‘Are you an
‘I am,’ said Steerpike. ‘That’s just what I am. But at the moment I want some water and soap.’
There was no water in the attic, but the idea of taking him down to her bedroom where he could wash and then go away for food, rankled in her, for he would pass through her other attic rooms. Then she realized that he had, in any event, to leave her sanctum and, saving for a return climb down the ivy the only path lay through the attics and down the spiral staircase to her bedroom. Added to this was the thought that if she took him down now he would see very little of her rooms in the darkness, whereas tomorrow her attic would be exposed.
‘Lady Fuchsia,’ said Steerpike, ‘what work is there that I can do? Will you introduce me to someone who can employ me? I am not a kitchen lackey, my Ladyship. I am a man of purpose. Hide me tonight, Lady Fuchsia, and let me meet someone tomorrow who may employ me. All I want is one interview. My brains will do the rest.’
Fuchsia stared at him, open mouthed. Then she thrust her full lower lip forward and said:
‘What’s the awful smell?’
‘It’s the filthy dregs you drowned me in,’ said Steerpike. ‘It’s my face you’re smelling.’
‘Oh,’ said Fuchsia. She took up the candle again. ‘You’d better follow.’
Steerpike did so, out of the door, along the balcony, and then down the ladder. Fuchsia did not think of helping him in the ill-lit darkness, though she heard him stumble. Steerpike kept as close to her as he could and the little patch of faint candlelight on the floor which preceded her, but as she threaded her way dexterously between the oddments that lay banked up in the first attic, he was more than once struck across the face, by a hanging rope of spiked seashells, by the giraffe’s leg which Fuchsia ducked beneath, and once he was brought to a gasping halt by the brass hilt of a sword.
When he had reached the head of the spiral staircase Fuchsia was already halfway down and he wound after her, cursing.
After a long time he felt the close air of the staircase lighten about him and a few moments later he had come to the last of the descending circles and had stepped down into a bedroom. Fuchsia lit a lamp on the wall. The blinds were not drawn and the black night filled up the triangles of her window.
She was pouring from a jug the water which Steerpike so urgently needed. The smell was beginning to affect him, for as he had stepped down into the room he had retched incontinently, with his thin, bony hands at his stomach.
At the gurgling sound of the water as it slopped into the bowl on Fuchsia’s washstand he drew a deep breath through his teeth. Fuchsia, hearing his foot descend upon the boards of her room, turned, jug in hand, and as she did so she overflooded the bowl with a rush of water which in the lamplight made bright pools on the dark ground. ‘Water,’ she said, ‘if you want it.’
Steerpike advanced rapidly to the basin and plucked off his coat and vest, and stood beside Fuchsia in the darkness very thin, very bunched at the shoulders, and with an extraordinary perkiness in the poise of his body.
‘What about soap?’ said Steerpike, lowering his arms into the basin. The water was cold, and he shivered. His shoulder blades stood out sharply from his back as he bent over and shrugged his shoulders together. ‘I can’t get this much off without soap and a scrubbing-brush, your Ladyship.’
‘There’s some things in that drawer,’ said Fuchsia slowly. ‘Hurry up and finish, and then go away. You’re not in your own room. You’re in my room where no one’s allowed to come, only my old nurse. So hurry up and go away.’
‘I will,’ said Steerpike, opening the drawer and rummaging among the contents until he had found a piece of soap. ‘But don’t forget you promised to introduce me to someone who might employ me.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Fuchsia. ‘How do you dare to tell such lies to me? How do you dare!’
Then came Steerpike’s stroke of genius. He saw that there was no object in pressing his falsehood any further and, making a bold move into the unknown he leapt with great agility away from the basin, his face now thick in lather. Wiping away the white froth from his lips, he channelled a huge dark mouth with his forefinger and posturing in the attitude of a clown listening he remained immobile for seven long seconds with his hand to his ear. Where the idea had come from he did not know, but he had felt since he first met Fuchsia that if anything were to win her favour it was something tinged with the theatre, the bizarre, and yet something quite simple and guileless, and it was this that Steerpike found difficult. Fuchsia stared hard. She forgot to hate him. She did not see him. She saw a clown, a living limb of nonsense. She saw something she loved as she loved her root, her giraffe leg, her crimson dress.
‘Good!’ she shouted, clenching her hands. ‘Good! good! good! good!’ All at once she was on her bed, landing upon both her knees at once. Her hands clasped the footrail.
A snake writhed suddenly under the ribs of Steerpike. He had succeeded. What he doubted for the moment was whether he could live up to the standard he had set himself.
He saw, out of the corner of his eye, which like the rest of his face was practically smothered in soap-suds, the dim shape of Lady Fuchsia looming a little above him on the bed. It was up to him. He didn’t know much about clowns, but he knew that they did irrational things very seriously, and it had occurred to him that Fuchsia would enjoy them. Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or his deeds, to mimic.
From the ludicrous listening posture he straightened himself slowly, and with his toes turned outwards extravagantly he ran a few steps towards a corner of Fuchsia’s room, and then stopped to listen again, his hand at his ear. Continuing his run he reached the corner and picked up, after several efforts at getting his hand to reach as far down as the floor, a piece of green cloth which he hobbled back with, his feet as before turned out so far as to produce between them a continuous line.
Fuchsia, in a transport, watched him, the knuckles of her right hand in her mouth, as he began a thorough examination of the bed rail immediately below her. Every now and then he would find something very wrong with the iron surface of the rail and would rub it vigorously with his rag, stand back from it for a longer view, with his head on one side, the dark of the soapless mouth drooping at each corner in anguish, and then polish the spot again, breathing upon it and rubbing it with an inhuman concentration of purpose. All the time he was thinking. ‘What a fool I am, but it will work.’ He could not sink himself. He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.
