Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter Page A

outside Sicily. Old family recipe. Il mio papa brought it with him. As for our bombe surprise –’
    ‘Ooops!’ interpolated Fevvers, who, at that moment, by some accident, had contrived to overturn her powder box. What a mess! It took a moment or two to dust the spilled powder off the things on the dressing-table and then it was she herself who continued.
    ‘So all us girls was fixed up satisfactorily and none of us got a wink of sleep that night, as we was all busy with planning and packing. Once our things were stowed away at last, we foregathered in the parlour to crack the last bottle of Ma Nelson’s port that Esmeralda thoughtfully hid behind the fireguard when that demented Minister bust in. How sad we were to say goodbye to one another and to that room, the repository of so many bittersweet memories and humiliation and camaraderie, of whoring and sisterhood. And, as for me, that room will be ever hallowed in my mind since it was there I first released myself from gravity. We each took a little souvenir to remind us forever of stout-hearted Nelson.’
    ‘Myself,’ said Lizzie, ‘I took the French clock that always says, midnight, or noon –’
    ‘– for ain’t it living proof that time stands still, sir?’
    And Fevvers opened her great eyes at him, again, with such a swish of lashes that the pages of his notebook rustled in the breeze even if, due to the lateness of the hour, the thick, shining whites of those eyes were now lightly streaked with red.
    ‘That clock – you’ll find it right there, on the mantelpiece, for we never move an inch without it. Why, I do declare! I must have tossed my knickers over it in my haste to dress for this evening’s show, for it’s quite hidden!’
    She stretched one long arm across the room and twitched the voluminous drawers away from the very pretty, old-fashioned clock of her description, with Father Time on top and hands stuck at twelve for all eternity. Then dropped the drawers in a lacy heap on Walser’s lap. The women chuckled a little as he removed them with tactful thumb and fingertips and laid them on the sofa behind him.
    ‘But, as for me,’ she said, ‘I took my sword, Victory’s sword, the sword that started out its life on Nelson’s thigh.’
    She thrust her hand into the bosom of her dressing-gown and brought forth a gilt sword, which then she flourished above her head. Although it was only the little toy sword of a full-dress Admiral, it flashed and glittered in the exhausted light so sharply that Walser jumped.
    ‘My sword. I carry it about all the time, for reasons both of sentiment and self-protection.’
    When she’d made sure he’d noticed what an edge it had, she replaced it in her bosom.
    ‘At the end of the night, there we clustered like sad birds in that salon and sipped our port and nibbled a bit of fruitcake Lizzie had put up for Christmas but there was no point in keeping it. How sad, how chilly that room! We never bothered to light a fire, after the funeral, so there was only a few nostalgic ashes of yesterday’s sandalwood in the hearth. It was: “Remember this?” and “Remember that?” until our Jenny says: “I say, why don’t we open our curtains and let in a little light on the subject, since this is the last we shall see of this room?”
    ‘And the curtains had never been opened in all my memory of the place, nor could a single one of the other girls recall when those curtains had last been opened, either, for with those drapes there had been made the artificial night of pleasure which was the perennial season of the salon. But now, with the Mistress of the Revels departed into darkness, it seemed only right and proper that we should give it all back to common day.
    ‘So we threw open the curtains, and the shutters too, and then the tall window that opened above the melancholy river, from which came off a chill yet bracing wind.
    ‘It was the cold light of early dawn and how sadly, how soberly it lit that room