The Little Shadows

The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott



OVERTURE





A summer evening. Moths dance in the lights outside the opera house.

A girl in a white dress slides into a seat on the aisle beside her father. The hall is crowded, many standing at the back. Ladies exclaim over the playbill while men, heads bent together, talk about the war. An older, greying soldier sits with his kind-faced wife. Her big black boot tucks out of sight behind his leg.

The curtain sways, curling along its bottom edge in a velvet wave, swept not by wind or the weight of the moon but by a company assembling backstage.

In the enfolding darkness of the wings, Aurora reaches out her hand on one side to find Clover’s thin one; on the other Bella’s, small and strong. Their warm clasp stills her trembling.

Silver-shelled footlights snap a scalloped arc of light onto the main curtain. Fresh red velvet: crimson lake, bright blood, the colour of love. Murmurs cease as the violins come creaking into tune, their mild excitable cacophony resolving into sense and meaning, into A, the one note they all seek. In the audience, silence falls. The cessation of visiting, the folding of programmes, the last adjustment to the seats.

Tips of shoes show beneath the bobble-fringe—a quiet rumpus, that must be the girls.

The bandmaster taps his stand.

It is about to start.

Breathe in—





ACT ONE





1.

Doing It in One




JANUARY 1912



The Empress, Fort Macleod

We usually select a ‘dumb act’ for the first act on the bill—makes a good impression and will not be spoiled by late arrivals. A song-and-dance turn, a sister act, or any other little act that does not depend upon its words being heard.

WILL ROGERS





‘Keep moving,’ Mama told them. ‘You will only be cold if you are slow, and we must get on. He won’t wait.’

So they went quickly over the half-frozen field, in gritty snow that crunched underfoot but stung on their cheeks, and rubbed like sand between their hats and collars. Three girls in a row behind one round-bundled woman, who bent to the wind and made good headway on short, flicking legs. Aurora slid between snowbursts, smooth-sailing as a swan over a white lake. Bella was the smallest, hurrying to warm her hand by tucking it into Mama’s pocket; Clover behind them, slowest and least desirous of their destination.

Everything in the little town was whirling and bright, late-afternoon whiteness unusual here where it did not snow deeply, being too far west into desert. But they could see through the squall the brick building of the Empress Theatre, and the black frame around its door, and the white placard tacked up on the door:

CLEVELAND’S STAR UNION VAUDEVILLE

And now they could hear a plink-plink-plink timpani of notes with depth removed by distance, and a soaring, scooping voice doing arpeggios. Aurora felt her own voicebox contracting in time, one octave up, tenor to soprano, reaching and then cascading down.

The door stuck—jammed—and their mama jerked her head so someone would help her pull. Bella did (no glove to soil, her right-hand one gone missing that morning and nothing for it but to keep her hand in her pocket, or in Mama’s) and then Clover too. They yanked off-time—then again, together, and the door burst open. They fell back, then moved forward into a blur of darkness and warmth, with somewhere in the distance red velvet and those arpeggios, very much louder now. Inside, a lobby gradually framed itself for their dazzled eyes, and a lighter square, two doors standing open into the theatre hall. An old scrubwoman, busy on the floor, grabbed her bucket away from their clumsy boots. Bella whispered an apology; after one glare the woman let her by and went back to her scrubbing.

Now that they stood still, the lobby was cold too. A little warmth curled out of the open doors, so the girls pressed their mother forward again, stepping quietly this time, Aurora’s new boots almost skating over the glossy floorboards, to look through into the theatre.

It looked much larger inside. The space opened up and out—high, high ceiling with a silver sheen even in this low light. The walls were pressed tin too, but painted flat gold, so that it took a moment to make sense of the play of light and dark on the ornate lozenge patterns. The chairs had been pushed to the sides for floor-sweeping, topped by a tumbled mass of velvet cushions.

One skinny boy with a broom stood looking up at the stage: an eight-foot butte of bare boards, the frankly false proscenium decked out with advertisements in florid fancy scripts. Silver-shelled footlights dotted around the curve.

Up on the stage people were shifting furniture, moving carpets and hauling ropes. A man in a bright yellow waistcoat shouted down to the boy to make speed, and he dodged to the right of the stage and up, broom flying ahead of him like the flag Excelsior.

The scenery flats had been hiked high into the rafters and the curtains drawn as far open as they would go; the stage was bald. At the rim of the stage an elegant young man stood beside the piano, one arm laid along it while he sang. A small squirrelly fellow played for him, very flourishingly as to the notes but no folderol in his face.

The smell was port wine and dirt, velvet, greasesticks. And ashes, a frightening smell in a theatre. It was cold in here too—everywhere seemed like it would be warm, and then was not. Not till nighttime. Then the heat of bodies would help, when this whole space would be filled with breathing, laughing, sighing people crammed in side-by-each, all waiting and waiting for some beauty, some moment of transport.

Finished, the elegant gent bowed to the squirrel, received back his music, and took himself off smartly to the left, his top hat rolling down his arm and vanishing last. It was quieter in the hall then, so they could hear the slopping and brushing of the woman washing the lobby floor on her hands and knees behind them.

‘Well—off we go,’ Mama said. She made a complicated good-luck gesture, nipped at some fluff on Aurora’s sleeve and gripped Bella’s hand again, and they set off across the empty expanse of the hall. Their feet made no clatter at all on the shiny wooden floor, as Mama had taught them.

A stout man in a black coat stood mending a chair close to the stage. Mama stopped before him. ‘The Three Graceful Avery Girls are here to audition,’ she said, very haughty.

The man looked up at her, then at the girls. His black eyes shone in a long white tombstone face, and he looked them all over, staring the longest at Aurora, at the shine of her gold hair under the black hat, the huge velvet rose. Then he jerked his lipless mouth into a sideways, considering purse. ‘Be a while. Stove in the dressing room,’ he said. ‘Stan’ll fetch them when we’re ready.’

Mama nodded and led the girls to the left side of the stage, where a hidden door now stood ajar into a bare brick passage open to the stage and the back workings. A little drift of snow lay in the bright patch of light along the back of the stage, where the flies above had been opened to the sky. Twenty feet along, stairs led up on the right, to the stage; down on the left, to the cellar under the stage. Aurora would not touch the makeshift splintery railing with her new mauve gloves, but the other girls held tight, stumbling down the steep steps after Mama.

Someone shouted as they were descending—‘Maximilian! You’re up!’—and a skinny dark man rushed up the stairs, pushing past, each one at a time having to endure him, a smelly man carrying a birdcage and a box, and both those things banged into the girls but he murmured, Oh dear, oh so, so sorry, as he went, clearly in a panic, so they could not mind him.

Except that Mama said, ‘Oh! Never cross on the stairs!’ and stared up after him, frightened. This was a day for good luck.


On Our Uppers

At the bottom of the stairs was a close dark space. Mama found the door and Aurora went first, into a warm room glowing with light from the oil-stove and a lamp or two, a cozy room with benches set in front of tables lining the walls, mirrors showing a crowd of people—but half those people were themselves again, redoubled in the glass. Still, the room was crammed, and very warm, with a strong smell of heating oil.

‘Flora!’ A little shriek, and then a pink hand clapped to a round pink mouth. A woman waved from one of the benches and leaned forward—so small was the room—to pat at Mama’s arm urgently.

Mama peered through the glittering shadows, and then cried, in a whisper, ‘Sybil! Of all delightful things! Now this makes me much easier in my mind—and you as pretty as—’

The woman got up (but was not much taller standing up) and hugged Mama. She was wearing bright-spangled pink artificial silk, very full in the skirt, which brushed too near the stove. Her eyes were shiny black sequins in a doll’s face. ‘You are a thousand years older now, Flora, and so am I. And who are these with you? Are they your daughters?’

‘Aurora’—pulling her forward—‘Sixteen! But we say eighteen, of course, and here is Amelia, not even a year younger, we call her Clover, her papa’s pet name for her—Girls, this is Sybil Sutley, you’ll remember me speaking of. Where are you, Bella? Arabella, she’s the baby, now—thirteen, but sixteen, wink-wink, for the Gerry Society.’ Mama patted them into order as she spoke, adjusting Aurora’s hat around her face and pulling at the velvet flower’s petals.

‘And this is what came of your schoolmaster?’

‘Yes, the very same, and very sad—’ Mama broke off. She gritted her teeth and turned her face to one side, the palm of her small hand over her eyes and nose. An ugly gesture. Aurora turned to help, but Clover put an arm around Mama’s waist as she continued, ‘And my little Harry as well. But there, not now.’ Then Mama was upright again, and Clover slid back into the shadow by the dressing-screen.

Bella was edging away, too, Aurora saw. Bella hated to hear Mama say Harry’s name, or Papa’s; she slipped out to sit alone on the stairs in the dark. Her skirt would get dusty, but they could brush it down for her. Aurora stood by a dressing mirror and carefully removed her hat, pin by pin, not looking (although she could see him perfectly clearly in the mirror) at the young man in evening clothes who had been singing upstairs, now lounging on one end of the table to draw on the wall an exact replica of a bottle on the table: King of Whiskeys. Many people had signed and drawn on the wall, so it must be all right that he was defacing it, but a whiskey bottle was not polite.

She stabbed each hatpin into a square of cloth that belonged in her velvet muff. Red scabs dotted her fingers, but she tried not to let herself pin them in the same holes each time, because that would smack of Mama, who had to count as she walked over the boardwalk back in Paddockwood—otherwise, what?—her long-dead mother’s back would break, the mirrors would crack, seven years’ bad luck would pour down on them. In sudden impatience, Aurora stripped off her mauve kid gloves. With her bare hand she swept dust from the dressing table before she set down her hat, then wiped off the dust on an inner fold of her black skirt. No towels set out, and they had forgot to borrow some from the boarding hotel.

Her mother and Sybil Sutley sat close together, talking sotto voce, reliving Boston and Chicago and their wonderful engagements with Keith’s twenty years before (of which the girls knew every turn and every whistle stop), while the mad Maximilian pranced about the stage above their heads, sifting dust down on them all.

At least this was a proper theatre, if shabby. Not like the hotel in Prince Albert where they’d had their first professional audition, last summer. The conceited young man lounging on a sofa while they sang and danced for him, making them spin over and over so their skirts flew outward and their petticoats rose, then sidling too close to the makeshift stage in the hotel banqueting room to see what they had on underneath. Mama had left the piano, shutting the lid with a bang, and marched them out of there double-quick. ‘Not for us,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, he has an unlucky face. I doubt if his touring company will come to pass.’

He had passed Aurora on the street as she walked to teach piano to the Sadler girls, and asked her to come for a second audition, on her own, and it was enough to make you laugh that he thought he was fooling anybody. Pulling her into a shadowed space between buildings, saying the number of his hotel room. If he’d had any skill she’d have thought it over, at least; as it was she just despised him. But he had a nice little tongue for kissing and he made her laugh with his bold unpractised wickedness, much as he made her angry with his superior air. She sang under her breath, staring at herself in the dim-lit mirror, ‘He’s a devil, he’s a devil, He’s a devil in his own home town!’ The elegant singer hummed along as he drew, but Aurora did not glance at him. A burst of jinkety music above: the piano playing Streets of Cairo—maybe the magician had a snake.

The pink-dressed Sybil woman leaned forward again to snatch at the knee of a dark old man, his massive head springing with wild gouts of grey hair, who sat hunched in a threadbare armchair shoved back into the alcove. Her hand like a bird’s beak, pecking: ‘And this is Julius Foster Konigsburg, my old man—we’ve been touring Europe, you know, after Australia, had a reversal there, but never mind that.’ Peck-peck again. ‘You remember me talking about Flora, Julius—we met in Boston on the continuous vaudeville—eleven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night and what a mercy those days are done.’

The heavy man’s face was exaggeratedly made-up, lined with ochre and highlighted in strange patches; he must be a character actor in a melodrama or perhaps a single-man comic—but the pink lady was with him. Sybil’s makeup was soubrette. She was still talking, though he paid her not the slightest heed.

‘Touring with the Leddy Quartet, refined entertainment, Mr. and Mrs. Leddy and their son; Flora replaced their daughter when she ran off with a miner. Costumed mimicry—Flora, you was the best fancy dancer on any circuit from Ottawa to Corpus Christi. And you won a piano for dancing, in Minneapolis, just before you left us!’

‘I did, but it’s sold now, had to go. Left without a sou!’

That was not true. Aurora hated her for saying it, when Papa had tried so hard about money. It was just that the teacherage was not theirs and naturally they’d had to leave when the new man came, after Papa died—and everything cost so much—but they could always go to Qu’Appelle and stay with Papa’s brother, only Mama would not. No reason they couldn’t earn their way, she had said, and better. But she should not talk about Papa like that.

Aurora could feel her huge heart pounding, but half of her knew it was not for these small irritations, but for the terror of upstairs, and Mr. Cleveland, and getting the gig. And they wouldn’t be paid less than a hundred a week; Mama would have to hold the line.

‘Well, we’re on our uppers, but the girls are greatly talented and we’re going to make our way very-nicely-thank-you.’ Mama ruffled her skirts and gave Aurora a chin-up look. ‘You could be getting dressed, you girls: dodge behind the screen, nobody will mind.’

Clover was in a dream, so Aurora slipped into the space behind the cloth screen first, took off her long black skirt and hung it over a chair, fluffing out her shirtwaist into the baby-doll dress and pinafore of their costume. The stove-oil smell made her feel both comforted, because it was like the teacherage, and sick.

She mmmed and hummed and worked her mouth in their exercises. There was not more than twenty dollars left in Mama’s purse. One more night in the hotel here, then the fare back to Calgary. Or write to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle, begging for help.

Aurora breathed slowly. She stopped listening to everything else and became still.


Music of the Spheres

Out on the stairs, cold and cramped, Bella sat thinking of the dark staircase the Twelve Dancing Princesses travelled down when they went out to dance all night, dancing the soles right off their shoes. Her own feet felt pinched, but only Aurora had new boots. It was fair—Aurora was the eldest, after all, and maybe tight boots would keep one’s feet from growing too gigantic.

‘Have a bit of chocolate,’ Sybil was saying to Mama in the dressing room, and the prospect almost made Bella go back in. But she would have to share, and she disliked that very much, and her mouth still remembered the hotel stew. She stayed on the step. The magician’s patter that pittered down the stairwell sounded stilted. She could go watch from the wings. The other door at the bottom of the stairs, though, would be the tunnel under the seats to the lobby, like the one in the Prince Albert theatre. That would be better; she could pretend to be audience. She opened the wooden-slat door. Inside was a dirt-packed tunnel, a mine shaft. It was dark.

She stepped in, meaning to leave the door open, but it had a spring attached, like a front-porch door. Nothing to brace it with, so she would have to feel her way along the dirt wall. She stood inside the closed door to test if she could bear the dark. No, she could not—she opened the door. But the thought came to her that if she was brave enough, they would get the gig. So then she had to.

This cold-earth smell is what it will be like inside my grave, she thought. What it is like in Papa’s grave, and Harry’s. She saw Harry’s small cold face, and how greatly still he had been. The floor was uneven, spills of dirt and pieces of lumber lying along it. Her fingers moved slowly over the dirt wall, scraping sometimes on a rock, jamming up against a beam every six feet or so. To calm herself she thought the hall was perhaps sixty feet long, so that would mean ten of those beams. Or maybe it was a hundred feet, and she could not imagine what the arithmetic for that would be. She stopped. Pretty soon she would be dead too, and packed in earth. There was no sound down here, none. Her own breathing, and a swimming sound. Papa had said it was the Music of the Spheres: you could only hear it when you were quite alone, when all other noise was absent, when your mind was clear. She loved that sound.


If She’s Your Niece

A trill of music plinking—the magician upstairs, playing a ukulele, Clover thought. Quite good. She leaned against the wall, reading a posted sign with great concentration so no one would try to talk to her:

Don’t say ‘slob’ or ‘son-of-a-gun’ or ‘hully gee’ on Mr. Cleveland’s stage unless you want to be cancelled peremptorily. Lack of talent will be less open to censure than would be an insult to a patron.

If you are in doubt as to the character of your act, consult the manager, for if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or suggestive, you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where Mr. Cleveland is in authority.

‘He stole that direct from Keith’s, of course,’ said a rich voice beside Clover. It belonged to the large man pushed deep into the armchair fitted into a hole in the wall; the bit of cloth draped around it was not enough to hide the dirt wall showing behind, hollowed out like a cave.

‘Has ideas above his station, Mr. Kennebec Cleveland does. Aping bloody Keith. Bloody one-horse, miles-from-nowhere …’

The man’s voice was swelling but the pink woman was suddenly across the room and up on his lap, her tiny paw stopping the large man’s mouth. She whispered, ‘No more of that, my dear, no more. Lucky to be here, and now my old pal Flora Dora, only Flora Avery she is now, and her baby-girl act—and no need for despair.’ She turned her face up at a new noise from the stage. ‘We’ll get a thousand a week before we’re done, you see if we don’t!’ As if listening to a lullaby, the large man subsided, until a raucous flapping above made them all start. Clover could see, between lines of dust filtering down through the cracks in the stage boards, a white feather.

The crooning, screeling noise of the birds was painful. ‘And there’s my flock!’ shrieked Maximilian the Bird Magician. His big finale.

The door slammed open and Sybil jumped up, frightened. It was only a gawking boy to say, ‘Julius Foster Konigsburg, King of Protean Raconteurs?’

The large man swept an arm forward, acknowledging the title. ‘Yours to command, dear boy,’ he said, and Clover could not help but laugh. Julius Foster Konigsburg liked that. He waggled his hand again.

‘Mr. Cleveland says you have to wait a while. Knockabout Ninepins up next, and then he wants the Avery girls before you …’

Sybil told Mama, ‘He does it in one, so he’s much in demand, and of course would not be required to audition in the ordinary way. But Mr. Cleveland has asked to see his new material, thinking to put him number eight, next to closer on a nine-act bill—a headliner comedy smash for the big finish.’

‘Nine, in such a little one-horse burg! Really!’

‘I don’t think you’ll know anyone from the rest of the bill: a mind reader, but he’s a sleazy type, and his assistant is beginning to show, poor little thing. Cleveland will be dumping them, his wife is a terrible prude. And of course there are the Wonder Dogs—’ Sybil jerked a shoulder to the back wall, where a minor mutiny seemed to have broken out in the next room over. ‘Now he’s a character, quite a sweetheart but trouble with his temper, swears without meaning to. He keeps his cheeks stuffed with chaw and you can’t make out what he’s saying, so he gets by. I heard—but this is only gossip—that he cut off his own pecker in a rage one day. But the dogs are dear little things.’

Clover could not help wondering what that would look like, a stump like that. She tried not to think. She looked instead at a playbill pasted to the wall: None are more Clever and Few Half so Good! Frederic LaDelle, the Man Who Mystifies! A very funny mystical effect that provokes laughter and surprise from the most blasé! She filled in the first e in Clever to make a circle, so it read None are more Clover.

‘Then there’s the Sidewalk Conversationalists, East & Verrall, you might remember—I can’t go on! I’ll go on!—and Madame Minou and Her Living Statuary, never been top-of-the-bill and they’ve seen better days. He’s lost the Hi-Jinx Jacksons, they got taken on by Keith’s and are shuffling off to Buffalo! Good luck to them—that’s why he’s got the Knockabout Ninepins coming on—and for now The Italian Boys are the headliners. Lock up your daughters! But don’t worry about them, good fun, but they’re all nancy-boys.’

And what would that mean? Aurora caught Clover’s eye, simpered. Oh!

‘Then there’s the pictures, of course, and In An Artist’s Studio for the play. When it comes to little dogs, I miss the Lone Hand Four Aces,’ Sybil said with some nostalgia. ‘Not to mention Mr. Ace!’

‘Girls, if we’ll be next you’d better put your faces on.’ Mama opened her valise and held out the pouch containing their greasepaint sticks and brushes. ‘Still doing comic songs, Syb? Or is it a double act with Julius Foster?’

‘Foster Konigsburg now, he’s gone up in the world! A German routine. Things have been pretty dull in our line right now, most of the theatres closed up for the summer. Julius did not work last week, and does not work this week unless he can put it over Mr. Cleveland, but next week we’ll work again and I think I can work the biggest part of the summer.’

Mama, giving a gurgling girly laugh: ‘I remember you so well, doing He’s a Cousin of Mine—that was the funniest thing, how many was it that one night, every available man in the company—’

‘Fourteen kisses! The head carpenter, he was a lovely fellow, mmm … Don’t listen, Jay! They didn’t shut us down, but they’re a bit more relaxed in Chicago. Then I did a follow-up, after you left us, He’s My Cousin (If She’s Your Niece)—did you ever see the sheets for that? It did quite well. I’ve got a mechanical-doll number now. Julius pulls my strings, it’s a take on ventriloquy … with plenty of Clown White on my face I don’t look an inch over fifty!’

‘You are too modest, dear Sybil—you look wonderful, and that’s the loveliest dress.’

‘Only thing is, dear, I shouldn’t say, but he’s got me doing a doll, and he’s got one baby-girl act already—the Simple Soubrettes. They do Polly Lollipop and what’s that cheeky one, Let Me Ride Your Pony, Daddy?’

Mama blanched. She put her little hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh God! This is the end!’

But Aurora laughed. ‘It’s all right, Mama, we’ll just have to be better than them! Or do the sappy stuff instead—a bit of tone and a sentimental ending.’

Clover put pink cheeks on, number 5 greasepaint smeared into the palm of her hand, mixed with a tiny dollop of cold cream to enliven her usual all-over pale fawn. ‘He does it in one’—that meant Julius Konigsburg didn’t need the whole stage for his act, so the next turn could be set up behind the curtain while he played down in front by the footlights. They could do it in one too, if they did the sweet songs. For snappy numbers the dancing took more room, but in the hands-clasped soulful airs Mama had grouped them together. A little lip-bow with the brush and the skinny crimson-lake stick, and Clover handed the mascara pad to Aurora, who spat into the small dish and mixed the block into a paste, and damped the brush with it.

‘Stand still!’ she said.

‘I was,’ Clover said patiently. Aurora was always as nervous as a cat before an audition.

This was their ninth audition. Nine was lucky, wasn’t it? It had to go well. The hotel in Prince Albert, three theatres in Regina, four in Calgary, now down into the sticks to the Empress—and there was no more money to go farther afield.

Clover stared into Aurora’s face, trying not to let her eyelids tremble. The brush dabbed, dabbed; her lashes felt cold and heavy.

‘You look lovely with your makeup on. Look how pretty,’ Aurora said. Their two faces glowed in the golden mirror, pretty as paint, as pictures, as porcelain dolls. ‘Where’s Bella?’


Like a White Bird

In the darkness Bella had passed not ten but twenty of those supports. The hall could not be so long—or had she missed the count? Bella’s teeth were chattering, she could not stop them. She laughed. It was truly like being blind. Perhaps her hearing would improve.

Swish, swish. Not, this time, the Music of the Spheres, but a scrub brush, overhead. The old woman cleaning in the lobby. Bella put her hand out and felt for the wall, but there was nothing—oh! it was a stair she’d hit. She crept up until there was a wooden door in front of her, a little light bleeding through the slats.

She had almost thought she would have to scream, which would make a commotion and the audition would be ruined and it would all be her fault. She found the handle and pressed the thumb, but it would not go down. She knocked, then knocked again, loudly. The door flew backwards, opening, and there was the broom-boy from the theatre. It was a very big broom.

‘Stuck?’ he asked. He had a sad, strange, flattened face, but it broke open in a moon-wide smile, and he took her arm and pulled her out of the dark stairway. ‘Did you go under all the way without a light? You are brave!’

She nodded.

A clattering of pail and bucket: the old woman had finished the lobby cleaning, and she gave the boy a cuff. ‘You’re up, young Nando,’ she said, eyes and mouth cold. She clumped through the double doors and down the long aisle created by the chairs, now back in their places. Bella and the boy followed.

He stopped halfway and held her sleeve. ‘I’m not on yet, it’s my dad and mam first.’

They stood still and watched what was happening onstage.

Two box-set pieces had been lowered, walls of a room with a window and a door, and a bedstead. There was a loud alarum, clang-clang-clang, so Bella was afraid it was fire, but a man in a nightshirt leaped out of the bed, higher than a human could, and landed with his feet plump! in his slippers. He found a giant wind-up clock hopping beside the bed, and threw it out the window—it came winging straight back at him and beaned him on the back of the head with a tremendous clatter.

‘Got him good!’ said the boy, close in her ear so as not to distract Mr. Cleveland.

The man stomped on the clock and hurt his foot. He leaped around the room one-footed, found and reached for his pants—but they whisked away on strings, to the right, to the left, as he lunged for them. The bed revolved as he was diving and caught him in mid-air, and he bounced once, straight up and then down, legs out, slippered feet pointed, and whoosh—straight into the pants now hovering over the bed—and whoops onto the floor all splay-legged and dazed.

‘Set the strings right that time!’ the boy said, laughing. ‘Cleveland’ll love that.’

The man pulled on his yellow waistcoat and reached blearily for his flask, but unstoppered his hot water bottle instead and took a big glug. He spat it out in a fan of spray, aggrieved, and went staggering round the room for his flask. No sooner had he found it than a vast pink elephant floated into the room, and as he backed away in horror from the elephant, a white-robed lady appeared from nowhere and grabbed the flask, holding it out of reach.

‘Mrs. Cleveland ought to like that, Temperance herself!’ the boy said, elbowing Bella. ‘Whoops, I’m up, I’ll miss my cue—’ He flew down the length of the hall and vanished.

Onstage, the drunken man wrestled and danced with the pink elephant until he had vanquished it and tossed it out the window.

The beautiful lady held the flask aloft, shaking her finger at the man, but he hauled off and punched her—very hard, Bella thought—so that she seemed to float back, suspended in air, before dropping like a dead bird. Satisfied, he smacked the effort from his hands and walked right up over her flattened body to grab the flask from her limp fingers.

Just as he grabbed it, the door opened and in came the skinny boy with his broom at the ready, as if to sweep the floors. When he saw the lady lying supine and frail, he pointed accusingly at the big man, who was busy draining the flask to the lees and would only roll his eyes and shrug.

The boy shrugged too, and swept her up as if she weighed nothing, had no substance but imagination. She tumbled over and over, light as air, and when they got to the window somehow she was picked up with the broom, and the boy shook her out the window, nothing but a dust roll. She reached backwards once with a graceful hand, and then fell—it looked like she was falling thirty stories, like a wind-blown leaf, but Bella had seen backstage and knew she must only have fallen into a mattress.

The father seemed to take offence at losing the woman, then. He grabbed the end of the boy’s broom in his huge hands and swung, and the boy rose in an aerial handstand as the broom rose, airborne at the end of it through the long arc, then came slamming down, the stage shaking with the impact. But he recovered and grabbed the broom back—then the father was diving up on the other end of the broom, as high, or higher, and letting go, vaulting and turning a somersault in air, grabbing, grabbing for a rope that was not there.

And then it was! The rope snaked gently down from the flies, the man relaxed and happy on its end, buffing his nails on his yellow waistcoat, cool as you please.

The boy had lost track of him. He bent to check out the window in case his quarry had flown out. The man crashed to the ground, grabbed the boy by the rump and upended him. He strode furiously around the room, sweeping the floor with the boy’s hands and head and hair, his anger so huge and real that Bella had to put her fists over her eyes. When she looked again they were bowing, and the lady bouncing back in through the window like a white bird, bowing for Mr. Cleveland, who was clapping all by himself. So he must have liked them.

Bella heard the backstage man yell, ‘Avery Sisters! Up next in one!’

She was still in her black skirt! She raced low and silent along the wall, through the invisible door, down the rickety stairs, unfastening her black serge skirt as she ran.