Walking in Pimlico (27 page)

Mr Toplady had pulled out the coke braziers (which warmed the building) into the yard for fear of fire, and I revived them and placed pans full of water from the pump on top. As I struggled with the buckets I looked over to the wagon, where the yellow light of the lantern glowed, and Joe’s shadow moved about. Her cries were muffled, but
I
could hear them. More than once – as the water slopped over my feet and then hissed as I heaved the pans on to the brazier – more than once I resolved to run away. It would be the work of a moment to step across the yard, unhook the gate, and take myself off to Halls’s, or anywhere I chose, anywhere to be free
of what seemed to be drawing me in. I am not a fanciful man, and I like to think that I know my own mind, but here, with the thin wind picking up and catching the coals, and the stars twisting and flickering above – well, I felt more alone than I had ever done in my whole life.

I’m not one to feel sorry for myself. I was always told I have much to be grateful for, and I wouldn’t argue. My father and my mother, though they weren’t blood kin to me, took me in out of their charity and because they were Baptists and didn’t have kids of their own. Me, what had been wrapped in paper and laid on their doorstep like a fishmonger’s parcel. My father told that story over and over. I was like Moses found a-floating in the bulrushes. Even so I was brought up to be grateful, and certain the thought of the black stones of my parents’ doorstep warmed my back many a time. (It is strange how I keep a particular horror of the cold to this day.) But once I left them I resolved never to return. I did not want to look again upon the shame of my birth – a cold doorstep, a wet and windy night, and a scullery-maid hurrying home and seeing me a-lying there in all my nakedness, the ink of the paper staining my hands and filling my mouth.

Now here was another one, another life brought bawling into the world, raising its fists at the hardness of it all. Though its mother was gentle and her voice was low, how many blows would
it
suffer, how many curses would
it
endure, this scrap of humanity, born in a circus wagon with strangers looking on?

Corney Sage – Chittick’s Circus, Birmingham

I
t’s my belief that the poor woman would have cried herself hoarse had the baby not come when it did. As it was she was well nigh beyond her own strength and using up someone else’s by the time the morning came and with it the child. And when Joe opened the door and let me in for a moment, I was more put out by the sight of her lovely face all strained and white by the long effort she had been through than – but more of that.

She opened her eyes and took my hand in her own, which was cold and damp, and I wondered if she knew me at all, it took her so long to speak. But speak she did, in a low, faint voice, and with a sour breath, so that I had to hold mine.

‘Mr Sage, Joe tells me that you have waited all night.’

I could not tell a lie. It was a cold vigil, on the steps of the wagon, and though I fetched a blanket from one of the horses, and pulled up the brazier, I still felt closer to the icy stars than the warm earth. But I could not say to her what I really thought: that I would rather sit out under the sky for a month than be in that wagon for a night. So I just nodded.

‘You are both true gentlemen and true friends. How I will ever repay you I don’t know.’

I looked over at Joe who was sitting on the steps. His face was like a stone statue, not that I’ve seen many statues of men of colour, though I’ve seen some waxwork and he was fairly like that. Still, and no inclination to blink or move his eyes about. I wished he would say something. But perhaps he too was worn out.

I had done everything he asked. I took orders from a black fellow, and I never struggled once. I got blankets, I found cleanish towels, I heated water in the pans. Just as he said. And when all that was done, I knocked on the wagon door. When he opened it, I could so smell the pain within that it shot me back down the steps, and I was standing on the ground like some fool, looking up at him. I came closer, with one foot on the first step, and I could just see past him, and the dark shape of the lady in the cupboard bed. I gazed and gazed, and suddenly – oh horror! I thought the sight would blind me – she turned her face towards me, her mouth drawn open in a scream, what had no sound to it. And it went on and on until I thought I should go to Bedlam.

‘For God’s sake, Joe!’ I cried. ‘Let me go for a doctor!’

But he shook his head, and she screamed, ‘No! No doctors! No doctors here!’ And then in a small voice, that was full of tears and misery, she said, ‘Only Helen! Let Helen come!’

We didn’t know any Helen, but I heard Joe saying she’d been sent for, and she fell to weeping again. I stood there in the yard for some while, looking at that old door to the wagon, and thinking how it needed a coat of paint, and how I would do it a nice bright red, like I’d seen some of the other wagons, and with flowers creeping up the sides. It would be a pleasant task, and I would take satisfaction in it, for I’m a man who likes to be busy. And then suddenly there was another awful cry from within, like there was an animal in there just trying to get out and though I knew it was that lady, I ran inside the circus like every devil was after me.

I found myself a stall with a nice, quiet mare – Beauty, in fact, as
gentle as gentle – and pushed myself into a corner and covered myself over with straw for my shame. Now I fell asleep, I can’t hardly say how, for when I lay down I was cold, and shaking, and strung up like a fiddle. But perhaps the warm straw and the breathing of the horses round me, and the sweet smell of their bodies, were like a drug to me. For when I awoke I was calm, and everything around me was still, and the lamp on the post was burning low. Outside the sky was dark, but coming light around the edges, and too early yet for birds singing, but as I stepped quietly across the yard, there was a sound – it was like the low moaning from the wagon had never ceased all that time. And as I came closer, Joe must have heard me, for he opened the door and I could see from his face, how it was strained and tired. There was blood on his hands, too, and stripes of it down his shirt.

He said quietly, ‘She’s very bad, Mr Corney, and only the Lord knows if she will survive. And as for the child, well, I reckon you should say some prayers.’

I protested that I didn’t know any (which is not true), and Joe said that he thought the Lord God wouldn’t mind what I said as long as I meant it. But I’m not a believing man, so I said nothing, and I often wonder if I
had
said a word or two whether things would have taken a different direction. So, when I should have been praying I was sitting out on the steps of the wagon, with the dead embers in the brazier before me, and Beauty’s blanket about my shoulder, watching the night sky melt into day, and stopping up my ears with my two fingers when her cries got bad, and wondering how such things come about.

My old master used to talk about the ‘fetch ’n’ carry of life’, how you fetch your own fortune and carry it with you till the right time comes up and then you put it down. How there was no reason to it, and a man might wonder till he fell to dust but he could never bottom it. I wondered for a while, watching the sky pink up over the
chimneys, how it was that I plucked this woman, whose name I didn’t know, from all those around the station, and how it was that I was a-sitting on these hard steps instead of lying warm in my bed, listening to her cries, rather than Mr Halls’s snores. I felt like I was watching myself. Over my own hunched shoulder.

Suddenly, the terrible cries from within reached a pitch that I can’t hardly describe (and don’t want to recall) and, of all the people in the wide world, they greeted Chittick as he come around the corner and opened the gate. It was like a drama what you see in a poor theatre. One of those where bad things are always happening to the good characters, and those bad things are spied out by the bad characters, who use it agin the good, and cause all the trouble. Chittick covered the yard with a great speed, and was about to push me aside and go into the wagon when the lady let out a cry that stopped him in his shoes, and instead he set upon me, cracking me across the shins with his stick.

‘What’s all this, Duke? Is this a circus or a lying-in ward?’

I was much taken by his observation, though I quickly realized that he might have a pretty broad knowledge of childbearing, having six of his own. I explained briefly, and made much of the panic of the previous evening, even suggesting that things might have been ‘brought on’ by the crush and the alarm of the firecrackers. I added that she was a respectable woman, and would no doubt feel obliged to recompense (a good word) him for the use of his wagon when she was in the way of moving about again.

I believe he was about to turn all sides of this inside out when the door opened and Joe, wiping his hands, filled the doorway. Now if Chittick had been inclined to vent his meanness on Joe – and I believe it crossed his mind – he very quickly thought again. Here was the Negro, with bloody hands and sweating like a horse, and asking – silently, for he was mute again – for a drink of water,
and one for the lady, and giving Chittick such a look as stopped up his mouth then and there.

And so it was the Gov’nor who returned with a can of water, and who directed me to get the fire lit and coffee made. Who peered around Joe’s legs at the figure in the cupboard bed and the bundle in the drawer next to it, and shook his head and shambled off into the building. Which was when I saw her lovely face and went and took her hand, and sat with her till Joe came and touched my shoulder. She was asleep, and it was like her beauty had been strained from her. It was still there, but pulled thin and pale.

Joe had washed his hands and covered his bloody shirt, and was drinking coffee from a tin. The child – I assumed that was what was in the drawer – was still. Dead, I thought, which was sad after all that pain and crying. But that was that. So it was in the quiet, as we sat alongside each other at the top of the wagon step, that I couldn’t help a curious look or two at Joe. I had discovered things about him that night which I would never have thought in a donkey’s age. Here was a Negro who was mute, but not, and who knew about things that most men, black or white, did not. And who was not afraid.

‘My master was a physician,’ he said, and I was took aback again, for he seemed to be able to read minds too. ‘Since I was a very little child I was with him, and he showed me things, and taught me about the body and how it works. He gave me the skill, taught me how to open up a man and stitch him again, to give him medicines that will take away pain or make him forget.’

‘Why?’ I said, not entirely believing him. ‘Why should he show you? I expect you were a slave.’

‘True. But my master suffered a seizure, and his hands became slow. His speech was like a drunkard’s, but his mind was still sharp. He taught me, and I was his hands. He directed me, and I was his machine.’

That took some thinking about, and we were silent for a while.

‘I have brought many children into the world, though none quite as difficult as this. I had no way of relieving her pain. Which was very great. There was much bleeding. The child was—’

He stopped and looked very hard at me.

‘She does not realize. She does not know. When she knows, I think she will die.’

Know what? He stood up slowly and went into the wagon and, picking up the bundle, and looking keenly at the sleeping woman, stepped carefully back out again. He cradled it in his arms, and I thought (as I often do when I remember him) how powerful those arms were and how slight that bundle. He pulled the towels apart and looked intently at the child.

‘Mr Sage, sir, it cannot live. It will surely die.’

Now I am not a fanciful man. I have seen the world (some of it), its wonders (few) and its horrors (many). If there is a God, he does not know me, and I do not choose to know him. I can do without him, and he won’t miss me. But, as Joe handed me the child, there I was, saying something my father, Mr Figgis, had taught me many years ago.

Little child, remember, in God’s sight
Thou are more precious than sunlight,
More treasured than the pearls and gold
Of emperors and kings of old.
Sweet babe, thou art the work of God—

Here, as I gazed upon the babe, the words froze up in my mouth.

It was a very tiny creature. Indeed, the cloths in which it was wrapped weighed more, and when it lay in my hand, there was no more weight to it than a feather. I parted the cloths, and looked inside. Its body looked like that of a baby bird. Too much skin and bone, and arms and legs, thin as wisps of straw, jerking and shuddering. And all of it covered with hair, which was long and fine. A head
too great for its body, and traced all over with blue threads. And though its eyes were tight shut, its mouth was wide open and sending out a noise, from the back of its throat, which I still hear. It was raw and dry, like the call of a hungry creature, casting around for food.