The Illusionists

FOUR

The young couple walked southwards through the park. Suspended behind bare trees the pale orange sun held little warmth, and the insistence of the wind obliged them to keep up a steady pace. Jasper Button would have preferred to stroll and perhaps to have taken hold of Eliza’s arm, but he was compensated for the lack of this opportunity by the way brisk exercise in the chill air brought colour to her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle. He thought how pretty she looked in her neat bonnet and brown coat, and this demure exterior coupled with his awareness of where she was heading only increased his pleasure. She was not just a beauty. She both was and was entirely not what she seemed. He had never met anyone whose contradictions fascinated him so entirely. His admiration made him a little awkward in her company, but he was a determined man who did not lack self-confidence. He would win her in the end, Jasper assured himself. Eliza Dunlop would be his wife, and they would have a handsome family together. Aspects of this plan brought a flush to his cheeks to match Eliza’s own.

Between the trees ahead there was a flash of gold. Laughing, Eliza pointed to a Gothic spire and a canopy topped with pinnacles that spiked the fading sky.

‘The Memorial looks just like the Philosophers’ cabinet,’ she said.

‘Or rather, Devil constructed his cabinet to resemble the Memorial,’ Jasper replied. ‘In either case, they are both monstrosities.’

The sun was setting now and the gilt bronze of the Prince Consort’s statue glimmered so harshly in the horizontal rays that Jasper lifted his hand and pretended to shield his eyes. They skirted the west side of the structure and stopped to examine the modern frieze and sculptures. Jasper seized the opportunity to link Eliza’s arm in his. Her gloved hand rested on his forearm, neither yielding nor resisting. Her chin was tipped upwards as she gazed at the enthroned Albert.

‘I am half expecting his head to rotate and Carlo’s voice to utter a dire warning, aren’t you?’ In a mournful voice she quoted, ‘“I curse you to eternity and beyond.”’

‘Carlo isn’t of a size for it. It would take a giant to work a trick inside that vast thing.’

‘You are right. They would have to recruit a suitable one. Then it would be Boldoni, Wix and Cyclops, and that doesn’t sound nearly so good.’

Eliza laughed again and withdrew her arm. She turned her back on the Memorial and began to walk so fast that Jasper had to scurry to keep up with her. He was thinking, Does Boldoni and Wix sound good to her? Why is that?

‘I am afraid I shall be late,’ she said.

‘You have plenty of time.’

They passed through the traffic in front of the imposing dome of the Royal Albert Hall and set off through the streets of South Kensington. The evening was closing in, and yellow lights shone in comfortable rooms where the curtains had not yet been closed. Jasper admired the handsome stucco residences with their solid front doors surmounting flights of stone steps.

‘I would like to live in one of these houses some day,’ he said. There was no reason not to be ambitious.

‘They’re very large.’

‘A suitable size for a family.’

She turned her head and their eyes met. ‘Is that really what you want, Jasper?’

Her directness unnerved him a little but he answered with complete conviction, ‘Yes. Of course it is. A wife, a family, a comfortable home and security for all of us. What man wouldn’t wish for the same?’

‘Quite a number, I believe,’ she said in her composed manner.

Jasper persisted, ‘And what do you want, Eliza?’

They walked under a street lamp and as the light swept over her face he noticed the sudden bright eagerness of her expression. She looked almost avid, he thought.

‘Ah. I want to know the world, and myself.’

Jasper smiled. He sometimes forgot it, but she was very young. Barely twenty years old. He felt the opposite weight of his own cynical maturity, forged by the years in Stanmore as much as by those that had followed. Eliza was quick to follow his thoughts.

‘You think that sounds jejune? Believe me, I have considered my future with proper seriousness, even though you think I am hardly old enough to have learned my alphabet.’

‘Not in the least. I think you are amazingly aware.’

Eliza almost tossed her head. ‘For one so young and so female, do you mean to say?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I do not want to be like my poor mother. Nor do I even want to be like my sister Faith.’

Jasper knew that Faith and Eliza were the daughters of a moderately prosperous greengrocer. Their mother had been a dutiful wife who had devoted herself to the care of her husband and daughters, always putting aside her own quiet interests in choral music and landscape painting, and then had died of a consumption before Faith turned fifteen. Until Faith’s marriage to Matthew Shaw an aunt had lived in the Dunlop household, but once that union was accomplished the aunt had grown tired of her role and returned to her own home, leaving Eliza in the care of her father. Mr Dunlop had soon remarried, but Eliza did not hold a high level of regard for her mother’s replacement. She had lived next with Faith and Matty, but when their first child was born a nursemaid arrived to help the new mother and the small house had been distinctly too small for all of them. By this time Eliza had declared that she would study art, her determination to do so only increased by John Dunlop’s opinion that this would be a waste of her time and his money.

‘Nevertheless, it is what I shall do,’ Eliza said.

She had a tiny amount of capital of her own, left to her by her mother, and this she used to establish herself in a room in a ladies’ lodging house in Bayswater. From here she had only to walk across the park to the Rawlinson School of Art.

‘A life model?’ her stepmother had gasped, her eyes two circles in her circular face.

‘Yes. It is a perfectly respectable job, and I need employment. Would you and my father prefer it if I went into service?’

John Dunlop had plenty of other pressing concerns, and there would soon be a new addition to his family.

‘Eliza reads books. She has educated herself out of our understanding, my dear. We must allow her to make her own mistakes,’ he said.

So Eliza had got her own way, which was the usual course of events.

Jasper asked too quickly, ‘Why don’t you want to be like your sister? Matty is a good man, they have healthy children, Faith appears – to me, at least – to be very contented.’

‘I hope so. But why do you assume that what makes my sister content would have the same result for me?’

He longed to tell her, Because I want to make you happy. Our happiness together will be my life’s ambition.

They had reached the steps of the school. Preposterously, Jasper found himself scanning the area for a spot where he might sink to his knees and propose to her. He didn’t manage to do this, or anything except gape at her like a village idiot.

A dark thought quivered at the margin of his consciousness, but out of long practice he suppressed it.

Eliza skipped up the steps and paused with her gloved hand on the massive doorknob.

‘You know, Jasper, there are so many places and things I would like to see. There is so much to learn.’

‘Yes,’ Jasper agreed, sounding even in his own ears the essence of dullness.

‘Thank you for walking me here.’

‘I’ll come back after the class and see you home again.’

‘No, please don’t do that. I can look after myself.’

Here was the nub of it, he understood. He wanted to protect her, but to place herself under a man’s protection went against what Eliza imagined to be her independent principles. He would have to be patient.

‘All right.’

She waved her small hand and the heavy door closed behind her.

Disconsolate, Jasper walked away. They had not quite quarrelled, but still the discussion had not taken the direction he had hoped for.

Inside the school’s domed entrance hall Eliza took a moment to collect herself. Students on their way to five o’clock classes clipped across the black-and-white marble floor, the double doors to Professor Rawlinson’s office stood partly open to reveal a slice of oriental carpet, portraits lining the stairs gazed down at her with welcome indifference. Jasper’s unspoken urgency, his sheer concern, had ruffled her temper. The school’s atmosphere of calm focus on art was soothing. She was pleased to find herself a small – but still essential – component in the functioning of this higher machine.

She untied her bonnet and mounted the stairs towards the Life Room.

‘Good evening gentlemen, Miss Frazier.’

The students had been lounging at their boards but they sat up as soon as Raleigh Coope RA, Master of Life Drawing, came in.

‘Good evening, Mr Coope.’

The Academician was an admired and respected teacher.

Eliza waited behind the screen. She was ready for the class. When the room fell silent she experienced a small flutter of nerves, but this always happened before she took a pose.

‘Miss Dunlop, if you are ready to join us, please?’

She emerged into the room. There was the usual circle of gentlemen, Charles Egan and Ralph Vine and the others, and one lady, Miss Frazier, in her tweed skirt and artist’s smock blouse. A mixed life drawing class was highly unusual, but the Rawlinson was a very modern school.

At the centre of the circle was an empty chair. Eliza walked to it, enjoying the snag of tension in the air. She untied the string of her robe and slipped it off, and Mr Coope took it from her and hung it within her reach. Naked, Eliza sat down and found her pose. She turned her head to reveal her neck, eased her shoulders, curled one hand and extended the fingers of the other on her thigh, letting all the bones and ligaments of her body loosen and settle in their proper alignment. A faint stirring of a draught brushed her skin.

Her gaze found the canvas she liked on the opposite wall. It was a blue-and-grey composition of sea, shingle and sky. She let her thoughts gather at the margin of this other place, and then she slipped into it as if into the sea itself.

The only sounds were the scrawl and slither of pencils on paper and Mr Coope’s slow tread as he circled the room.

The class lasted for two hours, with a short break halfway through during which Eliza put on her robe and drank a cup of tea. Miss Frazier ate a sandwich and read her book while most of the young men went outside to smoke and talk. The routine was familiar, even including Charles Egan’s attempts to engage Eliza in banter after Mr Coope brought the class to an end and left the room. She didn’t find any aspect of the work in the least tiring. She felt clean and refreshed after the dreamlike hours of wandering within the sea painting.

When Eliza emerged from the school she found herself satisfactorily alone, and briefly hesitated. An omnibus route passed quite close to her intended destination, but she noticed a hansom cab waiting nearby. She told herself that she took it on impulse, although at a deeper level she knew that this was what she had intended all along.

It had been a bad night. The house was less than half full and the sparse audience was sullen. All the performers were affected by the poor reception of their best efforts, and Jacko Grady’s brandy-fuelled bad temper and curses as they came offstage only added to the atmosphere of despondency.

Devil couldn’t see what was happening beneath the concealed trapdoor but Carlo had been slow to perform the demanding manoeuvre leading to his reappearance in the good philosopher’s robe, and there were three or four long seconds of delay before the heap of clothing stirred and resurrected itself. Devil lay waiting with his face in the stage dust and silently swore. Fortunately the audience seemed too sunk into lethargy even to notice the mistake.

When they came off Jacko Grady muttered to Devil, ‘What the hell’s the matter with you two? I keep telling you to go faster, Wix, not the opposite. Get it right or get out of my theatre.’

Devil clenched his fists within the sleeves of his costume. He hated the fat man so much that his fingers itched to close about his neck. In the foetid corner where they changed he took his fury out on the dwarf.

‘Grady’s right. You were like a dog in a sack out there. This is our chance, this act. Nothing less than perfection will do for Boldoni and Wix.’

Carlo’s bruised face turned even darker, but not before Devil saw the flicker of shame in it. He was proud and he would be even more disappointed with the night than Devil had been.

He snapped, ‘Shut your sloppy mouth. Where would this act be without me, I’d like to know? Who are you? Nothing but a tuppenny broadsman.’

‘What happened?’

‘Bloody stilt jammed in the trap.’ Carlo thrust out his hand. The heel of it was scraped, and freckled with splinters where he had evidently wrenched the raw wood to free himself. Silently Devil handed him a wet rag to wipe the skin clean. Next to them Heinrich took Lucie in his arms and arranged her ringlets over her shoulders before they went out into the lights. Bascia, the female partner of the acrobatic duo, sniggered and muttered something under her breath to her brother. The tiny bells stitched to her costume tinkled like an echo of laughter.

Devil tried to breathe evenly but suppressed frustration only made his heart knock against his ribs. Tremors ran under his skin and he shook as if in a fever. Failure was at hand, and out of failure fear blossomed.

The old figure of darkness edged with flame took shape and sprang at him. It was as real in that moment as Carlo or Grady. Devil recoiled. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to block out the apparition, but the screams of a dying boy were loud enough to deafen him.

Leave me alone, Devil inwardly howled. You are gone, I am still here.

He made himself drop his hands. If he brought his mind to bear on the here and now, he knew that the shape of Gabe would fade away.

He forced himself to think.

The badness of the show was Grady’s fault. Like its poor performers the theatre itself was cracking and subsiding all round them. Grady had chased away the proper audience, the front row customers in silk hats and jewels, and in their place he encouraged vulgarians and drunks – and not sufficient numbers even of those. The coarse comedian who now closed the first half was supposed to appeal to Grady’s mob, but the man wasn’t good enough to make even the lowest people laugh. Without subtlety, without at least giving an audience the opportunity to feign innocence at double meanings, dirty talk was just dirt. Devil was surprised to note his own prudery but he knew what was right: he knew what would bring in the crowds and their money. The failure was Grady’s, not his own.

The dark figure was still there, in the periphery of his vision. He was afraid of a memory, and a memory couldn’t hurt him. He aimed a vicious kick at the inner spectre but his foot connected only with a storage hamper that toppled over and spilled its contents. He slouched forwards to set it upright and saw that as usual Bascia was looking at him. Her black eyes reminded him of ripe berries in the Stanmore hedges. She tilted her head in a gesture of invitation.

Carlo ignored his antics with the hamper. He pulled down his cap to cover his eyes and stalked away. Devil understood that he should go after him and try to set matters straight, perhaps even apologise if he could bring himself to do so. There would not be much of an act without Carlo, whereas the dwarf could always find another front man. But instead he matched Bascia’s head tilt with one of his own. The warmth of a woman’s body would obliterate Gabe more effectively than brandy ever could.

There was a cupboard in an angle of the dim corridor that led between the dressing rooms and the stage. He took the girl’s hand and they slid into the cramped space. The opening bars of Heinrich’s and Lucie’s waltz scraped the air as their mouths met.

Eliza paid the hansom driver, wincing at the size of the fare. She hurried down the alley beside the theatre and she was at the stage door when the dwarf flew out. He almost collided with her but before she could stop him or call out his name he whirled past and raced towards the Strand. She watched him go, then seized the opportunity to step in through the open stage door. She blinked in the yellow light. The air was redolent of sweat and smoke and there was a hollow echo of stamping feet in the distance.

‘Yes?’

A man seated in a cubbyhole looked at her over his newspaper. She recognised the doorman who had bundled them into the street on her first visit to the theatre.

‘Mr Wix. I am here to see Mr Wix.’

The man’s grin showed his teeth, or the place where most of his teeth had once been.