Patter was having an excellent night until he learned why.
Usually Beldo let him remain in the ring for seven minutes. At seven, the drum rolled, the aerialists descended, and Patter had to carry his broken chair away. Tonight the drum did not roll. He balanced the chair on his head. He put his head through it. He asked a woman in the front row whether this was what people meant by taking a seat, and she laughed so violently that her husband began to laugh at her.
Patter loved that. The second laugh, which he had not planned.
Behind the entrance curtain, Beldo held up five fingers.
Five more minutes. Patter had never been given five more minutes.
He pretended to count the fingers, ran out at four, and removed a brass thumb from his pocket. The front row saw it first. The laugh travelled up the benches. He waited for it to reach the top before bowing.
His face had been cast in a broad smile. There were times it did not suit him. This was not one of them.
When he finally stepped behind the curtain, Liss was sitting on a packing case in her walking coat. Her aerial shoes lay beneath it, silver toes pointing in different directions. She had wrapped cloth around her bare brass feet.
“You missed your entrance,” Patter said.
“No.”
He glanced up. The two trapezes hung still above the ring.
Beldo came around him and pulled the curtain closed.
“Marvellous,” he said. “They’re yours. Give them the ladder.”
“The long ladder?”
“Whatever you like.”
Beldo always said the long ladder lost the children halfway through. Patter looked at Liss. She was tightening a knot above her ankle.
“The others are being difficult,” Beldo said. “I’ll sort it out.”
Patter knew what that meant. Sometimes the brass band slowed a march because they liked the low part better. Sometimes Crook, who carried the trunks, refused to carry Beldo’s bath until Beldo had emptied it. People made a great deal of these things. Patter generally found that a joke helped.
He pulled the ladder from its rack.
Liss raised her head.
“Don’t do it.”
“They’ve paid.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him for a moment, then bent to her other foot.
He took the ladder into the ring.
The long ladder began with a hat stuck on its highest rung. Patter climbed three rungs, noticed how far he was from the ground, climbed down and lay flat to recover. Then he tried raising the ground with pieces of wood. A boy called out that he should lower the ladder. Patter thanked him, laid it down, and found that the hat had become a considerable walk away.
He had worked on this for months behind the wagons. Crook had supplied the blocks. Liss had suggested that he shake hands with the boy who solved it, then become unable to let go because he needed the hand for climbing.
There was no boy in the ring tonight. Patter shook hands with the ladder. It fell on him.
The tent shook with laughter.
From under a rung he could see Beldo speaking to the men who erected the tent. Beldo pointed toward the baggage yard. The men left by the service passage.
Patter rolled the ladder off his chest. He could keep going. For once he would not have to leave while he still had something left to do.
He climbed to the top. He retrieved the hat. He put it on and discovered it was the wrong size, a development that interested the audience for another four minutes.
When he emerged, the packing case was empty. Liss’s silver shoes were gone.
Beyond the wagons came the scrape of metal against stone.
Patter left the ladder leaning against the rack and went to look.
The baggage yard ended at a timber fence. At its double gate, Crook stood with a trunk on each shoulder. Behind him waited the six musicians, the two jugglers and Liss. The second aerialist, Fen, was still coming down the steps of his wagon. He carried a saucepan.
Across the gate Beldo had ordered a freight wagon parked sideways. Its wheels had been blocked. Two tent men were putting the shafts down.
“You could shift it,” Patter told Crook.
Crook looked at the men. They had their hands beneath a shaft.
“Could,” he said.
“Wait till they’re clear.”
“They won’t get clear.”
One of the men sat on the shaft. He was called Hurly. He had a wife who sent him letters in green envelopes and an excellent singing voice. He would sit there all night if Beldo paid him.
Patter turned to Liss.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Before the finale?”
“We’re leaving, Patter.”
“Which town?”
“No town with him.”
He looked at the trunks. Crook had packed them badly. A sleeve hung from one lid. The musicians wore their everyday canvas covers, each slit and mended to fit a particular instrument. The trombonist’s cover had an extra pocket for his slide.
“Tomorrow,” Patter said. “We can talk tomorrow.”
“We did,” said Liss. “For weeks.”
“Not to me.”
“No. Last time Fen said he wanted to leave, you put it in the act.”
He had. The aerialist who wanted a ground-floor room. Beldo had liked it so much he had kept the joke for the posters.
That hurt. He raised his hand to his mouth, although nothing in his face could move except the lower jaw.
Beldo came into the yard with his watch out.
“Back in,” he told Patter. “The gentleman with the cornet is doing his best, but he’s a customer.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to go. As you see, I’m asking them to finish the engagement.”
“Then you’ll let them?”
Beldo put the watch away.
“I keep them wound. I keep the rain off. Who had Fen’s knee recast? Ask him. Who paid for it?”
Fen stood on the bottom step, holding his saucepan against his middle.
“You did,” he said.
“And was I obliged to?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could show some appreciation.”
“I did. I said thank you. I went up again.”
From inside the tent came a cornet playing the first phrase of a tune, then starting it again. The audience helped with a little uncertain singing.
Patter knew a way to get everyone moving. A procession. Crook could lead, the musicians could play, Liss and Fen could ride the trunks. Through the ring, one last turn, out through the audience entrance. Beldo would have his finish. No one need admit anything had gone wrong.
He explained it. He showed them where Crook could turn without scraping the trunks.
“No,” Liss said.
“It’s three minutes.”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t even have to smile.”
She looked at his face.
Patter stopped.
Beldo took him by the elbow. His fingers went into the familiar groove above the joint.
“Listen to that,” he said.
The singing had become a chant. Patter’s name.
“You can have the ring till closing. Your own notice on the bill. I should have done it years ago.”
Patter could see the bill: his broad red mouth, his loose trousers, letters big enough to read from the other end of a street. When it rained, people would still come. They would come for him.
Crook lowered one trunk. He had to bend sideways to do it without dropping the other. Nobody watched him except Patter.
“What about the public gate?” Patter asked Liss.
“Beldo’s put Torren there.”
Torren collected tickets and stood beside the public exit during the show. The gate opened inward into a narrow passage alongside the tent. It was kept clear so the benches could empty through it as well as through the main entrance. Once the audience had gone, Torren locked it.
“Torren won’t let us past,” said Liss.
“He might let me.”
“Yes,” she said. “He might.”
Beldo’s hand tightened.
“You’re not going.”
Patter looked down at the fingers. They had wound the key in his back every morning for twelve years. They were warm. He knew the small flat wart beside the thumbnail.
He gently lifted them out of his elbow.
Patter went into the ring without a prop.
The chant dissolved into cheering. He bowed before he meant to. A woman called for the ladder. Someone else called for the chair. He stood with his arms hanging. The audience settled, pleased by this new beginning.
“The others are leaving,” he said.
A man near the back shouted that he had married one like that.
Patter waited through the laugh.
“They want to leave. Mr Beldo has blocked the yard.”
The tent was much quieter now. Patter could hear the ticking in his own neck. He had never noticed it in the ring before.
“We’ve paid for a show,” someone said.
“Yes.”
“Then give us one.”
He looked at the entrance curtain. Beldo stood beside it. If Patter reached for his hat, there might still be time to make this an act. He could pull a frightened face with his hands; he could mime an argument with an invisible master. They would forgive the bad opening.
He kept his arms at his sides.
“That’s all from me,” he said.
He walked toward the side passage.
People stood. Some wanted their money, some wanted to see the yard, and some were already reaching under benches for their coats. Torren opened the side gate into its recess beside the fence.
Patter stepped into the recess beside the hinge and took hold of the gate’s edge.
Torren looked down at him.
“Not there.”
“I’m not in the passage.”
“No. You’re holding my gate.”
“Yes.”
Torren had laughed at the ladder during rehearsal. He did not laugh now. He could have dragged Patter out; he was taller, and his hands were large enough to encircle the clown’s wrists. But a family came past carrying a sleeping girl, and he stepped aside to show them the turn around the guy ropes. Behind them came two women carrying the cornet player’s case because he had become involved in an argument about refunds.
Crook appeared at the inner end of the passage. He had left one trunk behind. The other was on his head.
Liss followed, then Fen, then the musicians in single file. They kept their instruments close. There was no tune.
“Hold them,” Beldo called.
He came down the passage behind the last juggler. Patter saw Torren judge the space: departing audience, brass shoulders, one little girl being carried sideways through the turn. Torren kept one hand on the open gate.
“Not here,” he said.
“Shut it.”
“Not while they’re coming through.”
Beldo tried to get past him. A woman caught Beldo by his lapel and held out three tickets. He pulled free. By then Crook was on the road.
Patter let go of the gate.
Beldo caught the baggy cloth at his shoulder.
The seam held. It had been sewn to survive being pulled out of a cannon.
For a moment Patter hung between the two men. Torren had turned back to the people leaving. Beldo’s face was very close. He looked frightened, which Patter had not expected.
“Don’t,” Beldo said.
Patter unfastened the three buttons down his front. His body beneath the suit was narrow and dull, with patches of old polish at the joints. He drew one arm free, then the other. Holding the fence, he stepped out of each trouser leg.
Beldo was left holding the trousers as well as the coat. They were one piece. Patter had never thought about how convenient that might be.
He went through the gate.
A man on the road saw the brass clown in his long striped stockings and began to laugh. Patter turned toward him. The little flourish rose in his hand: embarrassment, false dignity, the bow that would turn exposure into triumph.
Liss was already thirty yards away.
He lowered his hand and ran after her.
His stockings slipped on the dirt. He landed on both knees. The man laughed again, louder. Patter got up without looking back.
They stopped where the road forked, beyond the last of the circus wagons. Fen had stopped a man wheeling an empty handcart along the public road and asked to buy it; the man wanted eight coins, and the musicians between them had nine, saved from coins tossed into their bell mouths. Now the trunk sat on the cart, and one wheel refused to follow the other.
“You were good tonight,” Crook said.
Patter waited.
“With the ladder.”
“Too long.”
“Yes.”
Liss knelt beside the wheel. Her walking coat had ridden up at the back, exposing the square winding socket between her shoulders.
Patter had never wound another person. He had let Beldo do it while he practised.
“Have we got keys?” he asked.
Fen opened the saucepan. There were six inside, wrapped in a cloth so they would not rattle. They had made copies in the repair wagon, he said. The sockets were all alike; they could wind one another.
“We’ve got keys,” he said.
The trombonist had turned north. He said he was going to the city. Two musicians went with him. Fen called them back long enough to hand over a key. Crook called after them, then stopped calling. Liss stood and tested the cart.
“You coming this way?” she asked Patter.
He did not know what lay down either road. Behind him, people were still arguing outside the tent. Someone called his name, once, as though he might have only stepped out to fetch something.
“For now,” he said.
“Push on this side. It pulls.”
He took the handle beside her. The wheel turned reluctantly, then more easily. Fen walked ahead with the saucepan. Its loose handle tapped against the rim.
Patter put his shoulder into the cart.
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