by Mary Stewart
‘It’s . . . a bit complicated, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘That, my dear, is the understatement of the year.’
‘What are you going to do?’
I said: ‘What would you do, chum?’
‘Well, eat, to start with,’ said Timothy, unhesitatingly, and looked round for the waitress.
6
To see a fine lady upon a white horse.
Nursery Rhyme
Understandably, there was something a little depressed about the Circus Wagner that evening. Normally, as Timothy pointed out, a small travelling circus stays only for one night in a place like Oberhausen, but the Circus Wagner had been obliged to stand for a week. I gathered that there had been no performance on the week-nights following the disaster of the fire, but the normal two Saturday performances had been permitted, and now with the Sunday show the circus was attempting to recoup some of its losses; but since most of the local people and those from the nearby villages had already been to yesterday’s performances, attendance was thin, and Timothy had had no difficulty in getting what he called ‘starback’ seats for us. These, the best seats, were rather comfortable portable chairs upholstered in red plush, right at the ring-side. As we sat down I saw that the place was half full of children, many of them in the ring-side seats. It turned out that Herr Wagner had reduced prices all round for today, and the children from this and the surrounding villages were perfectly happy to fill the places and see the same show over again for the price. It was a good move; it brought in a little money, and saved the performers from the depressing echoes of an empty house.
A dwarf in a scarlet baggy costume sold us our programme and ushered us into our chairs. The tent was filled with music from some vast amplifier: as always in Austria, the music was pleasant; even in a small village circus we were expected to listen to Offenbach and Suppé and Strauss. The tent was not a big one, but the floodlights on the poles at the four ‘corners’ of the ring threw so much brilliance down into the ring that above them the top of the tent seemed a vast floating darkness, and very high. Caught by a flicker of light the high wire glittered like a thread. On their platforms near the top of the poles the electricians crouched behind their lights, waiting. There was the circus smell, which is a mingling of sharp animal sweat and trampled grass, and with this the curiously pungent smell of Continental tobacco.
The big lights moved, the music changed, and a march blared out. The curtains at the back of the ring were pulled open, and the procession began.
For a small circus, the standard of performance was remarkably good. Herr Wagner himself was the ringmaster, a short, stocky man, who, even in the frock-coat and top hat of his calling, looked every inch a horseman. The ‘rodeo’, which followed the procession, was an exciting stampede of horses – real old-fashioned ‘circus’ horses, piebald and dun-coloured and spotted – supporting a wild-west act with some clever rope-work and voltige riding. Annalisa appeared only briefly, barely recognisable as a cowgirl eclipsed by a ten-gallon hat, and riding a hideous spotted horse with a pink muzzle and pink-rimmed eyes, which looked as clumsy as a hippo, and was as clever on its feet as the Maltese Cat. Then came a comic act with a donkey, and after it Herr Wagner again, with his liberty horses.
These were beautiful, every one a star, ten well-matched palominos with coats the colour of wild silk, and manes and tails of creamy floss. They wheeled in under the lights, plumes tossing, silk manes flying, breaking and reforming their circles, rearing one after the other in line, so that the plumes and the floss-silk manes tossed up like the crest of a breaking wave. Rods and shafts of limelight, falling from above, wove and criss-crossed in patterns of golden light, following the golden horses. Light ran and glittered on them. They were sun horses, bridled and plumed with gold, obedient, you would have sworn, to the pull of those rods of light, as the white horses of the wavecrests are to the pull of the moon.
Then the tossing plumes subsided, the flying hoofs met the ground again, the music stopped, and they were just ten self-satisfied horses, queuing at Herr Wagner’s pockets for sugar.
Timothy said in my ear: ‘You can’t tell me those pampered darlings ever bit anyone.’
I laughed. ‘You mean Mr Elliott, our horse expert? He did a good job of grooming on them, anyway. They look wonderful.’
‘If he’s as green about it as he makes out, he’s a hero to take on this lot. Funny sort of chap, didn’t you think?’
‘In what way, funny?’
‘Odd. If he’s an executive type you wouldn’t expect him to stay on here and get down to a job of hard work like that. Bit of a mystery about it, I thought.’
‘Perhaps he’s keen on Annalisa.’
‘He’s too old—’ indignantly.
‘No man’s too old till they hammer down the coffin lid.’
‘They screw down coffin lids.’
‘Goodness, the things you know. Come to that, he’s no older than Lewis. Do you see him anywhere?’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Elliott.’
‘No,’ said Timothy. ‘He’ll be out the back madly brushing Maestoso Leda from bow to stern and combing out his rudder. Did you mind coming tonight?’
‘Mind? Why should I?’
‘Well, you must be beastly worried. I must say you’re taking it marvellously.’
‘What else can I do? If you want the truth I feel a bit punch-drunk; it’s a right pig’s ear, as they’d say at home. In any case, there’s nothing I can do till tomorrow, so we may as well enjoy ourselves while we can.’
Timothy said: ‘It occurred to me, if you cabled Stockholm—’
But here, with a deafening crash of brass, and a wild cheer, the clowns came tumbling in, and Timothy, clutching his programme and rocking with laughter, took a dive straight back into childhood. And so, to be fair, did I. It was an act which needed no interpreting, predictable to the last laugh, being a version of the old water act, and the wettest one I had ever seen, with a grand finale involving a very old elephant who routed the whole gaggle of clowns with a water-spouting act of her own which – to judge by the gleam in her clever piggy eye – she much enjoyed.
After the clowns a couple of girls dancing on a tight-rope with pink parasols. Then a troupe of performing dogs. And then Timothy took his finger out of his programme, turned and grinned at me and whispered, ‘Wait for it.’
The trumpets brayed, the ringmaster made his announcement, the red curtains parted, and a white horse broke from the shadows behind the ring and cantered into the limelight. On his back, looking prettier than ever, serene and competent, and tough as a whiplash in a dark blue version of a hussar’s uniform, was Annalisa. This horse was not plumed and harnessed as the liberty horses had been; he was dressed for business, but the bridle was a magnificent affair of scarlet studded with gold, and his saddle-cloth glittered and flashed with colour as if every jewel that had ever been discovered was stitched into its silk.
‘Oh, boy,’ said Tim reverently.
His eye was on the stallion, not on the girl, and, remembering the picture of Carmel on her pony, I smiled to myself. But here the rider did deserve some of the reverence. I knew that all the steps and figures the stallion was now performing so fluidly and easily, took years of intensive and patient training to teach. Even though she had not herself done all the training, it took great skill to put a horse through these dressage movements as she did, without any of her own guiding movements being visible. She seemed simply to sit there, part of the horse, light and graceful and motionless, as the white stallion went through his lovely ballet.
Prompted by Timothy’s whisper, I recognised the movements; the slow, skimming, Spanish Walk; the dancing fire of the standing trot, or piaffe; the shouldering-in which takes the horse diagonally forward in an incredibly smooth, swimming movement; and then, as she had promised us, the ‘airs above the ground’. The stallion wheeled to the centre of the ring, snorted, laid back his ears, settled his hind hoofs in the sawdust, then liftend him
self and his rider into a lèvade, the classic rearing pose of the equestrian statues. For two long bars of music he held it, then touched ground again for a moment, and – you could see the bunch and thrust of the muscles – launched himself clean into the air in a standing leap. For one superb moment he was poised there, high in the air, caught and lit dazzlingly white by the great lights, all four legs tucked neatly under him, all his jewels flashing and glancing with a million colours, but not it seemed more brilliant than the gleam of the muscles under the white skin or the lustre of the steady dark eye. One looked for his wings.
Then he was on the ground again, cantering round the ring, nodding and bowing his head to the applause which filled even that half empty tent. Then, still bowing and pawing the ground, he backed out of the ring and was lost in the darkness behind the curtain.
I let out a long breath. I felt as if I had been holding it for hours. Timothy and I smiled at one another.
‘What’s the anticlimax?’ I asked him.
He looked at his programme. ‘Oh, here’s your absolute Star-Attraktion . . . Sandor Balog, he’s called. It’s “Balog and Nagy”, the high wire.’
‘For goodness’ sake, it always terrifies me.’
‘Me, too,’ said Timothy happily, settling back as the high wire sprang into the light and the two men started their racing climb towards it. The music swung into a waltz, one of the men started out along the wire, and in the carefully wrought tensions of the act all other preoccupations fell away, and tomorrow – Lewis or no Lewis – could take care of itself.
When we came out of the circus tent with the crowd we found it was quite dark.
‘This way,’ said Timothy, leading me round to the left of the big tent. Here, earlier in the day, there had been an orderly crowd of wagons and tents, but many of these had now gone. Already workmen were attacking the big top, the tent-men unhooking the sides or walls of the tent, rolling the canvas to leave for the trailer-men to pick up. Lights were still on in the big top, presumably to help the work of the pull-down. I saw the two high-wire artistes now clad in sweaters and jeans and plimsolls, dismantling their gear from the top of the king-poles. The hum of the big generator had stopped, and a small donkey engine had taken over, fussily supplying the remaining lights by which the circus people worked. Men in overalls hurried past us carrying ladders, boxes, crates, baskets of clothes. A tractor pulling some large trailer churned its way slowly and carefully over the uneven ground towards the gate.
‘The lions, I think,’ said Tim. ‘Can you smell them? The stables are round this way. Mind your foot.’
I dodged a bit of rope trailing from some bundle that a couple of girls were carrying. I recognised one of the dainty young dancers from the tight-rope act looking no less graceful but very different in close fitting black pants and sweater.
Next moment a welcoming shaft of light shone out across the trampled grass in front of us. It spilled out from the door of a caravan where, silhouetted against the light and holding back the rough curtain which had covered the doorway, stood Annalisa, peering out into the night.
‘Tim, Mrs March, is that you? I’m sorry I couldn’t come to show you the way, but I was busy changing.’
She ran down the steps. Gone was the smart young hussar in blue velvet, and here once more was the slender girl with the blonde pony tail. But she hadn’t gone back to the blue dirndl. She was wearing – like the other artistes we had seen – pants and sweater. Hers were dark blue. She had cleaned the circus make-up off her face, and this now looked fresh and scrubbed clean, without even any lipstick. She looked business-like and ready for work, but as feminine as ever.
‘I’ll take you to see the horses straight away. They will not be moving till they are taken to the morning train, but they’ll be being bedded down now. Did you enjoy the show?’
‘Very much indeed,’ I said, ‘and you most of all . . . That’s quite honest, Annalisa, you were marvellous. It was a wonderful act, one of the best things I’ve ever seen . . . And thank you very much for the croupade, you both did it beautifully, we were terribly impressed.’
‘It was terrific!’ Timothy chimed in with enthusiasm, and we both praised her warmly, and as we walked along between the lighted windows of the rows of vans, I could see how she glowed with unaffected pleasure.
‘It is too much – you are too good . . .’ She sounded almost confused by our praise. ‘He did do it well tonight, did he not? It was a good evening . . . I am glad for you . . . One cannot always be sure. I think, if there had been more time to train him, he could have been a very good horse. But in a circus, you see, there is no time; we cannot afford to keep a horse for all the time it takes to train them in the advanced leaps, they have to work, and this spoils them, they are never polished. In the Spanish Riding School they can train for years before they let them perform. Even then, some of the stallions never get to do the leaps. This is kept for the best ones.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it still looked pretty good to me . . . and the palominos were magnificent.’
‘Oh yes, they are lovely. Well, here they are. I brought some pieces of carrot if you would like to give them . . .?’
The horses were housed in a long tent, which, on the inside, looked every bit as solid and permanent as a stable. A few lights burned, showing up rows of horses’ rumps half hidden by their rugs, tails swishing lazily. There was the sweet ammoniac smell of hay and horses, and the comfortable sound of munching. Farther down the stable a couple of men were working, one forking straw, the other, duster in hand, shining up the metal studding on a piece of tack hanging from a pole. From a corner in the shadows came the whicker of greeting, and I saw the beautiful white head flung up as the stallion looked round at Annalisa.
Shorn of his jewelled trappings and standing at ease, Maestoso Leda was still beautiful, even though not so impressive as he had been on parade. Seeing one of the famous Lipizzans now for the first time at close quarters, I was surprised to realise how small he was; fourteen hands, I supposed, give or take an inch, stockily built with well-set-on shoulders and sturdy legs and feet, big barrelled, big chested, with the thick stallion neck and the power in the haunches that was needed for the spectacular leaps to which these animals could be trained. Something about the shape of his head recalled those old paintings of horses that one had always dismissed as inaccurate – those creatures with massive quarters, round and shining as apples, but with swan-curved necks and small heads with tiny ears; now I could see where they came from. His was – if one could use the word – an antique head, narrow, and sculptured like a Greek relief, while the rest of his body was massively muscled. The eye was remarkable, big and dark and liquid, gentle and yet male.
He whickered again at the sight of the carrots and bent his head to receive them. Annalisa and Timothy fed him, and the two of them were soon busy with him, almost crooning over him as they handled him. I watched for a little, then wandered off down the lines to look at some of the others. They were mostly stallions, the palominos looking at this close range a good deal more impressive than the Lipizzaner, but all relaxed and resting comfortably. I noticed one or two bandaged legs among the others, and a nasty graze skinning over on one palomino rump, but on the whole it seemed to me that the Circus Wagner had got off lightly. Nothing terrifies horses so much as fire, and if even one or two, in their panic-stricken plunging, had lashed out or broken loose, they could have caused immense damage to themselves and others.
At the far end of the stable one or two of the horses were lying down already, so I didn’t go past them, since no horse will allow you to pass his stall without his getting up, and I didn’t wish to disturb them. But the ponies I talked to, mischievous shaggy little beasts, twice as quick and twice as naughty as their big brothers, and at this moment all twice as wide awake. By the time I had worked my way back to the beginning where Annalisa and Timothy still stood talking softly in the royal box, the two stablemen had gone, and all seemed settled for what remained of the n
ight. In the stall next to the end one – opposite the white stallion – stood another horse of much the same height and build as the Lipizzaner, but very different to look at. He was a piebald, with ugly markings, and he stood with his head drooping and mane and tail hanging limply, like uncombed flax. I thought at first it was the clever, ugly beast that Annalisa had ridden in the rodeo, then saw that this was an older horse. His feed was scarcely touched, but his water bucket was empty. As I watched, he lowered his head and blew sadly around the bottom of the dry bucket.
I spoke softly, then laid a hand on him and went in.
Annalisa saw me and came across.
‘Because we spend so much time with the King horse, you talk with the beggar? I am sorry, there is no carrot left.’
‘I doubt if he would want it,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t touched his feed. I wasn’t just being democratic; I thought he looked ill.’
‘He is still not eating? He has been like this all the week.’ She looked from the full manager to the empty bucket, and a pucker of worry showed between her brows. ‘He was my Uncle Franzl’s horse, the poor old piebald . . . Ever since the fire he has been like this; nobody else looked after him, you see, always my uncle. He is old, too; my uncle used to say they were two old men together.’ She bit her lip, watching the horse. ‘I think he is – what is the word? – weeping for my uncle.’
‘Fretting. That may be true, but I think there’s something wrong physically, too. The horse is in pain.’ I was examining him as I spoke, running a hand down the neck, turning back the rug to feel the withers. ‘See how he’s sweating; he’s wringing wet over the withers and down the neck, and look at his eye . . . his coat’s as rough as a sack, Annalisa. Has anyone seen him?’
‘The vet came from Bruck after the fire, and he has been twice more since then. On Thursday, he was here.’
‘And he looked at this one?’
‘He looked at them all. Not this one, perhaps, after the first time, because there was nothing wrong.’ She looked doubtfully at me, then back at the old piebald. ‘Yes, I can see he does not look very good, but if there had been anything . . . anything to see . . .’ She hesitated.
