hovered within earshot. For her own part Eliza was enjoying the stimulating contrast between her nakedness of half an hour ago and the polite cadences of the present conversation.
She began by asking them, ‘I wonder if any of you have seen the new variety show at the Palmyra theatre?’
‘That old place?’ Leonard Woolley shook his head. ‘My father used to go to concerts there. It has been closed for years.’
‘Indeed it was closed, but it has recently reopened as a variety hall. It is not much better than derelict even now, but you should go and see the magic act. The illusion is called the Execution of the Philosopher. I promise you, Mr Woolley, you will not believe your eyes.’
‘Whatever you command, Miss Dunlop. May I persuade you to come with me?’
‘Thank you. I have already seen the performance,’ Eliza smiled at him. Some of the young men were languid and others were bumptious. None of them had interested her, even before her visits to the Palmyra and Herr Bayer’s studio.
When she arrived for the next class Leonard Woolley and two others were quick to announce that they had followed her instructions and enjoyed a visit to the theatre.
‘It’s a rough sort of place, though. Who took you along there, Miss Dunlop, may I ask?’
‘My sister and her husband.’
‘Not your young man?’ Ralph Vine slyly murmured.
‘I don’t have such a thing.’
‘I saw you walking in the park with a chap who looked as if he’d like to be.’
Charles Egan mocked him. ‘You might like it too, Viney, but that doesn’t necessarily make it happen.’
‘What did you think of the Philosophers illusion?’ Eliza persisted.
Mr Woolley whistled. ‘Top-notch, I have to say. I was astounded. Cutting off his head, you know. A strange person in the row in front of us nearly screamed her own head off. The trick is a waxwork of course. But how is it done?’
‘I couldn’t reveal any details.’
‘But you do know? How come? Do tell us. I love theatrical illusions. They have such a primitive appeal.’
Everyone was interested now. Miss Frazier paused in the adjustment of her smock ties.
‘I know in principle. I am acquainted with the performers.’ Eliza couldn’t resist the little boast. There was another whistle.
Ralph Vine said, ‘Are you? Dark horse, Miss Dunlop. Gentlemen, who apart from me has not yet seen this fascinating show? I propose we put matters right tomorrow evening.’
All the male students went in an exuberant group to the Palmyra. Eliza crossed her fingers that Devil and Carlo would give their best performance, but she could come up with no reason for going to the theatre herself. She returned to her lodgings in Bayswater instead. After eating the usual dinner in the company of her two fellow lodgers she left the beef-coloured downstairs front room and withdrew to her bedroom. Laid out beside the oil lamp on the table in the tiny bay window were two quires of blank paper acquired at an advantageous price from the clerk of supplies at the Rawlinson School.
Eliza sat down, picked up her pencil and turned over the pages. She sighed as she did so, but she persevered. The playlet she had envisaged, an airy confection of lovers, a duenna, and cupboards into which people disappeared before comically tumbling out through a different set of doors, remained obstinately buried inside her head. She had tried for several evenings in succession but however hard she stared at her paper before pressing the lead pencil into its creamy whiteness, the actual words defied excavation. Who would have thought the business of writing could be so difficult? She knew the character she would play, had planned her elegant costume and even the way her hair would be dressed, but how did one make any of this happen?
‘Good evening, Charlotte,’ she wrote, the first line to be uttered by the lover, a role that would necessarily have to be taken by Devil Wix.
‘Good evening, sir.’
Was that really all she could manage? The noise of the Palmyra’s brutal audiences in likely response to this insipid exchange was all too easy to conjure. Eliza gnawed her lip and screwed up her eyes until the sheet of paper faded to a fuzzy grey rectangle, but the pencil obstinately refused to move. She listened to her upstairs neighbour’s footsteps as they passed overhead, from the washstand to the wardrobe and back again. Miss Aynscoe was the overseer of an atelier specialising in fine beadwork and embroideries for ladies’ clothing. She was so poor that her own garments seemed worn almost to the point of transparency, and the sparse evening meal provided for them by their landlady was probably the only food she ate all day. But then Miss Aynscoe lived within her means. Eliza did not, and she was perfectly well aware that her small capital would not last for ever. Or indeed, much beyond the next year. But what was the point of being alive, she reasoned, if everything were to be planned for and measured in advance? That was the way Faith and Matthew lived, and it did not appeal to her.
She shifted her position so that she sat more perfectly upright. It was tempting to let her eyes lose their focus, even to drift into the reverie of her hours of posing – for all her energy, this state of suspension always beckoned her – but there was work to be done. Why would a pair of lovers tumble into separate cupboards? To escape from the duenna, perhaps. How would the cabinet interiors conceal and then reveal their contents? Whose advice should she seek on these technical matters? Not Devil’s, she instinctively knew that. Carlo Boldoni’s, perhaps. At the prospect of this collaboration the tight wire that ran between her shoulders loosened a little. Frowning like a schoolgirl, Eliza wrote a few lines of dialogue that she hoped were tender and sprightly.
Reports of the show at the Palmyra circulated at the Rawlinson. The young men visited it a second time, recruiting more of their friends to accompany them, and on this occasion they continued with a long night in and out of the drinking parlours behind the Strand. Someone had narrowly avoided being arrested after snatching a bobby’s helmet, someone else had fallen asleep on a porter’s barrow in the fruit market and had only woken up when the man threw him off in favour of a few bushels of pippins.
‘Viney, poor Viney proposed marriage to a young lady who sat on his knee for an hour and whispered her dark spells into his ear,’ Charles Egan crowed.
This riotous evening rapidly became a totemic event for the whole group, and as a result they adopted the Palmyra and the Philosophers illusion in particular as their badge of dishonour. Ralph Vine swept through South Kensington in a long black cloak like Devil’s, and the others started calling him Socrates.
Devil had told Jacko Grady that if there was to be no place for Heinrich Bayer in the company there would be no Philosophers either, and Grady had reluctantly agreed to include him again. Now a rival student coterie struck back by proclaiming their admiration for Bayer and the amazing Lucie. Two of them came to school wearing an approximation of his old-fashioned evening clothes, and one persuaded his fiancée to dress up like the doll and smile fixedly to the applause as they waltzed over the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall.
As a result of this exuberance more and more of the Rawlinson School’s students and their friends began to make their way to the Strand, and now they sat through the entire show as a collective demonstration of their commitment to understanding (prior to rejecting) the broadest spectrum of public taste.
A
