The Illusionists

At this point, with an inevitability that was becoming familiar, her thoughts would turn to Devil Wix. If she wished for closer acquaintance with the theatre, surely it was Devil who could lead her to it? It was true that he had dismissed her barely thought-out suggestion about a female role, but – characteristically – she would not allow that to deter her. Eliza considered matters. The first strategy was to earn Devil’s approval, and his gratitude if that were possible. She must find a way to direct paying customers to the box office in the Strand.

To this end, after the next life class, instead of leaving immediately once she was dressed and Mr Coope was out of the room, she lingered for a few minutes to talk to the students. Charles Egan and the others were delighted with this opportunity and they were soon established in a semicircle, with the young men’s coats slung aside and their feet hooked up on chair rungs. Ralph Vine laced his fingers behind his head and tipped his seat at a reckless angle. Even Miss Frazier 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 young polemicist from the sculpture school wrote an article entitled ‘Art and Every Day. Static Gallery versus Mobile Music Hall’ for a pamphlet that was read by some of the professors. As a result of this, Raleigh Coope and his current best protégé, a versatile young man of artistic promise, took two seats in the front row at the Palmyra to see the Execution of the Philosopher.

And at the end of the next life class Eliza was surprised when Mr Coope unrolled a sketch for her attention.

It was a lively pencil drawing of Devil in his robes, holding up Jasper’s waxwork head of Carlo Boldoni.

‘It’s a very strong likeness,’ she murmured.

Raleigh Coope waved this aside. ‘Mr Gardiner knows how to draw.’ Unlike some of the present company, he might have added. ‘He is much more interested in the subtext, the way that the piece subverts the biblical and classical mythologies. There is a subject here, Miss Dunlop.’

‘Yes, I see.’ Eliza did not think mythological subversion had been Devil and Carlo’s first intention.

‘If you are acquainted with the performer, you might enquire whether he is interested in sitting for Mr Gardiner?’

‘Yes, Mr Coope.’

‘The show has its slender merits, as Mr Gardiner has noticed. But it lacks an audience. The house was half empty on the night we visited. Doesn’t the management know how to attract paying customers?’

‘It seems not,’ she had to say.

A development which Eliza could hardly have foreseen now took place at the art school.

Attached to the back of the building was a mews and in this more humble environment – where the windows were not so tall, the north light less plentiful and the heating governed by economy – another establishment was housed. It had been set up as a philanthropic gesture by Professor Rawlinson himself and it was dedicated to the teaching of what he and Raleigh Coope chose to call commercial art.

‘For all the world,’ Charles Egan had once scornfully remarked, ‘as if that were not a contradiction in terms.’

The students at the secondary college were boys and young men who possessed a degree of artistic talent but did not aspire to become artists, and were in any case from poor families unable to afford the much higher fees at the school itself. Those applicants who were fortunate enough to be selected were taught by expert practitioners the techniques of signwriting, illustration for manufacturers, magazines and catalogues, and even of constructing models and mannequins for display purposes. Once they were Rawlinson trained, they easily and quickly found employment. When Eliza told Jasper about this he had sighed enviously.

‘If only I had known of such a school when I was sixteen years of age.’ Jasper’s own studies and apprenticeship had been hard, although easier to endure than his childhood in Stanmore.

Mr Coope had a fondness for lively and ambitious young men and he diligently involved himself with the curriculum of the technical school. One afternoon he addressed the class of illustrators and signwriters on the use of art as a means of selling goods.

‘How might you employ a visual image to encourage a purchase?’ he asked them. This was not a question he would have put to Mr Egan and his cohorts, who were paying for the chance one day to be able to write RA after their names.

‘By making a positive association?’ someone attempted.

‘Yes. Very good.’

The group dutifully discussed the possible combination of sturdy oak trees with health-giving patent medicines, and of portraits of beautiful young women with face creams. Mr Coope swallowed a yawn. Mr Gardiner and his enjoyment of the Philosophers illusion crept into his head and he was thinking idly of the Palmyra theatre’s rows of empty seats as he asked his class, ‘What if it were not a commodity to be sold but – say – an event?’

There was some more tedious discussion, this time of handbills and posters.

A red-haired boy at the back of the room raised his hand.

‘You could do the opposite, couldn’t you?’

Raleigh Coope arched one eyebrow.

‘I mean, sir, by not telling the people too much but in some way making them want to know more?’

‘Please go on.’

The boy’s face flushed as bright as his hair.

‘Sir, if I’m lectured over and over about, I dunno, who is going to preach in church on Sunday and if I have to listen to parson telling me what I have to renounce so as to save my soul, with my ma always reminding me even on a working day, then I starts saying to myself, I don’t care. But if it’s kept a secret, say, what really will get me to heaven, then I’m going to try my hardest to find out, aren’t I? It’s only natural.’

The rest of the class was tittering but the boy said defiantly, ‘Well, I am going to. It stands to reason.’

‘You have an idea there, Mr Cockle. Continue with it,’ Coope said. The boy’s forehead furrowed as he thought even harder.

‘So, if I wants to get people to come to my meeting perhaps I’d leave a hint they can see everywhere, not giving away so much but making them feel hungry to find out more. The idea is they will be worrying inside their noddles, “Am I going to miss what he’s got? Whatever it is?” ‘The boy jabbed a paint-splotched finger at his grinning neighbour.

Coope clapped his big hands. ‘Make them hungry, as you say, and whet their appetites further by filling the air with the scent of a fine roast.’

‘But folk will be disappointed when they get no pig at the end, wun’t they?’ someone muttered.

Coope looked over the rows of faces, many of them clearly familiar with what it felt like to be denied roast pork. He was a sympathetic man and he wished he had chosen his words and his example more adroitly, so he hurried on.

‘Here is an exercise for you.’

He had thought of setting them to the lettering of a handbill, but the young man with the unfortunate head of hair had accidentally come up with a more interesting proposition. So out of a moment’s embarrassment and otherwise acting on an impulse, Raleigh Coope began to tell them about the Palmyra theatre and the want of an audience for what he privately judged to be a music-hall turn. It was an audacious and well-executed turn, it was true, but it was mostly George Gardiner’s enthusiasm for it that had fired his own.

‘What might you do to bring in an audience, using a visual image, gentlemen?’

There was a long, baffled silence. Too audibly someone scratched his head. Then, slowly, the red-haired boy raised his hand.

‘Sir?’

Devil left the stew of alleyways and trudged out into Holborn. December’s bitter wind made him hunch his shoulders and clench his fists inside his tattered pockets. His belly rumbled with hunger and with the less easily assuaged pangs of general dissatisfaction. He was thoroughly tired of sharing his lodgings with an irritable dwarf of eccentric habits. Maria Hayes’s demands were intensifying according to the length of time that Carlo spent under her roof, and her husband had begun to glare at Devil with dull coals of suspicion in his eyes. Reaching a street corner, he hung there with his chest hollowed against the gusts as he tried to decide where to go. There must surely be a tavern nearby with a fire, and a landlord who would take his promise in exchange for a tot of brandy?

But no such place came immediately to mind so his steps tended southwards, towards the Palmyra.

In the distance in an angle of two walls, splashed over sooty brickwork, he saw a painted palm tree. The size of it – three feet tall, if it was an inch – and the insolent brightness of whitewash against the dingy background were what caught his attention in the first place. But then it came to him that its outline was entirely familiar because it was a crisp stencil-cut version of the palm that crowned the theatre pillars. The same palm motif had been taken as an ornament for the head of Jacko Grady’s playbills and posters and it also adorned the theatre’s programmes.

Devil splashed through the mud to examine it more closely.

The whitewash had been applied haphazardly through the outlines of a stencil held up against the wall. Trickles ran down from the curved leaves and dribbled from the base. It was clearly fresh. Devil ran his thumb over a section of the trunk and scraped the brick beneath. The whitewash was only just turning grey with wind-blown dust. He walked on and passed a dozen more palms. As he drew near to the Strand he noticed arrows in the same whitewash, painted over walls and lintels, on steps and on the stones underfoot, all of them pointing in the direction of the Palmyra. People hurried by, but Devil estimated that most of them bestowed at least a wondering glance on trees and arrows.

He reached the Strand. Here another much bigger arrow pointed from the street towards the theatre entrance. A ragged street sweeper prodded his broom at it.

When Carlo arrived for the matinée Devil asked him what he thought of this proliferation of palms. The dwarf shrugged.

‘Grady’s doing?’

Devil thought this was highly unlikely. ‘Grady? You mean, he’s had a selling notion and then paid to have this done? Or is there some third person involved? Someone we know nothing about?’

The dwarf shrugged again. He and Devil were constantly at odds, chafed by too much proximity and downcast after a run of poor houses.

‘Ask him, if you’re so interested.’ He swung away and took the philosopher’s wig out of its box. The horsehair was matted with grime from its excursions beneath the stage.

Devil never spoke to Jacko Grady unless it was impossible to avoid him. He undid his buttons and took off his shirt, ready to put on his costume. Next to him the soprano was preparing for the stage by gargling and spitting linctus into a tin bowl. From her other side Bascia darted Devil a thin, complicit smile of disgust.

The next day there were more palm trees, a white forest of them waving all across Covent Garden as far as Trafalgar Square. Devil saw a man stop walking, turn in his path and follow with his eyes the direction of an arrow. That night there was a somewhat bigger audience, and the atmosphere of expectation amongst the crowd raised the quality of the performance. There were some Rawlinson students present, and the Philosophers received by far the longest and loudest applause. Grady intercepted Devil and Carlo as they came offstage. His thumbs were tucked into the pockets of his grease-blotched waistcoat.

‘What is this, Wix?’

‘What is what?’

‘The trees.’

The bustle of the wings might not have existed. Prickling with antagonism the two men appraised each other. From the belligerence of his question Devil understood that Grady was concealing suspicious alarm, and so most probably was not behind the strange multiplying of whitewashed palms. This did not reassure him. It could only mean that some other individual threatened to intrude, one who might be more devious and therefore a more formidable rival than greedy Grady.

‘I have no idea,’ Devil blandly countered, hoping to convey that he did. ‘The question is – is it criticism or applause?’

Grady’s mind was working, but the labour did not bring forth any explanation or a reason to blame Boldoni and Wix. He contented himself with a generalised thrust. ‘You need to get up some new material. Use the rigmaroles from your audition. Cards, memory, vanishing. Your box trick will be stale by next month.’

‘I don’t believe it will, but to offer you some of our astonishing new tricks will be a great pleasure.’

The cabinet was carried offstage and they followed it, leaving Grady at his vantage point. As soon as the stagehands deposited the piece Carlo pressed his ear to the mechanism that controlled the hidden doors.

‘The hinge is catching. It takes a full second longer for the door to spring. You might pay more attention to the act, Wix, and less to your personal ambitions,’ he grumbled.

‘You heard the audience tonight. My ambition will pay off, and then perhaps you will appreciate what I have been trying to do.’

‘No one will ever appreciate you as sincerely as you do yourself.’

Devil ignored him. The dwarf’s carping pessimism and sense of his own importance were irksome, but whenever he thought of reclaiming for himself his lodgings and his act – the two halves of his life, because he had nothing else – he was forced back to the bare truth that he needed Carlo more than the dwarf needed him.

‘Ten per cent of every house more than eighty per cent full,’ he murmured. ‘Tonight we were three-quarters sold.’ The ribbon of gold that had shone so enticingly in Devil’s dreams at the beginning of the enterprise had drooped and grown tarnished, but in recent days it had started to glitter all over again.

‘New hinges,’ Carlo bared his wolf’s teeth. ‘Tomorrow.’

Heinrich Bayer passed with Lucie in his arms, her unmarked satin slippers skimming an inch from the floor. She had a new costume, a narrow skirt of heavy oyster-coloured silk worn over a high bustle in the latest style. But it was the other automaton, the manikin glimpsed in Bayer’s studio, which occupied Devil’s thoughts.

He was going to need Carlo’s cooperation for a trick much more difficult to execute than the Philosophers illusion. The dwarf would have to be kept sweet.

‘Tomorrow, my friend, of course,’ he agreed in a voice as silken as Lucie’s gown.

If the fine art students were piqued by the apprentices’ appropriation of their theatre, they did not retaliate by withdrawing their support for it. Stark black cloaks became the preferred costume for a certain section of the house, and each night the swoop of the executioner’s blade and the crash of the head into the basket were greeted with a louder roar. The severed head’s words from the black depths of the cabinet carried a whispering echo as twenty others mouthed them from the stalls. With the warm swell of approval buoying him up, Devil’s snapping of the sword blade and plea for forgiveness found a real pathos that even Carlo could not fault. The smoke coiled with devilish effect in the flashes of blue and silver gaslight that were now, with long practice, perfectly synchronised. The bitter cascade of gold coins at the end drew a storm of applause.

The Execution of the Philosopher illusion had reached its point of perfection. Word of mouth spread from the students to their friends, their families, and their friends’ friends and families. The palm trees had caused their own stir, and there had even been a picture and a teasing paragraph about it in the London Illustrated News. For an entire week the number of seats sold was greater with each successive night. Devil quickly concluded that the rumbustious youths who had taken to attending performances in costume were also in some way responsible for the street decorations. So long as the business was not a plot of Jacko Grady’s, he did not much care what young gentlemen mysteriously did with their time and money. As patrons of the Palmyra went they were on the harmless side, and therefore more than welcome.

Two nights before Christmas Eve, two hundred people took their places for the evening performance.

‘Two hundred,’ Devil repeated to Carlo as they waited to take the stage. Perched on his stilts, with the wicker cage supporting his gown, the dwarf’s enlarged shoulders nudged his. Devil added, ‘I may not have a Varsity man’s head for mathematics, but I do know that figure represents eighty per cent of capacity. I am looking forward to seeing Jacko Grady’s face.’