people in this city,’ the professor said. ‘Where’s the sense in grand statues when they’re dropping of cholera in the slums?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Massimo, the acrobat, was following the conversation with some difficulty.’

‘Spend money on the living,’ said Theo, ‘not the dead.’

‘We should respect a great man,’ said Massimo indignantly, ‘dead or no.’

‘Of course we should,’ the professor agreed, lifting his glass tipsily. He was a red-faced, portly man with a well-fed air. ‘I’m only saying—’

‘Have you been out to the country yet, Julia?’ Friederike asked.

‘Oh no, we haven’t had time.’

‘We must take a jaunt out one day.’ She dabbed the corners of her mouth with a white napkin, ‘When it’s a bit warmer. Oh, I’m so pleased you’ll be staying a little while in Vienna.’

‘Grand funerals,’ the professor said, ‘and fancy coffins, and fortunes spent on simpering whey-faced angels. If there was one thing the old emperor got right, that was it. Don’t see what was wrong with the old way. Tip ’em in and cover them over. Don’t matter to them, does it? Should have left it as it was.’

Theo had drunk a lot and lolled easily with one arm hooked around the back of his chair. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘spend it on the living.’ His eyes were sleepy.

‘Man cannot live by bread alone,’ said Hermann.

‘Helps though,’ said Theo. He knew what they were all thinking. And he’s married her! Can you believe? Really? The unspoken question: do they actually, I mean does he, do you think they really, what can it be like?

‘I’m not talking about the living,’ the professor said. ‘Mozart’s dead. He couldn’t care less about a statue.’

‘You’re one of these smash ’em up people,’ Hermann said. ‘What about posterity?’

‘Oh, posterity looks after itself whatever we do.’

Something was bothering the Italian. ‘Are you saying,’ he began slowly, ‘that we should not honour the dead?’

‘Of course we should. But why do we have to put money into it? Granted that resources are limited, I say the money’s better spent on the poor.’

‘Always with us, as the Bible says,’ said Theo, and laughed.

He’d had too much. Julia watched him refilling his glass, trying to catch his eye.

‘No monuments. No churches, no cathedrals. No frescoes, no palaces, no towers, no…’ Hermann smiled benevolently at Julia from the far end of the table. ‘What a world of tedium. Don’t you think so, Julia?’

‘I think the rich should give to the poor,’ she said. ‘Jenny Lind gives ever such a lot to charity. That’s what you should do if you have lots.’

‘Hear hear.’

‘Well, of course,’ said Theo, ‘but that’s a different matter. It’s all right for you to say it would be dull, Hermann, but what if all the blood and money that went into raising those stupendous structures had been spent on the living?’

‘They were,’ said Hermann. ‘We’re the living. We enjoy them.’

‘Oh tosh!’ said Theo, and she was glad he hadn’t said anything stronger.

Massimo was with Hermann. ‘You should respect a great man,’ he said solemnly, ‘and you should bury the dead with respect.’

‘Depends on what you call respect.’

‘Once a fellow’s dead, he’s dead. So why fork out… once he’s gone, his body doesn’t matter a jot.’

‘It may not matter to its owner,’ Friederike said, ‘but it matters to others. It’s nice to have a grave for people to visit.’

‘Acknowledged,’ said Theo, ‘all I’m saying is a plain wooden cross in the ground would do as well as a monument.’

‘Tell me,’ Friederike asked him, ‘is your mother alive?’

‘Indeed she is not.’

‘And where is she laid to rest?’

Theo accepted a cigar from the professor. ‘In a cemetery,’ he replied, smiling, ‘what did you imagine?’

‘Do you visit her?’

‘Never.’ He accepted a light. ‘It wouldn’t occur to me. My mother’s been dead for many years, and I never got to know her.’

‘Your poor mother.’

‘Why poor?’ He blew out a cloud of smoke.

‘You should take her some flowers,’ Friederike said, leaning across and tapping his arm. ‘She’s your mother.’

‘I’m with you, Lent.’ The professor was still chewing. ‘Now, here’s a thing.’ He leaned forward and twisted all his thick red fingers together as if he was torturing them. ‘Here’s the state of things in my country. Medical science needs cadavers. Can’t progress without them. But they can’t get them. People don’t want their bodies messed with.’ He pulled his fingers apart and reached for a macaroon. ‘So you have a ridiculous situation, people slinking about in graveyards at night, everyone forced to break the law so the doctors can get on with their work. Look at old Jeremy Bentham! What a man! Left his body to science.’ He popped the macaroon in his mouth and sucked. ‘Soon as he died,’ he said indistinctly, ‘had himself dissected for the students. Put it in his will. Got himself preserved, and there he sits this moment with his head between his feet. Now there’s a sense of humour.’

‘Can we change the subject please?’ Friederike pulled a face.

‘You’re a dualist, Herr Lent?’ asked the professor.

‘I’m a realist. Now my wife,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘still has her old doll from when she was very small, and she loves it as if it was a child. Do you see? The doll is a piece of wood. Just the same with a body. Any meaning we attach to it, we put there ourselves.’

‘I know what you mean, Theo,’ Julia said, taking it in good part, ‘I know Yatzi’s not really real. But I don’t care.’

‘I think that’s beautiful,’ Friederike said, reached across the table and gripped Julia’s hand. But then she speaks, Hermann had said that day in Leipzig, and she’s just a girl. Like you, he’d said. About the same age too. She smiled quiveringly, holding Julia’s gaze, hoping to convey some message of fellowship.

‘I don’t give a damn what they do with me when I go,’ Theo said cheerfully, ‘they can put me on a hillside for the crows to pick at for all I care.’

‘Oh, but you’d want your friends to come to your funeral,’ Julia said. ‘You’d want the proper thing. The singing, the candles, the wake.’

‘Respect for the dead is important,’ the Italian said, inaptly serious.

‘For their memory,’ Theo conceded, ‘absolutely. But not for the clay. That doesn’t matter at all.’

‘I want all my loved ones standing round tossing handfuls of earth and weeping,’ Otto said. ‘And the finest coffin available.’

‘Me too,’ agreed Friederike.

‘You can have everything,’ Theo said. ‘But you won’t know about it.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Julia.

‘I suppose I can see what you mean,’ Friederike said. ‘What’s the point of a grand state funeral if no one likes you? Better a wooden cross and a cheap casket and people standing around who love you. But I do like to think I’d get a good send-off myself.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ said the professor, ‘the streets will be lined. But all the same…’

‘Now,’ the Italian said, suddenly leaning forward, animated, ‘shall I tell you a story?’

‘Oh, do!’ said Friederike.

Massimo took a long drink of red wine, cleared his throat. ‘When the Medici ruled Florence…’ he began.

Otto beamed. ‘Ah, a history lesson!’

The Italian paused and glared at him.

‘Please, carry on.’

‘When the Medici ruled Florence,’ he continued, speaking precisely, in heavily accented English, ‘there is a conspiracy to kill these brothers, these Medici. But it goes badly. And of course these men, these conspirators, of course they meet terrible ends. But there is one man. One old man. A conspirator. Him, they torture.’ He spoke fiercely, glaring round the table at each of them in turn but avoiding Julia’s eyes. He had not been able to make eye contact all evening. ‘He is dead. They hang him from the window. They dig a grave and put him in. He is buried.’

He paused for effect, ‘So,’ he said, ‘what do you think happens next?’ Without waiting for an answer he continued, his voice hard and disgusted. ‘The people in the streets dig him up. Take him home. You understand, they take him to his house, through the streets, like an old sack through the streets. They come to his own house and knock on the door with his head. They shout: “Open up! Your master knocks!” That is their fun. Then they throw his body in the river and away he goes but down the river there are children, who pull him out. “What more can we do,” they say. So they hang him up in a tree and thrash him till they grow bored.’

‘Massimo,’ Friederike said, ‘what is this for?’

‘Friederike, I am sorry. That is the end. They are bored. They throw him back in the river and off he goes to sea. The end.’

‘That’s a hideous story!’ she cried.

‘Yes it is. And every word is true.’ Massimo sat back, folding his arms. ‘And that man’s name was Jacopo Pazzi.’

‘It may be true,’ she snapped, ‘but do we really want to listen to this kind of thing at the table? That was horrible, Massimo.’

‘Herr Professor, Herr Lent,’ said Massimo, ‘what did you think of my story?’

‘A vile story,’ the professor said, ‘obviously.’

Theo’s face, which had grown disgusted during the telling, was now detached and amused. ‘I can see what you’re getting at,’ he said, ‘but that story is only vile for us. For poor old Jacopo it’s neither here nor there.’

‘But that’s horrible,’ said Julia, sickened. ‘Massimo, was he a very bad man?’

‘Not so bad,’ he said, colouring. ‘For the times. Not the worst of them.’

‘Why did they hate him so much?’

‘Who knows.’

‘Now I wish I didn’t know that story,’ she said.

‘And yet, Herr Lent, Herr Professor, they will tell you this is not so bad. They will say this corpse is no more than an old sack.’

‘Oh but of course this is as old as the hills,’ the professor said. ‘It comes down to human nature in the end, and its genius for humiliation. That is why Hector dragged the body of Achilles round the walls of Troy. That is why the conquering army defiles the corpses of the conquered, that is why the heads of traitors were displayed on—’

‘Enough,’ said Friederike.

Theo smiled at Julia. ‘It’s grisly and filthy and unpleasant,’ he said, ‘but it didn’t affect poor Jacopo in any way at all.’

‘It feels to me as if it did,’ said Julia. ‘They should have left his body in peace.’

‘What’s so disgusting,’ the professor said, ‘is the intention of the beasts. The enactment.’

Massimo smiled for the first time. His face revealed itself to be friendly and wryly cheerful. ‘But what if I could see the future,’ he said, looking at Theo, ‘what if you were Jacopo Pazzi? And I say to you: I see this for you. This is what they will do. And what if you knew that I was right and that this was in front of you?’

Theo laughed. ‘Well, you are a card,’ he said.

‘You make believe that your soul would not recoil.’

A filthy thought. The man’s got a vile mind.

‘Were you laughing at me,’ she asked when they got home, tossing the veil aside. He still got a shiver seeing her magnificent head, all beast, released from its constraints. He followed her into the bedroom where she pulled out all her flowers and feathers roughly, throwing them down on the dressing table with a carelessly graceful gesture. ‘For keeping Yatzi?’

‘Of course not. Do I ever?’

‘You’re always laughing at me,’ she said, taking off her pearl cross, ‘you tease me all the time.’

‘Only in a nice way.’

‘Huh.’

He picked up Yatzi, smiling. ‘Hello, old boy!’ he said jovially, ‘thanks for holding the fort. Everything fine?’

‘See?’

He laughed. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘I find your medieval mind charming. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it!’ She took off her ear-rings, her choker, her bangles. ‘You’d stop children playing with their toys,’ she said.

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ He sat down with his hands behind his head.

‘Anyway, you’re just as bad. What about your Venetian umbrella?’

‘That’s not the same at all.’

‘Yes, it is. You were so miserable when you lost it.’

‘Because it was a nice umbrella. I don’t credit it with a mind.’

He laughed.

‘I don’t credit Yatzi with a mind. It’s the same thing. People get attached to things.’ She stood up and walked to the closet. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it.’

‘Come here,’ he said, catching her hand as she passed by, pulling her towards himself and kissing the top of her head. ‘Aah!’ he said, ‘you’re so small!’

The truth was, he was no longer repelled. Such a good old stick, Julia, truly brave. If it was him, he’d have cut his wrists at puberty, most like. And in fact, when you got to know her, you saw her in a different way. Not that you could ever forget what she was, of course, just that she came to seem less monstrous, more strangely normal. She was just Julia, and he never got tired of looking at her. Her face at times — a most peculiar thing — almost beautiful. Like the head of a tremendous wild creature, other, unearthly, impossible.

Still couldn’t kiss her on the lips though. Not a true all-out kiss on the lips, the real thing. Couldn’t do it as if she was just any woman. But she was strokable as a puppy, sleek as a pony in places. He could do everything with her but kiss her on the lips. Kiss her face, yes. Play with her hair. Find the sensitive spots where the hair grew sparse at the bend of an arm or knee, tickle them softly — in the dark she was a warm shapely thing, a plush doll, easy to slip inside.

‘Theo,’ she said when they were all snuggled up, frosty moonlight sifting in through the pale curtain at the side window, ‘you know at first I didn’t really believe you loved me, but now I do.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I know you do. You really do, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

He heard the sound of her smiling.

She fell asleep, and he stayed awake, staring with a half smile and glazed eyes at the shadowy forms of the dressing table and press, the porcelain bowl and jug, all made mysterious in the clear moonlight. Their apartment was on the third floor of what might once have been a palace, the rooms were so high and wide. They’d done well. It was a fine apartment, and a nice part of Vienna. Hermann had found it for them. They had it till July, then it was more touring: Poland, Czechoslovakia — Russia if all went well with the contacts there. There was a fellow in Moscow, a theatrical agent, Volkov.

The walls were thin. One o’clock in the morning and the people next door were still talking, two or three earnest male voices burbling steadily on, breaking out once or twice into bursts of high-pitched laughter. Lately Theo had been troubled by a certain mental tic, an irrational tendency whenever there was sudden laughter to think it was directed at him. Didn’t matter that it was impossible most of the time, didn’t matter that it was a bunch of kids squawking at Punch and Judy oblivious to his existence, still he thought they were laughing at him. Nonsense, of course. Stupid feeling. Since he married her, of course, it was hardly surprising. Who cares? They can think what they want. He turned over in bed, closing his eyes. They’re all the same, he thought, everyone, doesn’t matter who they are, even Hermann, even that Friederike, all thinking it. It’s in their eyes. Do they do it? Do they really do it? My God, the man must be mad!

And if I’m a madman, thought Theo, at least I’m a rich one.

Julia loved Vienna. She had money. She wore beautiful dresses. Why should she not wear beautiful dresses? Why not layer on the jewellery she sent him out to buy. He was good at that sort of thing, could usually pick out something nice. She liked the trips to the theatre in the carriage, the long streets of pale-coloured stone, the high whiteness of the buildings along the boulevard leading to the park, and the people strolling around on a Sunday in their best clothes, she among them, veiled. She liked their apartment, with the shops on the ground floor, a draper’s and a baker’s and a coffeehouse, the grim gloomy stairs that appeared so dark from under the thick veil that without Theo’s arm to guide her she’d never have got home. It grew lonely under the veil. The people she encountered were indistinct. Some seemed like workmen, some were more genteel. Across the landing lived the mother and pregnant wife of an officer of the regular infantry, respectable, friendly ladies who no doubt speculated upon the condition of the strange, veiled little girl who sometimes walked out on the arm of the fashionable dark-haired gentleman with cocky eyebrows. She liked the intricate looping and scrolling on the wrought iron balcony outside their rooms, and the way from there she could see mountains and forest rising far away above the high rooflines. She liked hearing all the different accents of the people in the streets, the sense of a million comings and goings.

Most of all she liked the fact that she was staying in one place for a bit. Everything had been fleeting, changing, faces, places, coming and going, fading in and out. Theo had been the only constant. His round boyish face swam up before her eyes whenever she closed them, and she gave thanks to Saint Jude and whatever it was she got from John Montanee. She never worried that the powers would fade. They’d given and would not take back. There was a semblance of routine now, church on Sunday (she made him take her), the knowledge when she closed her eyes at night that in the morning she would wake to the familiar aromas rising up from the ground floor, coffee and new-baked bread, that she would not have to clear her head and wonder for a moment where she was. There was a peace to life after the excesses of Prague. Hermann Otto came round occasionally and played cards with Theo, but the drinking was not desperate. And now and again, Friederike called in the afternoon, bringing a book from her library for Julia to read. Since she had seen Friederike’s library the night of the dinner, a tiny cosy room with nothing but books, an easy chair, a fireplace and a corner table, she wanted one of her own. It would be peaceful and nice to have a room like that where you could just sit. Not have to do anything but read a book and from time to time look at the fire, gaze into it and dally around in your mind. Somewhere a picture began to form, not only of the room, the fire, the way it would smell and look, the colour on the walls, deep blue, but around it a house, not terribly big, warm, with soft rugs and bowls of flowers. She lived there with Theo, and whenever they had to go away on tour, no matter how far, they always came back to it. And whenever they got back, she would go into her library and just sit and feel happy.

But the time went too fast.

A week before they left, Friederike called in a carriage and they drove out, through the meaner streets and the factories, past the garden fences and nice houses, through the building works and then the meadows, towards the foothills of the Wienerwald. They drank wine in the garden of a vineyard. Friederike knew the owner, who had clearly been pre-warned. His eyes scarcely flickered when Julia raised her veil for the introduction. A polite tall man with a long dog-like face, he shook her hand, smiling politely. She lowered her veil, and he led them to a table in a private part of the garden, bowed and withdrew.

‘You really don’t need to cover up here,’ Friederike said, putting her hand on Julia’s gloved one. ‘You must be sweltering under there.’

‘Not at all. I’m used to it.’

‘There’s really no need.’

Still, it was a public place, it was a warm summery Sunday and people were out and about, so she kept her veil down. Both of them were highly recognisable. Look, people would say as Friederike glided past, it’s the Cricket! Friederike’s picture was everywhere, the critics raved, the public flocked.

‘I know,’ said Julia, ‘but it’s better if I keep it on.’

‘As you wish.’

They were quite high up, and from their table they could see the white town in the distance beyond the trees, the high roofs glinting in the sun. There was a blue jug full of overblown yellow roses on the table. The owner brought them a dish of fat black olives and a carafe of wine so red it was almost black. A flock of pigeons rose up from the nearby woods. ‘I’ll miss you when you go,’ Friederike said, ‘but I’m sure you’ll be back.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ Julia said, ‘you’re one of the few.’

‘The few?’

‘Yes. People look but they don’t see me. You do.’

‘I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me,’ said Friederike, turning pink. And yet, thought Julia, she wouldn’t miss her anywhere as near as much as she missed Cato. A woman friend, her own age, things to talk about, books, the stage, wine in the Wienerwald, and yet…

The way Friederike looked at her, so frank and warm. A cultured woman, bright, quick, sharp, poised.

And yet, she still got a stab in the chest when she thought of that child on the road with good old silly Ezra and poor lost Berniece. Child! He was in his twenties, Ezra reckoned, but he could have been anything. It didn’t matter, child he was. Ezra wouldn’t let any harm come to him. But how heart-wrenching they seemed now those three, muddling through, fragile, tiny, vanishing into a past that receded like an echo.

No, she wouldn’t miss Friederike like that.

Julia sipped, expert at lifting the veil just enough to raise the glass to her lips but not to be seen.

The wine went to her head.

‘I’m very lucky,’ she said suddenly.

Friederike smiled. Wonderful it must be, Julia thought. To look like that and be sure about everything.

‘I’m seeing the world!’

‘You certainly are.’ Friederike adjusted her hat, a fine wide affair with a brim that performed a wave-like contour above her eyes. ‘I’d like to go travelling one day,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been out of Europe. I envy you.’

She envies me.

Julia looked aside. There was no one in sight, their patch of lawn was hidden away from the other customers behind a small shrubbery. Leaning forward, she lifted her veil. Friederike’s smile widened. ‘I like to travel,’ Julia said. ‘I want to see so much more of the world. And then one day when we’ve saved up a lot of money, we’ll settle down, Theo and me. Then I’ll go back home and visit, and they’ll all be amazed. I’ll walk in with Theo and say, “Here is my husband.”’

There must have been a village nearby because the church bells had started to ring. Julia remembered the time she wore Marta’s blue dress and nearly ruined the wedding. There would be no ostentation, she thought, just expensive elegance. Something simple, shot silk, dove-grey, palest blue. Touches here and there of a muted shimmering silver. And white lace-up boots, and her hair done simply with just a feather or two, and a few small white flowers. ‘I know what everybody says,’ she said. ‘They think he’s in it for the money. They can’t believe anyone could really love someone like me. But they’re wrong.’

‘Of course they are,’ said Friederike.

You could see she wasn’t sure. Actress that she was, you could see she didn’t believe. Didn’t matter what he did, no one ever would.

But Julia did.

‘Is Mexico very beautiful?’ Friederike asked.

‘The mountains are. We could see them from the town. But you know I didn’t see as much as you might think. I could never just go out like other people.’

Those days. Solana. The boys, Clem, Elisio. The iguana, the moon, the figs squashed on the stones. A world away.

‘I think when we settle,’ Julia said, ‘Vienna would be a very nice place to consider.’

‘Oh do!’ said Friederike.

*

‘How was it?’ Theo asked.

‘Lovely.’

‘And you stayed veiled?’

‘Of course.’

‘Friederike thinks I have real talent,’ Julia said.

‘And why wouldn’t she?’ He swivelled his collar round and pulled out the stud.

‘She should know.’

‘I dare say.’

When they finally left Vienna, Friederike gave Julia a copy of the book on which her great success was based.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘something to read on the journey.’

La Petite Fadette. She had signed it: For dear Julia, from Friederike (The Cricket). Happy Memories!

It was good, Julia thought. Unusual.

When did you ever get a heroine like Fadette? No one liked her. They all laughed because she was brown and ugly like a cricket, and her little brother had crooked legs. But then it turned out in the end that she wasn’t really ugly after all, not once she’d had a wash and put on a nice dress and started talking nicely and behaving like a lady. And she had a beautiful soul. Then everyone fell in love with her, and she married young Landry, the hero.

~ ~ ~

‘You know, we’re forgetting who we are,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes you are, you just don’t know it.’

‘That’s a meaningless thing to say.’

She could be so fucking annoying.

‘So what are you saying? You want to break up?’

‘No, of course not. But you’re here all the time.’

‘Well, you’ve never said anything before.’

‘Look Adam, there’s no need to fall out or anything. It’s no big deal. All I’m saying is—’

‘Oh Christ, she needs her space, she needs her space,’ said Adam scornfully. ‘We all know what that means, don’t we?’

‘I think about what you want all the time.’

‘I’m sorry but that’s just not true.’

‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what? Like myself?’

‘You weren’t like this last week.’

‘Of course I was. You just didn’t notice. I told you I didn’t want that stupid telly in here, and you wouldn’t listen. This is my place. I don’t want a stupid telly. If I have a telly I watch the news, and then I’m miserable all the time.’

‘OK, I’ll move it back downstairs then.’

‘It’s not just that, Adam. It’s the smell of paint too. It’s getting to me. You should paint downstairs.’

‘So you don’t want me to paint you any more.’

‘You know it’s not that. I just want you to do it downstairs. I could sit for you down there instead of here, and then this would still be my own place where I can come, and I can have it how I like.’

‘You should have told me if I was getting on your nerves.’

‘You don’t get on my nerves. It’s just one or two things. It’s just things have changed too much. Too quick. I just want some—’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I tried to.’

‘You’re being really unfair. You never said a word. You knew how it was. How I was. I love you to fucking pieces, and you know it.’

‘Stop it,’ she said, ‘I just want you to spend more time in your own place. We never made an arrangement for you to be up here all the time. It doesn’t mean you can’t come up here at all. That would be ridiculous.’

‘But you don’t love me. Not really.’

‘Adam,’ she said, ‘you’re making too much of this.’

‘Oh yes, much too much.’

He walked out. Didn’t slam the door, went down to his own place, didn’t slam that door either.

Rose lay down on the red sofa and covered her face. He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone. The relief was wonderful and immediate. Oh God! She sat up, got up, walked around crying. I never made a promise. No way I gave him any expectations. Why do they do this, why do they do this, why do they always do this? The world piled up against her like a freak tide about to break through. Why do they always want to change things? Smother. Stop your breath. This is who you are now. What I say. What I think you are. They change you and change you and change you, and then when you say hang on a minute, perhaps this isn’t me, they come at you with that lost dog look and cry and hang their heads and it’s all your fault. Not just a little bit of it, all of it, always your fault.

She stood looking out of the window. Bring on the rain, she thought. Then I can lie down and close my eyes and listen to it and forget everything else. But no, not today, no rain, only a thick grey sky like glue, lumpy like that stuff we had when we were little and pasted pictures in scrapbooks. Gloy. She wanted him back so she could say, hey, do you remember Gloy? It had a red top that always got gummed up? Looked like snotty frogspawn. He’d remember. In the days before they were together you could say a thing like that, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, I remember.’ It had been nice then. OK, so the sex had to happen. Run its course. But why did people have to make such a big deal of it?

She couldn’t bear another second of real life. She took Tattoo down from the mantelpiece. More of his stuffing was falling out. She lit candles all around the room, tall ones, stumps, white, blue, red, then turned the gas fire high, got the heavy eiderdown from off her bed next door and lay down under it on the sofa with Tattoo, needing that feeling, the stillness, the hiss of the fire, the colours in the dark inside her eyelids.

A phone rang downstairs, shrill and peremptory. Attend to me! Now!

No. Won’t. The world is not. Call up the deep woods. Walk in among the trees. In the heart of a letter on an illuminated manuscript made long ago, a mystical landscape, wildwood of hart and hound and hare and moon, where she could stay as long as she liked.

Deeper. Deeper.

She lay down there under a tree, fell asleep and dreamt she was in New York with Adam. She’d never been to New York in real life, but it was definitely New York. They were in a bar. They were whiling away the hours till it was time go to the airport to catch a plane back home. Next they were outside and it was raining and night-time, still New York, lights and cars, wet sidewalks. They’d lost all their money and their passports, everything, and they were just walking along in the rain. It was lovely. It’s real, isn’t it? Not a dream, she thought. But then it all started to break up. There was a moment, one fraction of a second when she thought that if she looked sideways — right or left, it didn’t matter — she’d see a new place. Like Narnia or something.

She’d been in this moment before, many times, and she always wanted to stay, turn her head and see that place. She never did though. Instead she woke up.

~ ~ ~

Poland, Czechoslovakia. Christmas in Budapest, beautiful city in the snow, lights hung in the trees, the fire in their hotel room banked up high and all the bells suddenly gloriously pealing on Christmas morning. Then the year gone, and another progressing. She turned twenty-five. Warsaw, Krakow, Brest. East, further and further, wide plains and lakes and vast forests, and the sense of excitement welling up all over again every day, something new, something more; more world, more life. They travelled in stages through a long white winter, bought furs in Minsk, stopped once in a village, where she heard from below in the inn where they stayed the sound of someone playing a zither, and at night the sound of wolves howling very far away in the woods. Money flowed. Nothing was out of reach. She still liked to sew now and then, but these days she could hire the best seamstresses available and give them precise instructions. Low-cut, skirts short, silks, ribbons. Theo grew his hair and whiskers and looked very distinguished.

‘You will slay them in Moscow,’ he said. ‘They can’t wait. How’s this for a name, Julia? Ilya Andreyevich Volkov. They all have three names. And they use them too.’

Ilya Andreyevich Volkov was the theatrical agent at whose house they were going to. Desperate he was, said Theo, desperate to host the marvellous ape-woman. Everyone wants you, you know. He’s got a big house right in the middle of Moscow.

‘Theo, you’ve been everywhere,’ she said.

‘Not quite.’ He smiled, took her hand and pulled it under his arm. They were travelling by night in a coach, through snow, blue under a high moon. From the window she could see a tall peaky castle high on a hill. She found the snow enchanting. It was like stepping into a picture in a book, a landscape she was dreaming. And Theo could even speak a fair amount of Russian. He was in a good mood, excited by his return to the east. It must have been twelve years, he thought.

‘So again,’ she said. ‘How do I say, “I’m very pleased to meet you”?’

‘I’ll write it all down for you.’

March was bitter cold in Moscow, snow hard-packed. A sledge pulled by two ill-matched black horses met them from the coach, and a tall big-boned young man came forward and introduced himself politely in French. His name was long and unpronounceable, instantly forgotten.

‘Ye gods, it’s cold,’ Theo said. ‘Yes, this is our trunk, and this bag here is ours. How far?’

‘Not very far. Please, this way.’ The boy was clumsy in his gestures. ‘We will be there in twenty minutes. Please sit here, Madame.’

Solicitously, smiling awkwardly, he spread a thick red blanket over Julia’s knees. Teeth chattering, nose turning red, Theo tucked it in. It was dark already, and starting to snow again. When she looked up it fell swirling black against the peculiar swollen sky.

‘It’s all right for you,’ Theo said, ‘you’ve got a fur coat,’ and laughed.

The veil kept the wind from her face, her eyes were wide but all she saw from the fast-moving sledge were huddled hurrying figures in wide dark streets, high buildings with many windows and steps, and the round-shouldered back of the tall young man, the cap pulled well down over his ears and a collar pulled up over a grey muffler.

‘You know, Julia,’ Theo said, ‘last time I was here it was spring. Lovely place. I don’t recognise a thing yet. Never mind, this surely can’t go on for too long.’ He raised his voice. ‘When does the weather pick up around here?’ But the boy didn’t hear.

Julia felt him quivering next to her as if a string inside had been tightened to the limit and was straining not to snap. She took her gloved hands out of her muff and put them over his. He was wearing a pair of gloves she’d bought him for Christmas in Budapest. She’d veiled up and they’d gone to a market, and she’d made him go and stand somewhere else so he wouldn’t see what she was getting him. The woman had looked at the veil as if it was a face she was trying to fathom. He’d been wearing the gloves ever since, they were good and warm, and she chafed them as if it could make a difference. He laughed and his breath was white fog. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Twenty minutes. I’m timing it.’

It took twenty-three.

Volkov was at the door to greet them, wearing a professional smile. ‘At last, at last!’ he said, running down the steps, a handsome wizened little man with a look of premature age. ‘My good friend!’ He clapped Theo on the shoulder. ‘Madame! We will speak English. Yes?’

The house was a plush, overblown affair, full of gilt and fat pink satin. Volkov was rich.

‘Ilya Andreyevich Volkov,’ said Theo smoothly, ‘it has been a very long journey.’

‘And you are tired. Tolya!’ he shouted, to the boy who’d driven them in and was now bringing in their luggage. ‘Show Mr and Mrs Lent to their rooms.’

Theo hated that. Mr and Mrs Lent. Was there something in the way he said it? Behind the smile, the style, the smarm. They’re all the same, he thought. You can see the thoughts turning in their heads like cogs. They do it. What’s it like? And he’s not even seen her yet.

‘Shall I send up chocolate? Please, you must rest. And later, when you are rested…’

Yes, later, the revealing.

When the boy had left them alone, Julia lay down on the bed at once, scarcely taking time to look at the two large comfortable rooms they had been given. ‘I might sleep,’ she said.

Another revealing. One more. One more, one more, and one more and more and on through life.

‘I’m so tired.’

‘No rush,’ said Theo. ‘Let them wait. My God, look at this.’ He was fingering the curtains. ‘That’ll keep the cold out. You could wear that on the Steppe herding your goats or whatever it is they do. That must’ve cost.’

He sat down, pulling off his collar.

‘I’m not going down,’ she said.

‘Old money, you see. You can always tell old money from new. He doesn’t really need to do this, you know, all this show stuff, he does it because he’s got the bug. It gets people like that. Wait until he sees you.’ He laughed shortly, a huffing of breath. ‘Bet he lies awake all night.’

She didn’t go down that night. She went straight to bed. Someone knocked on the door, bringing hot chocolate, Theo carried it in to her and she drank it sitting up against the pillow, watching the snow drift past the window. There’s nowhere further than this, she thought. The other side of the world. She closed her eyes. A dream of heat came, Mexico, drenching sun. Heat came through her palms from the cup she held. When she opened her eyes, she couldn’t focus for a moment, and thought the fire that crackled in the grate was the glowing in the brazier when Cayetano was getting ready to shoe a horse. But then she saw the snow sifting down, finer now like flour, and it was still snowing next morning when she woke, dressed carefully and went down to meet the household. There they stood in a line as if she was royalty or the new mistress, all perfectly prepared: Volkov, his ancient mother and the servants. The mother was a tiny shrivelled thing with watery lips and pale sore-looking eyes, very bent over, leaning on a stick on one side and the arm of a stout maid on the other. There was a housekeeper, a cook, a couple of girls, and Tolya, the tall young man from the night before. Theo, in personable professional mode, did the introduction. Well-trained, he thought. Not one of them showed a flicker. You’d think they met women who looked like apes every day. He got an urge to laugh. She didn’t open for another two weeks. Till then she was under wraps, with only this lot and the Salomansky musicians getting a look. Oh yes, they may look as cool as cucumbers, but look, they’re overjoyed, they’re wild, already they’re thinking in their minds what they’ll say, even though they’ve been sworn to secrecy. You should see her! It’s unbelievable! Just you wait.

She’ll slay them.

The sledge, driven by Tolya, carried them most days between the house and the rehearsal room at the Circus Salomansky. Tucked in with her furs in a shawl that covered her nose and mouth, she was no different from all the other muffled forms carefully picking their ways along the freezing pavements. Theo, in new checked trousers and with perfume in his lengthening side whiskers, wore a habitual smile by her side. She was practising new steps, a Russian dance with two handsome booted male dancers who flattered her shamelessly. Now you are happy, he thought, watching her count time with the pianist, because of me. She works hard. God, she’s come on! At her peak. And with the new costumes. Poor Theo. Poor poor Theo. Such a refrain to have always running in your head. Poor, poor Theo, an idiot high voice nagging on the edge of consciousness, inescapable as the sky, no matter that his face wore its perpetual wry smile and his eyes were soft. Nonsense, nonsense, all is well. But so many voices spoke in his head. What have I done? What woman now would have me, tied to that? If he puts his thing in that he’s not putting it in me. The way they look at me, everyone, all with that same question. Does he actually do it with her?

Yes, he does. He does, and it is altogether compelling. He is obsessed. There’s no doubt revulsion plays a part in it, he doesn’t understand it, why he grows hot and tense and hard even as a shiver of horror shoots along his spine. Everything stands up for her, every hair on his head, every nerve and fibre.

‘Are you all right, Theo?’

She was bending down towards him where he sat, a look of concern on her face.

‘Yes, love,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know. I thought you looked, I don’t know, sort of serious.’

He laughed. ‘Serious? Me?’

‘Watch my new dance,’ she said, swishing away. ‘Tolya’s been teaching me.’

At Volkov’s she practised her new songs, three Russian, one new from America. Polina, a big friendly girl who brought her hot water in the morning, had been drafted in to help with pronunciation.

‘That’s impossible!’

‘Not at all. Try again.’

Theo, lounging in a chair, crossed his legs and lit up a fat black cigar. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘an accent can be charming.’

‘And this line?’ Julia asked. ‘This means?’

‘By the edge of the lake where you gave me your hand—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said again. ‘You don’t have to know what it means, you only have to know the sounds.’

‘I want to know what it means,’ Julia said. ‘How can I give it feeling if I don’t know what it means?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘happy, sad, whatever the mood. That’s all you need to know.’

Polina, her back to him, made a face, very slight. Silly man, her face said.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Come in!’ called Theo.

Tolya entered backwards with a tray. ‘I’ve brought you some cocoa,’ he said.

‘Oh, lovely!’ She clapped her hands. ‘Just what I want!’

‘Not for me.’ A glass of red wine was on the small table by Theo’s side.

‘Tolya’s a country boy, did you know, Theo. That’s where he learned to dance. Didn’t you, Tolya?’

No conception of how to treat a servant, Theo thought. You’d have thought this was a family friend dropping by. She was much easier with these two than she was with Volkov and the old lady. The crone kept pretty much to her own quarters with her nurse-maid, and Volkov was out at his office a lot of the time, so they didn’t see that much of them anyway, apart from at meal times, which were awkward and protracted.

‘Look! He’s been teaching me.’ She seized the boy and whirled him around, humming some Russian tune he must have taught her.

‘You’re a marvellous dancer,’ Tolya said, ‘such an easy pupil.’ He looked delighted. Well of course, imagine, something to tell the grandchildren about, the time I danced with the eighth wonder of the world. Something you’d never forget, as Theo knew, an armful of sweetly smiling animal, a womanly arm around you, little hand, gardenia, furry brow strokable as a cat’s, lips of an ape, thatched black brow.

‘I have danced with many men,’ Theo heard her say. ‘In Baltimore they were lining up. But you, Tolya, you are the best.’

The boy was pretty and beardless with long fair hair and a ring in his ear. She really liked that young man.

‘Wait till you see all my costumes,’ she was saying to him. ‘How many changes do I have, Theo? Is it five? The kilt, the sailor, the—’

‘Four,’ said Theo.

‘But I will not be coming,’ said Tolya.

‘Why not?’

‘I will be working,’ he said and laughed, dancing backwards, drawing her after him.

‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘You must come.’

Look at that, Theo thought. What’s she doing? Is she flirting with him? The way she lifts her face, the way she turns. Is she making a fool of herself? Surely not. But the boy acts charmed, as if she’s a normal girl, and that big lump Polina is clapping her hands and singing along.

‘It really isn’t difficult,’ Julia said, growing breathless.

‘Not for you,’ said the boy.

‘There,’ said Theo, standing, ‘I think it’s time you rested, Julia. Thank you, Tolya. Thank you, Polina.’

‘I’m not tired,’ said Julia. ‘Dance with Polina!’ And she grabbed his arm and the arm of that silly girl and shoved them together, and the girl began to shriek with laughter as if someone was tickling her. It was like dancing with a heaving over-stuffed bolster. Theo didn’t want to seem like a misery, so he whirled her twice round the room to show willing and deposited her by the door. ‘Madame,’ he said gallantly, opening the door, ‘you dance like an angel.’

Her face had gone bright red, whether from the exertion or the thrill of being in his arms, he could not tell. But then she looked at him, and her eyes were serious. ‘No sir,’ she said with pathetic dignity, ‘I dance like an ox, as you well know.’

His smile faltered then reasserted itself. ‘There’s no answer to that,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Thank you for the dance, Miss Julia,’ Tolya said, following Polina out of the door, glancing shyly sideways at Theo, who inclined his head, smiling and formal.

‘You must come,’ she said. ‘Both of you.’

You know, Julia,’ Theo said when they’d gone, ‘I wish you showed the same enthusiasm when we dine with Ilya Andreyevich Volkov and his mother.’

‘They’re boring,’ she said simply. ‘And I can never remember all their names. It’s much easier with Tolya and Polina. They’re just Tolya and Polina.’

‘Oh, you get used to it. And yes, he is a bit of an old bore, and she is practically non-existent, but don’t forget we’re in their house. Eating their food. And I don’t think you realise quite how much that man has done for us. For you. We’re all sold out, everywhere. The entire tour is his doing.’

‘I know. But I don’t like his face. It’s false.’

‘False?’

‘He’s always smiling,’ she said, ‘but his eyes never smile. You’re like that too sometimes.’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘Yes, but he’s like that all the time. Anyway you’re not like that with me, only with other people. But he’s like that all the time with everyone. And he laughs too much.’

‘Poor man!’

The ugliest woman in the world, the walking singing dancing impossible woman-beast opened to a packed house. Watching with Volkov from the wings, Theo was almost tearful with pride and anxiety. Look at her. Just look. If she messes it up now. My God, she’s a pit pony, a Trojan, the way she’s gone at it. All this new stuff. Over and over again at midnight, the words, the steps, the dancing fingers on the fret board. And look, all they want is to look at her, eat her face. She could just stand there. What a crowd. Not just hoi polloi this lot, look at those toffs. Volkov beside him spoke some Russian thing, the tone was my God, oh my God. Never ceases to impress. Oh my God, my God, just look at her, what is she — is she even human? Look at their mouths hanging open. She paraded along the front of the stage playing her guitar, singing some old song and swaying her skirts. When she went into her dance, she was so practised she didn’t have to think about it. At least that’s the way it looked. Oh, she’s a good girl she is. Wait’ll she does ‘Lorena’. Oh Lorena. Pure sentiment was a sensation he liked to sniff out, confront and destroy at first stirring, but ‘Lorena’ bashed through all that. ‘This is all the rage at home,’ she’d said, in some godforsaken little hole in Poland, singing it for the first time. She played it now on her harmonica, a thin, slow, plaintive tune. To see those huge lips so sensitively draw such yearning from that old harmonica. Terrible. Quite terrible. Such beauty. Such a surfeit of ugliness. Then she sang:

The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the ground again…

And it was all he could do to keep the tears from his eyes.

The crowd went mad. Volkov bounced up and down, applauding vigorously. Theo could have crowed. Wouldn’t you like to have her? Wouldn’t you just love to steal her away? Don’t worry, you’ll get your cut. Up struck the band. White dress shining in the spotlight, she performed a ballet and a Spanish dance, her old stuff, well perfected, then sang an aria she’d learned specially, one of those Russians. Her voice strained a little at times but recovered itself quickly. ‘Ah now we come to the best bit,’ said Theo. ‘Here come the boys.’ Shouting, laughing, they leapt on stage, they’ve been flattering her and she’s basking in it, very good for the performance. She greets them with a massive smile, the audience draws a breath, the boys take her hands and all three dance in line, a quick-footed jaunt that involves a lot of changing places and backwards and forwards. Here’s where it could all go wrong, the timing must be exact, but she’s got it to a tee, good girl, God they’re loving it, look at their faces, and those boys, the way they gaze at her. They’ll never forget her. Something about these Russian lads, half of them have got the Steppes running in their blood, half wild themselves, I suppose. She does like them. Well, they allow for the costume changes, so necessary, and the crowd likes it. Old Volkov there, she’s right, he has greedy eyes. Look at that ridiculous dance, the old Cossack thing, all hup! hup! hup! as she glides off. Grinning, clapping their hands, dancing backwards. She re-appears as a Scottish lassie in a kilt and throws herself into a wild highland fling, a killer but she handles it. Look at those tiny feet go, slipping against one another like little fishes.

‘You can’t say this girl doesn’t have stamina,’ laughed Volkov with his cold fish eyes. Next she was a sailor in white bell-bottomed trousers, cross-armed, dancing a hornpipe, and then, by God, in less than a minute, a Russian peasant in a red skirt with a fancy apron and a lot of embroidery, trailing long coloured hankies from her fingertips.

The crowd as one stood up and cried ‘Bravo! Bravo!’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Volkov. ‘Oh yes, bravo, bravo, bravo.’

She glided round the empty stage as if on wheels, waving the hankies in the air so they coiled and floated lightly with the music, three times round, her massive wild face aloft. The boys and their shiny boots returned, handing her gracefully between themselves into the final dance. They are on springs, their legs fly out, their boot heels crack. And Julia centre stage, quick-stepping, swirling, a butterfly.

Yip! Yip! Yip!

The crowd goes wild.

She finished with a simple Russian folk song, alone with her guitar.

‘Julia,’ Theo said, stepping in front of Volkov to greet her in the wings, ‘my love, you have conquered Mother Russia.’

Polina banked up the fire. ‘There,’ she said, getting heavily to her feet. ‘Keep you lovely and warm.’

Julia lay sprawled on the big sofa with her head on a cushion. ‘Thank you, Polina. Look at the snow! It’s so beautiful.’ Her shoes lay askew on the rug. The snow fell strong and steady past the window. Polina didn’t even give it a glance. ‘You must feel the cold so much,’ she said, stooping to pick up the shoes, ‘coming from a hot country.’

‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘but I’m beginning to get used to it. It was cold in New York. It was cold in Europe.’

‘Polina,’ said Theo, coming in from the bedroom in his dressing gown and slippers, red wine spilling over his fingers from a tilted glass, ‘did Julia tell you about the show?’ He strode across to the fire and stood grinning before it.

‘A great success,’ said Polina, setting the shoes neatly side by side next to the bedroom door, ‘I knew it would be.’

‘It’s colder here,’ said Julia, ‘but I came in stages so…’

‘A triumph!’ Theo was tight. They’d been drinking downstairs with Volkov and some fat friend of his whose name she couldn’t remember, a prince no less — only prince here didn’t mean the same as in other places, it seemed. Princes and counts abounded. She’d only had one glass of champagne, but the men had polished off half a bottle of vodka before starting on the wine. It had been so boring. ‘And I have to say, Polina,’ Theo gestured with his glass and more wine sloshed, ‘your coaching was a stunning success!’ He laughed. ‘The voice of the people! Where are you from, Polina?’

‘From Meshchanskaia,’ she said, as if that would mean anything to him. ‘Careful sir, don’t spill your wine.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘where the peasant tongue holds supreme sway. Julia, I think it worked.’

‘What did?’

‘The common accent. They loved it.’

‘Will there be anything else?’ Polina asked.

‘Don’t think so.’ Chuckling, he took a swig. A long strand of hair had come adrift and slanted across his left eye. ‘That’s all’

‘What I do like about snow,’ Julia said to Polina, ‘is being warm inside watching it fall. The fire’s magnificent. Theo, please don’t block the heat.’

He jumped aside. ‘At once, my lady!’ When is that girl going? His head was about to burst. Go on, you silly girl, get out. Thank you.

‘Can you believe what we have achieved?’ Wide-eyed, he walked about in his new dressing gown, which was exactly the same colour as his wine. ‘There’s no limit.’

‘She reminds me of me.’

‘Who? Polina?’

‘She reminds me of me when I was at home.’ Julia yawned. My God! The mess of teeth!

‘Do you still think of it as home?’ he said, a little sadly.

She had to think about that. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘Home is with you.’ Her eyes closed. ‘I’m asleep,’ she said, smiling.

All of a sudden he felt weepy. Not like him. My diamond mine, my fortune, my millstone, he thought, still amazed at what he’d done. Look at her. He could go out. Send her off to bed, go where no one knows him, a drink, a game of cards, a few discreet questions. He could find them, the girls in their small rooms. Girls who don’t know he’s married to a freak.

There was a tap on the door.

‘Oh let Tolya in,’ she said, ‘he cheers me up.’

‘Don’t I cheer you up?’

‘Of course you do,’ she said, sitting up, ‘but you’re here all the time. Come in, Tolya!’

‘Tea,’ said the boy, coming in with a tray. She even knows what his knock on the door sounds like, thought Theo, placing himself once more in front of the heat. The fire jumped when the door opened, and the wind howled. I’m not going out in that, he thought. But still, he knew he’d never be able to sleep, his mind was feverish.

‘They went wild, Tolya!’

‘Of course.’ He smiled his big-toothed smile, putting the tray down on the small table beside Julia. ‘I’ve been listening to them talk. Prince Rudakov wants to invite you to his party.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, as if it wasn’t a huge honour, ‘I’m not sure I’ll enjoy that.’

‘Of course you will,’ Theo said. ‘It’ll be just what you need. I knew this kind of thing was going to happen. Didn’t I tell you? Whatsisname. Bartolomeo or whatever and his sister.’

‘Maximo and Bartola,’ she said. He was always going on about them.

‘They met royalty. Went to the White House, shook hands with the President. And they weren’t anywhere near as good as you, they were more akin to your little friend Cato.’

‘Cato,’ she said wistfully.

‘Anyway,’ said Theo, looking irritatedly at Tolya as he poured tea for Julia, with a delicate touch for such a clod of a thing, ‘are you quite sure you’re the person who should be telling us this?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Tolya, not sounding it at all. ‘Didn’t really think.’

If I was Volkov I’d never employ him, thought Theo, sprawling himself into a chair.

‘And my dance?’ Tolya said, ‘it went well?’

‘Oh Tolya, you should have been there! It was marvellous! You’d have been proud of me.’

‘I am proud of you.’

‘No really, really, the steps you taught me, they made the show. They were the highlight.’

‘Well, not quite,’ Theo said dryly.

The stupid boy laughed. ‘Miss Julia,’ he said, ‘you are so nice a person.’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said, ‘you’re easily as good as those other two, those dancers. You should have been up there on that stage with me.’

Tolya snorted. ‘Much better to dance with you here,’ he said. ‘I am very privileged.’

‘You most certainly are,’ said Theo.

‘Anything for you, sir?’ The boy straightened, turning with a polite smile. ‘Tea?’

‘I have my wine.’

‘Ah, but those boys, Tolya!’ said Julia, picking up her cup and warming her hands round it, ‘Oh, you should have seen them, the life in them.’

‘I suppose a dance like that,’ Theo said, ‘in a country like this, probably comes from the cold. You have to dance to keep warm.’

‘There may be something in that,’ Tolya said, beginning to withdraw.

‘Certainly damn freezing this place.’ Theo stretched his legs and put his slippered feet on the fender.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I miss the sun.’

‘Wait until spring,’ said Tolya.

Spring came suddenly, along with an invitation.

Prince Rudakov sent a carriage to bring them out to his country house for a weekend party, and Volkov rode with them. The sun was hot, everywhere was willows, a haze hung over the fields, rolling away into wooded distance. Now and again they passed a church or a wretched huddle of shabby huts and knocked-together barns, and sometimes carts drawn by bony horses, ragged people at the reins. At last the driver pointed with his whip to a red roof among the green slopes, and a few minutes later the house came into view, long and low, with many windows and a balcony running the length of the upstairs storey. A sloping lawn ran away at the front and tall trees closed in on three sides. Rudakov was there as soon as the carriage turned into the drive, waiting in a pale linen suit like an eager child about to get a present. ‘Enchanté, enchanté,’ he was saying before she’d even got out of the carriage, and Theo stood by, beaming like a proud father as the Prince fawned all over her.

‘The countryside is very beautiful,’ she said in Russian, something she’d learned specially.

The house was sumptuous inside. She unveiled in a small parlour. Rudakov had seen her before, of course, but there was his mother and sister, his wife, three stiff little boys on their best behaviour. And when they’d all stared their fill and exclaimed their delight, a servant showed them to their room. Julia started fretting about her dress, a flounced crinoline with tiny bows decorating each tier of the skirt and one great bow fanning out at the back, trailing long silver ribbons. It was too fancy, she said. The kind of thing for grand entrances and sweeping down wide curving staircases.

‘Nonsense,’ he said, wandering out onto the landing, standing a little dazedly looking over the balcony rail. A door in one corner opened and a tall young woman in a pale pink dress ran across the atrium with skirts raised. He caught a glimpse of a thin white ankle before she vanished through another door. Well now, he thought, craning a little over the rail. Maybe cop a dance with her later.

But when evening came, it wasn’t a dancing sort of a do, more of a grand soirée, with a piano only, and lots of formal introductions. Julia’s entrance was a showpiece. Prince Rudakov was waiting at the foot of the stairs as she tiptoed down on Theo’s arm, her dress like the great cup of a flower, lifting and settling as she moved. She’d been getting ready for hours and her hair was a flowery masterpiece. The Prince led her into the big parlour where ornate chairs were artfully arranged around small tables bearing dishes of Turkish Delight and bowls of pink and blue flowers. The guests stopped their twittering and turned as one to gaze.

‘My dear friends,’ Rudakov announced in a ringing voice, ‘I am delighted to introduce to you Madame Julia, the great artiste.’

Theo hung back.

The usual sort, he thought, scanning the crowd. A couple of military men, a few distinguished and delighted middle-aged women, lavishly dressed, with their indistinguishable husbands. A tall blond man with a haunted face and thin lips stared with something approaching passion. And there was the beauty he’d seen earlier, now wearing something golden-brown and shiny that displayed her fragile shoulders. Rudakov was saying the girl’s name. Liliya Grigorievna Levkova, my cousin. She laughed in a self-conscious way when she was introduced, wrinkling her nose and narrowing her eyes. It made her even more beautiful.

Theo drank too much that night and remembered little afterwards apart from Liliya Grigorievna Levkova, shimmering always in the corner of his eye, and the intense blond man, who scarcely blinked and never took his pale eyes from Julia for a second. At some point, Rudakov crossed over to the man and drew him by the arm to be introduced:

‘My very good friend, Professor Sokolov.’

Sokolov pushed his furrowed brow at Julia, his staring grey eyes.

‘Madame Julia Pastrana,’ said Rudakov, a flourish in his voice.

‘Hello,’ said Sokolov in English.

‘How do you do,’ said Julia.

‘Monsieur Lent,’ said Rudakov, ‘her husband.’

Sokolov barely glanced at him, but gripped Julia’s hand as if he’d never let it go, and stuck his face right in hers so that she drew back a little.

‘Professor Sokolov is a very distinguished doctor,’ Rudakov said.

The professor began to talk to Julia stumblingly, smiling and sweating — had read everything ever written about her, followed her progress, utmost fascination, immensely gratified — and on and on, till Theo drifted away, floating round the room with a vague smile on his face and another drink in his hand. Someone was playing something dull on the piano. Old Volkov was getting tight. Then he saw her, Liliya Grigorievna Levkova talking animatedly to the mother of Prince Rudakov, a stern old lady in a pearl cap. And glory, she caught his eye and came running over as if he was an old friend. ‘Oh, Mr Lent,’ she said in perfectly accented English, ‘what a lucky man you are!’ Close to, she was not as young as she’d appeared from the balcony, but none the worse for that.

‘Am I?’ he said.

‘She’s so sweet! So lovely!’ A delightful voice, low and eager and exciting.

‘Oh. Yes, she is.’

‘It’s so romantic,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to hear her sing. I’ve heard so much about her!’

‘Julia is a very fine singer,’ he said.

‘Everyone’s dying to hear her. And will she dance? Oh, she must dance! What a pity we have to sit through all the others first. And I hear you are to tour very soon?’

‘Yes. And then we are going to Saint Petersburg. To the circus. We will make Saint Petersburg our home for a while.’

‘Oh! We’ll be so sorry to lose her.’

‘We’ll be back for the Christmas season.’

‘How wonderful. You’ll be in Saint Petersburg in the summer.’

‘Yes.’

‘She has such an effect on everyone!’ said Liliya Grigorievna. ‘Just look at Professor Sokolov.’ She giggled. ‘Poor Julia! Go and rescue her.’ She turned him, giving him a familiar little nudge in the back before swishing off to talk to someone else. Where she’d touched him, it was as if a little creature had woken up under the skin. He found himself beside Julia. Sokolov was speaking urgently at her, a set smile on his face.

‘Theo,’ she said, taking his arm, ‘Professor Sokolov has been telling me all about his collection of anatomical Venuses. They sound horrible.’

‘Horrible but fascinating no doubt.’ Theo’s smile widened and quavered. ‘Forgive me, Professor, I must borrow my wife for a moment.’

Solokov bowed politely. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Not another doctor,’ she whispered in Theo’s ear, rising on tiptoe as he led her away.

‘Don’t worry.’ He lowered his head. ‘This is purely social.’

‘I’m sick of the lot of them.’

‘Not surprised.’

‘I’m not a piece of meat,’ she said.

‘You most certainly are not.’

No more, he’d promised, after the last one. No more poking and pressing and measuring.

‘Not exactly a doctor anyway,’ he whispered, ‘I don’t think.’

‘These Venuses,’ she said, ‘they’re opened up. You can see what’s inside.’

‘My love, they want you to perform,’ he said.

She sighed. ‘Do I have to?’

‘I think they’ll be very disappointed if you don’t. I think they’ll never smile again.’

‘They’ll get over it,’ she said glibly, but she’d been expecting it.

‘Not the full show, of course.’ He leaned close and spoke into her ear. ‘Just a song or two, and one of your pretty Spanish dances. Nothing too strenuous!’

‘I don’t mind dancing,’ she said.

‘And a song? That little Russian thing?’

‘That’s a whole performance, Theo,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say? I haven’t got my guitar.’

‘Yes, you have. It’s in the box.’

‘So you knew?’

‘Oh Julia, you must have realised. You know what these things are like. Lots of other people are going to be doing their turns and none of them are going to be anywhere near as good as you. It’d be peculiar if you didn’t perform.’

So, after sitting through a great deal of apparently hilarious stuff in Russian and the mediocre warbling of several ladies and a portly baritone, the party was treated to three songs and a Russian dance from the one they had after all come to see. Julia performed as well as she’d ever done, and they applauded wildly, turning their delighted faces to one another.

‘Oh Julia,’ Theo called out, ‘one more please.’

‘Oh yes, yes!’ cried Liliya Grigorievna, bouncing a little.

‘Sing “Lorena”,’ he said. ‘A new American song,’ he explained to the people, went to take a sip and noticed that his glass was empty.

She didn’t want to but smiled obligingly and once more picked up her guitar.

Oh, ‘Lorena’ would slay them. He retreated to the back of the room and refilled his glass. The doors to the verandah stood open. The chandeliers glittered, the crystal glasses glittered, her big black eyes glittered. Big black, wet eyes. He saw Sokolov, his doctor’s stare. He looks like a thin white bird, a crane or something. Oh, what a specimen you are, my jewel. No one else has got what I’ve got, and everyone wants it. Professors want you. A hundred months have passed, Lorena, since first I held that hand in mine. She brings tears to the eyes. Look at them. The parted lips. The fixed eyes. Not one of them can look away, not for one second. Don’t suppose they all understand the words but even so… he slipped out onto the verandah. The air smelled of lilac. Before him, just about still visible through the deepening night, a descent into a steep wooded valley. From out here it was just a woman’s voice, a nice voice, not magnificent but sweet and full of feeling. Hard little worker, my Julia, uses what she’s got. She’s bought you this. This lot, that ridiculously beautiful woman, they wouldn’t give you the time of day if it wasn’t for her. Snobs the lot of them. And that pompous old general. Those awful whiskers and that stupid little beard. Those villages we came through, probably full of cholera. What a world. And that fat fool down there stuffing himself like a goose. Still, the same everywhere. Jesus, he could have gone down the sewers himself one time. Back there. Easy to go under in this business. The sultry evening air carried the drink to his head very quickly. No more going under. Not for me. Not any more.

She was drawing to a close when he returned to the room, standing by the verandah doors with his glass and his empty grin.

I hardly feel the cold, Lorena.

That’s the way, Julia.

An uproar of applause. The beauty was jumping up and down and clapping her hands, turning to the girl next to her, all teeth and lips and perfect little nose. Sokolov applauded sternly. His mouth constricted to a thin short line, perfectly straight. Theo watched his wife engage with the process of acclaim and congratulation, using all the bits of Russian she’d learned, ‘Yes, thank you, how kind.’ He watched Liliya Grigorievna cross the room like a fawn and embrace Julia, then he watched them converse. Amazing, those two faces close together, their two mouths side by side. It made his head spin. The world could not contain such strangeness. He found himself next to them. They were talking animatedly.

‘Liliya Grigorievna was just telling me that there’s this wonderful fortune-teller in Saint Petersburg,’ Julia said. ‘She lives near the circus.’

‘And now he’s going to laugh at us,’ Liliya Grigorievna said.

‘Indeed,’ said Theo, smiling, ‘I am.’

‘Theo,’ she said later back in their room, ‘you knew I was going to perform. You brought my guitar.’

‘Of course I did, dear.’

‘How much did they pay us?’ she asked.

He laughed.

‘Theo! It’s not funny. You should tell me these things.’

‘Come on, Julia, you know you’re not interested in all that.’

‘I thought this was a social visit,’ she said. ‘But I find I’m the paid entertainment as usual.’

‘It’s both!’ he cried, coming behind her and clapping his hands down on her shoulders. ‘Haven’t you had a nice time?’

‘How much did Rudakov pay?’

‘Julia,’ he said, pushing himself down beside her and smiling drunkenly into her face. His hair was in a mess and his cravat was loose and stained with wine. ‘You know damn well it wouldn’t mean a thing to you if I did tell you an amount. We did well out of it. You don’t have to worry about a thing. We — we did well.’

‘I’m always the entertainment,’ she said.

‘Of course you are,’ he said, ‘because you’re so wonderful.’

‘I like Liliya Grigorievna,’ she said later, tucking her feet in under his thigh as they lay in bed. ‘When we get to Saint Petersburg, I want to go and see that fortune-teller.’

‘Don’t waste your money,’ he said, ‘it’s hogwash.’ Then after a moment, ‘Anyway, who was this fortune-teller who said you would travel a very very long way? A thing just about anybody with half a brain could have told you.’

‘It was in New Orleans,’ she said.

‘Oh, your time in New Orleans.’

‘I want to see her, anyway.’

Theo yawned. ‘Oh, if you want,’ he said, ‘as long as you know you’re wasting your money. Tearing it all up into tiny pieces and throwing it in the sea. Who cares?’

‘Oh, you,’ she said sleepily, and in a moment had drifted away silently and completely. There one minute, gone the next.

Wide awake and still drunk, tears starting in and out of his glazed eyes for no good reason, Theo stared at the moonlight shadows stealing over the top of the curtain onto the ceiling. These tears made no sense, and he didn’t understand them. He only knew he felt terrible. Julia slept by him like a faithful dog. He could feel a pulse beating strongly under the fur in her neck where his hand rested. ‘It’s not fur,’ she always scolded, ‘it’s hair.’ As if it made a difference.

*

After a long tour they arrived in Saint Petersburg in a high summer of thick yellow heat and many storms. ‘Here’s where we get you on a horse again,’ Theo said. Close by their rooms was the grandest circus of them all. She was tired as hell, and it felt as if they’d been on the road forever.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

She’d been getting weepy these past couple of weeks. Sentimental weepy, so that the sight of a dog scrounging round a bin or the sound of birds singing in the dark of an early morning would set her off. Now she stood looking out of the window at the gnats dancing in a smoky pollen haze that hovered outside the window overlooking the garden behind their lodgings.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and grabbed his hand and kissed it and told him she loved him.

‘I love you too.’

He could say I love you and mean it, at the same time crying out a silent howl of confusion to the heavens. Who is she? Who am I? What am I doing in this strange land?

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said, pulling herself together. ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ and stepped away and began picking at the garland of small white flowers she was adjusting for tomorrow night’s performance.

‘Well, you’ve got a whole day off. What are you going to do?’

‘I think I’ll read for a bit.’

‘Good idea. Put your feet up.’ Theo paced twice about the room.

‘I think I’ll go out,’ he said.

‘Bring me something nice,’ she said, looking up, ‘from the pastry shop.’

‘Not in a hurry, are you? I thought I’d take a stroll around.’

‘Not in the least.’

He went back to the circus, walked about behind the scenes, just strolling with his hands in his pockets, drinking in the smells of the place. Nothing like it. How could he live without this? The circus was in his blood. He’d tried other things, they didn’t work. God! Raising his eyes to the glory of the place. Not so much a circus as a huge palace with columns and frescoes and chandeliers. He’d never forget the sight of her in that ring last night, riding in on a white horse, three times round then dismounting — and — smoothly into the dance as the horse is led away. Such a small thing, Julia in that great space of red curtains and gilt, the tiers of boxes around the ring going higher and higher, back and back, with the toffs and the swells with their jewels at the front, and everyone else behind. Oh, you have cracked the nut, boy, you’ve made it, he told himself. One in the eye for the folks back home. From the circus he walked down to the river, over a bridge, back across another, went into a tavern and sat in a corner with his drink, his suave smile imposing itself upon his face as it did more and more these days, even when his insides were quivering. He drank a few more then walked back, got half way upstairs before remembering about the pastry shop and went back for a couple of sweet buns.

When he got back, she was gone.

He looked in the other room. ‘Julia?’ he said. ‘Julia?’

But there was nowhere she could be. She’d gone out.

He broke out in a sweat.

She knew exactly where to go. Behind the circus, Liliya Grigorievna had said. The street with the barber’s on the corner, and on the other side a draper’s shop. A few doors down, red door, number sixteen. And on the way back from yesterday’s rehearsal she’d seen it plain, as if it wanted to be found so easily, the barber’s corner, the draper’s opposite, a quick glance down the narrow street as they passed. I’ll go now while he’s out, she thought. I’ll just knock on the door and make an appointment, I’m sure she won’t be able to see me straight away. I’ll get back before him, and he’ll never know. Ah, but then I’ll have to get away again, won’t I? One thing at a time.

It was ages since she’d been out alone. Not since the American tour. She walked past the pastry shop. Her bonnet was deep, the veil very thick and long. A young man was swabbing the steps. He smiled and tipped his head to her, respectful, and she nodded back. It wasn’t far.

The door was answered by a very beautiful little girl of eight or nine with long tangled golden ringlets.

‘Dobryj dyen,’ said Julia brightly to assuage the effect of her thoroughly veiled condition. ‘Parles tu français, ma chérie?’

‘Oui, Madame,’ the child replied gravely.

Liliya had said the fortune-teller spoke good French but no English.

‘I’d like to make an appointment to see Madame Pankova,’ Julia continued in French.

‘Un moment,’ said the child, withdrawing into the shadowy hall and disappearing into a room at the back. Now that she was here, Julia felt silly. Of course Theo was right. You couldn’t be on the road any length of time and remain unaware of the artifice involved in this kind of thing, but still, she thought. Now and again you got an exception. She had no doubt whatsoever that the gift existed and that one or two people had it, you just had to weed them out from the rest. She heard voices, the child’s and another that cracked and croaked. In a minute or so the girl came back. ‘If you can wait twenty minutes or so,’ she said, ‘she’ll see you now,’ and showed her into a small sitting room with a cheerful fire, comfortable chairs, a samovar on the sideboard and a tall unlit white candle in the centre of a round table. Madame Pankova had just seen another client and needed time to re-muster her strength, the girl said with the air of someone much older who’d said the same thing many times. She took Julia’s money, asked her to please sit, then poured tea and politely offered the cup, raising her large grey eyes to where Julia’s would have been.

‘Merci,’ said Julia, amused by the child’s official air.

There was a slight hesitation, a flicker of time when it seemed the girl was going to say something more, perhaps ask a question, but it passed and with a solemn bow she turned and left the room, leaving the door open. The sound of dishes being washed came from somewhere down the hall. A bell rang far away in the city, a steady, listless tolling. There was a poster of Paris on the wall, and the wallpaper had a pattern of coiled ferns.

Madame Pankova entered twenty-five minutes later from an inner room, a short fat woman in a dark blue dress, leaning heavily on a stick. ‘I have constant pain,’ she said by way of a greeting, ‘constant pain. Nothing can be done about it.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Julia.

‘Nothing to be sorry about. Yeva!’

She sat down in a high wing-backed chair, resting her stick by its side. The girl appeared and set about what was obviously a familiar routine of putting a battered footstool under Madame Pankova’s black-buttoned boots, which were tied up with indigo ribbons in floppy bows. She lit the tall white candle in the centre of the table, placed a worn deck of playing cards next to it, drew the curtains to shut out daylight, and withdrew as quietly as she’d come, closing the door behind her.

‘Well,’ croaked Madame Pankova, ‘you’re a mystery woman. Are you going to take that veil off?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I never do.’

Madame Pankova sighed heavily. She was a swarthy woman with long white hair hanging down under a red handkerchief. She sighed again, looked away, blew out her cheeks in a rude kind of way and looked back. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Can I ask anything?’

‘Anything at all.’

Julia thought for a few seconds then said, ‘Does my husband love me?’

Madame Pankova drank some tea. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘I think he does.’

Madame Pankova held up her finger for silence, stared expressionlessly for several minutes at the dark shape before her. At last she leaned forward, wincing and gasping softly as she did so, picked up the pack of cards and shoved them across the table.

‘Shuffle,’ she said.

Julia shuffled with thinly gloved fingers.

‘You’re not taking your gloves off to shuffle? Don’t want your palm read?’

‘No. Just the cards please,’ Julia said.

Madame Pankova nodded.

‘Is that enough?’ Julia asked.

‘Is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Madame Pankova shrugged and looked away as if she’d lost interest.

‘There,’ said Julia, ‘that’s enough,’ and laid down three cards as commanded. They meant nothing to her. There was the ace of spades and the kings of spades and clubs.

‘One more,’ said Madame Pankova.

The nine of hearts.

Madame Pankova stared at the cards blankly for a few minutes, then said, ‘This is a mess,’ and after a longish pause, ‘You’re having a boy.’

Julia started.

Madame Pankova leaned over with her eyes closed and her head in her hands. Her fingernails were violet, long and thin like talons.

‘Your boy is a traveller.’

She sat back, opened her eyes and drank some tea.

Julia’s heart was a distant pounding in her throat and wrists. The blood came and went, not always regular. She hadn’t seen it in a while. Why hadn’t they thought about this? What, was it too impossible to think about?

‘Can you tell me,’ asked Julia, trying not to seem surprised, ‘will my baby take after his mother or his father?’

Madame Pankova slopped her tea with a shaky hand. How old the hand was, older than the rest of her, a shrivelled, shiny-veined whitening chicken claw. ‘Both of you,’ she said. The hand scooped up the cards and shuffled them expertly back into the deck.

‘Shuffle again.’

The second spread was bigger and mostly diamonds and spades. ‘Yes,’ said Madame Pankova. ‘He does. Your husband.’ Three or four vague meandering forgettables later — it appeared there was some trouble ahead but this would pass and peace would be restored — she suddenly said, ‘Your mother is watching over you. She is saying, you are mine.’

‘My mother?’

‘You are mine. You are mine. She watches.’

Dead, then.

Of course.

The room was too hot. The fortune-teller pointedly consulted a small watch on the end of a purple ribbon that she drew from a pocket. ‘One more question,’ she said.

‘One more,’ repeated Julia softly, ‘one more.’

‘Come, come,’ said Madame Pankova.

The sound of seagulls passed over the street and settled petulantly somewhere close by.

‘Am I human?’ Julia asked.

Madame Pankova looked down into her lap and said nothing for a long time.

‘Why do you ask?’ she said at last.

‘Because,’ said Julia, ‘I want to know for sure.’

Madame Pankova closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows high. ‘It’s possible to be human and not know it,’ she said, fingering the ribbon in her hands. The minutes stretched, and Julia wondered if the old woman was falling asleep. But then she opened her eyes and stared into the candle flame. Another minute passed.

‘You’re human,’ Madame Pankova said, snapped her eyes shut, sighed, snapped them open again and called, ‘Yeva!’

Immediately the child appeared, hovering through the darkness like an angel in the candlelight, to the window to throw back the curtains. Light flooded the room. Madame Pankova screwed up her face and muttered darkly to herself in Russian, then raised her ravaged face and said loudly for Julia’s benefit, ‘The pain is terrible. No one knows how terrible the pain.’ Out she hobbled, the stick trembling, and the child blew out the candle.

A boy. All the way back, hurrying, she held one hand against her stomach. Are you in there? But of course it could happen. Never discussed, never considered. She’d thought she couldn’t. Why? Because she was so wrong in so many ways, somehow she’d thought that would be wrong too. And he’d never said anything. Never a what-if or when-we, like other couples. It must’ve been there all the time like an island in the fog and neither of them had seen it. It might not come, the unimaginable boy. Creature-to-be. It would hurt. The thought of Theo made her scared. He never said he wanted a child. Never said he didn’t. The show. She couldn’t dance, ride horses. Any day the familiar stain, the sense of drain would surely come. The old woman had mostly just rambled, vague — you will make a good friend whose initial will be T, something has been troubling you, your husband thinks about you a very great deal, he is thinking of you this very moment — yes, I’m sure he is. But that thing about mother. Mama walking away. Pigtail eternal. Julia’s eyes filled. What a fool she’d been. Keeping that so close all her life, the eternal clue she invoked at night before she went to sleep. That was her mother, neither alive nor dead but simply other, gone. A dream, not in life or death but somewhere else. At no time had she ever thought: my mother is dead. And she’d never wondered about a real woman somewhere up there in those green and sandy sierras, somewhere you could reach by walking. She’d been a child with a story.

She’s dead now. Final. And this boy.

It might all come to nothing.

Theo was there when she got back.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ he said furiously, stamping over as she came in the door.

‘I went to the fortune-teller,’ she said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake! You can’t do this, Julia! You can’t just go out without me whenever you want.’

‘Well, you know I don’t. It’s all right, I was covered.’

‘That’s not the point.’

Here we go again. ‘No harm done,’ she said, ‘I’m back now.’

‘It’s just not fair, Julia,’ he said as she unveiled and took off her gloves. ‘It’s not fair on me. What if something happened to you?’

‘I only went round the corner.’

‘You have got to be honest with me, Julia, this is just not fair. You waited deliberately till I’d gone out, didn’t you? Then you sneaked off. I bet you thought you’d get back before me and I’d never know.’

It was so true that she couldn’t help but smile. I’ve done it, she thought. I went out and nothing happened.

‘It’s not funny!’

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He’d sulk for the next couple of days. He was getting it down to a fine art. Here came the first harbingers, the noble suffering face, the downcast brow. He was spinning a little web of woundedness between them.

‘You know damn well I’d have taken you if you’d asked,’ he said.

‘Oh, but you’d have laughed at me.’

‘Well yes, but that’s understandable. Giving your money to some fraud! Oh, Julia.’

‘You really do think I’m stupid, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Like all those other people who think I must be because I have this.’ She pulled on her beard.

‘I know you’re not stupid,’ he said coldly. ‘That’s why it makes me angry to see you behaving as if you are.’

He walked out abruptly. His footsteps echoed in the stairwell. She went to look. No blood.

~ ~ ~

Instead of a heat haze, there was rain falling softly on willows outside the window.

‘I wish we could go to Vienna,’ she said.

‘Don’t you like it here?’

‘It’s getting cold again.’

Theo took a match from a silver box and lit a cigar.

‘I think,’ he said, shaking the match with the air of a man with nothing to do, leaning back and blowing smoke upwards, ‘if we give it another two years. Till we have enough for a decent apartment somewhere pleasant — Vienna, by all means if you like, or even…’

He broke off and gazed into space.

She picked up that lump of wood, her old doll, and lay down on the bed, turning on her side. ‘Thank God, nothing for a while,’ she said.

‘Nothing at all unless you want to go to the circus.’

‘On Friday.’

‘Why Friday?’

‘Darmody’s juggling.’

‘Fine. I’ll get tickets.’

‘I have friends in Vienna, don’t I?’ she said proudly.

Theo nodded, savouring the tang of his cigar. He’d get them a box, the best he could. She’d walk in on his arm, veiled. Everyone would know who she was but no one would get near. They’d whisper: that’s Julia Pastrana. But if they wanted to see her they’d have to pay.

‘Vienna is certainly a possibility,’ he said.

‘I can’t ride any more,’ she said suddenly in an odd tone.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t ride.’

‘Why not?’

She looked away. ‘I’m having a baby,’ she said.

Theo’s face didn’t change.

‘You’re not serious,’ he said.

‘I think I am.’

Oh God. His face didn’t change. A thousand voices murmured in his head.

‘I’m sure I am,’ she said.

It couldn’t happen. He was always careful. When? Not always easy getting out in time. When? Oh God, after a few drinks. Who cares then? ‘What?’ he said, screaming inside.

‘I’ve missed twice now.’

‘Twice.’ He swallowed, playing for time.

‘A baby,’ she said, meeting his eyes with a wary look.

Time slowed for Theo, his every move, the way his lips formed the shape of opening to allow smoke to drift from them, the way the smoke seemed alive as it played with the air. He closed his eyes.

‘Do you think that’s why I’ve been feeling so tired?’ she asked.

‘Very likely,’ he said.

When he opened them again her eyes were glistening. ‘You don’t want it,’ she said. ‘You don’t want it because you think it’ll be like me.’

His eyes filled with sympathy. His brain went tick tick tick, bring another poor freak into the world, tick tick, as it is they’re all looking at me, tick tick tick, this is impossible. ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘not at all.’ He knew he ought to go to her but was suddenly afraid. ‘You have to see a doctor,’ he said. ‘Make sure.’

‘You don’t want it.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

The shine of tears under her eye. ‘Will you love it, if it’s like me?’ she said.

‘Of course I will!’

‘You don’t want it to be like me though, do you?’

Tick tick tick. Calm. ‘Listen, Julia,’ he said, pulling sense on like a cloak, walking over to her, caressing the sides of her arms and smiling reassuringly, ‘it’s mine, it goes without saying I’ll love it.’ A hairy baby monkey, he thought. ‘But obviously it would be better for him to be born normal.’

‘Him?’

‘Or her.’

‘But if he isn’t?’

‘Just — I don’t know, Julia, I don’t know what to say, it would just be better if it was normal. But I don’t suppose — I don’t know how these things work. We need to get a good doctor…’

Trailing off.

Think think think. We have — six, yes, six more shows to February. She’d never get rid of it, not her. Catholic. She can sing anyway, play her guitar. They’ll still come. Could she dance? Even if she just stood there, whatever she did, they’d still come, just to see her. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said with worried eyes. Doing sums in his head. Oh God. We need to rake in as much as we can before. She’ll have to take it easy for a bit. But not for too long. She’s a trouper.

‘We’ll get you to a doctor,’ he said. ‘If we were in Moscow we could get Sokolov.’

Perhaps she’ll miscarry, he thought. No. She’s strong as an ox. He laughed. Strong as a Julia.

‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she said.

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

*

It was confirmed. She was three months gone. The doctor had shaken Theo’s hand and looked him steadily in the eye on parting, and he’d seen it there, the thing he would find in all eyes from now on, the thought: My God, he does! He fucks the ape. Now they’d all know. Looking in the mirror, he practised the smile he would smile back at them. Calm, proud, defiant.

Three months, four, five, still dancing, hardly showing. The sparkle was back in Theo’s eyes, and a weight lifted from Julia’s mind.

‘After these shows we should settle for a while,’ she said. ‘Till the baby’s older.’

‘Sure,’ he said, smiling. ‘But not for too long.’

While not quite at rest, his mind had settled now. First, the child might be normal. Firstborn. My seed. Blood of my blood and all that. It was a tangle. He’d no idea how he felt. Fatherhood had never been a consideration. But then, he thought, if it’s hairy, think about it. If they flock now, imagine. The ape woman and her remarkable offspring. They’ll be trampling over one another to get a look. And the science! God, those doctors salivating. How well they lived now — Theo bit the end off a high-class cigar — but this would be nothing. They could live anywhere. A place here, a place there. The best. Sometimes a creature formed in his mind, a baby monkey with human eyes as soft and sweet as a kitten’s.

‘Our baby will grow up in the most wonderful world imaginable,’ he said expansively, lying back on the chaise and trying to blow smoke rings, ‘backstage. Born in a trunk. Town to town. The thrill of it all. The smell of sawdust.’

‘Face facts, Theo,’ she said, breaking the thread on something she was sewing. ‘We can’t drag a baby around all over the place. Not when it’s tiny.’

‘Some of the happiest people I’ve ever known have been born into the business,’ he said. ‘Suckled in the wings. Weaned in a circus wagon.’

‘I think we should go back to Vienna,’ she said. ‘After the last show.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘We’ll see.’

To Moscow, where the baby would be born. Ilya Andreyevich Volkov had found them a nice little flat near the Arbat, and was lending them Polina to take care of the place. He sent Tolya to pick them up from the posting stage. The familiar face was reassuring, breathing smoke into the frozen air from deep inside a sheepskin collar. We don’t go back, she thought. Or hardly ever. We move on. And on and on. At night the names of places paraded through her mind as she fell asleep. Moscow, snow, Tolya, Polina, almost a homecoming.

‘My congratulations to you both,’ Tolya said, grinning widely as he hoisted the trunk onto the carriage. Look at the monkey father, Theo thought, shivering. He could see the thought in the boy’s eyes.

‘Oh, it’s so lovely to see you again,’ Julia said, ridiculously excited as if the boy was a lost kinsman home from war.

‘And you, Madame.’

‘Hurry it up, Tolya,’ Theo said, ‘I’m soaking wet out here.’

‘Of course.’

Theo climbed in and huddled himself up, shivering. ‘What a climate,’ he said.

Julia laughed. ‘Look at you, all snowy!’

It was late afternoon, already dark. The shops were open, the streets crowded. She was humming, leaning forward to watch it all go by. It was pelting down, fat flakes falling intently. Tolya carried their trunk up and Polina was there, smiling and flustered, showing them the bread and pies she’d laid out, the rich pickly soup simmering at the back of the stove. The fire blazed. ‘I’ll make tea now,’ she said.

‘Heaven,’ said Julia.

Theo threw himself down in the biggest chair and closed his eyes. Three more months. Oh well, Moscow. Maybe he’d see Liliya Grigorievna. Julia flittered here and there, opening doors. ‘Theo,’ she said, ‘come and look.’

‘In a minute.’

‘Will you eat now or later?’ asked Polina.

‘Now,’ said Theo, ‘I’m starving. Julia!’

‘Wait until you see,’ she said, appearing in the doorway.

The table was already set. Polina served soup and put the bread on the table. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said, ‘if there’s nothing else you want. I’ll come in early and see to the fire. Tolya can give me a lift now.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re looking so well, Madame,’ Polina said as she put on her coat. ‘We’ve all been so excited about your news.’ I bet you have, thought Theo.

‘Oh stop with all the Madame,’ said Julia. ‘Call me Julia.’

‘Oh!’ said Polina, pausing with her muffler wound half round her neck. ‘That’s so nice.’

‘And you too, Tolya.’ Julia broke a piece of bread in half.

‘Thank you so much, Madame,’ he said, and the three of them laughed.

‘And now,’ said Theo, ‘let’s eat before we expire.’

‘Oh, isn’t this nice?’ she said when they’d finally gone. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’

‘Indeed we are.’

‘And wasn’t it nice to see Tolya again? And Polina.’

‘Absolutely.’

A fog of tiredness was making Theo feel stupid. It was four more days till Christmas and he’d arranged for her to see a doctor the day after tomorrow, get it over with before the holiday. She was well enough, but no harm in making sure. He watched her eat. She was fastidiously clean and dainty, as if to compensate for her appearance. She caught him looking and her eyes smiled.

‘You have lovely eyes, Julia,’ he said.

She did. That wasn’t a lie.

‘He just kicked me,’ she said.

‘The brute.’

She’d put his hand there the other night. That peculiar feeling against his palm, something alive under the skin. Her belly was hard and round. She wore loose gowns now except onstage, where she covered the growing mound with a crinoline.

‘You don’t seem that tired,’ he said.

‘I was,’ she said, ‘but now I feel all excited. Hurry up, Theo. There’s a crib.’ She pushed her bowl away and stood up.

‘Aren’t you going to eat any more?’

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Come and see.’ She went next door, and he heard her struggling with the catches on the trunk. He finished the soup and ate another slice of bread with butter before following her next door. The room was pleasant but not large. The bed filled most of it. A blue and yellow jug filled with dried flowers and grasses stood on the chiffonier. There was a chest of drawers, a pretty armoire painted peasant style, and above the bed a picture of a country lane in a flat landscape of thin spring trees and low sun. She’d changed into her nightgown and was taking all the little dresses and bonnets she’d been making for the baby out of the trunk and laying them on the bed.

‘Look,’ she said. Next to the bed, a hooded cradle with a white blanket.

‘If I die,’ she said in a practical voice, folding things neatly away into the bottom drawer, ‘don’t forget I’ve put his things in this drawer all ready, in sizes look, the smallest at this end, getting bigger over there.’

‘You won’t die.’

‘I know but just in case.’

‘No talk of dying. You’ll have Trettenbacher. He’s the best.’

‘I know.’ She shrugged. ‘No harm in being prepared.’

He lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head watching the snow drifting above the curtain. She closed the drawer. Her nightgown was too long for her and she had to hold it up. ‘And the coverlet,’ she said, reaching once more into the trunk and bringing out a tiny quilt embroidered with flowers. ‘There!’ she said, laying it down on top of the white blanket in the cradle, stroking it gently.

‘I’m glad it’s not Sokolov,’ she said. ‘When am I seeing Dr Trettenbacher?’

‘Day after tomorrow.’ He turned back the covers and started to undress.

‘I wonder what he’s like.’ She got into bed and sat with her knees up watching him.

‘Trettenbacher? I told you. The best.’

‘Yes, but I wonder what he’s like.’

Trettenbacher was a brisk, bluff man with a shiny red face and a heavy thatch of grey hair. ‘She’s very healthy,’ he said, closing the bedroom door after the examination, ‘apart from the fact that she’s coming down with a cold.’

‘Oh good,’ said Theo, standing by the fire, ‘yes, Julia’s always been healthy. Polina!’

Polina appeared.

‘Take her some cocoa, would you, Polina,’ he said. ‘Get her to lie down.’

Trettenbacher waited till she’d left then said, ‘That’s not to say we might not have a problem.’

‘Problem?’

‘Her size.’

‘What’s wrong with her size?’

‘She’s narrow,’ said Trettenbacher, snapping his bag shut.

‘Julia? Narrow?’

‘It’s a big baby.’

‘But she’s quite hefty,’ said Theo.

‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.’ Trettenbacher looked up, smiling in a meaningless, professional way. ‘But don’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, ‘she’s not the first. Might have a hard time but we’ll get her through. Now, I’ll see her again after…’

‘Tell me the truth,’ Theo said, scared. ‘Is she in any danger?’

Trettenbacher looked at the fire. ‘Well…’ he said, and Polina came in with a tray. ‘Cocoa was all ready,’ she said, smiling and bustling through the room. ‘Any for you, sir?’

‘No.’ Theo glared at her. ‘I am trying to speak to the doctor.’

‘Oh, sorry, sir.’

Stupid woman.

‘Let me,’ said the doctor, opening the bedroom door for her, ushering her in and closing it sharply behind her. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘where were we?’

‘Danger,’ said Theo sharply.

‘Of course. Birth is, of course, always dangerous. She’s probably a little more at risk than the average woman but not as much as many.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Exactly what it says.’ Trettenbacher walked to the door. ‘There’s always danger. She’ll be fine. Make sure she gets plenty of rest. She’s not still dancing, is she?’

She was, not as much, a little, slower. Three more stops on the tour. ‘Of course not,’ Theo said.

‘Mr Lent,’ said Trettenbacher, ‘I must stress that your wife will have the finest available medical care, the absolute best of modern obstetrics.’ He buttoned his overcoat. ‘I can assure you I have no shortage of extremely talented volunteers to assist me.’ He smiled. ‘Scientifically,’ he said, putting on his hat, ‘this is a fascinating case. A tremendous opportunity.’

Theo imagined them all craning to see what came out. She could die, he thought, as the doctor’s footsteps faded away in the stairwell.

‘I’m off now, Mr Lent,’ said Polina, coming out of the bedroom. ‘I’ve taken her some cocoa and she’s having a nice lie-down.’

‘Thank you, Polina.’

‘Are you all right, Mr Lent?’

Theo blinked. ‘Of course I am, why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know, I thought you looked a little — upset.’

‘No, no, I was just thinking,’ he said, then realised he was standing gaping at the girl in a vacuous sort of way. ‘Good, good,’ he said, reviving, ‘we’ll expect you on Christmas Eve then as arranged. Very good. Thank you, Polina.’

By Christmas Eve, Julia’s cold had settled in, and she had an awful headache and was beginning to wheeze. There was no question of her attending the party at Volkov’s, but Theo went anyway. She didn’t mind. They’d be together all day tomorrow. Polina came to make hot drinks and see to the fire. She’d brought a cake and some nuts, and after she’d pottered about at the stove for half an hour they sat down and ate the cake while Julia drank some awful milky buttery thing that Polina said would do her good. The slippery texture made her gag but she sipped away obediently.

‘You get that down,’ Polina said, ‘and you’ll be better before you know it. I dare say this must be the coldest winter you’ve ever seen.’

‘I wanted to go to Vienna,’ Julia said, ‘but the schedule won’t allow. Not yet.’

‘It’s a shame you can’t go where you please.’

‘Who can?’ said Julia.

‘Some can.’

‘Can you?’

‘I’m going to my father’s tomorrow,’ Polina said, as if that answered the question. ‘My sisters and brother will be there.’

‘Oh, well you mustn’t stay up late, you know. You’ll be wanting to make an early start tomorrow.’

‘Not that early.’ Polina took the empty cup from Julia. ‘They don’t live far. Shall I make you some more of that before I go?’

‘No, I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘How’s your head?’

‘Better, I think.’

‘You should have a sleep,’ Polina said. ‘There’s nothing a good sleep doesn’t improve.’ She stood up.

‘This creature’s kicking me,’ Julia said. ‘He doesn’t want me to sleep.’

‘Calm down, you bad baby.’ Polina leaned over and patted Julia’s huge drum of a belly. ‘Let your poor little mother sleep. Now. I’ll just tidy up a bit in there and then I’ll be off.’

But after she’d gone there was no chance of sleep. A boy. Big boy. Elbowing, kneeing, sticking his feet everywhere. Kicking right where all the milky slop lay and making her feel sick. She put her hands over him. Theo Junior. Don’t let him be like me. Make him normal. It would not be so bad, she thought, to live in Moscow. A house here, instead of Vienna. It was quiet, no sound but the snow, placidly falling, kissing the window. ‘Look at your crib, little man,’ she whispered. A baby’s smooth head, her dark hairy hand, an indrawn breath. Elisio. Solana holding her hand. Come away. ‘I’m your mother,’ she said. ‘Now go to sleep.’ But he was restless under her ribs.

Theo came back drunk at midnight, face glowing with cold. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he cried. ‘It’s Christmas Day!’ striding to the window and flinging the shutters wide. ‘Listen to the bells.’

‘Theo! Don’t open the window, we’ll freeze.’

‘Sorry.’ He knocked against the chiffonier, yanked at his collar. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she said. ‘How was it?’

‘Oh, wonderful. You know Volkov. Only the best when he puts his mind to it. Everyone dressed up. You know. Games and all that jolly stuff. Plenty to eat. We all sang Christmas carols. Liliya Whatsername was there, and she asked after you. Sends her love. How’s your cold?’

‘The same.’

He sat on the side of the bed, grinning at the floor and chuckling to himself. He had danced with Liliya Grigorievna Levkova, this smooth fragrant creature, her slender waist a thing of beauty. She’d smiled in his face the whole time, chatting brightly. He hadn’t got the foggiest idea what she was talking about, her words were floating somewhere in the air above his head. One dance.

‘Want anything?’ he asked. ‘Shame you weren’t there. A drink?’

She shook her head.

‘Poor old Julia,’ he said, patting her knee, ‘never mind, it’ll pass. You should have gone to sleep.’

‘Every time I start dropping off, he kicks me.’

‘Oh he does, does he? You’re that sure it’s a boy?’

She smiled, taking his hand. ‘I have a feeling.’

‘Give the little bastard some vodka,’ Theo said, ‘knock him out.’

She settled back on the pillow. ‘I think he’s quietening down a bit now. He doesn’t like it when I cough.’

‘Cough no better?’

‘On and off. I’m afraid I’ll be tossing and turning.’

‘I’ll sleep in there,’ he said, ‘give you some peace.’

‘You should. You don’t want to catch it.’

‘It’s nice in there by the fire,’ he said, ‘I’ll take this other pillow.’

‘Look at you,’ she said fondly, ‘you’re reeling.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Get yourself another blanket from the chest,’ she said. ‘Now you’re back, I think I can sleep.’

By the time he’d made the Chesterfield comfortable and got ready for bed, she’d fallen asleep. He poured himself one more drink, lit a cigar and stood in his dressing gown looking out of the window. It had stopped snowing. Everything was still, and the moon made the snow-covered street blue. His heart raced. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he told himself aloud, swaying slightly, ‘nothing at all to worry about.’ He drank some more and didn’t remember going to bed and falling asleep till the bells woke him. Julia was up making tea, padding about in her nightie, unaware that he was watching her. Her strangeness could still strike him breathless.

Three more months, give or take. Lyublino, Pushkino, Mytisci. Three more months, my little trouper.

It was a Tuesday in March, a very cold morning, and she’d just got up. She’d woken early, Polina wasn’t here yet, and she was stirring the still glowing embers of last night’s fire back into life. Suddenly she was soaking wet. Everything was soaking wet. She took the candle from the mantel, went back in and touched Theo’s shoulder. He was frowning in his sleep, mouth open, a faint snore back in his nose.

‘Theo.’ She shook him gently. ‘I think it’s starting.’

Theo blinking, scowling at the candlelight, his hair in his face.

‘It’s early,’ he said, grunting, sitting up in a groggy fuzz, ‘are you sure?’

She stood shivering, holding her wet night-dress away from her body. ‘Look at this.’

‘It’s too soon,’ he said.

‘I know.’

Theo groaned. First sign, Trettenbacher had said, bring her in. We won’t leave anything to chance, her being so small. He swung his legs out of bed and the cold hit him.

‘What time is it?’

‘About five.’

‘Oh God!’ He started dressing, semi-conscious. Julia stood quietly, holding her stomach with both hands and looking down at it. It felt heavy, ridiculously so, but then it had done for ages. She listened for pain within her body, but there wasn’t any, just a great cold that made her tremble all over.

‘Quick,’ said Theo, ‘put a dry nightie on.’

She took one from underneath the piles of bibs and bootees and neatly folded baby dresses in the chiffonier.

‘Right,’ he said, running out to fetch a carriage with his coat half on, ‘get yourself all muffled up. Be ready.’

She wiped herself clean with a towel and was ready by the time he came back. In the carriage she felt something shift inside. ‘Theo!’ she said, gripping his arm.

‘Nearly there,’ he said. But the first real pain she’d ever known began, and she tightened her grip so much on his arm that he clenched his teeth. The pain soared, made her close her eyes, tense every muscle and hiss. ‘Nothing at all to worry about,’ he said with more confidence than he felt. ‘You’re getting the best possible medical attention.’

The pain ebbed but came again at the door of the hospital. Trettenbacher himself came out to greet her, flanked by nurses. She was doubled over, Theo holding her up.

‘My dear, your teeth are chattering,’ Trettenbacher said, rubbing her cold hands. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ she gasped. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Well, we shall warm you up! This way—’

‘You’re in good hands now, Julia,’ Theo said, shifting from foot to foot in the cold. ‘Trettenbacher, do you need me for anything? Should I wait?’

‘Not at all. It won’t be for some time.’

‘You’ll keep me informed.’

‘Of course.’

‘Brave girl!’ Theo said. ‘You can do it!’

‘Of course she can!’

The nurses took her to a room painted white, with a high bed. The pain was gone. They told her to lie down and call them as soon as it came back. A door was open, there were voices. One of the nurses came back with an extra blanket. ‘Very cold out there this morning,’ she said pleasantly, ‘icy. How are you feeling?’

‘Scared,’ said Julia.

‘Of course you are.’

She was a kind-looking woman with a tired smile and a soft, wrinkled face, deeply hollowed. ‘Everyone feels scared with their first. Only natural. Don’t worry, it’ll all be over before you know it.’ Julia knew her from one of the doctor’s visits.

Another came and stood looking over her shoulder. This one knew her only by reputation and had been longing to see her. ‘Poor strange thing,’ she said quietly.

The hollow-faced nurse smoothed down the blanket and checked the water jug. ‘I’d try and get a bit of sleep if I were you,’ she said.

Impossible.

It was hideous. The pain beyond words and imagination, a raw black bubble blowing bigger and bigger, unendurable. Surpassing, turning its monstrous back for the fall like a sea beast. In the respites, the nurses came and went, and Trettenbacher with his assistants. All morning. But what was time? She knew it passed because of the window. She’d watched the light come up, watched the snow so cool and lovely a world away, wanted to roll in it, roll away the heat, watched the flakes grow sparse and slow, watched the white unremarkable sky persist in indifference as she burned, till slowly, scarcely perceptibly, it dimmed towards another evening.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she said, tears wetting the front of her nightgown.

‘Not much longer,’ a voice said briskly. One of those doctors. There were lots.

The hollow-faced nurse, smiling kindly.

‘She’s quite the stoic, isn’t she?’ someone said.

Then it was dark and there were no more respites. In the end it was only pain, and the pain was like fire, greedy for air, greedy for the whole world. Julia put back her head and moaned, a long harsh growl that rose to the pitch of a scream.

‘Time to send for the father,’ someone said.

‘Chloroform,’ said Trettenbacher calmly, calling his students round him.

The pain was taking her away. The voice, urbane, whispered in her ear, ‘There is nothing to worry about. We’ll give you something for the pain now, your baby is very large and we’ll need to help him along.’

She couldn’t see or think.

‘Take another look, Dr Chizh, can you feel the head? Breathe. Breathe in very deeply, very deeply.’

She was lost in the dark.

‘Heroldstein, check her pulse.’

Chizh cut and Trettenbacher, stern-faced with concentration, reached in with his metal tongs and slowly pulled into the world a big, hairy boy with screwed-up eyes and clenched fists.

Peace. No more pain, or if there was it was ignorable, just ordinary pain, tame pain that would one day die. They were sewing her up. The baby had not cried when they pulled him out, though he took in that first mighty gasp of the world audibly. What is this now, and how should I meet it? Steel yourself. He was quiet when the nurse finally placed him swaddled in his mother’s arms, the most beautiful baby in the world. Apart from the soles and palms of his tiny pink feet and hands, he was hairy all over, even the backs of his ears, and his big cone-shaped head bore a great healthy black mop. He was puzzled, perfect.

That’s how it was when Theo arrived, their two hairy entranced faces staring each at the other.

‘He knows me, Theo,’ she whispered.

‘Of course he does.’ Theo reached furtively towards the baby’s mop of a head. ‘You’re his mother.’

‘No, I mean he knows me. Isn’t he beautiful?’

‘He is.’

‘Just look at him. Theo. Theo Junior.’

‘He won’t look at me,’ said Theo Senior.

‘He can’t see much yet.’

‘He sees you.’

‘Yes, he does. He sees me. Do you want to hold him?’

He’d rather not, but couldn’t say. Babies were odd. He might drop it. Well, he’d better do this, so he took it and there it lay, it, him, the baby, warm and heavy in his arms. ‘Hello,’ he said to it.

‘I wanted so much for him to be normal,’ she said, ‘but now it doesn’t matter. His skin’s pale, look. He gets that from you.’

‘So it is.’

Poor child would suffer, Theo thought. Mine. My child. How did it come to this?

She burst into tears. ‘He’s so beautiful and everyone will call him ugly,’ she said.

‘No, they won’t.’

But of course they would. His path was clear. Ape-Boy. Remarkable, Unparalleled, the only Mother-and-Child Ape-People in existence.

‘He’ll be a wonder like you are.’

‘But I’m ugly. The ugliest in the world. But he’s not, he’s beautiful, but no one will see it. It’s not fair.’

‘Ugly’s only a word,’ Theo said.

‘No, it’s not.’

She wiped her face with one hand.

‘We have to look after him, Theo,’ she said. ‘We have to make sure nobody’s cruel to him.’

Theo’s own eyes filled up, but he wasn’t sure who he was crying for. ‘Of course we will,’ he said. ‘It’ll all be fine, he’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.’

‘Don’t let anyone throw stones at him,’ she said, and he picked up her hand and rubbed it firmly between his own till the baby started crying and Julia had to feed him. Theo stared in disbelief at the size to which her breast had swollen. She was very tired and started dozing while she fed, head drooping down towards the baby’s pup-like face. After a while the nipple slid from the baby’s mouth and both were asleep. Theo covered her breast and went to find Trettenbacher.

‘They’re asleep,’ he said. ‘Everything seems to be fine.’

‘She’s had a nasty time,’ the doctor said. He looked tired. ‘She needs her sleep.’

‘What were the odds, I wonder,’ Theo said, ‘fifty-fifty, eh, Doctor?’

‘What? That the condition would turn out to be hereditary?’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? We know so very little about it.’

‘Well.’ Theo sighed a very deep sigh. There was a flattened look about his eyes. ‘The world must make a place for these people.’

‘As it does,’ said the doctor.

‘Does it?’

Trettenbacher offered him a cigar, and the two men were quiet for a while. Trettenbacher was thinking about the medical report he would write and where he was going to publish it. Theo went out for a drink. The night was dark and cold, the stars above sharp as ice. A man in the tavern started talking to him about the price of tobacco.

‘I’ve just become a father,’ Theo said.

‘Hear that?’ the man yelled. ‘This man’s just become a father.’

The whole room, glad of a diversion, began drinking his health.

‘What is it? Boy or girl.’

‘Boy,’ he said proudly.

‘Congratulations! A man needs a son. Strong boy, is he?’

‘Very.’

Round after round to the new son.

He was misty-eyed when he got back to the hospital. Thank God I’ve got a sense of humour, he thought, bursting into laughter standing on the snow-covered steps. There we all are drinking the health of a fine decent-looking child, son and heir, the sort any man would be proud to own, and little do they know. Boy. Child. Well, it’s true, isn’t it?

He went in to find Julia crying, and the nurses running about tight-lipped. Not a doctor to be seen.

‘They’ve taken him away!’ she said.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. The doctors took him. I was feeding him, and he started coughing.’

‘I’ll find out. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing.’

The corridor was empty. He walked about till he found a nurse to waylay. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Why isn’t anyone looking after my wife? She’s very upset. Why have they taken her baby?’

The nurse was a small strict creature. ‘Oh, Mr Lent,’ she said, ‘we didn’t know where to find you. It’s all under control. The baby was having a little trouble breathing, but the doctors are taking care of things. Please go and sit with your wife.’

‘He was all right a minute ago,’ said Theo.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Lent, you’ve been gone a couple of hours. He had a little choking fit while he was feeding, and it seems to have set something off. But the doctors are taking care of it.’

Oh Jesus, he’s gone.

Theo walked to the end of the corridor. He’d seen it before with puppies. When he was a kid, the one that didn’t thrive, always thinking yeah, sure, it’ll make it, but it never does. Not once all this starts. Poor bloody creature. What was that all for? Eh? She’ll go mad. The way she looked at it.

He turned and walked back, preparing his face.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked, twisting a useless wet handkerchief in her hands.

‘I don’t think it’s anything serious,’ he lied jovially. ‘This often happens, I think.’

‘They said he stopped breathing.’

‘Yes, but they know what they’re doing, these doctors.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s quite amazing the things they can do these days.’

He said all the right things, but she still cried.

‘When are they bringing him back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go and see. Please go and see, Theo. Ask them how long.’

But then the hollow-faced nurse came in and took over, plumping up the pillows, filling the water jug, wiping Julia’s face with a cool cloth. ‘Now, now, no more crying,’ she said. ‘This happens sometimes. Dr Chizh knows what to do.’

‘Is he breathing?’

‘Of course he’s breathing.’

Theo tried to read her face. Good poker players, these nurses would make.

‘Where’s Trettenbacher?’ he asked.

‘Dr Trettenbacher’s gone home. He’ll be here first thing in the morning. Shall I bring you some tea? Mr Lent? You look done in.’

Theo wasn’t a tea man but said he’d take some with lemon and sugar. He’d forgotten he was drunk. The tea scalded his throat. Good, he thought, concentrating on the burn. Good. Julia sipped some too, her hand shaking a little as she raised the cup. The nurse went away and returned almost immediately. It was all looking very good, she said. They would be bringing the baby back in about a quarter of an hour. ‘In fact,’ she held up one finger and tilted her head, ‘listen…’

The newborn cry.

‘It’s him!’

‘Of course it’s him.’

Julia laughed. ‘He’s all right.’

‘See,’ said Theo.

Round spins the wheel. Round spins your head, your life, your future. To be or not to be. Theo was not convinced. Long, long ago, when he was a child, his Aunt Losey lost three in a row.

This baby, when it returned, was good as gold, feeding steadily then falling asleep. A quiet baby. That’s the way with some ill babies, he knew that. She didn’t though. She was happy.

‘You go home, Theo,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘You’re so tired.’

‘Go home, Mr Lent,’ the nurse said. ‘She’ll to to sleep now. God knows she needs it and so do you. Get some rest.’

When he got home, Polina had been in and cleaned up and left bread and cheese and pickles. He did nothing for a while, just gazed into space. Don’t think of him. He never even was. What a thing! What a terrible thing! His head felt light. It would’ve been all right. They could have made him part of the show. It was the only real life for them, after all, people like her, people like him. At least he’d never have had to want for anything.

Theo put his hand over his eyes.

Already he was hardening himself to the boy. Terrible thing, terrible, but you just had to get on with life. People got over things. His Aunt Losey did. Best thing all round. Bring another poor freak into the world to suffer. They’d go back to how it was, and he’d take her to Vienna for a holiday. She could see that Friederike she likes so much, go to a few shows. No need to work yet.

He slept restlessly and went back to the hospital late morning the next day. Julia was very tired.

‘I feel sick,’ she said.

Theo touched the baby’s hand. It was just like any baby’s hand, the grip, the softness of the palm. He smiled faintly. ‘Are you all right. Do you want a sick bowl? Shall I get a nurse?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’ll pass, I think.’

‘Look, he’s sleeping now,’ Theo said. ‘I’ll put him in his crib.’

‘Would you?’ She yawned and turned onto her side. ‘He’s a very sleepy boy, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘He is.’

Then she was asleep too and there wasn’t much point in hanging round. That day a thaw had began. The sweepers were driving slush along the sides of the roads when Theo went home for the soup Polina had left on the stove, buying himself a pie on the way and eating it before he even reached the door. There was a note from Volkov inviting him to dinner tomorrow night. After he’d eaten, he lay down and fell into a sleep much deeper than any the night had allowed, and it was dark when he woke. Polina had left a bunch of pansies in a jug on the table and they caught his eye as he was leaving. She’d like those he thought, pulling them dripping from the jug and looking round for something to wrap them in. He couldn’t find anything so let them drip as he trudged blearily back through the slush to the hospital. Trettenbacher took him into his office as soon as he arrived. ‘She’s taken a fever,’ he said, leaning back behind his desk. ‘Dr Chizh has given her a sedative, and we’ve managed to get her temperature down. She’s asleep now, best thing for her. A good night’s rest can work wonders.’ All under control, his manner said. ‘You might as well leave it till morning now.’

‘I brought her some pansies,’ Theo said blankly.

‘Wonderful. Give them to one of the nurses, and she’ll make sure they’re taken care of. Now Mr Lent, I’m afraid I have to tell you that the child’s chances aren’t good.’

He wasn’t surprised.

‘How is he?’

Trettenbacher sighed. ‘He doesn’t seem to want to breathe for himself,’ he said. ‘That may change. We’re doing everything we can, naturally.’

‘What about her? Does she know?’

‘We had to take him from her when the fever came on. She was upset, of course. But she has no idea how ill he is.’

‘I’m afraid of how she’ll take it.’ Theo looked down at the water drops from the flowers gathering into a small puddle by his foot.

‘Well, it will be hard,’ said Trettenbacher. ‘You know that.’ He stood up. ‘Still, it may not come to that, we’ll have to see.’

Of course it will come to that. He realised half way back that he hadn’t left the flowers. ‘Look at that,’ he said to them. ‘I took you out for a walk,’ and laughed. He thought how pretty they’d look scattered in the street and wanted to cry.

In the morning he was met by Trettenbacher again. ‘He went less than half an hour ago,’ Trettenbacher said. ‘She doesn’t know yet.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s not feeling well. But we’re doing our best to bring the fever down.’

‘Someone’s got to tell her.’

‘We thought perhaps you would want to.’

‘Oh God,’ said Theo.

He wasn’t surprised the baby was gone, but he was shocked at how ill Julia looked. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ he asked, and the sound of fear in his own voice scared him.

She was breathing as if it hurt, staring strangely. A new nurse was on duty, a raw-boned masculine woman with a clean sick bowl in her hand. ‘A fever,’ she said stoically, setting the bowl down on the table by Julia’s head. ‘The doctor’s treating it.’

‘Theo,’ Julia said, ‘they won’t let me see him. Tell them they’ve got to let me see him.’

‘Not now,’ said the nurse calmly, mixing a drink. ‘You need to rest.’

‘I want to see him,’ she said.

‘Look what I brought you,’ Theo said, the pansies, on their second outing, drooping a little in his hand. Her breath was rank when he leaned over.

‘I want to see him,’ she said.

‘Now you just calm yourself,’ the nurse said, placing a cold cloth on her forehead.

‘Will you take these and put them in water please, nurse,’ Theo said. When she’d gone he sat down beside the bed. The corners of her eyes were sore and red, and she looked at him as if she knew.

‘Has he gone?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Julia,’ he said, ‘he’s gone.’

Her eyes welled up. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has he gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘What have they done with him?’

‘I don’t know. Shall I go and find out?’

‘Has he gone?’

‘Now Julia, don’t you worry. He’s…’ What? In a better place. At peace now. He said nothing. The nurse came in with the flowers in a jug and put them down on the table next to the sick bowl.

‘I’ve told her,’ Theo said.

‘I want to see him,’ Julia said, and her throat began to convulse. The nurse grabbed the sick bowl and supported her shoulders. He watched in fascinated horror as Julia’s mouth, cavernous, complicated, reshaped itself and spewed forth bright yellow bile. She retched emptily for a few more minutes before the nurse lowered her head back down onto the pillow.

‘There, you’ll feel better now,’ Theo said uselessly, ‘now that’s up.’

‘Tell them to bring him,’ she said.

‘The little one’s gone to the good God, who knows best what to do,’ the nurse said, ‘and it’s your job now to get better. Drink this.’ She slipped a pill between Julia’s lips, pushed it quickly back on her tongue, poured in a little water and stroked her throat as if she was a dog. ‘Probably best if you leave, Mr Lent,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll send for you if there’s any change.’

There was no change that day. He walked about for a bit then went back to the tavern where they’d drunk the baby’s health. There was no one there that he recognised, and he sat by the wall drinking and wondering what to do. It occurred to him that she might die, and his mind went blank then started turning over and over. The end. The end of backstage, the lights, the crowds, the smell of sawdust. His savings wouldn’t last forever. He should have made good investments but speculation had never been his strong point. He calculated the cost of travel back to the States. His eyes burned. How could he live? He’d go back, find another fortune. Out there somewhere, another. Another.

How could there be another Julia? His heart felt sick.

He drank, pushed the thoughts away, pushed the baby away, tried to push her away. Push away the whole strange interlude in his life. If she was going to die, he couldn’t risk emotion. He remembered he was supposed to be going to Volkov’s tonight for dinner. ‘God damn,’ he whispered. One more, and home to the quiet apartment. I’ll go mad in here, he thought, but there was nowhere else to go and he couldn’t go in the bedroom because all the baby’s things were there. So he passed the time trying to read one of her books but couldn’t keep his eyes on the page. At seven he changed and set off for Volkov’s.

It wasn’t a big affair, just Volkov and his mother and the professor, Sokolov, with his bright, fierce bird’s stare. Somehow they’d all heard the news, and of course everyone asked after her.

‘They’ve taken blood,’ he said.

‘The little one,’ the old mother said, ‘he’s in a better place.’

That was all she said all night. The atmosphere was restrained. These fevers killed, everyone knew.

‘She’s a strong girl,’ Volkov said, ‘she’ll pull through.’

‘She’s strong,’ Theo replied, sounding more hostile than he’d intended, ‘but she’s grieving. That weakens one.’

As he crossed the hall after dinner, Tolya came up to him. ‘Can she have visitors?’ he asked.

‘She’s nowhere near well enough,’ Theo replied. Sokolov was walking behind him.

‘Do let me know when she is well enough,’ Tolya said solemnly as they passed into the drawing room.

Theo nodded.

Sokolov leaned close enough for Theo to smell a sourness on his breath. ‘A word, Lent, if I may?’

‘Of course.’

They sat down. ‘I believe you said you were returning to the hospital later this evening?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Please,’ said Sokolov, ‘allow me to put my carriage at your disposal.’

‘There’s really no need. Thank you for the offer, but the walk does me good.’

‘No no, I insist. It’s going to be a very cold night.’

The evening dragged on. When the time came, Theo, dreading whatever he’d find at the hospital, found himself rattling through the streets in Sokolov’s carriage, the professor beside him. The day had been long, and he’d drunk a lot. Now I am coping very well with this, he was saying to himself in his mind. The baby, poor little nothing, he didn’t even exist. Couldn’t call that an existence. Julia now, strong as an ox, she’ll pull through. Back to how we were before. Odd, yes, but we were getting by. It was working. Never before stayed in places like we did, those grand beds and expensive rooms. Everyone wanted to know us. She’ll get over it. They do. Look at Aunt Losey. Three in a row. Lots of women do.

‘I would like to be very frank and I hope you will not take it amiss,’ said Sokolov. ‘I would like to put a proposition to you.’

‘Fire away,’ said Theo.

‘Are you familiar with my work, Mr Lent?’

‘To some extent.

‘Perhaps not with my most recent studies. Are you aware of the work being done at the Anatomical Museum at the University?’

‘No.’

‘Some fascinating progress, Lent. Quite staggering. Lent, I realise this is an inopportune moment, but I must stress the importance of time.’

‘Time?’

Theo had no idea what the man was talking about.

‘Mr Lent, I will be frank and ask you to consider the possibility of offering your son’s remains to our Anatomical Museum at the University.’

My son. How peculiar.

‘Time?’ said Theo, a look of profound bemusement on his face.

‘The scientific benefits would be enormous.’

‘What are you suggesting, Doctor?’

Sokolov took a deep breath. ‘Your son is a medical curiosity. This you know. I repeat: the scientific benefits would be enormous.’

‘And I repeat: what exactly are you suggesting?’

‘We have perfected a method of embalmment more sophisticated, I believe, than any that has gone before. This is new territory, of course.’

‘You want,’ said Theo, turning away from the misty window and looking at Sokolov, a pair of anguished eyes, a thin forehead, all muffled up against the cold, ‘to embalm my — son.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Sokolov. ‘A very bad time.’

‘Yes indeed. A very bad time.’

They didn’t speak again until they reached the door of the hospital. Sokolov leaned over and shook Theo’s hand. ‘I am so very sorry for all your trouble, Mr Lent,’ he said. ‘I do appreciate your loss, and I would hesitate to bring this up at such a difficult time, but I am aware of the importance of time in this case.’

Theo’s face didn’t alter. ‘Not now,’ he said.

‘Of course. I am so sorry.’

The cold air bit as he got out of the carriage. Snow beginning, slowly swirling. He didn’t want to go in, wanted to run far away, a time before, once, before, anytime. But he went in, idiot-blank, and they said she was a bit better and he could go in and see her, but she was absolutely worn out so best not to stay too long. Someone had given her a rosary, and she was lying with her eyes open, slipping the beads between her fingers. The look in them cut him.

‘What is it?’ he said, taking her hand, ‘what’s the matter? You’ve been very sick but you’re getting better now. Soon be home.’

Her breathing was shallow. Though they’d cleaned her up, she still smelled faintly of vomit and diarrhoea.

‘What have they done with him?’ she asked. ‘Have they thrown him away? They do that, don’t they?’

‘Of course they don’t.’

‘I want him buried nicely.’

‘Of course. Thrown him away! Where do you get your ideas from?’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in the morgue.’

That set her off crying again. ‘A terrible place,’ she said. ‘Why do they put the dead in such terrible places?’

To grieve so deeply for someone she’d never known. Not like a person you’ve known for years, Theo thought, that’s understandable. But a baby, it never lived, never knew you, never got the time to be a person. So where does it come from, all that grief?

‘Good God,’ he said, ‘you’re still burning up. Would you like some water?’

The fever seemed to radiate out from her into the room.

‘We have to look after him, Theo.’

‘Of course we do.’

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at the wilting pansies. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she said. ‘Did you bring them?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sweet, Theo. He still needs someone to look after him.’

‘Here. Drink some water.’

‘My stomach hurts,’ she said.

‘Yes. Don’t worry. It’ll go away.’

She lifted her head to sip. Her hair was lank and straight.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s better.’

‘I think I’m going to die.’

‘What? Ridiculous. Of course you’re not. You’re going to get better and better, and we’ll go to Vienna. Don’t talk like that.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for you,’ she said, ‘but I’ll really miss you, Theo.’

I can’t take it, he thought. Two, three days ago, everything was normal.

‘I want Yatzi,’ she said. ‘Will you go and get Yatzi for me?’

Oh God, this’ll kill me. ‘Yatzi!’ he said indulgently. ‘Oh Julia, you are so funny. You and your old stick of wood.’ He leapt up, glad to get out of this awful sick room and back out in the cold. ‘Of course I’ll get him.’

He’d walk. It would be good for him. As he walked, he sang under his breath to stop himself from thinking. No point in thinking while the wheel was still spinning. They were good doctors, they’d pull her through. A letter on the rug. He ripped it open. Nothing good for sure. The name. Sokolov. He read: ‘ … hope you will give it careful consideration… a very fair remuneration for your valued co-operation.’ Oh hell, it never lived. Just dead matter. ‘… when she feels well enough… many would dearly love to see her… so much concern… a privilege… to see her… for which many will pay…’

He ventured into the bedroom, avoiding looking at the crib. There it was under her pillow. This old Yatzi thing. She hadn’t given it a thought since the baby started, and now look — back in favour.

‘There, my dear,’ he said to it, ‘you’re wanted again.’

He was back at the hospital within the hour and gave her that old lump of wood. She fell asleep immediately, holding onto it.

Some time in the very early morning, she woke and lay for a while remembering where she was and why she was alone. She didn’t feel sick any more. She wasn’t shivering. It was warm in bed and a curious sensation crept over her, as if she was back in the mountains. She’d never been away. Mama was there, and Yatzi. They were happy. Mama made Yatzi out of wood. She put something in him, something invisible that came from the mountains with us when we came down. ‘That thing’s filthy,’ Solana said. ‘At least let me give that bit of old cloth a good wash.’ Todos me dicen el negro… ‘Little girl,’ said John Montanee, ‘you still a little girl.’ How old? Dancing. The snake dancing. She was in her bed in the Sanchez house. Sunlight on the wall. Don Pedro came in. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘My baby.’

‘She’s better,’ Theo said to Trettenbacher.

‘No,’ the doctor said quietly but firmly, ‘I’m afraid that’s not true.’

‘She seems a lot better.’

‘It’s the nature of the illness. This is puerperal fever. It follows a pattern.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Nothing’s ever sure,’ said Trettenbacher.

‘Would now be a good time?’

‘There’s never a good time.’

‘Perhaps it would cheer her up to see people.’

‘She may well relapse before night. If she is to have visitors, best it were soon,’ Trettenbacher said shortly and walked away.

Theo sat down at the bedside and leaned over. ‘Julia,’ he said softly, ‘Julia,’ whispering, ‘my dear, there are some people who would very much like to see you.’

She lay on her side. Her eyes were open but vague and gummy. Her breathing was steady but slow, and a hot, sickly smell rose from the sheets. She said something in Spanish.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

More Spanish. Her voice had deepened.

‘So many are praying for you, love,’ he said. ‘Some friends who want to wish you well and a speedy recovery.’

All waiting on benches.

‘As they always did, my love,’ he said, ‘like old times.’

She smiled. ‘Has Cato come?’

‘He’s on his way.’

What harm?

‘Would you like to sit up a little?’

He settled her against the pillows, spread her hair out across her shoulders.

‘There,’ he said. ‘I’ll just bring them in.’

And oh God but they’ll pay.

Sokolov had come from the Museum. He sat first by the door. A line of faces looked expectantly, solemnly, towards Theo. Sokolov stood up. Theo leaned close and spoke rapidly into his ear, ‘I don’t see a problem with your plans for the child,’ he said. ‘As long as his mother doesn’t find out.’

Sokolov smiled, almost boyish in his unconcealed delight. ‘I think that’s the wise decision,’ he said. ‘I’m very grateful. We shall talk soon.’

Theo glanced along the row. A couple of learned doctors. Some dandy young buck. His girl. Couple of ladies. Old man in black fur. All rich.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said.

She saw faces looking at her.

‘Theo.’ He could scarcely hear her.

‘Yes, Julia.’

Her mouth was dry. ‘Give me a drink.’

He held the glass to her lips, and she wet them and spoke.

‘Do they want me to sing?’

‘No, no, you don’t have to do anything.’

‘Don’t cry,’ she said.

‘I’m not. Don’t worry about anything, Julia, it’s all going to be fine. It’s just some friends come to say hello.’

‘Has Cato come?’

‘Soon.’

The faces blurred in front of her eyes. She didn’t recognise any. Voices murmured. Someone wanted to shake her hand. A face, close up. Faces. It was hot. Too hot in here, she wanted to say but couldn’t remember how to say it. Her hands were touched. The faces melted into one another and the mess made her feel sick. It swirled about then re-formed into a mass of spiteful child faces.

‘Take them away,’ she said.

She turned to look at Theo but all she saw was the fig tree dropping its fruits onto the stones in the patio and Federico the iguana stretched along the lower branch. His eye swivelled and fixed her. The stones burned. Fiery, they rose up around her. Solana would come soon and take her back to bed, because she was sick. So sick.

The hollow-faced nurse came in softly, walked over to Theo and said, ‘There’s another young man for Miss Julia. He says his name is Tolya.’

Theo looked up, surprised. Julia’s eyes had closed, but she opened them now and it made him jump, as if she were dead already and her corpse had opened its eyes.

‘Tolya,’ she said.

He looked about at all the serious faces, feeling as if he’d just woken up. The old man in black fur was staring at him intently. ‘Lent,’ he said, ‘can I ask her a question?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Theo said.

‘Tolya,’ said Julia, lifting her head a fraction from the pillow.

‘In a minute, dear,’ said Theo, ‘we mustn’t overcrowd the room.’

She sank back, tossed her head and started speaking in Spanish again, a note of panic entering her voice.

‘Mama,’ she said, ‘my belly’s sore.’

‘Julia,’ said Theo.

‘Time to leave,’ the hollow-faced nurse told the assembly round the bed, smiling as she began to usher them towards the door.

‘There,’ he said, ‘they’ve gone. Here’s Tolya.’

But she was burning up again.

‘Only for a minute,’ said the nurse, leaving the room and closing the door quietly.

Poor clod sat there gawping. Theo felt himself dislocate. We are getting there, he thought with almost a sense of wonder. That far-off place round every corner. This is it. Tolya reached out and took her hand, sat holding it silently, stroking the back of it with his thick fingers. She probably didn’t know he was there. ‘The fur is very soft,’ he said.

‘Not fur,’ said Theo. ‘Hair. She doesn’t like you to call it fur.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t think she’ll mind if it’s you,’ said Theo.

When her head began to toss upon the pillow, Tolya left in tears. I won’t cry, Theo told himself. I’m not here. The nurse came by and gave her something that put her into a restless sleep, and he went out into the corridor, down to the front door and stood gratefully gulping cold air.

‘Here, Lent,’ said a slightly aggrieved voice, ‘was that entirely fair?’

The old man in black fur stood on the steps smoking a pipe.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘In there,’ the old fool said. ‘That was nowhere near ten minutes.’

‘What!’

‘I know it’s special circumstances,’ he went on, ‘but that wasn’t cheap. And then you go and let that other fellow in for nothing.’

Theo stared at him for a moment, turned and walked back inside. Sokolov was coming out of Trettenbacher’s office. ‘My dear Lent,’ he said, busying himself with his gloves, ‘I am so sorry.’

A year ago, we’d never have imagined. A year ago — a theatre opening, pink flowers in her head-dress. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Theo impatiently. He returned to her bedside. How long had he been gone? He’d only been gone a minute but it was all change again, sleep gone, two nurses, Julia doubled over on her side, Trettenbacher striding importantly in. Her nightie was up, her stomach swollen up hard like a coconut. Her eyes squeezed tight. Trettenbacher laid his hand on her stomach and she screamed.

‘Wait outside please, Mr Lent,’ said the hollow-faced nurse.

He could hear her screams in the corridor. He couldn’t bear it. He ran outside, stood on the steps, covered his face. She wouldn’t want it. Him remembering her like that. No good. He walked backwards and forwards on the steps for several minutes, punching the side of his head from time to time. He could not carry it, this death, this end, it should not have happened. ‘It’s all over,’ he said aloud. No more on the road. No shows. No rush of it all. Her in the spotlight, taking a bow, the applause, the smell of perfume. He went back inside, found a nurse and said he was going home, it seemed there was no use in his presence here and could someone please let him know as soon as there was any news. Then he almost ran home through the dark empty streets.

She didn’t even know I was there, he told himself. What’s the difference, here or there? There was another letter from Sokolov on the rug. He skimmed it. Money. Let us talk. The remains of your son. I would not raise such a delicate issue were it not for the pressures of time.

He poured a long drink.

The Museum, he read, I’m sure you realise, would pay very handsomely indeed for two such specimens.

Around midnight they called him, but she was dead by the time he arrived, her hands crossed on the coverlet, hair combed, eyes closed. All gone, that sickness, pain, everything. He should do something, say something. The nurses were there. ‘So, was it?’ he said, ‘Did she?’

‘We helped her all we could,’ said the hollow-faced nurse.

‘I’m very grateful to you.’

‘Mr Lent,’ said the big nurse, touching his arm, ‘here are her things.’

He didn’t remember getting home, but there he was, sitting on the bed looking at the baby clothes he’d taken from the chiffonier. All in sizes, as she’d said. The poor could have them. Her guitar. The harmonica. A pair of small white dancing shoes standing neatly together at the side of the bed. And this ridiculous thing in his hands. Ye Gods. Yatzi. What do I do with you? He walked into the other room where the fire still burned in the big fireplace. I looked after her, got her a living, kept her company, he thought. And she certainly looked after me. Wouldn’t hear a word against me. Always on my side. He stood looking down into the flames. Tears came into his eyes. What now? Can’t have this around. Reminding me, reminding me.

He dropped Yatzi into the fire. The old bit of dress was so faded and rotten that it just curled up and died. The wood beneath caught quickly and burned with a dark green flame. Just a piece of burning wood.