The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘But stay away from the tent,’ Mrs Cooke shouted after them. ‘You get under the feet of that prad and the rum coll’ll take his hand to you.’

  ‘I was surprised to see the big top up, Mrs Cooke,’ I said, plumping for the only bit of her discourse I was sure I had understood.

  ‘And where else would they work?’ she asked. ‘There’s no good working an act up in a field and then asking the horse to do it in a ring, now is there? He’d knock his legs on the ring fence every step and then he’d bolt, wun’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘It never occurred to me.’

  ‘One time, when I was a girl, a chavvy – a feller, I should say – with a clever donkey act come up and joined us in the middle of the year. He’d been doing his turn on the nob there – round the streets, you know – and a fine turn it was too so my old pa took him on as a run-in to fill where a tumbler had come off with his arm broke … always something in this lark, and no lie there … but the first night in the tent, bless us if that cuddy-horse didn’t stop in the middle of his turn, kick the poor chavvy’s legs out from under him and take off out the door to the wide blue yonder, right across the gallery packed with screaming babbies. And can you guess why?’

  ‘Because of the tent?’ suggested Ina. ‘The ring?’

  ‘No there,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘My old pa was too fly not to see that. He’d had the pair of them in the ring from sun-up to early doors. No, it wurr the band. The drums and cymbals. We never saw that cuddy again, nor the rig-out and props he had on him when he scarpered. And my mother always said the chavvy did it on purpose, to land himself a new kit when his old one was wore through and then back to the street corners again.’ I could not help thinking that the moral of Mrs Cooke’s story was getting lost somewhere, and she seemed to agree. ‘But now there,’ she went on, ‘Ma was a dread suspicious type, shame on me for speaking ill of my own dear mother what’s gone but it’s true. Nothing happened anywhere on the ground but she saw it fraying her purse string. What I’m saying is the tent’s up all winter and then just you wait and see what grand acts come out of it in the spring there. Just you wait and see.’

  ‘And will the band be playing too?’ asked Ina, possibly gauging the distance from the tent to her drawing-room windows and wondering whether the drums and cymbals would carry that far.

  ‘Time was, but no, Tam paid the band off after the last stand and we’ll get another come spring again. We have one of them Panatrope machines now and them round records – does the job there.’

  She had been busy plying the teapot and milk jug while she told her tale and now she watched us sipping with the delighted watchfulness of the true hostess.

  ‘Delicious tea, Mrs Cooke,’ said Ina. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come!’

  ‘Twas a godsend to be asked, maid,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘Your man has done us a favour there and no two ways, because we wurr in for a hard winter in that nasty Leith, only the shops for a bite of meat and town roughs bothering us of a Saturday night with a drink in them. When Mr Cooke told me about woods and streams and rabbits in the pot I thought he’d been at the bevvy.’

  ‘I feel rather a churl for asking you to keep my little visits here a secret from him,’ said Ina, but Mrs Cooke shushed her.

  ‘Away!’ she said. ‘A woman needs a man and a fine strong man is the best kind, but …’ She flicked a glance at me and, appearing to find reassurance there, she creased up into another of her grins. ‘… but of course we have to let him think he’s the king and all or he’d only think something more trouble still. Don’t you fret your head, maid.’

  In complete accordance about the proper disposal of our loyalties, then, the three of us drank our tea.

  ‘I could read your leaves, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Cooke when we were done. I was mildly offended that I remained so called when Ina was a ‘pretty maid’ but then she had her circus face to recommend her and I assumed I did not.

  ‘You tell fortunes?’ I asked. I had not had my fortune told since the departure of the last nursery maid from my parents’ house and my promotion to my own bedroom and lady’s maid, and I cannot say that I had missed it.

  ‘Palms and leaves,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘I tell fortunes in the ticket wagon before the show, Madame Polina and her crystal ball: all good news and happy futures – ah, changed days, changed days – but my real talent is palms and leaves.’

  I edged forward in my seat and held my palm out to her, thinking that palms were much less mess and bother than upturned teacups and at least she could find no dark strangers or sea voyages there.

  ‘A long lifeline,’ she said, running her fingertip around the pad of my thumb. ‘Very clear and sure, but your money has run out – turn your hand a little to the light – no, there it is! It’s just coming from a different place now. And your heart line, let me see …’

  ‘Broken?’ I suggested.

  ‘Chained,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘Intertwined, doubled, and it dun’t untangle any time soon there.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And that’s not all,’ she went on, warming to her task now, bending close over my hand. ‘What’s this I’m seeing?’

  ‘But Mrs Cooke, that’s Mrs Gilver’s left hand,’ said Ina. ‘Shouldn’t it be the right?’

  ‘Of course it should,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘unless you’re left-handed. Well, forget all of that and we’ll start again.’

  The sound of feet on the caravan steps, however, prevented it and we all turned to see a dapper little man, breathing heavily and dressed only in shirtsleeves and britches despite the cold, step through the door to join us. He was about Mrs Cooke‘s age but looked younger somehow, his greying curls less draining to the complexion than her blackened ones – when one looked closely one could see that the black extended to her scalp and even crept across her forehead here and there. His figure was youthful too and better suited to caravan life, one imagined, than Mrs Cooke’s comfortable girth.

  ‘Here’s Pa there,’ she greeted him. ‘Pa, here’s Mrs Wilson back again, on the quiet, mind, and we han’t seen her, and her friend Mrs Gilver and have we seen you or han’t we now?’

  ‘Tam Cooke,’ said the man, in a voice which was of purest Edinburgh and more, like Sir Harry Lauder over-egging for Americans in the music hall. ‘So you’re back amongst us, Mrs Wilson. Cannot keep away.’ He sat down heavily on the edge of the box-bed and wiped his brow with a large silk handkerchief pulled from his pocket.

  ‘Is that your day done there, Pa?’ said Mrs Cooke, moving the kettle forward again.

  ‘I’ve done all I can,’ he replied. ‘The lass is that headstrong and as wick as a flea with it. Changed days, Ma, changed days.’ Mrs Cooke shook her head and sucked her teeth in sympathy. ‘Our newest entrée,’ her husband explained to Ina and me, ‘our Anastasia.’ The word was in heavy italics. ‘A fine talent for the voltige – never seen a trick rider so slick since Ma was a girl – but she’s a josser all the same – not circus-born – and it shows. I’m done telling her, Ma. I’m the equestrian director, never mind the owner – Cooke’s Circus, it says over the ring door, and she can read better than most.’ He took a cup of tea from his wife’s hand and nodded his thanks.

  ‘Oh, Tam,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘Don’t you go fretting the maid there. She hasn’t had her troubles to seek. Anyways, it said Cooke’s Family Circus last time I looked, and she’s one of our own now, like it or not.’ She spoke easily enough, but she was watching her husband closely to see how the words went with him, and the overall effect was rather pointed for the setting. Mr Cooke said nothing. Ina gazed dumbly out of the window. I cleared my throat. Mrs Cooke stepped in and ended the silence at last.

  ‘Any sign of Topsy’s swing?’

  ‘Not a sniff of it,’ said Pa, with a faint smile. ‘That lass needs to learn to take more care of her props – I’m not made of money for new ropes and she should know it.’ He spoke, however, with a chuckle in his voice and Mrs Cooke relaxed too and grinned back at him. ‘So
the Prebrezhenskys are up now.’

  ‘Our Risley act,’ said Mrs Cooke, turning to Ina and me. ‘Foot jugglers – worth a look for you there.’

  ‘For sure,’ said Mr Cooke. ‘They’re working on the double flick-flack, and it’s looking good too.’

  ‘Tell me they’ve got them little maids on the mechanic,’ said Mrs Cooke, pressing her hand to her heart. Mr Cooke nodded wearily and flapped a hand at her to calm her. I crossed my eyes at Ina, quite at a loss on the question of flick-flacks and how mechanics might improve them.

  ‘Prebrezhensky!’ said Mr Cooke, and his wife tutted again. ‘Helps if you can even say it. I told them “Kukov” would be better for Cooke’s Circus. Clever, you know? But what say do I have these days? Or Romanov, if they must. Bit of class, bit of history and it would go with our “Anastasia” at least, but they’d have none of it. “What we have lost! What have we have left but our name?” they said to me. I don’t know. Changed days.’

  ‘When I did my voltige,’ Mrs Cooke said, ‘Mr Cooke used to ride the haute école.’ She pronounced it oaty coil, but I had an aunt with a passion for high-school Spanish dressage and so I caught her meaning. ‘And everyone in the ring was a Cooke or a Turvy or an Ilchenko on one side or both – all family.’ She sighed. ‘Now our boys are in America doing their act for a packet of pay and our girl’s married to a tobacconist and here’s me telling fortunes …’

  ‘Front-of-house show,’ corrected Mr Cooke, but the doldrums had conquered both of them now. ‘In the old days, you never needed no fortunes told to entertain them coming in. They’d look round the menagerie and be happy as sand boys. Sometimes I think we should hang the expense and get back to it, Ma. An elephant, a camel or two, some cats, wouldn’t you like that, eh? We could have a parade again – better than posting bills on lamp-posts any day.’

  ‘And beast wagons and show wagons and tent grooms and the ticket price so high to cover it we’d show to empty galleries like as not. We’re stretched flat taking on the new acts anyways. Them days is gone there, Tam. All gone.’

  They sounded exactly like Hugh and me.

  Ina and I excused ourselves shortly afterwards; Mr Cooke looked done in and I was sure he wanted to pull off his long boots and flop back on to his bed. We made our way across the ground to the big top – although I had noticed that Mrs Cooke called it simply the tent – pausing only to gape, stunned, at the not inconsiderable sight of Bunty sitting up on her haunches with her front paws crossed while Sallie, the tiny child who had led her away from the caravan, waved a biscuit slowly back and forth in front of her nose. Bunty, catching sight of me, whined and lowered one paw towards the grass, but the child said ‘Yat!’ and clicked her fingers and Bunty turned to face the biscuit again.

  ‘I cannot believe my eyes,’ I said to Ina. ‘Nothing the Bresh-whoevers might do in the way of juggling feet is going to top that.’

  Of course, I spoke too soon. We pulled aside the flaps under the canopy and stepped as discreetly as possible inside, into the canvas dome, into the smell of sawdust and oiled rope, into a place even more magical in its dim emptiness than it had been filled with music, lights and laughter and the sugary tang of toffee-covered apples when I was a child.

  The Prebrezhenskys turned out to be a large fair-haired man, a small dark woman like a pixie, two dark pixie girls of around eight, twins perhaps, and one of five or so with golden hair and fat pink cheeks, her father’s daughter. They nodded at us in a friendly way as we entered and I attempted a nonchalant nod in return as though I found them as unremarkable as they me. In fact, all five were dressed in britches and short leather coats with fur collars and the two bigger girls had harnesses around their waists, attached to ropes slung over a pair of high beams.

  ‘This is Mrs Gilver, a friend of mine,’ said Ina. ‘Now, Dandy, um …’

  ‘I say for you,’ the woman laughed, surveying her family with casual pride. ‘Nikolai Prebrezhensky.’ Her husband clicked his heels together and gave a curt bow, no more than a nod really. ‘And Rosaliya, Inessa and Akilina the baby. I am Zoya. Please to watch and please to excuse mechanic.’ She gestured to the harness and rope arrangement with an air of apology.

  With another bow, the man turned back to his womenfolk. He seemed to be explaining something to the girls, speaking with expansive gestures and many loud flourishes. ‘Ah-Tah-Dahhh!’ he boomed, spreading his arms wide. ‘Bamm-Bamm!’ They nodded, very serious. He dropped down on to his back on a canvas pad spread on the floor and the two girls – heavens, they were tiny! – each grasped one of his hands and hopped up until they were sitting on his feet. Their mother caught the ends of the ropes attached to her daughters’ waists and began beating time against her leg with a short stick. The little girls, curled into balls, began to revolve. The baby retreated to a safe distance, clapping her hands.

  ‘They really don’t mind us watching?’ I said to Ina.

  ‘Not at all,’ she replied, not shifting her gaze from the ring. ‘Privilege of the tober-omey’s donah, Mrs Cooke told me. The ground-owner’s wife,’ she explained. ‘And anyway, as she said, the more distraction the better, at least as far as the animal acts are concerned.’

  ‘Did you believe the story about the runaway donkey, then?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ina, turning to me briefly, although her eyes soon went back to the act, where one of the girls was now balanced in a handstand on her father’s feet and was repeatedly curling up into a ball and straightening out again while he bent and locked his knees in time. Her mother, who now had the rope looped firmly around herself like a belt with the end gripped in her hand, stepped close and spread her other arm wide. They must be about to attempt ‘the flick-flack’. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away. ‘I mean,’ said Ina, ‘if you had lived all your life in a circus, with camels and elephants and Russian relations, you’d hardly need to make stories up, would you? Gosh! Oh, jolly good try! What a brave girl you are!’

  I looked back to see the child swinging inelegantly on the harness, while her mother let the rope out slowly, hand over hand, and lowered her to the floor.

  ‘That woman must have nerves of iron,’ I said. ‘Oh Lord, now the other one. I can’t watch.’

  I felt quite wrung out by the time we left them. It was perhaps only that, whenever I had watched a circus before, the acts appeared effortless, the performers boneless and weightless, the tricks just that: tricks to fool us into believing what we saw. Witnessing the Prebrezhenskys’ rehearsal put the lie to that, for if practice makes perfect then necessarily anyone at practice is not quite perfect yet and those little girls were made of soft flesh and delicate bone, with no trick to brush simple gravity away.

  Outside, Bunty was curled asleep with her lead tied to a caravan wheel and her trainer nowhere to be seen since, judging from the savoury smells wafting from several open doors, it was now teatime. She rose, stretching and giving her eerie moaning yawn, what Alec calls her Baskerville yawn, and was content to leave the campground trotting at my heels on a limp lead as though she did so every day.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Ina, her tone caught between wryness and real concern, as we neared the castle again. She pointed to one of the many turrets where a yellow duster had been hung out of a window. ‘Albert’s back early,’ she said, pulling on her gloves and buttoning her coat to the neck. ‘You know the drill, Dandy, don’t you?’ I nodded and veered to the other edge of the path so that I was quite eight feet from her. ‘And we’ve been for a short turn around the grounds keeping to the gravel, not walking on the grass, and I sat for ten minutes resting before we came back again.’

  ‘What if he’s been home for ages?’ I asked.

  ‘He hasn’t,’ Ina said, looking sheepish. ‘One duster is less than half an hour. Two is up to an hour and the plan is if it ever goes over the hour someone will slip out and come to find me. But it never has: Albert is a man of regular habits, I’m happy to say.’

  He might very well have been, but he had certainly in
terrupted his habits that day. He had only just arrived home and was still out on the sweep when we came around the turn of the drive and into view. In fact, he almost caught the lowering of the warning flag, turning his head at the sound of the closing window as a maid drew the yellow duster in again, only missing it because he could not keep his eyes off Bunty for long enough properly to scan the entire frontage in time.

  ‘In you go, darling,’ I said in a loud voice, ushering Bunty up into the Cowley. ‘You know you don’t come inside here.’ Bunty, still subdued by whatever circus-magic had been worked upon her, did me the credit of dropping uncomplainingly out of sight and leaving me to turn and offer my apologies to Albert Wilson. ‘Do forgive me the dog,’ I said. I never can bring myself to say his name. ‘I’ve kept her well away from dear Ina and I admit I was agog for the Cookes.’

  Ina cleared her throat gently, reminding me that as far as Albert was to know we had not gone within a floating germ’s distance of such a thing as a newly arrived circus. It would be Christmas before she was allowed to watch the show from the back row of the big top and weeks more until it was safe for her to go hobnobbing.

  ‘To hear about them, I mean,’ I added, but Albert Wilson was too distracted by momentous news of his own to notice my blunders.

  ‘I’ve brought a visitor home with me, Ina my love,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve brought …’ Ina’s voice trailed off in wonder. ‘You’ve brought someone home?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ her husband answered. His voice is normally monotonic in efforts to shake off the last droplets of Glasgow, but it swooped and fell quite extravagantly now as he delivered his news. ‘We met on the train. That is, we met up on the train today, by chance; we are acquainted already, of course. As I daresay you are too, my dear Mrs … Dan … my dear.’ Because I never call him anything, he has simply no idea what to call me. ‘Robin Laurie,’ he announced with an attempt at casualness which was spoiled by a tremor of pride. A tall willow-wand of a man in exquisite town suiting and a long dove-grey overcoat of obvious Paris cut stepped out on to the step behind him like an announcing angel.