The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  He flourished his hand into a display of chivalry and guided her by the small of her back away from the crowds and into the hub of the foyer. ‘Drink, glass of champagne as we tour?’

  ‘No thank you. Don’t drink and write,’ she lied, and reluctantly followed him into the throng.

  To her annoyance Frankie was not offered another drink and, finishing Mr Parsons’ tour, found herself with nothing but a heavy brain and a sticky patch on her back where his hand had rested for much of the tour. Resentful at the sight of people sipping port in the tea rooms she went directly up to her seat. The growing crowd on the top floor was hot as a farmyard market, scents of women’s perfumes and men’s cologne stifling the air. Fur and silk had given way to tweed and cotton. Frankie’s chair was hard and wooden with no upholstery, and she could only see the top of the stage if she craned her neck to an uncomfortable angle. ‘Weekly treat, my eye,’ she murmured.

  Down below, stiff bottoms were making their way onto velvet seats while violent discussions arose in the stalls about the size of ladies’ hats. Those who had paid for their tickets wanted to see, and those who had paid for their hats wanted to be seen. Scanning her eyes round the hall she frowned. Two women in brown were leaning forward discussing something earnestly. Were those two faces she had seen before? She racked her brains for a few moments, then the memory popped up. They had been in the gallery at the suffragette sentencing. One of them had on the same taxidermied seagull hat.

  The bang of the auditorium doors closing made her jump and as her eyes settled, she found her face had lit on a box below, not the closest to the stage but the next in. She had always had good long-distance eyesight so it didn’t take her long to realise that the girl sitting in the box was the snake girl from the other night. Now however, she looked different. Her long blonde hair was pinned up, a faux hairpiece creating curls round her face. She wore a perfectly fitting turquoise gown with exquisite beadwork spidering her fine shoulders, and yet she seemed strangely uptight with discomfort. She glanced up and caught Frankie’s eye. Startled, Frankie looked away, finding anywhere else to plant her gaze. When she tentatively looked back, the girl was staring at the stage.

  Frankie didn’t have time to think on it because once the lights dimmed, the rumbling of bodies hushed, and the curtain whipped up sharply.

  The first half of the show rambled slowly. There was Xandra Beagle, a muscular woman who belted out Wagner from a plasterboard crescent moon; the Boston twins who played ragtime and danced a two-step; a bizarre German imitation of the Ballets Russes in silk harem pants and dirndls, and a pack of bulldogs dressed as can-can girls who slobbered violently making treacherous piles of slime on the stage. In between each act the Chairman emerged with his gavel, hurling jokes into the audience like grenades – ‘What’s the difference between a motor taxi and a hansom cab? One’s got acetylene lamps, the other a set o’lean horses!’ Frankie had begun to grow anxious, not just about Ebony’s act but for the day’s article. She wished she hadn’t thrown the paper away. She pictured it curling in the fire and wished she’d had the guts just to open it and see if they printed it. She wondered if she had time at the interval to go out and buy a copy, then remembered that she only had one shilling left in her pockets to last until tomorrow.

  The Great Foucaud was up next. The Chairman’s red bald pate nearly burst in excitement. The interval nigh, Frankie could smell wafts of sugary buns and eclairs through the auditorium doors.

  The stage lights dimmed until the footlights were just a glowing hiss. Then came a sound she had heard backstage on Parsons’ tour, an irate roar; a narked catty beast, hot under stage lights, pacing back and forth. Stripes became visible one by one until the whole back corner of the stage was lit and out of the gloom materialised the striding form of a tiger, its slow hulking gait rippling behind the bars of a shining cage. Any doubts there might have been about the authenticity of the Great Foucaud’s impending trick evaporated. The crowd shifted quietly.

  After letting the sight of the big cat soak in, a jungle drum began to murmur in the pit and a woman in white tripped across the stage, screaming politely. Minutes later, men in tiger loincloths followed, their bodies greased dark and streaky by some kind of varnish. The woman swayed this way, then that; the drums echoed her movements. Upstage, The Great Foucaud himself appeared in a mawkish burlesque of savagery, feathers and bones, leather and teeth, little plaster of Paris monkey skulls rattling from him. He snarled and joined the mob until they had the woman pinned on her back and were lifting her by her wrists and ankles towards the tiger’s cage.

  Frankie sat forward. They weren’t going to . . .

  They pressed her spine against the bars, one man on each limb, the Great Foucaud casting gigantic spells with his arms around her. A gentleman behind Frankie cleared his throat. The drums beat louder and faster. Foucaud’s conjuring grew wilder. His men thumped their feet and bent their knees. The woman thrashed her head. The man behind Frankie coughed and she jerked her neck back at him until he stopped.

  Foucaud paused, his hand on the cage. The tiger was crouched at one end, licking its fangs with a slippery pink tongue. Then, without flourish, Foucaud swiftly opened the cage and shoved the woman inside. He snapped the door shut. She pinned herself to the back bars. Something about her posture said that she wasn’t entirely confident about Foucaud’s magical powers. The lavish play-acting stopped. She took a couple of steps to the left. The tribal dance picked up and the men ran around the tiger cage, pressing their hands to their mouths and shrieking, waving their arms in the air.

  Frankie leaned closer. The woman inched one way, then the other. The tiger swayed, following the pattern of her pacing. She clutched the bars behind her. It meandered forward, hunched and skulked, then pressed itself backwards as if it would spring. Suddenly, it took both front paws from the ground. Someone screamed prematurely. But instead of lunging, it raised its paws to its head as if something was bothering it about its face. Frankie watched intently as the tiger scratched away, eventually managing to tug its own head off, and standing there in the cage, dressed from head to toe in tiger skin was the Great Foucaud, who even now had seized the hand of the woman and was dragging her out of the cage, spreading his body, wide and cruciform into the centre of the stage for a huge showman’s bow, his arms up, his head proud, the tiger mask tossed aside.

  The stalls were on their feet applauding. The Great Foucaud luxuriated in the approval, bowing first to one side, then the other, then a special twist of the wrist and a flop double at the Royal Box. Frankie found to her irritation that her heart was racing wildly. She didn’t like to be tricked.

  She blew her breath up into her hair. Most children loved the thrill of deception; a coin disappearing behind an ear, a queen of spades turning into a jack. She had always wished she were quick enough to yank the hand free, see where it was concealing the coin, prise open the folded card. Once or twice she’d had a go, before being hauled out of the magic tent by her mother.

  The interval was brief and the show began again, but Frankie found herself unable to concentrate on any of the acts. The two suffragettes in front of her seemed to be having the same problem, whispering so loudly to each other that a woman with a necklace of taxidermied mice round her throat to rival the seagull hat leaned forward and hissed at them.

  And then she was announced. The last act. Ebony Diamond: The circus girl who had spent her childhood in a travelling wagon had made it to the London Coliseum. Peachy footlights slammed to black. A communal fidgeting rustled round the space, then halted as the scenery began to shift.

  From the top of the proscenium arch a trickle of stars rained down, tiny firefly lanterns held on wires, drifting to the floor. They came to rest a foot short of it stretching from the footlights all the way to the back wall. And in this pitch Milky Way, lowered from the heavens of the theatre with a slow mechanical crank, down she came like a raven, every inch of her skin except her face sheathed in black stocking, silk or lace, h
er figure almost disappearing against the twilight. It was as if she knew, in this replica of the galaxy, inside the replica of the world itself, here was a place she could vanish safely and become just a reflection, a spectre of herself. She looked incredibly calm, the horror on her face that Frankie had seen earlier in the street all washed away. Frankie held her breath.

  The orchestra played the opening of a melancholy waltz. After a few bars she recognised the tune. ‘Once I was happy, but now I’m forlorn . . .’

  Ebony Diamond began to swing gently, back and forth, catching the melody’s three-beat circle at the peak of each swing. When the trapeze was in full motion, she twisted her legs to a stop several feet up the rope and held herself there, using gravity to fly for a split-second before she plunged, catching the bar upside down with the tops of her feet.

  There was a gust of applause. The tune faded to the end of its first run, and Ebony hung among the stars.

  A rush of strings, and it whipped itself up to a fiercer volume, repeating the chorus. Some people in the stalls had begun to sing along. ‘She flies through the air with the greatest of ease . . .’

  Ebony twisted and her hands caught the bar before she took off again, swinging and catching, swinging and catching, knees, ankles, then elbow joint, using the thick ropes to snake round her thighs that strained through their bloomers, then flipping again, catching the bar only with her fingers, hoisting herself up, spinning with the wood nestled in the crook of her pelvis, somersaulting, somersaulting among the stars, as the trapeze whipped faster back and forth. In the crowd, the voices fell silent. There was only the pitch of the maddening waltz. ‘. . . And my love she purloined away . . .’

  Her body became a twirling ball, a shooting star, a Milky Way of its own. She was joined to the trapeze like another limb, a lover she could charm and entwine. She spun for minutes and minutes, and as the second run of the song came to an end, she dropped suddenly and hung from her neck, facing the crowd while the whole of the stalls stood to applaud.

  The ovation lasted a full minute and she hung there, not moving a muscle.

  Then came the third verse. This time more slowly, statelier, while she slipped her ankle round one of the ropes and swung upside down. The music continued and she pulled herself upright, waiting patiently as a leather hoop on a chain slid down the rope towards her. She clipped it to the middle of the bar. Frankie’s stomach jumped. She had heard of acrobats holding on by their mouths before but never seen it.

  ‘. . . The daring young lass on the flying trapeze. Her movements were graceful, all the world she could please . . .’

  She began to swing again. The orchestra sped up the dizzy waltz. Her swing grew wilder. The strings of tiny lights flickered back and forth in the current, and soon were moving at different paces at different times, a black sky shimmering with diamonds.

  Frankie could barely keep her heart from her throat as Ebony swung faster. The final round of the chorus was coming to an end; the audience could hear it in the violins, pelting out against the wall of trumpets and brass. ‘Her movements were graceful, all the world she could please . . .’ She leapt into the air like a jackdaw, spreading her arms. There was a giant wave of exclamation. And Ebony disappeared.

  It looked at first in the silver gauze of the footlights as if she was falling fast. But if she was, she never made it as far as the ground. There was no thump, no body to see. The stage was nothing but an empty black sea, sprinkled with the firefly lamps. No smoke, no mirrors, no changes in the light. Just a swinging trapeze and a woman who was somersaulting one minute and gone the next.

  There was a collective holding of breath, then a few people began to applaud. The idea began to cotton on that this was it, the end of a brilliant act. The leather strap had been a ruse, she had no intention of catching it. The applause grew until it was louder than the Great Foucaud’s. People began jumping to their feet. The stalls turned into a garden of swaying colourful hats. The vigour of the clapping grew overwhelming. Young men put their fingers in their mouths and whistled.

  Frankie’s hands stayed on her lap. Looking down she saw that she was trembling slightly. She waited and waited for Ebony to appear. The stage stayed black, the lanterns still swinging with the current of the trapeze that was flinging itself back and forth as if a ghost rode it now. People began to clap in rhythm, demanding her, summoning her. The rhythm swelled, fell into a beat, one, two, three, four. Voices joined in, cheering for ‘The Black Diamond’.

  A movement at the back of the stage caught Frankie’s eye. She breathed out in relief, for a second struck dumb by her own stupidity, realising she had been tricked again. But it didn’t draw any closer. At least not at first. And gradually it sunk in, sickly and slowly, that it was not the movement of a woman striding out to take her bow. It was the inching of something prowling left to right along the backcloth of the stage, stripes catching the footlights every now and then. It didn’t waste much time before it made towards the crowd, a thin, slinking predatory lope; a tiger heading straight for the centre aisle. And Frankie was glad for the first time that evening that she had been given a seat in the gods.

  Twelve

  The tiger stumbled as it snaked down the side steps into the stalls. Men and women jumped on their seats, grabbed umbrellas and canes. One man made a valiant attempt to clasp his wife to him before swooning back into a faint, toppling into the next row. A stampede began towards the back doors of the auditorium. Frankie knew for certain it was no trick when the ushers threw their trays of cigarettes and ices into the air and joined the crush.

  The tiger was busy licking one of its heavy paws, idling on the front aisle that ran along the orchestra pit, blithely unaware of the chaos it had caused. It sniffed the footlights and turned its nose away then stared down the aisle at the screaming swarm. It pulled back its shoulders, stretched its front paws and bowed like a kitten, twisting its head, enjoying the strain on its muscles. A thought crossed Frankie’s mind, and reaching for her notebook she began to move, not towards the fire escape, but down through the empty red corridor that led to the stalls.

  She took the steps two at a time, but when she got to the grand circle her nerve faltered. It wouldn’t be prudent to get too close. She squeezed back into the auditorium against the grain of a fur-perfumed crowd heading reluctantly for their own fire escape. ‘Most drama we’ve had all week,’ one lady laden down with gemstones lamented to her companion.

  Frankie reached the lip of the gilded balcony just in time to see a curl of gold-black tail lingering in the left fire exit, beside the pit. Two stagehands in brown aprons were waggling sand buckets at the cat’s rear, creeping closer, until one took courage enough to reach out and grab the fire door behind it, then slam it shut with a crash.

  Some of the crowd turned tentatively to look. Word quickly spread and screams turned into sighs, shrieks to weeping. Men breathed out, and put back down their canes; some women took off their hats to look for signs of damage in the crush. The auditorium seemed to relax its huge belly.

  Frankie exhaled slowly and was annoyed to find that she too was now shaking. People continued to make their way out but at a slower pace now, aware that the one place the tiger was not prowling was the auditorium. Frankie pushed back into the corridor and continued down to the stalls.

  As she nudged her way in, she tried to scribble down snippets of conversation. For once Teddy Hawkins was nowhere to be seen, though she could be certain he would be dispatched to the Coliseum like a fusty old bloodhound the second the wires tapped into Stark’s office. She touched a man on his elbow. ‘Excuse me.’ He turned, and after a second, frowned at her trousers. ‘Sir, were you sitting close to the stage when the tiger came out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m from the London Evening Gazette. Did you see . . . ?’

  Frankie tailed off as the man smirked, turning back to his wife.

  She cursed him under her breath. A cane patted her shoulder. ‘You the press, are you?’ She tw
isted her head to see a short man with military medals pinned to his blazer. ‘I did, I saw the tiger. Captain John Barnes. I saw it open its mouth, teeth big as a walrus. He was a hungry beast. I was in the second row.’

  There was a tug on her sleeve. ‘Miss Mildred Gibson. I saw it too. It came right at me. I had goosebumps all down my spine, thought I was a goner I did. Never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Excuse me, mister,’ a poke in her back, ‘you write this down for your paper. That beast nearly had my wife. James Horlicks, Stroud Green Road. It looked right at us, I had to lift my cane to stop it leaping across the seats . . .’

  Suddenly the throng was upon Frankie. Names were flung at her, wild claims thrust at her notebook. She peeled slender clammy fingers off her elbows and dodged the tap of heavy hands on her shoulders. Everyone had valiantly fended off the tiger, single-handedly, everyone had been in grave danger. It had licked its lips; it was furious; it was three times the size of a circus beast; they didn’t know what Mr Stoll thought he was doing letting it loose in a theatre; he was lucky no children had been eaten.

  Frankie made a show of scribbling it down, then politely ducked under a cane at the moment it was raised to tap her shoulder, and picked her way into the auditorium. The front twenty rows were clear, the back still jammed with people trying to force their way free. Some folk had given up and were fanning themselves, complaining of dizziness.

  That was when Frankie looked up and saw the tiger was back.

  Without fuss or noise it paced a quick path onto the stage from the rear. The footlights were now at full blast and caught the blazing colours of its fur. But there was something different now about its appearance. It seemed agitated where before it had been languorous. The stage manager staggered on, brandishing a chair, the Great Foucaud behind him, half-dressed and sweating profusely, his braces bashing his knees. And then the big cat opened its mouth and let out a roar that sent ice into Frankie’s blood.