The Little Shadows

Charlatan

On the fifth floor Aurora was in perfect order, her rooms fresh as iced water after the overheated atmosphere downstairs. Bella and Clover vanished into the kitchenette, in fits of horrified laughter after attempting to convey the situation.

Aurora made a polite effort to entertain Julius—with whom she’d never had a cordial friendship, his heart having been given to Clover. She had noticed it often: people picked one or another sister to like, not understanding how closely they were twined. There was no point in his partisanship for Clover, because Clover herself was hopelessly partisan for Aurora and Bella, and they for her.

She sought for some subject that might interest him. ‘We had a delightful dinner with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle last summer, perhaps you have met him on your travels? I know he is fond of vaudeville.’

Julius gave a snort of mingled derision and amusement. ‘Phoo! A charlatan, I believe. Authors always are. But I confess, I enjoy the humbuggery of his stories. A fascinating instance of Art surpassing the frail human who creates it—who is the conduit for it, more like.’

Since that had been Aurora’s own estimate of Conan Doyle, she could not help laughing. ‘It was only a month before war was declared, yet all he could talk of was those uppity suffragettes and his moony wife. He is a champion storyteller, though.’

The girls came in with a tea tray, and Aurora sighed as she saw that Clover was thoughtfully carrying Fitz’s good whiskey by its neck.

Some time later, when Julius had succumbed to the whiskey and lay snoring in a corner of the upholstered sofa, Mama brought Sybil up to see Aurora’s flat and all her nice things. They had made up, by the mysterious alchemy of long knowledge of each other. Aurora marvelled at the cozy way the ladies walked arm-in-arm through the suite, conferring over the latest rising salaries in the big-time.

Sybil spoke with earnest emphasis: ‘Tanguay gets $3,500 a week. Miss Barrymore asks $3,000—but vaude is on the up. The trick,’ she said, flicking a jaundiced eye over the slumbering form on the sofa, ‘is making sure Julius doesn’t give up. Which he will do, he’s such a one for losing heart. Only sixty-three, but you’d never know it; he’s got a decade to go before he really can’t be hired, if I play his cards right and keep him off the roller skates.’

Papa would have been forty-five this year, Aurora calculated. Ten years younger than Fitz. Sybil bent over Julius, stroking his shoulder to waken him, and for a moment Aurora saw herself standing there. Blonde curls, black smudged around starting eyes, elderly husband.

Aurora promised herself that she would not let her eyes goggle like Sybil’s. But the husband was undeniable.

The door opened. As if conjured by her thoughts, Fitz Mayhew strode in with a bundle of shirts, spiced meat from the Hungarian butcher, and an armful of gold chrysanthemums. ‘Aurora! The car is waiting! You’ll miss your call!’ he shouted—then halted, seeing the array of women in front of him, and the bulk of Julius sleeping in the distance.

‘My dear, you ought to have warned me, and I’d have brought more whiskey,’ Mayhew said.

‘Yes, and you’ll need it,’ Sybil said darkly. She prodded Julius. ‘Jay! Jay! Here’s Fitzjohn back. Tell him what you want.’

‘I’ve no room at all on the bill,’ Mayhew said, but he had a laugh in his eyes. He was entirely on the ball, as always, and Aurora found herself enjoying the scene, which had taken her some time to piece together. She wondered how much Mayhew owed Julius.


Not Brought Up to It

Excusing themselves on the grounds of their early call, Mama took Clover and Bella down to dress for the theatre. ‘Can you feature it?’ Mama said, as the elevator clanked down grinding its chain. ‘What was Julius about to let her get into that state?’ She polished her wedding ring on a lifted bit of skirt. ‘He ought never to have lent Mayhew that money, but it’s hardly our funeral—she was unreasonable, distrait even, during our little tête-à-tête.’ (Clover could not help a gasp of laughter whenever Mama trotted out her French.) ‘And Julius—that word.’ She scrubbed at the ring, staring out into the bright brass cage that fell so slow. ‘Can you feature?’

Must be close to the truth, or she would not be so distrait herself, Clover thought. She must have come pretty near it in Paddockwood, towards the end. Where is the line between being a weak, sweet, affectionate widow when the grocer comes for his bill, and being Lily Bain? A heavy clunk, and the cage opened, and they were set free.


Sham Friends

After the show Mayhew hosted a late dinner at the Shasta Grill, near the Pantages. Aurora hated going there; it always made Mayhew ill-tempered to see the Pantages Theatre’s opulent appointments, compared to the little Muse.

As they drove through the rainy streets, Mayhew listed the evening’s guests for Aurora: he had invited several vaudeville managers, including C.P. Walker, a Winnipegger who had taken over W.B. Sherman’s enterprises in June (Sherman retreating to Calgary with his tail between his legs). Walker wanted to discuss continued rumours of Sullivan & Considine’s demise, which would hurt them all; Mayhew discounted S&C, but had other fish to fry. He’d invited Mr. Penstenny too, the Muse’s main investor. Mr. Penstenny’s real estate wangling (he’d made a sudden fortune by being third in line when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold off their lands) had financed the Muse. Penstenny was a stout ex-grocer with darting eyes and a pouted-out mouth, exuding stockyard breath. Aurora found him physically repellent, but always made an effort to hide that, out of courtesy as well as practicality. Penstenny now had a mortgage on his office block, and she did feel sorry for him.

The Pierce-Arrow whisked them along Jasper to the Shasta, where the party settled at a large table and began, as always, with champagne. Like that night at the roadhouse, Aurora thought, feeling unaccountably tired of popping corks.

Walker arrived with Charles Gill, manager of the Pantages. Both substantial men, but Walker the sharper-eyed of the two. Mayhew put Aurora between them, and she set about her work, to fascinate the new man, Walker, and jolly the dyspeptic Gill. Mayhew would manage Penstenny.

Aurora was surprised to find Sybil and Julius present. Mayhew must be feeling guilty, she supposed at first. But then she saw that he was using them as puppets, to talk to Walker and Gill. ‘This city is on the verge of greatness,’ Mayhew was telling Julius. ‘Real estate speculation men have surveyed and laid out lots for a city the size of New York!’

Julius said, remembering his lines, ‘Four and a half millions! That’s what those chisellers at the Hudson’s Bay netted when they sold their land.’

‘A good bargain, for that land,’ Mayhew said. ‘Money is tight with the unsettling prospect of war—but it will loosen later, whether or not the war continues.’ Under this, Aurora heard Sybil and Mama reciting a rude verse about the war, cackling at the end of the table.

Julius rode over them. ‘Your house, the Muse—magnificent—full to bursting tonight!’

‘Never better!’ Mayhew lied and smiled with equal breadth. He leaned across to Gill. ‘You may say the Pantages beats us, and for size you surely do, but not for high-class acts! East & Verrall, as an example: top-draw, top-class, travel all over the continent.’

So—the theatre was successful, land values were secure, nobody need worry about their money. Not looking at Mayhew, Aurora wondered how far in debt he was, and to whom.

The courses kept coming. By 2 a.m. the wine and the warmth had sent Sybil off to sleep beside Julius. A long day for them, Aurora thought, considering they’d been rampaging at Mama’s door at ten that morning. Mama herself was having a grand blowout, and had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Walker of Winnipeg.

‘Sherman had Marie Lloyd here in January,’ she was saying. ‘Now, she needs no publicity stunts!’

‘A little of what you fancy,’ Walker said, agreeing. He winked at Aurora.

Mama flung an arm out in Marie’s dashing style—‘There he is, can’t you see, a-waving his handkerchee!’—and lashed a waiter who had just bent forward, Mayhew having directed him to fill her water glass. The waiter caught the pitcher, but Mama upset the glass as he poured, and icy water flooded the south end of the table. ‘Oopsy-daisy!’ she cried gaily, mopping with her napkin. ‘Fitz! Fitz! Didn’t Ziegfeld have them deliver four hundred bottles of milk for Anna Held? And when the pressmen didn’t get hold of it in time, he sued the dairyman, saying it was sour. Anything to get her in the headlines.’

Walker laughed. Mayhew was turning a cigar under his nose; he snipped it and looked up. ‘That’s the ticket, Aurora, my girl, we’ll have you bathe in milk.’

Aurora saw that Gill was a little scandalized that Mayhew would mention her naked body (or cause it to be imagined, at least) at the dinner table. Walker cast a speculative eye over her, which she caught, and returned with a minutely arched brow.

‘Onstage, Fitz?’ she asked, cool as milk herself.

She let her bare white arms float up in a flash of soap-sudsing, and the men shouted with laughter, that bursting basso shout that had flared up from her father’s card-games in childhood. She loved how it mixed with the smell of cigars and liquor, loved her skill in provoking their big-toned laugh. Walker leaned towards her, his interest caught by the glimpse of wit beneath her polished surface.

But Mayhew raised an imaginary hat to her, not smiling, and she looked away, putting a hand across the table to ask Mama if she would like a soda water.

The night wore on, and the talk turned to the war, and to despairing, at least from Gill. Not Walker, who seemed a sensible man: ‘Oh, war will be bad for vaudeville, take it from me—but we’ll do better in polite vaudeville than the burlesque houses will, when their audiences disappear. My wife reminds me that when the men go off to war we’ll still have the women and children, anxious to forget their troubles.’

Already, Aurora considered, they were seeing this very thing at the Muse.

‘Unpleasant bully-ragging in Europe,’ Julius pronounced, peering from his fug. ‘Weeping sore, can be lanced. Strike hard and sharp.’

How Julius loves to look wise, Aurora thought. But she had begun to despise everyone. A darkness had slid over the world.


True Pain

The party broke up around four without anything secured, as far as Aurora could see. They were the last to leave the dimming Shasta. Mayhew’s flourishing signature on the bill, and a fat tip in bills pressed into the maître d’s hand, seemed to console the staff.

The elevator struggled up, first to Mama’s floor to let her totter out, then to theirs, doors clanging as they shut and opened, even though Mayhew put out a gloved hand to damper the noise.

‘You seemed to get along very well with Walker,’ he said, throwing his gloves on the table in the hall. ‘He’s hired Julius. Did he boast? Given him dates in Winnipeg as well, the remainder of the year. Shows his lack of discrimination, I suppose.’

Mayhew was jealous; Aurora had had to turn down her lamps at dinner. Irrational, since he’d been using her to sweeten the table; and now it likely meant a sleepless night while he railed at her misbehaviour and then took her with some force. Sometimes that was good, the race of it making her blood thump, but tonight she was unaccountably tired and only wanted sleep.

He came to take her cloak and held her, his fingers pressing underneath her arm so as to leave no bruise visible onstage. He was never entirely blind to practicality.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she said, gently pulling away. You had to be careful not to escalate things, with Mayhew.

‘Oh, it’s a world of hurt,’ he threw at her, and crashed the cloak onto the table as he stalked into the parlour, ignoring the lateness of the hour and the sleeping tenants below them.

Turn it aside to something else. She went to the piano, and lifted the keyboard lid as if she would play to soothe him.

‘How much did you give Julius?’ she said lightly.

‘I paid him back. He’d lent me a century—told his wife it was only fifty.’ The electric candles at the fireplace went on. Mayhew pushed with his boot at the half-burned log in the grate, and bent to light it again.

Aurora’s index finger touched a note, a note, a note. Very softly. ‘With sixteen months’ interest?’

Mayhew cracked a laugh. ‘No! Only Julius’s self-interest. The hope I’ll hire him again someday.’

She sat on the piano bench, where he could not comfortably follow her. Every inch of her body was weary and sore, and she had a strange taste in her mouth.

Mayhew turned from the fire. ‘I’m taking Les Très Belles off the bill,’ he said abruptly, with no softening introduction. ‘You’ll be the better for a transformation of some kind. Get involved in another vaude house, perhaps—you can work with Walker, or Gill.’

‘Why?’ She bit her lip. She knew why, all the reasons.

‘Give the Muse’s audience a goddamned rest, for one thing,’ he said.

Aurora turned her head to see his face in the firelight.

He stayed by the mantel, staring back at her. ‘You can take a break for four months. I’m working on the Spokane deal. We’ll see how that pans out. In the meantime, you’ll have to economize,’ he said, closing the subject. He poured another whiskey and headed for the bathroom.

Four months—stuck in the apartment with nothing to do, and with less money! The collapse must be closer than she’d suspected. And she did not see how the Spokane deal could possibly come together.

Her trailing skirt caught on a carpet tack as she went to the bedroom—and when she pulled, it ripped. Another thing to fix. Mama would do it. The dressing table was tidy, Annie and Berthe had been in that afternoon. They would not be able to afford to have the maids every other day. Once a week, perhaps, at first, and then once every two, and then there would be a stiff little meeting where she handed them an envelope with a generous present for their service and a ‘thank you very much, no thank you,’ as Sybil would say.

Pulling out the velvet stool, she sat, bone-tired, took her hair down and ran the brush through it. It would be pleasant to braid one’s hair for bed again, but Mayhew liked it loose. She took off her necklace. They were not diamonds, only brilliants. The glass laid over the fine wood of the dressing-table surface bothered her, she wanted to touch the wood. She ran a finger along the bevelled edge, careful not to cut herself.

Mayhew came from the bathroom with a damp face, scrubbing it with a towel. He shaved before bed, a custom he’d acquired from some fancy-woman so as not to scratch her delicate skin. Aurora was grateful enough, although she had not liked to hear him tell the story. He often talked of former lovers. She had none, of course. But she’d known better than to mention Maurice Kavanagh or any of the boys from the old days. No reason on earth to mention Jimmy Battle. Mayhew’s dignity was fragile.

She switched off the dressing-table lamp. Mayhew lay on the bed in his shirt-sleeves, waiting for her. He liked her to be naked in the bed and she had become accustomed, so that it was no longer anything odd, to let her peignoir drop away.

The moon fell in the river windows. Sounds floating up from the street below. Pieces of him were worth loving: his acumen, his energy, his definite, positive stance. But he was not honest, and never aimed for anything but the progress of Mayhew.

His hands moved over her like brick hods, one hand bigger than her breast pulling it, sliding downward, smearing the shape. She was cold, and wanted the comforter, but he lay sprawled across it, surveying her body in bands of moonlight that fell over the white bed. She arched her back when his hand moved lower. All she had to do was magnify the small responses that her body made. But she was tired, deep inside, of all this work: trying to please him by day and by night.

‘Your mama had better watch the drink,’ he said, as if he had only just now thought of it. ‘I won’t put up with that, I’ve told you so.’

Aurora lay still, not answering, Mama being a subject that could go either way.

His hand pulled heavier down her, moving into the cleft of her legs, pulling and pinching there the way he liked to do, feeling or fondling. He believed she would like it; maybe some woman in the past had told him so. She did not like anything, any of it. The spell that could come over her and make it all right was not working this night; her mind was too full of thinking.

She supposed they had been cancelled again, in fact. Taken off the list.

That thought made a vast lump in her chest, too hard, so she pushed it away. After a moment’s stroking and pulling he unbuckled his cummerbund, awkwardly, then sat up to the edge of the bed to pull it away and unbutton his trousers.

‘I won’t take her to Spokane if she’s in that state again,’ he said, casually, in the brief pause between one trouser-leg and the other. Speaking as if she wouldn’t care at all what was done to Mama. He flung the cummerbund into the corner, where his evening shirt lay crumpled. ‘She’s an embarrassment, in public.’

Aurora turned in the bed and found her peignoir with one hand; stood and pulled it on in one motion, not able to talk without at least that shield.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I said!’ He laughed at her ferocity. ‘I’m not taking her. And the way things look, we’ll be off sooner than later. The girls can come, but you’ll have to ditch Flora.’

And for how long could the girls come? She must pull her wits together.

‘If we’re to shake this boondocks dust off our feet we can’t be travelling with an old harpy—I’ll tell you what, she and that Sybil hag get along so well, give her to Julius, he can have a hareem.’

Aurora’s arm jerked as if she might hit him, but Mayhew was fast. He grabbed her hand as it came up, and he laughed. ‘I won’t put up with a drunk! Making a fool of herself, and of me.’

‘Don’t say that! You don’t mind the drink in Julius, or your pals—or yourself.’

‘I’m not supporting them to the tune of a hundred a week.’

Little enough, for headliners, she wished to say, but she could not fight with him. It was not safe to do so. She could not cajole him when he was close to anger. And he had drunk a great deal himself.

She let the lace peignoir drift apart, and put a hand on his arm. ‘I’ll speak to her, Fitz. She’d had a terrible fight with Sybil, and she’s not feeling up to snuff these days, that’s all.’

‘Send her to grass, with that uncle of yours in Saskatchewan.’

‘I can’t do that, she wouldn’t go. She needs us to look after her, you know that. She couldn’t do without Clover and Bella—’

‘Send them too!’

But he did not mean that. He saw her realize it, and he flung his trousers at the chair behind him, angry again, silver from his pockets spinning along the floor.

‘Time for her to pack it in, the old cow!’

She shoved at his bare chest, at the grey wool and sunken paunch revealed in the cold moon—her temper suddenly lost, she felt a fierce need to make him lose his, and to hell with everything.

‘She’s no older than you! Time for you to pack it in? If you can’t manage—’

He pushed her back into the bedclothes then with all his power, slamming her head down, hands on her neck and crushing her into the sheets, and she remembered that she had no strength at all, compared to him; there was nothing she could do. She did not panic, but waited, effort drained from her muscles. Thinking done with, pride useless. But she’d said what she thought, there was some virtue in that.

He stopped, and released her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not mean to hurt you.’

She lay still, pushed down into a nest of linens. Her eyes were slow to open.

‘Poor darling girl, poor girl,’ he said, as soft as the wind outside. ‘Forgive me. Poor dear sweet girl, I love you so, and I torment you. You are a precious girl, my dearest one, don’t fear me.’

Finally then she put her hand on his arm, and raised her head so her neck was open to him, submitting. Tears ran out her eyes and down the side of her face, but she did not cry out loud.

Later, she heard him speaking. She was almost asleep, not certain whether he spoke to her or thought her dreaming.

‘I love beauty,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do beautiful things.’

Bella’s bee wings had never got mended—I will do them tomorrow, she thought.


Legerdemain

Nobody at the Muse knew what caused Mayhew’s patience to snap, but it was done. Bella stared at the new order-list that had been pasted on the lobby doors in the morning: the Knockabout Ninepins were moved to opener. A grievous insult for an act with the Ninepins’ years of experience in the big-time. Not to be borne. Everyone was scared and silent in the dressing rooms, wondering what Joe Dent was likely to do.

What he did was simple enough: he took an alarm-clock onstage with him, set for twelve minutes, and when it rang, he stopped the act without finishing the routine. Mrs. Dent and Nando stopped too, frozen in their window frames. Then they all walked offstage. The audience tried to clap, unsure what was going on; they had been only half attending, as usual with the opener, and the brief patter petered out.

There was a long blank silence, on an empty, lit stage, before the boy rushed out with OK Griffith’s placard and his music started up.

That was the end of the Knockabout Ninepins at the Muse.

Up in the booth, Bella was beside herself with rage, so angry and frightened that for the first time in recorded history she was unable to speak. By the time she got back to the dressing rooms, Joe had the whole family packed up and out the back door, a feat of legerdemain that would have taken masterly planning—so he must have known they’d be done.

Late that night, Nando sent a note to the Arlington to tell Bella what was happening.

Found a booking, so it’s the Flyer south for us. We’re off to the small-time in Spokane, a place Dad knows well. Ma not so pleased to leave the Muse and she remembers the last place we was at in Spokane, where we had to put the bedstead legs in cans of kerosene to stop the bugs invading nightly.

No hard feelings, tell Mayhew. He’s a hard man, but Dad’s head is harder than anything.

Spokane is just till November, then we’re booked straight to Christmas, so don’t be blue. Up to Winnipeg in January, two weeks at the Pantages, fine old Pan-time.

See you in the funny papers, and don’t forget that you are my, and I

your sweetheart,

N. DENT

Bella declared secret war on Mayhew from that moment.

And he was making Aurora miserable too. In the morning, as soon as Bella was sure Mayhew would have left for the Muse, she went up to the top floor to get her bee wings, leaving Clover to wake and dress Mama. She found Aurora still in the bedroom, her head down on the burl maple dressing table. Still in her nightgown, cloudy hair in a bad tangle.

Bella picked up the comb and began to work through it. Having to be gentle made her calmer, and she told Aurora about Nando’s letter, including the bit about Nando having no hard feelings. ‘But I do!’

‘Fitz is in trouble, Bell, it’s not—it’s not his real nature, to ditch them that way.’

‘What trouble?’ She pulled the comb through another long unknotted section.

‘Oh, too many things to say.’

Aurora bent her head to let Bella reach the last of the tangles, and to rest her forehead again on the cool glass protecting the wood. She spoke from within the dark shade her arm and head made. ‘He left a hotel bill as long as your arm in Helena, for which both the Placer and the Ackermans are chasing him, and another in Calgary only half paid. All those dinners.’

Bella whistled. She let the ends of Aurora’s hair curl around the comb, satin once again, and patted her neck.

‘You comb so well, with your light hands,’ Aurora said, turning her head to kiss Bella’s wrist. ‘He says it is perfectly justified, that everything was for the betterment of the theatres, even the wedding. All press is good press—you know what he says.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Yes.’

In the grey morning, rain drenching the windows, the bedroom was ugly, untidy. Tangled sheets on the floor. Bella began to set things in order again, ready for the maids to clean. She watched her sister lift her head and stare into the mirror, blank eyes making a cold assessment of her face; at least it was not the dumbstruck tragedy mask she’d been wearing when Bella came in.

Aurora opened a little pot and added a tinge of purplish ochre to one eyelid. ‘The thing is, he is not a scrupulous person.’

‘I know.’

‘I think he will make us all do a bunk in the night. Don’t tell Clover, it would make her unhappy.’

Bella nodded, coming to have her own eyes done. She spat into the little pot and stirred, then held out the mascara stick and leaned forward so Aurora could do her lashes.

‘Hold still,’ Aurora warned. She took the pin to separate the clotted lashes. ‘He is not precisely bad,’ she said, in a light, objective tone as she pricked and dabbed. ‘He just does not operate under the same code—he was trained by Ziegfeld, and he goes on the way they do there. For these Ackerman circuit types to be slandering him is pretty rich.’

‘They can’t slang anyone more than they’ve been slanged themselves,’ Bella agreed. She kept her head as still as marble.


Rain

Rain made the rooms at the Arlington cold, so that early October felt like November. Clover lit the gas fire and made tea before waking Mama. At first waking, as usual, Mama came back from the distance of her dreams, eyes moving frantically under tight-closed papery lids. ‘Mama,’ Clover said gently. ‘Mama, here is your tea.’

She watched as Mama’s eyes opened, rolled, trying for focus. She reached for a sip of tea and then pushed the cup away and turned back (bedsprings squeaking like a thousand baby mice) to catch at her dream, murmuring in a slurred, furred voice, ‘One more minute …’

Fire within, rain without, suited Clover’s mood. She sat at the window, rereading a letter from Victor about Galichen, the guru Victor’s parents had espoused. How he demanded unthinking obedience from his followers, and often gave them ridiculous or conflicting orders ‘to set their orderly brains at odds, so they might wake from what he calls their sleep.’ Once, Gali had made Victor’s parents the floor-washers at his tall, thin house in Ladbroke Grove, a part of London. The stairs there were steep, five pairs of rackety narrow flights, ten landings to the attics—where they found Galichen waiting with freshly muddied boots, in which he stomped and slid downstairs so that they had all to do again. There was some lesson in there, but Clover decided she was too asleep, or too sensible, to see it.

There had been no news since the enlisting letter.

Mama stirred again in the bed and propped herself up on one pointed white elbow, smoothing a hand across her chest. She stared at the rain-smeared window, her hair crazy with curl-papers from the night before, half of them come undone.

‘I’ve irritated poor Fitz,’ she confided, picking at her lip with one unsteady hand. ‘I must go in today and see if I can mend our fences … Bees in the caragana, and a stone leaning sideways in the churchyard. Collapsed because of the rain, it had flooded out the grave, you know. That would mean a change of scene.’

Mama always told her dreams in the morning now, as she searched for warnings. Clover put the kettle on again and brought a warm towel and Mama’s wrapper, wondering if she ought to tell Aurora how unsteady Mama was these days. Her rough, misshapen feet peeped out of the bedclothes; Clover slipped carpet-shoes on them, and together they made their way down the hall to the bathroom.

‘You ought not to spend so much time with Victor, dear Clover. It is not suitable,’ Mama said, as Clover closed the bathroom door on her.

‘I am nearly eighteen, Mama. I have not seen Victor for two months, I don’t know why you’re saying this.’

‘Mooning over him. Just that one must be so careful—think of Julius, the other day, and how the least suspicion can destroy—You do not know how harsh the world can be.’

Clover thought that, actually, she did. Through the bathroom door, Mama had gone back to dream-recounting. ‘One stone leaning, another crashed down … Moss grown into the letters, a missive gone astray.’

Papa’s gravestone, she must be thinking of, or Harry’s. Clover ran her hands over her face. The rain had got into her head.


Flood

It rained and rained and rained. A percussion pattered under all the numbers in the matinee. Water dripped from weak places in the roof, and steamed up from the pitifully sparse audience, who sat drying in the communal warmth. The wet-dog smell was terrific.

Between shows Teddy the stage manager took a couple of hands up onto the roof to sweep the water from the worst places that had pooled and begun to leak; wherever they pushed the water over, the white stone front of the theatre stained grey. Clover watched Mayhew stalk the aisles, directing one or other of the cleaning women to towel up wet patches or blot a seat down. Morose, distracted, he failed to respond at all to Mama’s damp curtsy and trill of greeting, after she’d ventured out for buns from the Whyte Avenue tea room. Mama scuttled back up to the dressing room, Clover following; Mama found her needle again by jamming it into her thumb, but did not curse. The room was silent in the humming hive of the Muse, each sister locked in her own thoughts and Mama too anxious to sing.

But East and Verrall brightened the day when they knocked on the door, fresh in on the northbound Flyer from Montana. They’d come in early to replace the Ninepins, to start that night, although Friday was the usual bill-change day. Bella shrieked and jumped up to tell them the true story of the sacking of Joe and the others, which shocked Verrall.

East professed to have seen it coming, of course. ‘Can’t blame Mayhew,’ he said. ‘Joe isn’t hardly fit for human consumption. He’s a brute and treats that boy like a rented mule, and the sooner they start losing bookings, the faster Nando’s going to jump ship.’

‘He cannot leave his mother,’ Flora said. ‘He is too loyal and good a boy for that.’

East glowered at her, and said pointedly, ‘She made her bed, and has lain on it these many years of her own choosing. What’s the boy to do, submit to endless beatings? Kill his old dad?’

Clover intervened before they could brangle, asking how the golf sketch had shaped up. East clapped his hands. ‘Capital, capital, we’re ready to try it out tomorrow if you’re game, Belle of All the World? Verrall has your sides—where are they, Verrall? Don’t say you left them in the train or I will simply—’

But Verrall produced them, and they retreated to the Ninepins’ empty dressing room across the hall to run the sketch through pronto. Clover could hear them through the flimsy walls: Verrall attempting to teach East, who had no idea how to hold a club.

VERRALL: No, no, now take the stick again in your hand and I’ll show you … you swing back like this—

EAST: Like this? (smashing sound as the club connects) A pause.

VERRALL: (very controlled) What are you going to do with that club now?

EAST: Hit around corners?

VERRALL: Stand over here—no, here, in front of me. I want to examine your form.

EAST: Examine my form?

VERRALL: Yes, now I’ll just stand behind you, and put my arms around yours like this, and my hands on your—

EAST: Hey! (smashing sound as the club connects)

VERRALL: (yelping) Hey! What did you do that for?

EAST: You don’t know me well enough for that yet. I think you need someone more—female—to teach! Hey, miss! miss!

Bella was a young golf widow searching for her husband with a bent club of her own. She told East and Verrall the whole sad story:

BELLA: My Archie played golf yesterday—he came home two hours late! He confessed the whole sordid tale: he said that a beautiful lady had jumped out of the bushes on the eleventh tee, dressed just as she came delivered from her Maker. She ravished him for hours, and he did not have the strength to refuse her, and he was very sorry.

EAST: He made a clean breast of it, in fact.

BELLA: He did indeeeeed.

VERRALL: And did you forgive him?

BELLA: Ha! I know him far too well for that—I hit him over the head with the rolling-pin. Lady, indeed! The wretch had played another nine holes!

Her mama had told her that she must take up golf herself, if she wanted to preserve her marriage, and she was there for a lesson. Verrall taught her about golf, and East taught her about love, ending in a completely ridiculous song, the lyrics of which descended to a thousand rapid repetitions of the word love.

Clover continued her work, putting Aurora’s hair up and tidying the dressing room, but it seemed to her that the song echoed and echoed in her own idiotic heart, love love love love love—and no one to answer it. No letter from Victor.

And now the rain had got into her eyes.


Lot’s Wife

At the eight-thirty show, the girls pranced on for Spring Song to the basso accompaniment of a colossal clap of thunder. At least, Bella thought it was thunder—

But as everyone in the house looked up, the middle rows of the audience were stung with a sliding shower of water. Then a shining sheet—then the roof parted, through the centre, and a waterfall fell through.

Aurora and Clover had raised their wreaths for Bella to duck through, and they all stopped still, stone statues of the Muses.

The audience began screaming, starting with the people directly under the waterspout. Luckily it was a paltry house again, and there was plenty of room to run up the aisles.

The bandleader in the pit turned when he saw the stricken look on the girls’ faces. He whipped his stick up in the air and shouted, ‘Out, boys!’ and the orchestra grabbed their instruments and hightailed it, the sudden ceasing of the music lost in the stampeding noise of the water still pouring down, and the ominous and quite dreadful shrieking of the ceiling.

The sidelights in the house went out, but the stage lights, wired separately in a new-built section, stayed on, so they could see it happen: the roof caving in. First the pressed-tin panels sagged, and a few drooped to the seats; then the great metal span bent down and down, and then it snapped, with another hideous wrenching noise, and more of the ceiling came down, in a terrific rush of smoking dust and water. The older girls huddled over Bella, but it did not occur to them to run. Teddy and his hands had come out to see the devastation. The stage was filling with silent gawping faces, turned audience themselves. The balcony emptied fast, but people were still streaming up the side aisles, some looking back like Lot’s wife, then yanked along by their friends.

‘Playing to the haircuts,’ Aurora said, and the other two could not help but laugh. That’s what was said when your act was so bad people left in the middle.

The fire curtain never did come down, as it was supposed to in any catastrophe.

Another span bent, another section of roof collapsed. And another. At the centre lobby doors, a brave or reckless group of men from the audience stood watching. Those onstage stared back, across the awful chasm that had been the Muse’s seats. Just before they finally ran for it, Bella watched in fascination as Mayhew appeared in the window of the booth, shouting something nobody could hear.