The Little Shadows

INTERMISSION





7.

North Pole




SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1914

The Muse, Edmonton

Always leave the audience wanting a little bit more, but by all means take your share without overdoing it, as you will find at times some audiences that seem frozen to their seats with a North Pole expression to their faces.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





September in Edmonton—sixteen months they’d been stuck in this North Pole city. The streetcar ran through backyards on its way to the High Level Bridge, as they rode home from the Muse after the matinee. Bella and Clover liked to stand along this stretch, ready for the dizzying view off the top of the bridge.

Aurora sat with hands clasped in her lap. Overgrown rhubarb reached up rusty fluted leaves to the car window; small leaves shifting on the city’s spindly trees were tinged with yellow. Everything was aging, turning back to winter. It made Aurora want to leap up and run south.

But you don’t run from the lap of luxury. Fitz had moved them out of the King Edward Hotel (last June, when things began to run tight at the Muse), but the Arlington Apartments were luxury too, the newest and best in the city. The very desirable top floor, riverside corner, for their own suite; a separate apartment for Mama and the girls, two floors down, so they were not living in each other’s pockets. Bella took great delight in the Murphy bed in their suite’s parlour, swivel-flipping out of its shining mahogany pocket like Long Chak Sam’s conjurer’s boxes; her pleasure made Aurora happy. Pretty kitchenettes let them do for themselves, at least breakfast and cups of tea. Aurora had caught herself resenting it when Fitz told her to have eggs and bacon on hand, and then laughed to think how quickly she could progress from fearing for their lives and dining on bread-and-milk—if at all—to being too fancy to cook an egg.

Fitz was not often in for breakfast these days. He was busy doing the rounds of the other theatres, wooing backers and the press with all his might. The Muse was teetering, although her sisters and Mama were not to know that. Aurora could not bear Mayhew to fail again, at another theatre, with no one else to blame.

The streetcar jolted, coming round the tunnel for the run across the bridge—Aurora did not like it. And did not like that she did not like it. Stupid to feel so low in the belly as the car swung. A daring dash across a chasm was just what she used to love; now she was mouse-like, tremulous, squelched and afraid, hiding in Mayhew’s big fur coat.

She thought of Lady Conan Doyle, who had been like this, yielding to her man. A natural-enough pliancy, but it chafed Aurora somehow. When the Conan Doyles had visited Edmonton a few months ago, also staying at the King Edward, Mayhew (who’d been unable to get a leg in when Sarah Bernhardt was in town) had arranged a dinner for Sir Arthur, whom he had met in London years before and wanted to cultivate. It had been a difficult evening for Aurora, and for Mama and Clover too; even for Bella, who had sulked for days after Mayhew refused to let her attend. War was imminent—was declared a few weeks after—but Sir Arthur had talked of nothing but suffragettes, how they put all thinking men out of patience and would never get the vote. An insufferable man. Especially beside Mayhew, always on top of the joke. If she was older, she would be an equal partner with him, not a—a concubine.

Aurora had not despised Lady Conan Doyle for being a chattel until she’d leaned across the table to confide in a stage whisper that her husband was ‘quite silly when she was about.’ Sir Arthur had stretched his hand across the table, declaring with a sentimental smirk that she had been a wonderful companion to him. ‘Not one clouded or grey moment since we started from England!’ (Unlike the suffragettes, who must be down-pouring regular monsoons on their husbands, Clover had said, when she and Aurora left the table to tidy their hair.)

Delightful, Aurora reminded herself, to be in company with the great men of the world. To wear a fur collar to one’s coat. To take the streetcar as a treat, an outing, rather than as the only way to get about.

To eat. Although she had no great appetite these days.

Clover saw Aurora’s white face, and let down the upper window for a breath of autumn air as the car came out into the light, out of the coal-dust smell in the tunnel. Up the trundling incline, then out onto the beautiful iron height of the bridge, lost in air between the two high banks the river had cut through the city. There were the old fort palings, the tiny clustered houses along the riverbank, and rising up from that the fine built-up city. Clover loved cities. The pale provincial buildings (the pattern of civilization, exactly like Helena’s capitol building) hid the Arlington, but over the bald stretch of hill she could see the water tower, even the edge of the Journal building, where the man painted the day’s headlines on the bricks each morning.

At the end of June, Clover and Bella had stood in the street watching the Journal man on his ladder, painting WAR DECLARED. And now there were soldiers in the streets, and you could hear shots and the shouts of them training, and already audiences had fallen off; every time a new shipment of soldiers left, the house emptied by another row of seats. Clover remembered the crowd watching the painter, more and more people stopping as they saw the word WAR. There had been sighing and cheering, except for one foolish old man who moaned and held his jaw with the toothache of patriotism.

She and Bella had been on their way from the King Edward to mail a letter to Victor, whose latest letter, from the Pantages Theatre in Cincinnati, she held tight-folded in her hand now. She knew it by heart already.

I am a pacifist, as are all followers of Galichen. But it is hard to bear—hearing wild rumours, not knowing what is true. With his usual contrariness, Gali tells my mother he can help me into the London Territorials, having some pull. I will work out my remaining tour dates till Christmas but I feel an urgency to be there. I know those fields very well from childhood.

The Fabians say, for the right moment you must wait … but when the right moment comes you must strike hard. It is not that I sentimentalize the politics, or feel a patriot pull, but on the ground, in the towns I knew in Belgium and France, people are in dire need—and I am strong and wily. If I cannot help, who can?

Clover, I must enlist.

I will make my way back to London after Christmas. But before then I will find my way to you, my heart.

Clover wished she had not opened the letter. It was not real, anyway, the war—Mayhew said it would be over very soon: posturing in Europe, not to be indulged. Even thinking about it felt false and romantic. A little fanfare of tin bugles.

Bella returned from talking to the driver, strolling back along the car as it ran forward, feeling she was walking in air because she was so high-transported above the river. That would be Life, if she could ride the streetcar all day long like the driver did, and wear a nice little uniform! But girls could not be streetcar drivers or train drivers, could only prune-and-prism, pout and marry well, or be schoolteachers (which Mama had made them promise they would never be, considering how Papa was treated by the superintendents, who never appreciated his learning or his temperament); or else get out of all that and go on the boards—and marry anyway, like Aurora had.

But she herself would not marry very soon, Bella thought. The Ninepins were at the Muse this month, and she saw Nando every day, but even if she was old enough and he wanted to, his father would never let him marry. And Nando could not abandon the act, because then who would look after his mother? It was too bad that Joe Dent would not let her train for knockabout, because she thought she might do very well with it. She was as clumsy as anything, always falling down or tripping. It was good for comedy. Sadly, East and Verrall were out in Winnipeg; she missed them very much, especially since they were working on the golf sketch again, which was really about love and had many gags for her.

She snugged in beside Clover, slipping an arm around her waist, and was surprised to get a tight hug back from her. Clover tucked her letter away and pulled Bella back to sit on her knee beside Aurora, lacing fingers over Aurora’s the way they both liked. The three of them together in one seat was comforting to Bella, who had not even known she was sad—but this was a dreadfully boring life, staying in one place for so long. The air was cold over the river; she would be glad of the brisk walk to the Arlington. Where Mama would be lying tangled in the blankets on the Murphy bed, dead to the world.

Mama had taken to missing matinees lately; she drank endless cups of tea, laced with a little sherry for her throat, that wavered into a smudged nap. Clover and Bella had the bedroom to themselves; Mama often stayed in bed till they came back to make her supper, the drapes left pulled across in the parlour for an all-day twilight that seemed to ease her head. Without meaning to, Bella thought, she and Clover were keeping that from Aurora. It was just that Aurora usually went straight up to her own suite when they got home, so Clover and Bella would rouse Mama and help her put her stockings on and make herself presentable before they all had to leave again for the evening show. There wasn’t much time to rest. She had her bee-wings with her in the bag at Aurora’s feet, because she had ripped a long tear in one. Mama would have to mend it before Mayhew sent the car for them at 6:15.


The Melee

The Muse’s current bill, a short one, opened with the Novelli Brothers, tumbling twin violinists who were the antithesis of the Tusslers. Fey little men, they rolled and caracoled like two bits of chestnut-fluff on a zephyr. As the Novellis came running offstage, Clover would duck behind the curtain-leg to evade the delicate sweat that sprayed off their foreheads, arms and heaving chests. She had never seen men so watery before. They played their violins with precise joy even while tumbling. When the first twin had heard her playing Victor’s violin as he climbed the stairs past the girls’ dressing room, he’d offered to play with her from time to time. ‘To make a practice go more pleasing,’ he said—by which Clover knew that she was not playing well enough. She was willing to be schooled. Novelli the Elder showed her how to allow her fingers fall over the neck to let strings sing more silkily, to make the notes fly crisp from one perch to another, no flailing in between. He was involved only in music and never offered the least effrontery; nor did Novelli the Younger. She’d have thought them nancy-boys, if she had not had East’s word on it that they spent all their money at a fleabag whorehouse farther south into the boondocks.

Professor OK Griffith, Hypnotist, came next. Clover thought him the strangest man! A round, buglike body supported on slender legs; delicate feet, the toes of his shoes curling upward. Offstage, the Professor sported a blue swallowtail coat, a vest of white duck stretched across his wide body, and trousers of fawn-coloured plush—like a riverboat gamester from the late century. For the stage, he donned a scholar’s gown of glistening silk, opening over a striped vest. His round black eyes popped more than was strictly usual, but the expression on the Professor’s face was never unpleasant.

Suggestion was OK’s first great trick. He suggested to the audience that only the highly intelligent were susceptible to hypnotism, which made them all wish to be susceptible. Reading people well was his second: he could spot lonely women and gullible men a mile away, and the ones looking for any excuse to cluck like a chicken.

Mayhew said the act stank of snake-oil, and was not intending to bring him back to the Muse. Besides, he had lost a painful amount of money to OK, playing poker one evening. Not a smart move on OK Griffith’s part, Clover thought. But perhaps he had read Mayhew, found him unsuggestible, and already knew he would not be booked again at the Muse.

Bella came to coax Clover out of the wings before the end of OK, to watch the Ninepins from the projection booth, which Clover knew was her secret hideaway—the booth was empty till late in the second half, when the projectionist would come with his oil can and prayer-book. The projection machinery was ticklish.

Nando always blew a lavish kiss up to Bella, which the girls in the balcony believed was coming to them. Twenty little arms would shoot up into the air, but Bella turned her face to the light and caught it smack upon her cheek. Clover would have worried about her except that Nando was tremendously well behaved, and under his father’s bloodshot eye near every minute of the day. Mrs. Dent was so sweet and weak, she could have used a girl about. If Bella had been eighteen, Clover thought, she’d have been off with the Knockabout Ninepins in a flash, taking her knocks as a fourth member of their troupe. Joe Dent would not take her until then.

But Joe might not last that long. Tonight he was struggling through their act. The Ninepins were working these days with a breakaway wall, spring-hinged windows and doors, and a couple of hidden springboards, all of which seemed to be nipping at Joe’s heels. Nando said you had to be wide awake, or the scenery would spank some sense into you. When they were first setting up, he sat beside them and described everything: ‘And that rotating thing there is the paraturn, of course …’

Clover bit. ‘What’s a paraturn?’

‘About two bits an hour, if he’s got good references.’

He made her laugh even more than East and Verrall.

In their A Good Night Out number, Nando and his father were two burglars in dark suits and half-masks, wild fake hair escaping from dark cloth caps. Each scaled the wall for separate nefarious purposes, scrambling over the bricks as if it were horizontal instead of vertical. Nando tumbled out through an upper window, Joe through a bottom—they collided—and the chase was on. Just as the schtick was getting a little familiar, Mrs. Dent appeared from a hidden alcove with a board, whacked Nando, and vanished again. Next time Joe went by, her arm snaked out and whacked him one. Clover always loved that, when Mrs. Dent got one in on Joe. Nando and Joe, each thinking the other had hit him, went for each other and fought in and out the windows. The business was repeated with a bucket of water—but just as Joe kicked Nando out the bottom window, both of them sopping wet, they spotted Mrs. Dent at the top with the bucket and realized she had done it.

Then the music picked up wildly and all three of them were in and out the doors and windows like mice or snakes. In the melee, Joe caught Mrs. Dent a good clip on the side of her head with his lump-filled burglar sack (clang! from the cymbals) that whooshed her in through the bottom window in a heap, and gave a terrible clout to Nando (clang!) that sent him flying ten feet straight up into the upper window. For an instant Joe stood victorious on the stage. Then Nando and Mrs. Dent flew back to the attack, and the fight was on again, in and out and up and down. Clover got dizzy watching—like a shell game, she had no idea who was where.

The music blared, and all three of them emerged from the same upper window, stuck fast, stuck—till their pounding caused the whole wall to collapse in a cloud of white chalk dust. The cloud hung for a minute, then the three of them emerged for a bow, in whiteface rather than blackface, coughing and wheezing. Even back in the booth, where they could not possibly hear her, Clover clapped like mad.


Down to Twelve

Bella slipped out of the booth and dashed back round the theatre in the cool night air, to help Nando towel off the white dust from his act. She didn’t like that dust; it made Nando cough. Behind the curtain stagehands were busy with wet mops while the audience exploded into noise and swelled out into the lobby and the street for a breath of air. Bella examined Nando for bruises and cuts, as she always did, and he laughed and showed his unmarked face, saying, ‘You should see the other fella.’

Joe was mopping himself down in a fairly good humour. It wasn’t till after the show and back at the hotel that he became difficult. His excessive energy could be useful: the first place the Ninepins had stayed in south Edmonton had burned down—Joe had got them all out, and went back to get other tenants out too. When he came out of his berserker mood later, on the smoking grass, they saw the one treasure he’d managed to save from their luggage: a bar of soap. It was their third boarding-house fire, Nando said, and each time his father had saved a bar of soap. He was good in an emergency but a terrible fellow for ordinary life.

At the dressing table, Myra Dent pulled a washcloth over her face and stared blankly into the mirror. Myra still had a girlish figure, high breasts and slim waist, but her face was cut so deep in sad lines that it seemed she could not smile. Nando was not much of a smiler either. Only Joe: big teeth grinning in his round face, little eyes stalking round the room for something to get mad at.

A knock on the door, and there was Fitz Mayhew, just the ticket.

‘What were you doing a-standing there offstage like that?’ Joe shouted, going from his self-satisfied hum to rage in a winking. ‘Puts me off! It’s dangerous!’

‘Timing you,’ Mayhew said. ‘Seventeen minutes, Joe.’

‘We’ve never gone over fifteen in our lives!’

Bella and Nando and Mrs. Dent all seeped back into the walls, white into whitewash, as Joe swelled and darkened with rage.

‘Well, you’re going down to twelve, tomorrow. Figure what to cut, and I’ll see you at the band call at eleven.’

‘You can’t cut us! Who do you think you fecking are?’

‘I’m the bloody boss around here, that’s who. Cut to twelve, or you’re cut for good.’

You had to hand it to Mayhew for laying down the law, Bella thought. He stayed steady even while Joe came at him, though Joe outweighed him by fifty pounds and was known as a scrapper. Mayhew’s cigar came pointing out, that’s all: ‘Don’t press me, Joe. I won’t take guff from a drunk. You’ll end up in the tank tonight if I have to call for help.’

‘I’m not drunk!’

‘If you were, you’d be fired.’

For a moment it seemed that Joe would jump Mayhew, and Bella felt Nando tense beside her. But he subsided, slumping his shoulders back down, turning his head from side to side. ‘After a show, medicinal purposes only,’ Joe said. ‘Have one with me then, Fitzie.’

Mayhew smiled then, never one to say no to a shot himself. He took the glass from Joe and knocked it back. ‘You watch it,’ he said, still smiling. ‘You’ve got a reputation for precision. Don’t want to sully that.’

There was something about Mayhew that Bella found unsettling, lately. He was reckless in some ways, and acted unpredictably. Perhaps Aurora could predict him. Bella shivered and gave Nando a smearing kiss before she dashed off to her own dressing room, one flight down.


Far, Far Away

To revamp their number, and against their protests, Mayhew had insisted that they do The Rosary, which he called French on grounds of its sheer Catholicism. They obeyed, but with shame. Gentry had been entirely right to disdain it. ‘Oh, how I hate this tawdry song,’ Aurora sang softly, as the intro ran on, turning her cheek into the light and making her throat into a silver funnel for false and holy prettiness. Clover hid a laugh. Mayhew would not let them sing it at anything approaching a bearable tempo, so they were forced to moo slightly.

‘The hours I spent with Thee, Dear Heart!

Are as a string of pearls to me,

I count them over, every one apart,

My rosary, my rosary!’

‘My Gent-a-ry, My Gent-a-ry!’ Bella sang for Clover’s ears only. ‘O King of excellent taste, we loved you so.’ Funny that Bella would remember Gentry with such fondness; she was always asking for news of him, from any artistes who’d been out east. Not that they ever heard much; he had disappeared into retirement like a bear into a cave—but, Clover thought (stepping sedately through ‘to still a heart in absence wrung …’), they would have heard if he had died.

At last, My Rosary over, they processed mournfully offstage to a tiresome sprinkle of applause from the saps who actually liked the song.

The girls crowded back into the wings stage right to peel off their vestal-white gowns and scamper into their second costumes, low-cut waltz-length gowns with flower wreaths round the neck for the sappy L’Air Printemps. Mama adjusted the wreaths and they flew out, one-two-three: fifteen seconds in all.

They pas-de-trois’d Muse-like round and round, again feeling the energy leaking out of the act. The city was tired of them, and no wonder, after sixteen months. Clover and Aurora moved through a tricky series of arabesques while Bella danced off to get into her bumble-bee wings; they wafted into the ether of spring, the music metamorphosed, and Bella came clumping on in her bee costume: a comedy no matter how you tweaked the wings.

‘Be my little baby bumble bee

(Buzz around, buzz around, keep a-buzzin’ ‘round) …’

Nothing fazes Bella, Clover thought, watching from the darkness. Bella’s plump bosom filled up the stripey dress so nicely. Clover’s own chest was two separate little teacups, but Bella had turned out almost upholstered, her rounded robin’s front very appealing.

‘Let me spend the happy hours

Roving with you ’mongst the flow’rs

And when we get where no one else can see

(Cuddle up, cuddle up, cuddle up) …’

There she went, flirting with the men in the first row of the balcony. Every few steps she’d hop-sidle, in sweet imitation of a bee landing on a flower clump. Mama had tried to infuse this dance with a bit more grace but had thrown up her hands in the end and told Bella to dance it her own way.

‘I’ve got a dozen cousin bees

But I want you, to be my baby bumble bee!’

The stage manager, Teddy, grinned as he watched Bella, showing tiny upper teeth in a very even row, so that they looked as if they might have been filed off. He was decent and kind, as they had come to know, but Clover could never feel entirely easy with him. She waited till he’d turned his back before slipping her Spring dress off, and the Per Valli costume on, over her head.

Per Valli was her favourite song in the world, Clover had decided. It was Italian, not French, but Mayhew hadn’t seemed to notice. Perfect to sing with Aurora, whose lovely high register had got better and better while working with Gentry, and ever since, continued to put his lessons to use. Clover dashed across the dark stage behind the second drop, and slowed her breathing in time to enter as Bella bumbled off, taking advantage of the wave of applause the audience always gave her bee-costume and general odour of honey-sweetness.

The audience settled in the dark, seeing Aurora and Clover reappear. Another damn song, you could almost hear them thinking. But they would like this.

‘Per valli,’ Aurora called.

‘Per boschi,’ Clover answered, and they were off.

The song went over valleys and forests, searching for the beloved, Clover singing the darker second line and searching in her heart for where Victor might be, going through his calendar in her mind’s eye. September 30, Cincinnati to St. Louis.

‘Dimando di lei

I call for him

ogn’ aura tacendo

out of the silent air

ogn’ aura piangendo

out of the weeping air

sen passa da me?

whither has he gone?’

She sang for Victor. For whom did Aurora sing? Not Mayhew, watching in his box. For Gentry; or perhaps for Jimmy Battle, who was far, far away, under the aegis of Eleanor Masefield. Maybe she sang for Papa, and Harry. Or only for the idea of gone.

‘Sweet echo replyeth, he is far, far away …’


What Vicissitudes

Next morning, before it was light, Flora woke from a feverish vision and lay still, piecing together the dream: the empty house, bees clustering at the eyes of the dead woman, a policeman coming up the step: it seemed she was being lied to.

She moved her head, away from the dawn bleaching the window.

About Arthur, as always. But this was the Arlington. There was no one lying on the front walk, eyes staring at the ground. Arthur was a skeleton now, in his cold earth in Paddockwood, and Harry beside him … The police had wanted in the front door but she wouldn’t let them enter in the afternoon, so they came back in the evening and there was a little blood by the back door, and the bees.

No, that was from the dream, not from life. Bees meant a secret and death. The police: a secret, and possibly death. Blood, oddly, could be a journey.

She shook her head to dispel the fog, and wished Mayhew had not ordered the third bottle of wine at supper. A kind and generous host, no matter what vicissitudes. She fell asleep again.


Cheats and Whores

Later, the rasping apartment bell twisted and twisted. After a minute there was a rapping knock, then more twisting. It was ten, but only Clover was properly up—Bella was still in her nightgown, stirring scrambled eggs. At first Clover thought they should ignore what must be a peddler or the brush-man—unless it could be Aurora, needing milk for morning tea? Clover put her eye to the peephole and then stood back on her heels. After an instant she tiptoed backwards down the hall to the kitchen.

‘Sybil and Julius!’ she told Bella, who popped her eyes wide open and glanced round the kitchen at the truly dreadful mess they’d let build up since the maid had last been. Clover dodged into the parlour, where Mama lay tangled in blankets on the Murphy bed.

‘Mama!’ she whispered. ‘It is Sybil at the door. And Julius!’

Mama opened one eye, then the other. Clover could see her trying to focus.

Then Mama jumped out of bed, flung the bedclothes towards the centre, shoved the Murphy bed back up into its niche and dashed for the bathroom, snatching her wrapper and a tangled assortment of sewing notions from the chair as she ran. ‘Wait, just wait!’ she whispered, and whisked the door shut, opening it again to release the sash of her wrapper. Her wild eye showed through the crack, and she nodded.

Clover opened the apartment door. ‘Why, hello!’ she said. ‘Dear ma’am, dear sir—how pleasant to see you after this long while!’

‘Yes, you’d think so! Sixteen months, as I count,’ Sybil said, biting the words out. Her face was pinched and strange, not at all her eager, unsquashable self. She drew back her upper lip to display tight-clenched teeth. Julius looked at the ceiling.

Bella came from the kitchen, where she had been bundling dirty dishes quietly into the oven. She had tied a bib apron over her nightgown, and her feet were crammed into Clover’s other shoes. ‘Julius!’ she cried, giving him a warm embrace; she turned to Sybil, but stopped in time.

‘We are here to see Flora, if you please,’ Sybil said, frost sharp in her voice and face.

The girls fell back and Clover showed their guests into the parlour. There they all stood awkwardly. The Murphy bed’s rise had left the room disordered. Clover flicked the carpet into place and adjusted the armchair and the small table by the window. She opened the drapes to let in pale autumn sun.

Nobody spoke; there was only the wheeze of Julius breathing.

Then Mama was at the door, her hair tidied, girdle snug and everything dainty about her, as if she’d never had a bad night in her life. ‘Dear Syb! And Julius,’ she cried, her hands outstretched as she came forward. ‘Here you are in cold old Edmonton, what a pleasure!’

Sybil tittered. ‘Yes, here we are, back again like a bad penny. Two bad pennies!’ Clover saw her eyes dart over Mama, taking in the new lace-point collar, the dove kid slippers peeping out under the silk morning-gown wrapper—noting, no doubt, the undeniable air of prosperity. ‘We thought you would find it a pleasure,’ Sybil said. The splotches of colour on her cheeks worried Clover.

Julius shambled to the single armchair and settled his bulk. One eyebrow waggled. Enjoying himself, Clover thought, the old scallywag. She sent Bella for more chairs.

‘Got your address from Teddy Vickers at the Muse. We ourselves are staying at Mrs. Springer’s, where the food is very decent—very. Performing later this week, Professor Konigsburg’s Ventri-lectricity—at the Princess, south of the river …’ He subsided, at a glance from Sybil.

‘They’ll know where the Princess is, Julius,’ she said, with the sweetest of trills. ‘Even though they theirselves are at the up-tone Muse, above our touch. Took us this long to get to Edmonton, to find a theatre that would book us here, but we made it.’

Bella came back, dressed, with two wooden chairs from the kitchen. She set them carefully for the ladies, but Sybil would not sit, so neither could Mama. Clover, queasy from the excess of ire in the room, saw that Sybil’s eyes showed white all round the pupils.

There was a silence.

‘When we left Helena so abruptly—’ Mama began, but Sybil would not let her finish.

‘Swanning it pretty well up here, are you? Cats that swallowed the cream?’

Mama turned her head in distaste.

‘Oh, is that too coarse for you? Too materialistic for your fine sensibility?’

‘You—I don’t know what you mean,’ Mama said. ‘I’m sorry if you—’

‘Hist!’ Sybil said sharply. ‘None of that! We need no apology from you!’

Julius turned from the window, pulling his chair beneath him without troubling to lift its feet. It set up a painful screech in the suddenly silent room. ‘Sybil, my dear,’ he said, mild as milk. ‘Can it be you harbour some rancour towards our dear Flora?’

Sybil pounced on that: ‘Oh, can it be? But how should I rancourize? You and I left high and dry without a gig and without a pay packet—Mayhew having come to Jay cap in hand that very afternoon, to ask for the loan of a hundred to tide him over to meet payroll! Fifty dollars he got off him! And if Jay had had more in pocket, we’d have been out all that as well, sure as shooting.’

Mama put out her hand towards Sybil, who leaped back as if the hand were a hot poker. ‘Oh no! Don’t you come the friendly with me now. Never a word we had from you, nor from Fitz Mayhew, not that I’d have expected it from him—and Jay ought to have known better—we’ve had enough words over that, thank you very much. But no word of warning that everything was done up! How much would that have cost you?’

Mama sat down quickly on the kitchen chair, as if her knees were not obeying her.

Bella had crept forward to Clover’s elbow and now tugged very slightly on her sleeve, making bulgy eyes to pull her out of this. Clover was grateful—she knew Bella herself could stand the music and if there was to be a fight would not want to miss the fireworks, but Clover was likely to faint if she was too close to the action.

‘I’d like to know how you could betray me so,’ Sybil continued as the girls edged away. ‘That had been your friend from olden days and forward, and would have gone to the ends of the earth for you—left with egg all over my face!’

The girls had reached the doorway; Clover halted there, feeling cowardly to leave Mama alone. But Mama was rising to the attack, cheeks flushed and eyes bright as if she’d been dancing.

‘I thought it was you who had your finger on all the pulses, always up to snuff, queen of the prying noses—knew anything there was to know, long before we knew it, Sybil Sly.’

Julius leaned back in his chair, applauding this rejoinder. ‘One to the solar plexus!’

Now Mama turned on Julius: ‘You introduced my daughters to Fitz Mayhew in the first place, as I recall it, you old Pander.’

Sybil milled back in. ‘So we did, as a favour, and look what good it’s done her! And you!’

‘If you call it good, for her to be tied to an old goat more than twice her age. Whom you now—when it suits your story—call unscrupulous.’

In the doorway Clover clung to Bella. Thank God, she thought, Mayhew is not here to add to this. Mama waved a hand at the girls, ordering them from the room. But Clover stayed rooted to the spot, as Sybil, towering to her full five feet, jabbed her jaw forward furiously. ‘I don’t say he’s unscrupulous—I say he’s a damned cheat, and I’ll be damned if we’ll ever work with him again!’

Julius hummed, his demon tickled by this excitement. ‘Well, now, my dear Syb, where would we be in vaudeville if we refused to work with cheats and whores!’

Mama turned on him in a fury. ‘And who are you calling a whore?’

There was a moment of silence in the room. But Julius never backed away from a fence. ‘I suppose, dear lady, that I was referring to your eldest daughter.’

Mama stared at him, her eyes dark caves, her mouth fallen off its usual line.

Sybil cracked a sudden laugh. ‘You’d rather he was talking of you?’

‘That’s enough!’ Mama dashed her hand across her eyes to clear them and advanced on Sybil, step by step. Her wrapper had come untied, Clover saw, and the slip underneath drooped, revealing her slackened chest. ‘After what you did to me! Such a good friend in those olden days—you made trouble between me and Arthur that nearly dished me, talking to Chum as if I was no better than a trollop.’

Sybil sobbed. ‘I never meant to,’ she said, ‘I never meant it.’

‘Well, you ought to have meant not to! You were jealous as a cat, and you are still, and you near as nothing ruined my life.’

Sybil gave a bleat of anguish and fell to her knees.

‘Do you know how hard that was to fight against?’ Mama demanded. ‘He never truly believed me again—his whole life—’ She looked at Clover and Bella, seeming to see them there for the first time. Her voice cracked and her fists flew through her hair, disarranging it.

‘Girls, out!’ She pointed to the apartment door. ‘Go to Aurora.’

They ran.

Outside in the stair-hall, Bella and Clover stood shivering, almost laughing, unable to climb the flights to Aurora and Mayhew’s suite. Bella rang the button, but the elevator banged and clanged down in the basement region.

‘Whore!’ Bella said, behind her hand, her eyes bright and scared.

Clover put her arm around Bella. ‘Oh, fish! Any girl in vaudeville might be called that. Even in the legitimate, to some people’s mind.’

‘I thought he liked us!’

‘Think of Mr. Tweedie in Paddockwood,’ Clover said. ‘Everybody had him over to supper and felt so sorry for him because he was a bachelor and a sidesman. But nobody talked to Lily Bain or even let her come to church.’

‘Well, but Lily Bain went with all the men.’

‘Why should that make a difference? All the men went with her!’

‘She looked like a scrag-end of mutton.’

‘And Mr. Tweedie an old goat, they were well-suited that way.’

Bella laughed. ‘All those scrawny goat-kid children!’

‘I don’t see why when a woman does that, she’s a whore. When a man does it, there’s no bad name to call him.’

The elevator came trundling up at last.

The apartment door behind them opened and Julius slid out, then shut the door again on a confused babble of women’s voices. ‘I’ve a mind to see Mayhew,’ he said, with a bob of his massy head. ‘And Miss Aurora—the virtue of whom has never been impugned, to my knowledge. Regrets! My devilish tongue cannot resist a quarrel.’

So Clover held the gate open, and let Julius ride up with them.