Meridon twt-3 Read online

  Robert could judge people like he could judge horseflesh. Within days he had Rea setting the rigging as well as William ever did; and before the show he had him practising standing on horseback, and vaulting on and off. He was little, but he was wiry, and he would get up early in the morning and work all the day long without ever seeming to get tired. He was excellent with the ponies and even Sea, who still hated most men, would allow his touch. I was glad, for working with the horses and my little act on the trapeze at every show was tiring.

  We kept the show much the same as that first time when the Quality had come from as far away as Salisbury and stood to cheer and showered the flying act with coins.

  When we had a barn we would do the show indoors. It meant a smaller audience but Robert charged twopence a head at the gate and people paid willingly, aye, and came back for the second performance and paid all over again. Very few people had even heard of a trapeze act. No one had ever seen girl flyers. We were as much a novelty as if we had two heads apiece.

  If Robert could not hire a barn we would work in a field, with the A-frames for Jack and the girls fixed deep into the wet ground and a mesh of rigging pegging it down to hold it still. It was cold working on the outside but people huddled together and cheered and did not seem to mind. I was mortally tired at the end of a day with two shows, and it was worse when we worked in the open air because I was chilled by the end of the show as well. Preparing the ponies and showing them, changing their harness, and then my two rosinback acts were hard work. I could hand the horses over to Rea for the second half but my trapeze act strained my tired muscles, and always I stiffened in a frenzy of tension while Dandy was working up high. Then I had to force a smile on my face for the historical tableau at the end when Jack and I rode Snow and Sea around the ring at a fast canter and snatched Dandy and Katie up behind us to represent the rape of the Sabine women. The crowd loved that. Katie and Dandy wore their indecent trapeze costumes with a veil over their faces and screamed like banshees. Jack and I wore our breeches and blue shirts with little fez hats. We tried it one time with burnt cork smeared on our faces and it went even better.

  We did three shows a day if we were in a barn. Robert would hire lanterns and we would work until the light was going. He would sometimes hire benches and do a gala show for invited local gentry if we were in an area of big houses. Katie and Dandy would be on their mettle then, catching the eye of the local squire.

  I used to peep through the door of the barn to see the clothes, to smell the clean perfume smell that came off from them. The clothes were so smooth, the cloth so silky. The colours of the women’s dresses were so pale and so regular – the dyes seemed never to have run streaky. Their collars were always white, and if it got hot in the barn they brought out exquisite painted fans and wafted them gently at their necks where you could not see a line where they had stopped washing.

  I used to watch them and long to be one of them. It was a dream as foolish as Dandy’s thought of taking the fancy of one of the young squires. But it was part of my old dream of Wide and I longed for clean sheets and a quiet room. The tick of a well-oiled clock and flowers in a vase. The smell of beeswax and the view from the window of other people bent-backed working on my land.

  The dream of Wide which had slipped away from me in Warminster came back to me now we were on the road again. Every day as we went eastward into Hampshire and then towards Sussex it grew stronger. I used to close my eyes every night and know that I would see on my eyelids a high horizon of green hills, a lane white with chalky mud, a straggle of cottages down one main lane. A vicarage opposite a church, a shoulder of bracken-strewn brown common reaching up behind the cottages and a blue sky overarching it all.

  I would dream that I was a girl just like myself, with a tumble of copper hair and green eyes and a great passion for things she could scarcely hope to have. Once I dreamed of her lying with a dark-haired lad and I woke aching with a desire which I had never felt in real life. Once I awoke with a shriek for I dreamed that she had ordered her father’s death and had held the great wooden door open and stared stony-faced as they carried him past her on a hurdle with his head stove in. Dandy had shaken me awake and asked me what was wrong and then hugged me and shielded me from Katie when I told her I had dreamed of Wide, and something awful. That I must stop her, the girl who was me. That I must run to her and warn her against the death of her father.

  Dandy had rocked me and held me in her arms as if I were a baby and told me that Wide was a place we had none of us seen, nor heard of. That the girl was not me. That I was Meridon, Meridon the gypsy, the horse-trainer, the showgirl. And then I cried again and would not tell her why. But it was because the gulf between me and the girl in the dream was unbridgeable.

  I had another dream too. Not one which woke me screaming, but one which made me long with a great loneliness for the mother that Dandy and I had lost so young. I had somehow got her muddled in my mind with the story Jack had told us of the loss of his mother – of her calling and calling as the wagon went away from her down the road. I certainly knew that my mother had not run after any wagon. She was too ill, poor woman, to run after anything. The memories I had of her were of her lying in the bunk with her mass of black hair, Dandy’s thick black hair, spread out on the pillow all around her, saying to Da in an anxious, fretting voice, ‘You will burn everything when I die, won’t you? Everything. All my dresses and all my goods? It is the way of my people. I need to know you will burn everything.’

  He had promised yes. But she had known, and he had known, and even little Dandy and I had known that he would not complete the ceremonies and bury her as a Romany woman should be treated. He took her body off on a handcart and tossed it in the open hole which served as a pauper’s grave. Then he sold her clothes, he did not burn them as he promised. He burned a few rags in an awkward shame-faced way, just things he could not sell. And he tried to tell Dandy and me, who were watching him wide-eyed, that he was keeping his promise to our dead mother. He was a liar through and through. The only promise he kept was to give me my string and gold clasps. And he would have had that off me if he could.

  But it was not that death that I remembered. That was not the mother I grieved for in my dream. I dreamed of a thunderstorm, high overhead, a night when no one who could close shutters would venture out. But out in the wind and the rain was a woman. The rain was sluicing down on her head, her feet were cut in many places from the sharp flints in the chalk soil and she limped like a beggar come new to the trade. The pain in her feet was very bad. But she was crying not for that pain but because she had a baby under her arm and she was taking it to the river to throw it away like an in-bred whelp which should be drowned. But the little baby was so warm beneath her arm, hidden from the storm by her cape. And she loved it so dearly she did not know how she could let it go, into the cold water, away into the flood. As she stumbled and sobbed she could feel it nuzzling gently into her armpit, trustingly.

  Then the dream melted as dreams will and suddenly there was a wagon, like the one I live in now, like all the wagons I have lived in all my life. And a woman leaning down from the scat by the driver and reaching out for the baby, and taking the baby without a word.

  And then – and this is the moment where I suppose the dreams become muddled with Robert Gower’s wife calling after him on the road – then the wagon moved off and the woman was left behind. In one part of her heart she was glad that the child was sent away, off the land, away from her home. And in another part she longed for her child with such a passion that she could not stop herself from running, running on her bleeding feet after the rocking wagon, and calling out, though the wind ripped her words away: ‘Her name is Sarah! Sarah…’

  She called some more, but the wind whipped her words away and the woman on the box did not turn her head. And I awoke, in the early, cold grey light, with tears pouring down my cheeks as if I was grieving for a mother who had loved me and given me away; sent me away because there was