The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  At length, Pa Cooke wiped around his bowl with a crust of bread then set it down and lit a cigarette. He offered his case politely to me, but I could see that his cigarettes were hand-rolled, their ends twisted like toffee papers, and I declined.

  ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Topsy and Ana, you’re up.’

  ‘Right, Pa,’ Topsy said. ‘Might as well get started.’

  Anastasia’s brow lowered until her dark eyes were entirely lost in shadow, not a spark showing. There was a long pause and I was aware that everyone around the fire was waiting. At last, she spoke.

  ‘I am not a chorus girl,’ she said. Charlie Cooke, I noticed, nodded slightly. ‘I should appreciate not being treated like one,’ she went on, looking to Charlie as though she expected more from him, but even the nodding had stopped at a quick gesture from Ma, which went unseen by her husband. Her voice was the most curious I had heard yet, with none of the lilt of Topsy and Ma, none of the colourful mix to be found in Lally Wolf and little Tommy, yet it was not the like of Tiny’s or Andrew’s: not, that is, an ordinary accent from somewhere or other on its way to turning circus. She spoke as though unaccustomed to English and she was expressionless to the point of sounding wooden.

  ‘You,’ said Pa Cooke, ‘are an entrée artiste and every entrée artiste in this show does two spots. So unless you’ve got a better idea, we’ve an act to practise and you should think yourself lucky Topsy is letting you in.’

  ‘Sure it’s all one to me, Pa,’ said Topsy. ‘Until I find my blessed swing I’m stuck with the corde lisse anyway.’

  Far from her cheerful assent helping matters, however, it only served to throw Anastasia into a worse light. She turned and glowered at Topsy now.

  ‘I have two acts,’ she said, and her slow, blank voice lent her words a threatening air. Ma Cooke stirred again.

  ‘Now there, my maid,’ she said. ‘Let’s not go back over all that again.’

  ‘Don’t you start talking comfort to her, Polly Cooke, when she’s cheeking me,’ said Pa. ‘She needs to learn the life as well as the turns, if she’s going to be circus.’

  At that, Anastasia jumped up and flounced off in the direction of the horse tent. There was an uneasy silence around the fire after she had left until Mrs Cooke began to direct the collection of the plates and to issue instructions to the children about who was to wash them and who was to dry and, one by one, the others began to drift away. I lingered, having caught a look she flicked towards me.

  ‘See there?’ she said, softly. ‘Don’t tell me that’s a happy maid.’

  I could only agree and I made my way towards the tent very keen to see what act had put Anastasia in such a state of umbrage and what fountains of talent she must have to remain so precious to Ma Cooke despite having all the charm and diplomacy of a sulking mule. Except as soon as I had thought that, I came up hard against the memory of her face, breaking suddenly into smiles as though the sun had come out on a stormy day.

  Inside the tent, Topsy Turvy was taking off her skirt and I hesitated in the doorway, unsure about the etiquette, but she looked over her shoulder and hailed me, quite unconcerned.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘Looks even worse than a chorus girl, this, don’t it?’ Under the skirt, which she was now folding into a bundle, she wore what might have been very thick tights or very thin britches and something like a boy’s bathing suit. She laid her skirt on a seat outside the ring then went over to one of the poles and began to climb it. ‘Poor Ana,’ she said as she ascended. ‘Pa’s right, so he is, but I can see both sides.’

  ‘I can’t honestly say I have a solid grasp of it yet,’ I admitted. Topsy stopped and leaned out backwards from the pole looking at me upside down.

  ‘I thought Ma had called you in to get it seen to,’ she said. ‘I thought you were here to talk to Ana, in her own language like, get things kushty again.’

  ‘And what language would that be?’ I asked, rather astonished. Topsy chuckled.

  ‘Now isn’t that the question?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it just!’

  ‘And can you tell me anything about what’s going on?’ I asked. I spoke deliberately vaguely, guessing that Mrs Cooke would not have informed Topsy of her suspicions regarding the lost swing.

  ‘Not me,’ said Topsy. ‘And don’t ask me what that clown’s up to because there’s no accounting for taste.’ Her face had hardened and she glared down.

  ‘Well, what’s the problem with your double act, for instance?’ I prompted her.

  ‘Oh!’ said Topsy. ‘That. Well, Bisou – Ana’s horse, you know – was trained up for the haute école, but he … well, he died, when Ana was away visiting after the last stand. And now she just has her rosy-back – her voltige pony – and only one spot, so Pa wants her and me to work up an act together for the spring.’ She had reached the top of the pole now and was sauntering along a beam, high enough to make me feel dizzy just watching her.

  ‘Do be careful,’ I said.

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Topsy, with a grin. She had reached the middle of the roof dome, where a rope was coiled around the beam, looking like something between a wasps’ nest and a Turkish basket. ‘Ana thinks Pa should buy another horse for her, see, or at least advance her some of her pay so’s she can buy one, but Pa says no. She could never get a new prad trained up in one winter, so she can do a second spot with me and work next season on her haute école. Makes sense anyway, because where would she be getting a horse this time of the year anyway? Needs to wait for the fairs and she knows it. But there’s no telling her anything these days. She wants to watch out, madam, if you ask me.’

  Her voice died away as we both heard someone come under the canopy and open the door flaps. It was Mr Cooke, still rather on his dignity, although his face softened when he looked up at Topsy high in the roof.

  ‘There’s my good lass,’ he said. ‘Got the circus wrote through you like Blackpool rock. Not like some we could mention, eh, Mrs Gilver? You don’t catch Topsy kicking up a fuss and a bother when she turns her back and loses something.’

  ‘Oh, Pa, come on with you,’ said Topsy. She was frowning down at him from her high perch, with her hands on her hips. ‘I can’t just lay my hands on a prop – probably put it somewhere silly and forgot it – it’s not the same. How would you feel if you went to town one day and come back to find … say, Sambo dead and gone, or Midnight?’

  ‘Cheek of a monkey, you have, talking to the rum coll of the show that way,’ said Pa Cooke. He shook his whip at Topsy, not too threateningly since it was trussed up like a horse bandage for safe carriage, and besides his eyes were twinkling. Either proper circus folk had privileges of which jossers could only dream or it was just that the sweet, dimpling Topsy could wind any man around her little finger where the haughty Anastasia left them cold. As though to confirm it, his face grew stern again as he turned towards the sound of someone coming into the ring from the backstage doors. Anastasia, evidently, was not to be treated to any leftover smiles.

  When the curtains were swept aside, though, it was not Anastasia and her pony who stood there. Rather stark-eyed, Mrs Prebrezhensky came falteringly into the ring.

  ‘Mee-suss Kilvert?’ she said. It took me a moment to realise that she was talking to me. ‘Can I speak with you, please. It is of most important.’

  ‘Why, certainly,’ I said. ‘Do excuse me, Mr Cooke.’ I hurried towards the curtains, aware of his contemplative stare and a look of acute interest from the bright-eyed little figure perched above.

  With the fall of the curtain behind us came a feeling that we had entered another world. We were standing in a narrow corridor whose walls were fashioned from patched and faded canvas and whose floor was made of slatted boards set on the grass below and covered with sacking. Above the archway back to the ring, the top of the tent was still visible and I could see one end of the beam where Topsy was sitting, but back here sounds were clothy and muffled and I could hear my own breathing, unnaturally loud as when one
is wearing a rubber bathing cap, and could smell none of the fresh sawdust and oil of the tent, the purposeful, competent smell I had thought was the smell of the circus, but only the stale dust of the sacking under our feet and faintly from under that the cold smell of the ground, dying grass and earth turning to mud. I shivered.

  Mrs Prebrezhensky laid a hand on my arm and drew me further along the corridor, past little cubby-holes full of painted barrels and harnesses, past trunks full of spangled costumes and tables covered with props. I saw the parcel of hats from the clowns’ act that morning.

  ‘I know why you are here,’ she said, as she hurried me along. ‘Polly told me dinnertime. It is sometimes most useful to be able speak secrets in a crowd.’ She smiled at me as she held up a piece of the canvas and we stooped to pass under it, emerging from the warren of passageways into the low light of the field. ‘I bring you this ways because nobody need to see we go,’ she said. Sure enough, we were near the door end of a wagon and with a quick look round to see that we were unobserved, she flitted up the steps with me hurrying after.

  Inside, the wagon was criss-crossed with a veritable cat’s cradle of washing lines, over which were draped dozens of pairs of woollen stockings and as many again woollen vests and winter knickers. The door of the stove was open to help with the drying but it seemed to me that the washing might win and the fire lose, because the air was soft and sweet with steam and the painted walls were beaded with moisture.

  ‘Kolya, my husband, is gone take girls to see the village,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky. Then she hesitated. ‘Kolya says to me to say nothing, not to bring trouble to ourselves. He forbids me to speak. But he is wrong.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked her. Perhaps it was her accent, terribly glamorous in a sepulchral kind of way, or perhaps Mrs Prebrezhensky’s flair for dramatic presentation was not reserved for showing off her girls in the ring, but I could feel my pulse quicken.

  ‘Last evening,’ she said, ‘we have found Topsy’s swing.’ She bent down and opened one of the panelled cupboard doors. Various jars and bottles of richly coloured foods, pickles I thought, had been shoved roughly to the back and one of them had fallen over and broken, releasing a sharply pungent smell. In the space thus made was a jumble of rope with a gold lacquered stick mixed up amongst it.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Topsy will be pleased to have it returned.’ I quite saw that it was not ideal to have lost property turn up in one’s cupboard, but still I could not account for her sombre face, nor for the secrecy. There was no great harm done, surely.

  ‘But look,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky, and pointed one of her long painted fingers at the bundle. I stepped closer to peer at it and could see that just where she was pointing the rope had been cut halfway through.

  ‘It was not me,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky. ‘It was not us.’ In her voice there was a note of real fear, not just drama now. I stared at the rope and tried to think quickly.

  ‘Well, of course it wasn’t,’ I said, after a minute or two. ‘Or you’d hardly have hidden it in your own caravan, would you?’ Her breath came out in a long, hissing sigh. She pressed a hand to her heart.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘Thank God you are here to help us.’

  I knelt down and extracted the bundle from the cupboard, careful not to upset any more jars as I did so. Then I peered at the cut, but it told me nothing. Perhaps a sailor, or a butcher, might be able to glance at it and sketch the knife that made it, but not me.

  ‘Nasty,’ I said. I started to roll the bundle up as neatly as I could, but that was not very neatly, I suppose, and Mrs Prebrezhensky took it from me and began twisting it with practised hands. ‘Who would want to do such a thing?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know?’ I wondered how wide the suspicion of Ana might be. She shook her head. ‘And why, after cutting it, would someone hide it? And hide it here? It doesn’t make any sense.’ I wanted to ask if Ana had any reason to do so, but did not like to drop her in it with so little ceremony, no matter what Mrs Cooke might have told me. Mrs Prebrezhensky was beaming at me.

  ‘You good clever lady,’ she said. ‘You see real things. I told Kolya is very bad if we hush this, but he does not listen to me.’

  ‘Well, he has a point,’ I replied. ‘Obviously, someone wanted to make things bad for you, Mrs Prebrez—’

  ‘Zoya,’ she said. ‘I am Zoya, please.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘How could this make bad for us? Someone wants to make bad things for Topsy.’ That was unarguable. She had finished twisting and the swing was now a tight lozenge of coiled rope with just a glint of the golden stick peeping out of each end. She handed it to me. ‘And if I listen to Kolya,’ she said, ‘and say nothing, no one ever would know. Not clever trouble put it here in my cupboard closed for many weeks and weeks. If the jar not smash and we smell something, who knows how long a secret?’

  ‘Unless there had been a search,’ I said. ‘If Pa Cooke had ordered a search and it had been found here, that would have been trouble enough.’

  ‘But such a thing would never happen,’ she said, glaring at me as though I had just suggested it. ‘Never in any circus would anything so … what is the word? So disrespect. Never would so disrespect be from one circus man to another.’

  Perhaps, I thought to myself, that began to explain what I was doing here. Perhaps it was unthinkable for Mrs Cooke herself to discover Ana’s guilt officially, one circus woman to another, even if she suspected it. If so, matters might be different now: a missing prop was a prank but a prop slashed with enough venom to cut a thick rope halfway through was something else again and would surely outweigh all thought of polite convention.

  ‘You must tell Topsy,’ said Zoya, as though reading my thoughts. ‘Warn her someone is make danger for her?’ I hesitated. Was it dangerous, exactly? Topsy could hardly have used the prop; the cut was almost at the swing end, after all, and she would have seen it. It was threatening, certainly. Thoroughly nasty. But there was no real danger.

  ‘I shall ask Mrs Cooke what she thinks best,’ I said. ‘In the meantime …’ I bent and looked out of the window. Mrs Wolf was at the fire, upending washed pots on the tin roof to dry. Two of the grooms were walking four black horses towards the pool. ‘Can I leave it here with you?’ I said. ‘It had better stay out of sight until I have a plan. Even if the damage is hidden.’

  I left her busily turning summer clothes out of a deep drawer under the box-bed to put the swing at the very bottom and hurried back to the tent, keen to watch Topsy and Ana together, to see if there were signs of a deep enough hatred to explain what I had just seen.

  Anastasia had arrived and was sitting astride a large and rather broad-backed dark grey pony, who stood in the middle of the ring blinking his long lashes. I glanced up and got a wave from Topsy who was perched where I had seen her last, high on the beam. In ringside seats were all of the clowns, Bill Wolf and Ma, who beckoned to me.

  ‘Now,’ said Pa Cooke, slapping his whip against his thigh to unravel it. ‘I know you have your own ideas about things, Ana, but if you’ll think about it for just a minute, you’ll see that I, with sixty years of circus behind me and ten generations of circus in my blood, know a thing or two and this little act we’re working up here is going to be a beauty. Elegant, breathtaking beauty. There won’t be a sound to be heard and there won’t be a dry eye in the tent. We kill the flares, we powder out Harlequin’s star and socks.’ He nodded to Ana’s pony. ‘We’ll have Topsy on a black rope and the two of you girls … phosphorescent! You’ll be like a couple of fireflies, like fairy queens. I can see you now.’

  ‘But what do we do, Pa?’ Topsy shouted down. Pa, however, had not finished setting the scene.

  ‘Music will be clarinet and brushed snare,’ he said. ‘All the babbies will be off to sleep, it’ll be that soothing and peaceful. And the act will be called Reflection by Moonlight. You’ll be the talking point of the whole show and do you know the best of it?’ He paused dramatically. ‘It’s all the kind of lines
you’ve been doing since you were knee-high. Well—’ He broke off and spoke the next part in his normal voice. ‘I mean you, Tops, but Ana will be able to do them just as well.’

  He certainly knew this bit of his business, I thought. The picture he painted was irresistible.

  ‘Moreover,’ he went on, ‘I am fairly sure that no such act has ever been seen before. Charlie? Bill? Am I right there?’

  ‘I never seen it, Tam,’ said Bill Wolf’s rumbling voice, quick to praise the boss man. Charlie Cooke nodded rather reluctantly. Indeed, his whole demeanour was that of a sceptic, come in hopes to see the venture fail. He crossed his arms and put his tongue in his cheek. Tiny had his eyes fastened on Ana, Andrew gazed up at Topsy and Ma sat forward with such an expression of rapt attention directed at her husband that I had to bite my cheeks not to giggle.

  ‘Now, to start with,’ said Pa, ‘I want just an arabesque from both of you. Start at a walk, Ana.’ He clicked his teeth and Ana’s pony moved forward. ‘There’s a good girl,’ said Pa. ‘Right, Topsy?’

  Up on the beam Topsy had uncoiled the rope from its wasps’ nest shape and let its free end drop downwards. She now turned it twice around her body and then twice around her leg. Then, somehow, and it happened so quickly that I could not see how it was done, she seemed to make some kind of a slip knot which allowed her to drop gently down until she was suspended about ten feet below the beam, caught up in the coils of rope. I took a deep breath and told myself that I was going to watch this through without squeezing my eyes shut or wincing.

  ‘Hup,’ said Pa and, in unison, Ana on the pony lifted one foot behind her and both arms to the side and struck a pose on the broad, rolling back while Topsy above pointed one leg downwards and one behind and let one arm drift dreamily free. She craned her neck to look at Ana and then set the rope spinning, trying to match the pony’s gentle walking speed. There was an appreciative sigh from the ringside seats.