The Little Shadows

A Snow White Dove

Earle Martin, the Orpheum manager, brought the war in by insisting the Belle Auroras add a soldier song to their medley. He summoned Aurora to push for the sentimental number Cradle Song, a soldier’s widow singing to her poor che-ild:

Father lies upon the plain.

He is sleeping too.

Mother’s heart must bear the pain

Heav’n hath sent her you.

Over your bed a snow white dove

That watches the long night through …

The horror of crooning vile treacle to an imaginary fatherless babe, while conscious of the real fatherless babe within, made Aurora adamant against it. She argued that it was hardly an encouraging song, a poor fellow left dead on some Belgian field. ‘Soldiers brave must fight and fall for their native land,’ she pointed out to Mr. Martin. ‘I would think twice, myself, if that were the recruiting poster.’

The orchestra leader (a long-faced Dutchman called Vanderdonk, known as Donkey) agreed with Aurora and suggested instead a new song from Britain, There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, on the grounds that it could be almost a cowboy song, as well as a girl longing for her soldier-lad. He shuffled through his sheets to find the music, muttering about another new song, Roses of Picardy.

Aurora could sense Martin studying her—too closely—in the pause. She pulled herself up, and refused to smile at him. He was following, she knew, the little path down between her breasts, gleaming in the work-lights. She caught his eye and he looked upward to the fly gallery, checking the position of the second drop.

In the end Martin let the Belle Auroras off with Long Trail, but with two stipulations: they must add a brief, brisk gallop through a rousing song being puffed off as the latest thing.

We’re the Boys from Canada

Glad to serve Britannia!

Don’t you hear them? Well then, cheer them!

Send a loyal, loud Hurrah!

Not at all to Aurora’s taste, but better than the snow white dove. And his final demand: he wished them to use Flora, whom he had known in years past, as accompanist for the Long, Long Trail. An old mother, he insisted, would lend the song authenticity.


Washed Up

When Aurora relayed Martin’s request, Flora was taken aback, not having yet begun to consider herself an ‘old mother.’ But she was game for anything that kept her girls at the Orpheum. That evening when they’d gone onstage, she climbed the iron stairs to the dressing room and powdered her hair, to dim the brown and see how she looked. Very tired, very old, was the answer. She stared at herself in the mirror: washed up, finished. Her memory failing, her eyes impossible; there had never been time to get a false tooth, and the little gesture to hide the gap with her hand was second nature now—her hand had drifted up even as she thought.

When the girls came up ten minutes later, they found her in a state of strangled weeping. Flora could see that they hated her grief. ‘It is nothing,’ she said, to forestall them. ‘A momentary spasm. I looked very ancient with white hair, that is all.’

Then they went to work to fix it, her good girls: to brush the powder from her hair, to kiss her and tell her how pretty she was, to scold her for dimming her beauty with tears, to chatter about which gown she ought to wear, perhaps the Alice-blue linen that had been Aurora’s in Montana, a flattering yet maternal colour. Flora laughed and pushed them away and said she was all right, never mind it.

But she felt the strain—the move from the Walker, the danger of cancellation—in her chest. She was aware of Aurora’s misery, and hated Jimmy and that Actress, whom she would not name even in her thoughts. He was a weak puppet, she a monster.

And there was something still wrong, some other axe to fall that nobody was telling her. She could not discern whether it was Clover’s trouble or Aurora’s, or even Bella’s, because her girls did not confide in her any longer, because she was too old and they too strong and young, and the girls who had loved her best of anyone in the world, better than even Arthur had loved her, now found her foolish and had to manage her.

Which could not be allowed, so she must take courage and stiffen her backbone and do this small performing, without any more silly vanity.


Man in the Moon

The Ninepins’ flying apparatus was being wasted, since only the one rig was needed for Bella’s New Car. But Nando could not stop his mind from thinking up new stunts, and he came to Aurora with an idea for a new number, a dreamy thing about the man in the moon that she loved the sound of; when he showed her the sketch, Bella pointing and explaining, Aurora had clapped her hands and laughed for the first time in ages.

Donkey had sides for My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon, and he was happy to do the switch for the coming week. He would put it in three.

Nando had drawn a crescent moon, with a seat and a harness and a couple of girls dancing around on the ground, vaguely worked in, because he was only interested in the flying. Aurora scotched that, though. No dancing in this one. She needed a sit-down number, for a rest from the exertions of Beautiful Doll. And once she’d read the lyrics, she wanted three moons. ‘One each, please,’ she said to the stage carpenters. ‘And each one different: silver and cream and faint, faint green—with a whiff of cheese.’

She sang it straight down to the baby, who had begun to swim and cavort inside her, who loved underdone beef (she realized when she ate steak at Mariaggi’s one night, and received such a tremendous kick that she thought Mama must have noticed), and kept her awake at night with its constant exertions. During those wakeful hours she thought of how she would break this news to Mama, but always fell asleep before a sensible answer occurred.

The number began with an empty, cloud-strewn stage, just Aurora strolling on, already singing and dreaming, a pirouette to match the simple, winding, dreamy tune.

‘Everybody has a sweetheart, underneath the rose.

Everybody loves a body, so the old song goes …’

She found her mark in the gauze-and-batten clouds, and turned to tell the audience,

‘I’ve a sweetheart—you all know him just as well as me.

Every evening I can see him shortly after tea.’

Behind her tiny stars sprinkled in the rigging, and the great creamy moon floated down from the night sky, a perfect crescent moon, closer and closer, until it was the right height for her to hop up into the seat nestled in its cupped point.

‘My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon

I’m going to marry him soon

It would fill me with bliss, just to give him one kiss

But I know that a dozen I never would miss …’

And the moon climbed gradually with her into the night sky—but not very far, for she had no kind of a head for heights.

‘Then behind a dark cloud, where no one is allowed

I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon …’

Words just intoxicating enough to cause a slight, delighted gasp from the audience. Before they had time to settle in to another verse, another moon rose into view—this one cunningly contrived to sweep in from stage left, as if rising over an unseen horizon, Clover already in place in its silver curve. Dark hair gleaming, she sang the chorus, with Aurora singing wistful harmony.

And at last Bella came chiming in, her green moon sinking gradually down from the heavens (six flights of iron stairs on tiptoe, to get into position on the catwalk).

‘Last night while the stars brightly shone,

He told me through love’s telephone,

That when we were wed, he’d go early to bed,

And never stay out with the boys (so he said).’

All three moon-girls became aware of each other, in the venerable musical tradition of suddenly seeing what’s been under one’s nose for some time, and continued together.

‘We’re going to marry next June,

The wedding takes place on the moon.’

And each of them reached behind the moon’s curve to produce a small bundle of joy.

‘A sweet little Venus,

We’ll fondle between us,

When I wed my old man in the moon.’

If Mama doesn’t get this hint, Aurora told herself, settling into better comfort on her moon’s shelf, she can’t really blame me.


True Moon

The Man in the Moon was a colossal hit. For the next two weeks, the theatre sold out night after night. No slouch, Earle Martin quickly switched them to the headliner spot, raised their pay to six-fifty, and wanted them to sign a long-term contract. But the idea for the number had not been his and on the advice of Verrall’s booking agent (wired to in New York) they felt no qualm saying no.

The act was good because it was true, Clover thought. All their loves were on the moon, in one way or another: Victor, that night in Camrose under the moon’s power. Anyone could see how much Bella loved Nando, the high-flyer, her hand in his, her face lifted to tell him something funny as they walked by moonlight ahead of the others, on the way home after the evening show. And Aurora was a moon herself, a small new moon burgeoning out of her. Then Clover shook her head to shake out fancy, and ran a little to catch Nando’s other arm and be warm and close in company, rather than alone and cold like the moon in the darkness.

The second week with the new number, Martin upped the ticket price and still sold out. On Friday morning Alexander Pantages, of the Pantages chain, sent his Winnipeg manager Tom Brownlee round to Mrs. Jewett’s to enter into negotiations with the Belle Auroras for a move to Pantages following their stint at the Orpheum. They would begin in Chicago, with jumps to the end of July, including Boston and New York. Further continuance in the fall if suitable to both parties.

He offered a thousand a week.

When Brownlee had gone, the girls sat quite still in the back parlour. Mama’s eyes were shining, and the hand at her mouth trembled. She could not speak for happiness. ‘It’s Bella’s little telephone that took the trick,’ Aurora said, and Bella laughed. ‘No! It’s the three dollies that make it so good!’

Clover looked at the calendar. May fourth. One more week.


The Flower

Before going to the theatre for band call on Saturday morning, the eighth of May, Aurora made Mama stop at a dental surgery to have an impression taken for a new tooth. It was time and more—they were settled and prospering and little things could be looked after, she told Mama, blowing aside all objections happily.

But when they reached the theatre, Aurora decided to stay in the dressing room and let the others run through without her. She was not comfortable. Her back had ached all night and she wished she had stayed in bed. But you could not stop when the going was good.

In the last weeks she had been very careful not to stand in profile when Mama was watching; but Mama, tired and seeming queasy herself, had hardly been watching. She was making new skirts for the moon number, their old skirts now soiled beyond what was nice, and always had one with her to stitch the endless gored seams. She would have stayed in the dressing room for the band call, save that Aurora snapped at her to go.

A wave of cramping hit Aurora and she had to sit down, but that was not comfortable either, she had to squat, and then lie down, and no position made her better until it lifted in a moment and she could breathe again. She could not bear the couch; she spread a spare velvet curtain-leg, all there was, on the floor and tried to be calm, knowing she must have done something wrong—she had been tight all morning, and low in spirits, and had not wanted to eat her breakfast. She feared for the baby, suddenly. Another wave coming, another mountain of—oh heavens, Aurora thought, or did not think.

A Russian psychic, Madame Tatiana, had the next dressing room. It was she, hearing Aurora’s stifled cries, who came in time to assist with the baby’s birth. Aurora had hardly spoken to her before, but took her offered hands without the least restraint and obeyed every command she was given, and bit hard on a fold of velvet rather than shriek when her entire body was riven and split up the middle and her back exploded and cracked right open, and then with a surprising and quite different ease a tiny squaller slid out of her onto sheets of Clover’s newspaper, which Tatiana had quickly spread.

‘Oh, you are a rare one for speed,’ Tatiana said, crowing with surprise. ‘We will have to get you training all the women!’

Aurora could not believe it was done with. She wanted the baby, she wanted to stop it crying. With shaking fingers she pulled at the buttons on her bodice, and then the laces on her corset cover, and let all fall open, leaning up—all the time keeping her unfocused, focusing eyes on the round dark head and tiny red face of her baby, whose arms and legs were waving like water-fronds in this unexpected element of air. A firm hand pushed her back down, and laid the baby warm and damp on her chest, and a voice said, ‘You wait, wait.’ Her belly being swept with strong hands, and then there was another awful wave of clenching and turbulence and another push of something rushing out and such a deal of blood and mess, it would have been humiliating except that Tatiana was taking care of it and it did not matter. The baby’s mouth was seeking on her chest, complaining and writhing with its arms, and she sat up a little to guide it to her breast and then it was all right: its mouth sucking for a moment, its fingers relaxing from fists to open and spread on her chest, red on white.

She closed her eyes, and let the flower feed.

‘A lovely boy—maybe early, but in good heart. Did you not know this dear one was coming?’ Tatiana asked, in a soft crooning quite unlike her mysterioso stage tone.

‘I knew, I knew,’ Aurora said. The baby, now that it had found its place, let go with his mouth and looked around the room with great attention, his black glossy eyes, like chips of shining coal, roving here and there.

Something warm was wrapped around her, and the baby wrapped too, in a spare petticoat.

‘You are not much torn, there, lucky girl. I need some string—you stay till I come back, and we let nobody bother you.’

‘The matinee,’ Aurora said.

Tatiana laughed. ‘You are true vaudeville, my dear.’

Bella was the first to see, running up after the rehearsal. She gasped in mingled horror, for the bloody cloths still heaped against the wall, and adoration, for the tiny squeeze-faced lump that Aurora held so lightly. ‘It is real! It has come, then!’

Aurora laughed, a whisper of a laugh, at least. ‘Real, oh yes—look at his hand.’

Bella leaned close to study the furled fist and the furled eyelashes, the perfection of the blistered lip. ‘What kind is it?’ she asked.

‘It is a boy, it is my boy.’ Tears welled out of Aurora’s eyes and Bella seemed more shocked at that than at the blood.

Then Clover was at the door, with Mama. Who took in the scene and looked around for help, or air, and crumpled without sound into an untidy faint.


New

Everybody in the company came round to see the baby, the news having zipped through the backstage like a quick fuse. Madame Tatiana and Clover had tidied the room remarkably well, Aurora found when she looked up from staring at the darling creature. She had not expected to like it so much—it was new, to see the thing that had been growing for so long inside her, but not frightening, because he was so instantly a person. He was not a stranger, but she did not know his name yet, and when East prodded her for one she only laughed and shrugged.

‘Not George East, at any rate,’ Verrall told him severely.

Julius bent to peer at the red thing and announced a solid likeness to Fitzjohn Mayhew, which was undeniable, but no one else was rude enough to bring it up again.

Clover and Bella did the matinee without her, but Aurora insisted on doing the moon number in the evening show. ‘All I have to do is sit,’ she said. ‘I am not wounded, only a little shocked.’

Turned inside out was more like it, but able to sing. Eager to sing.

Mama had recovered from her faint and turned to frenzied cleaning, the one anchor she could hold to. She saw a likeness to Harry (so frequently that Aurora found herself superstitiously unable to use Harry even as the boy’s second name), and drove herself into a frenzy watching over the baby—all with an eldritch air of stability, entirely invented.

The worst of it was that Mama had conceived a ferocious jealousy of Madame Tatiana and seemed to feel that Aurora had preferred to have another woman help her with the birth. Aurora felt guilty enough already for not having told her of the secret, but on the other hand, here was an excellent illustration of why she had chosen to keep silent.

For two days she watched as Mama cleaned, murmured to herself of lists and tasks, and smiled perpetually—showing off her new tooth, though she said she found its unaccustomed presence odd in her mouth. The only respite was when she held the still-unnamed baby. Then she fell quiet, seeming to be in a relapse of mourning Harry. She suffered frequent palpitations, needing to sit, just for a moment, begging their understanding. Aurora was no longer merely impatient with her: it was difficult to manage the baby with Mama bleating and getting in the way. She suffered bouts of unstoppable hiccups—her embarrassment heaping more fire on Aurora’s head.

Nobody slept much, with the new one in the bed between Aurora and Clover (a less thrashy sleeper than Bella), and the necessity for keeping him quiet to placate Mrs. Jewett, who although reminded vehemently by Mama of Aurora’s married state, had not bargained for an infant and said as much, twice.


Pole-axed

A week later, worn out from long days and nights of fretting, Flora sank for a moment onto the dressing-room couch before the evening show, wishing she could wake the baby to have an excuse to lie and hold him. But then Madame Tatiana came snooping about, and how could she lie down when that woman was there, thinking her neglectful no doubt for not realizing that her own daughter, her own—

The anxiousness became so extreme that Flora had to rise, and bustle to the drying rack to fluff out the girls’—what?—sleeves. The other fly-bite was that she had been forgetting words, quite simple words like sleeves. She smoothed her blue linen, and pinned up her hair in the mirror. Mouth sagging, no prettiness left in her. She could kill Hattie Walker for remembering her, and even yet dismissing her girls.

With a dreadful glut of hate in her heart, Flora went down with the girls, leaving Madame Tatiana (too tenderly thanked by Aurora, who was after all paying the woman) to rock the baby during their turn.

A person gets themselves into a state, she thought, as she made her way to the piano in the dark behind the curtain, and the body well nigh goes berserk. She felt she could not contain any more worry, nor endure it. She would have to leave the stage and lie down. There was no pain, only the weight of dread, something terrible to happen to the baby, or to the girls, and all of it her fault, and if she had been a better mother to begin with, Harry would not have died, and then nor would Arthur, because she could have jollied him along a while—

The girls were in place. Flora opened the piano, ready for A Long, Long Trail A-Winding.

As the curtain lifted and the glittering fragments of the house appeared, she lifted her hands to the keyboard to play the introduction.

The left hand line went as usual, but she found that she could not make her right hand play. She turned to look at Clover, sent a beseeching, apologetic look to Aurora, and then fell forward onto the keys in a jarring chord. She tried to muffle it with the soft pedal, but her foot would not catch, would not obey. Not fainting, not, but. Words suspended, she slumped from the bench to the boards.


Nice Little Number

Mama was brought round, one eye opening and closing, but she could not stand or respond sensibly to questions; she was in vague distress, but unable to speak or even to weep. Bella watched in shock as Clover, who had run almost in time to catch Mama before the fall, held her while Aurora spoke urgently to East, who stepped in front of the curtain to request any doctor present to visit the rear of the stage.

A burly, bullish man presented himself, and after examining Mama’s inert form pronounced her to have suffered a paralytic stroke. ‘Have her conveyed to the General,’ he said, giving Verrall his card. ‘I will attend on her.’ He stood, and brushed stage grit from his knees. ‘Nice little number you girls do,’ Bella heard him say to Aurora—as if they cared for his review just then! ‘My wife has seen it twice already, she won’t mind leaving early.’

East took the card from Verrall’s limp hand, bustled a stagehand into bringing round the theatre’s wagon, and organized the transfer to the hospital; Clover went with her in the wagon while Bella and Aurora went back upstairs to dress and take the baby from Madame Tatiana—who must be onstage soon. Indeed, after a slightly extended intermission, the show continued, Martin never being one to hand out refunds if any alternative existed.

Bella’s hands trembled as she buttoned up her coat and boots; then she took the baby, who mewled and cast his little head from side to side, alarmed by the upset. Aurora dressed in a trice and gathered Clover’s hat and coat, and they followed Mama.

Dr. King was before them, already standing by the bed where Mama lay, suddenly minute, beneath a hard white sheet. Knife-starched nurses clip-clopped out as the girls came in; it seemed to Bella that the oldest of them cast a sharp eye at the baby bundled in Aurora’s arms, but the nurse said nothing.

Clover stood, like a line of shadow in her straight grey dress, by the long window at the end of the room, a small ward with six white iron beds. Each bed had a white curtain pulled to the wall at a mathematical angle, and the antiseptic bite in the air was ferocious. It was the cleanest, most military place Bella had ever seen; nothing in that comforted her. She rushed forward and knelt beside the bed, her face on a level with the flat, deserted thing lying there. ‘Mama, Mama,’ she whispered, until Clover put a hand on her shoulder. Then she clamped her mouth shut and said no more, but stayed, stroking her mother’s hand.


Possibly, Possibly

‘It is an ischemic stroke, what you would know as apoplexy, not the worst of possibilities,’ Dr. King said, taking Aurora’s arm to lead her out into the hall. The Matron, at her station near the door, offered to hold the baby while they talked. Aurora gave him into her arms and beckoned to Clover.

‘She has lost the use of the left side, and is presently incapable of speech, but that may alter. It is very likely that she will regain some function, possibly more than with the usual run of patients. She is relatively young, and looks to have been in general health before this—was she under a great deal of strain?’

Aurora did not feel that the doctor needed a full account of their recent years.

‘She had returned to the stage,’ was all she said.

‘Possibly, possibly. There is often some instigating incident. But the underlying condition of worry contributes.’ He was a chubby man, with a habit of leaning his weight over his heels, so that he seemed about to fall backwards. ‘We will bully her out of bed tomorrow, and sit her upright as much as possible—difficult to say for a day or two what degree of impairment we may expect. Then there is the question of long-term care. Of course you lead a transitory life, but perhaps there is family? I do not recommend a sanatorium, or anything of that kind. With the best will in the world, the institutional tendency is for a patient to be left to rest, and that will not do for your mother. She must be cared for, but more importantly she must move and walk, the more the better. A sanatorium is a death-sentence. She must use those faculties which are impaired—you must demand that she speak, for instance.’

Aurora was grateful to have Clover standing beside her, hearing all this too. She would remember what must be done.

Then the Matron came out into the hall carrying the baby, newly washed and wrapped tight. The doctor went to consult at another bed, leaving Aurora with her little family.


Not the Belle Auroras

Time passed strangely in the hospital ward, compressed but empty. The afternoon shaded down—they would have to go back to the theatre for their call at 8 p.m. When the nurses came to change the sheets under Mama, Clover and Bella moved to the last bed by the window, where Aurora had retired behind the white curtain to nurse her child.

Bella sat on the end of the bed, and Clover stayed by the window, looking out.

‘We do not need Mama for the act,’ Aurora said. The baby had lapsed into sleep at her breast, petal mouth fallen open. ‘But she cannot be moved about from hotel to hotel.’

Bella said, ‘She would want to come—’ And then, feeling that made Mama sound dead, said, ‘She wants to come! A thousand a week!’

Clover looked back to the suddenly slight figure in the bed, hardly making a hump in the white sheet. Stricken, that is why they call it a stroke, she thought.

‘Or—a sanatorium! Joe Dent is at one in Philadelphia—I will ask Nando—’

‘Not a sanatorium,’ Clover said. She had an obstructive lump in her chest and was finding breathing difficult, let alone speaking.

Aurora traced the round line of her baby’s cheek with a delicate finger. Under downcast lids, her eyes flicked this way and that, considering. A decision had to be made, she must find the best solution—oh, but she was hardly used to the child yet and still fuzzy-headed. She looked up at her sisters. ‘It is the tenth today, we are due in Chicago on the eighteenth—there is nothing for it,’ she said. ‘We will have to send her to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle.’

Bella exclaimed, ‘No! She would hate that!’

The nurse at the far end of the ward straightened from a patient and gave an admonitory shhh!

‘The doctor does not think she is going to be fully aware for some time yet.’ Aurora put it as careful as she could, not wanting to give Bella all his bad news. ‘We can work it this last week at the Orpheum: two moons will be enough. Not as funny, but we can let the situation become known, and I do not think the audience will complain. We will ask to delay our opening in Chicago by a week, and if we cannot, then we’ll start there, with two moons, until Clover gets back.’

‘Back from where?’ Clover asked, her voice more quiet than usual.

Aurora looked up, impatient. ‘From Qu’Appelle, of course. You will have to accompany Mama there, see that she is safe, and then hurry back to us.’

‘I cannot go,’ Clover said. Behind her the window shone, and the dark blue, clouded sky outside. Bella stared at her, wondering why she looked stone-stiff, desperate. Clover never refused Aurora. Bella found herself holding her breath.

‘I cannot take her,’ Clover said. ‘I am going to England tomorrow.’

Then Aurora stared too. Her grip must have changed, for the baby startled awake and began to wail, and the ward sister came hurrying down the polished black floor, shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave!’ An officious whisperer. ‘My patients really must be kept perfectly quiet!’

Aurora stood, furious, her bodice open and a damp-shining nipple eluding the baby’s grasping mouth. As she guided him back, she said to the nurse, ‘Have the goodness to leave us in peace. Most of your ward is catatonic, and if my mother wakes, so much the better for her to hear her grandson close by!’

‘Well, really!’ said the nurse.

‘Oh, do go away!’ said Bella, pounding her fists together in a passion.

Clover took Bella round the waist, pushing her to the window enclosure; to the nurse in a soothing tone she said, ‘The baby is brand new, you know, and still learning how. Look, he is content now, and so tender, is he not?’

Which made the nurse leave off her huffing. After casting a softened eye over the now-suckling infant, she turned and went back to her work.

They sat in silence, then, the only noise the baby’s gulping and grizzling.

‘Victor has sent me a steamship ticket, to sail from Montreal on the fifteenth,’ Clover said at last.

Bella felt so lonely then, so painfully lonely, that her icy fright dissolved and she felt tears come to her eyes. She said nothing, but let them well over and fall, trying to be interested in the cool trails they left down her cheek, and wondering which would fall first to her chest.

After several moments Aurora asked, ‘Were you never going to tell us? What about the Pantages contract?’

‘I was too cowardly,’ Clover said. She twined her fingers together in a nervous knot. ‘And I did not know yet whether I would go.’

That was a lie, Aurora thought; you’d go anywhere he asked. She looked down at the round head at her breast, and for the sake of the milk she tried not to let herself be angry.

‘Well. We will have to refuse the contract,’ she said, at last. ‘We could do without you for a week, but not for longer. We are not the Belle Auroras if there are only two of us left.’

Clover looked at her sister, her cool grace not lessened by the recent birth, or by Mama’s collapse, or by anything. Then you shouldn’t have left me out of the name, she thought. But it was a childish thought, unworthy. Childish, not to have told them. ‘I could not disappoint you both—I could not bring myself—A thousand a week! But I must go.’

Impossible to explain how she could abandon them, after all they had done to get to this place. And Mama in the bed like a dead bird on the road, flattened and helpless. To abandon her too was a dreadful thing. But if she stayed now, if she was dutiful, she would be the one to take Mama to Qu’Appelle, and nurse her there, and never leave that place—so they would be disbanded anyhow. And she would never see Victor again, because he would be killed in the war.

She turned from them and walked away down the long black road of the ward, straight and modest in her grey dress, carrying nothing.

Bella was crying openly now, leaning against the white iron rail. ‘I’m going to die too,’ she said in a clogged whisper. ‘Like Mama.’

The baby unlatched, his arm flying open in ecstatic relaxation, with a popping noise and a vast, surprising sigh that made Bella laugh, she could not help it.

‘She is not dying,’ Aurora said, smiling down at the baby. An inexplicable calm possessed her—she supposed it was his doing. His little body, still curled like a fiddle-head, occupied her in some way that did not allow, at present, for worry or ambition. After adoring him for a moment she returned to the business of soothing Bella. ‘The doctor does not believe so—but her recovery may be long. What will we do, Bella? We are in the soup now. We must both go with Mama, I suppose. I do not know how we will manage, without money to—well, never mind it,’ she said quickly.

Bella straightened like a puppet yanked into life. ‘I? I am not going to that rinky-dink place, I promise you! Besides, we cannot both stop working. I have Bella’s New Car—Nando and I will book more dates for it. Or I can work with East and Verrall—in their new number somehow.’

She was intent, her face bright in the evening sun streaming through the window, and Aurora saw her all at once as a person, not the baby sister. That was as it should be: there was someone younger in the room now. ‘I wish you could take our Pantages dates,’ Aurora said, thinking. ‘It is all Nando’s flying equipment anyway …’

‘He could be the man in the moon!’

Yes, that might do very well, the second verse, and perhaps the telephone could stretch between them—or a tin-can phone. ‘We would have to talk to Mr. Brownlee. You must be ready by the eighteenth, or he’d have no incentive to book you.’

‘We can! Easy!’

‘Nando—can he even sing?’

‘No, but he don’t need to,’ Bella said, her eyes in happy circumflex as she thought of how it might go. ‘He can have one moon, and I’ll take another, and I’ll do most of the singing. He plays the ukulele, we might let him strum.’

‘You could put his mama on the third moon?’

Bella looked doubtful. ‘She is not much for performing now, the life has been squashed out of her. But she is very pretty.’

It would mean income. Bella was sixteen—older than she had been herself when they set out from Paddockwood—and established. She would be safe travelling with Nando and his mother; East and Verrall would look out for her too. And Bella could send money to Qu’Appelle for their keep, so they would not be entirely beholden to Uncle Chum.

‘One good thing,’ Bella said, staring down the ward to Mama’s bed with some of her buoyancy restored. ‘That you insisted on her new tooth. She could not bear to go to Uncle Chum without it.’

But Aurora’s eye had caught the big clock at the end of the ward, and she jumped up. ‘We must dash back—we’ll be late for the call.’

‘Do you think Clover will even come?’ Swept into sadness again, Bella kissed the uncomplaining baby’s downy scalp.

Aurora fastened her bodice and settled the baby in an already-practised arm. She stooped to place a cool hand on Mama’s cheek, and they went away down the echoing polished halls.