The Little Shadows

ACT FOUR





10.

Per Valli, Per Boschi




JUNE 1915–AUGUST 1917

Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan

London, England

The Pantages Circuit, United States

Practice alone before a mirror, then before one or two of your friends, and ask them to tell you of any faults they see in your work. The vim and enthusiasm you put into your act is often contagious, and many a mediocre stunt will bring applause if presented in a buoyant manner.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





An Indian man crouched by the side of the road, smoking a long white pipe. His coat was a white blanket, roughly cut and sewn, edged with ragged fringe. He wore a bandana at his neck and a big silver ring on one long finger. His face was the leather of shoes, brown and hard, seams cut from nose to mouth and around his eyes, which sparked in swollen pockets. Hunkered on his heels in long grass, he looked up at Aurora. Earrings glinted under his fall of grey matted hair.

The sight of him pulled Aurora back to the old days, before their vaudeville life. Her father had bought his liquor from an old Cree woman who ran a still in the woods near the school in Paddockwood. Her sons had come to the teacherage with deliveries or to ask for payment. They made jokes. Sometimes the girls came, bright eyes and soft cheeks, big with babies, one on a hip and one in the belly. Now Aurora had her own baby, halfway between belly and hip, too small to balance there yet.

Dust kicked up by the horses had been sifting gently over them since they’d left the train station, sanding the blanket Aurora had set over the baby, sleeping in his basket. The wagon moved slowly, every wheel-turn rolling them closer to Uncle Chum.

Qu’Appelle was as far away as Paddockwood from flying rigs and marble foyers. Pretty in the afternoon stillness: brilliant green leaves frilled under mauve cones of lilac, and yellow-flowering caragana hedges bordering streets of oiled dust over hard-packed dirt. A girl walked along the ditch, white stockings tanned with dirt, dust-coloured ringlets and a fine white dress blowing vaguely about her.

It was hot. Grasshoppers creaked their gates.

Aurora clenched her knees together to stop from jumping out of the wagon and running back to the station. It would jounce the baby, and Mama could not be abandoned.

Mama sat in a daze, dully conscious but not talking. She’d been given a slate at the hospital; she had not used it yet, but Aurora was to remind and require her to write. Aurora found herself looking everywhere but at Mama’s face, still dragged down on the right side, fallen from sense, from gravity.

Looking down instead, Aurora checked the baby in his basket at her feet and gazed at his sleeping face, beautifully abandoned, mouth slightly open, petal lip blistered from nursing. A delicious quiver filled her chest.

Half a mile past the edge of town, a big house rose behind a bank of caraganas. It was square-built stone, an imposing place with eight-foot windows and a white-roofed portico. Far grander than Aurora had expected. She was not sure whether that was good or bad. Uncle Chum had retired from the North West Mounted Police as an inspector, but he might still have family money, after all these years. Papa’s remittance had been cut off when Aurora was ten—what a wailing in the house there’d been at that letter! Mama could not tell her now, if she knew, whether it had been punishment for some action of Papa’s or a failure in England. Aurora put her warm hand on Mama’s cold one.

Not a word between the brothers even then; they’d had no contact at all since Papa had married Mama. But when Aurora had written to inform her uncle of Papa’s death, a kind letter had arrived by return, offering them help or a home—only Mama had been very angry, and had refused even to answer. In her right senses, Aurora knew, she would never have agreed to come here.

The wagon trundled inexorably down the long drive, and at length pulled up.

Aurora stepped out onto the gravel and grass of the drive, a little blinded by the sun. People stood on the porch, and one of them moved forward: a man in a dark suit coat, upright in his bearing. A pleasant shape of a man. His face, as well as she could see, was calm, with mild, well-intentioned eyes—not the martial personage she had expected from Mama’s stories. Familiar around the eyes, the nose, but not much like Papa, she thought. His thick hair was iron grey, for one thing. Her father’s had been fair.

Her uncle came down the steps and reached to help her down, saying, ‘Well now, you are no little girl, but all grown up!’ He put an arm around Aurora’s shoulders, to her surprise. ‘With a great look of your father about you—that pleases me.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ Aurora set the baby’s basket at her feet, and turned to help Mama down.

‘And there’s little Flora,’ Chum said. He set Aurora aside and lifted Mama down from the wagon’s step. ‘I hear you’ve been through the mill, my poor dear. Come inside, let’s have a proper talk.’

Mama was docile enough, but did not lift her face to look at Chum. She looked round at the garden as if dazzled.

‘Sad to see her so burnt to the socket.’ Chum spoke to Aurora, but kept Mama’s arm tucked through his own as they went up the walk. ‘And what’s in the basket you carry so carefully?’

Until that moment Aurora had not realized that she ought to have mentioned the baby. All her telegrams had been of Mama, and the stroke that had befallen her, never the baby—he was her secret still, she suddenly understood.

‘This is Mabel,’ her uncle was saying. ‘My wife’s goddaughter, who is good enough to live with us and keep us company.’

His wife’s? But—Aurora had thought him a bachelor.

‘How d’you do,’ said Mabel, her eyes careful, unrevealing. She was neat and narrow.

‘And Elsie’s somewhere close by. Else!’ he shouted, suddenly parade-ground.

Another woman shadowed the screen door and came through: a warm face, brown braids pinned in a coronet; a round figure, well-corseted in a pretty flowered dress, with plump fluttering hands. A little older than Mama.

‘I hear you, Chum, no need to holler.’ She made a gentle buffer to his larger energy.

‘Here’s Aurora, and poor Flora, they’re here.’

‘I see them, Chum. What a long journey! But the best time of year for it.’

Mabel slipped back up the steps to help Aunt Elsie down, for she was lame in one foot, with a great-heeled black boot.

None of this was what Aurora had expected; her head was buzzing. And she had not mentioned the baby! People were apt to be doubtful about babies, when there was no father to be seen.

She set the basket down, shifted the blanket and lifted out her sleeping son, light as air, still curled into his fern-frond posture and gently complaining as the lifting roused him.

There was a small silence on the porch, on the steps, on the walk.

Mama moved, stepping closer to Aurora and raising her left arm to shield the baby, as if defending him. Aurora pressed her hand, whispering, ‘Good! You are stronger already!’

Then Aunt Elsie moved forward too, and Mabel, to see the baby more closely.

‘Oh! So new!’ Elsie said. Her finger traced the baby’s chin.

Chum was tall enough to see over his wife and niece, no need to move. He asked, ‘What is the child’s name?’

Aurora could not bear to admit that she had not named him yet. ‘Avery,’ she said—unable, though thinking she ought, to say Chum. ‘Avery Mayhew.’ She listened to the sound of that, wondering if it was any good. Poor babe, if it was not.

‘And your husband?’ Chum asked it gravely, as if expecting the worst.

‘No longer with us.’ Then, realizing that might cause them to think her a widow, she quickly added, ‘My husband left us, I’m sorry to say. His theatre was destroyed and he—decamped to the States.’ A military way to put it, perhaps that would be best.

Elsie gave a short sighing gasp, either sympathy or censure. Chum and Mabel looked at them without speaking for a few moments. Mama, who had been dully silent all day, looked up and tried to speak. Nothing emerged.

Mabel showed them up to a wide bedroom. A high spool bed, a dresser, a washstand with china bowl and pitcher, and a lidded pot beneath. The room shone, evening sun pouring through two open windows. Mama stood at the west window and hummed a droning tune.

‘Mosquitoes aren’t much this year,’ Mabel promised, drawing the net curtains aside to show the view out over the prairie—nothing to see but grass and sky, and more of each beyond. ‘But we keep the screens in place anyhow. I could hold Avery for you, while you help your mother,’ she offered, with some awkwardness, and it was only fair for Aurora to hand him over.

Avery. In Mabel’s arms she could see him better. It might suit.

When they had washed, Mabel took them down to supper in the quiet dining room: chicken stew and early greens from the garden, and rice pudding made plain without eggs.

This was a peaceful house. In lieu of children, Aunt Elsie kept fourteen cats in the kitchen, lolling close by the stove on a conglomeration of pillows, reminding Aurora of Swain’s Rats & Cats. They were never allowed in the rest of the house, but Mama was agitated by them. It was the first thing she wrote on her slate: overlay?

Aurora laughed to see it, from relief that Mama had taken chalk in hand; kissing her mother, she promised faithfully not to allow the cats to overlay Avery.


The Dark Ship

In the darkness, the mass of people on the pier overwhelmed Clover, along with the smell, and the boat’s bulk in the nighttime. Thick black shadows claimed its upper half, past the reach of the dock lights. She laid one hand on her mouse-brown trunk, to keep up with the porter, and watched the massive planks beneath her feet. Her kid boots (bought new for the moon number) had narrow teetery heels that might fit in the gaps.

A column of uniformed soldiers swung through, slicing the crowd into halves that rejoined as they passed. Perhaps Victor had enlisted already—she did not even know if he would still be in England when she arrived.

The porter lurched forward and she lurched after him. They joined the queue moving towards the gangplank and stopped again; the porter slumped into conversation with one of his counterparts, in French that Clover could not follow.

The press of people was frightening—a nervous crowd, shadowed eyes shifting like fish. The Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat, had sunk in eighteen minutes. Twelve hundred lives lost. At the wicket the Cunard purser offered her a more desirable outside cabin for half the fare, because so many people had cancelled their bookings. But she had no money to spare. He winked at her. ‘Ah, well, you’ll have the cabin to yourself, at any rate, miss, and that’s the best of all.’

The porter shoved against the shoving; Clover clung to the trunk. Pressed up against the rope at the water’s edge, she could smell the river and the planking stained with oil. The dark ship rose vertical above them. Between the boat and the pier was a narrow strip of greenish air; far below, green-black water with an oil slick on it, and a dank slopping noise she could hear even through the shouting of the crowd. Clover stared into the black and green, down to where the water caught the lamps and swayed like oil in a jar. If she fell between the dock and the ship, she would be crushed or drowned or merely trapped until the ship had gone, and her chance gone with it.

But the rope held and she felt her well-known trunk beneath her glove. She was not afraid. In another quarter of the globe Victor would meet her in London, where there was a high brick house and a wall, and pavement stones along the street. The air would be sweet. A pear tree in the garden and Victor doing scales, birds singing in the darkness.

The porter cried hup! It was their turn to climb the gangway. He set his shoulder and pushed the trunk. Clover went beside it up into the hulk of the ship, ready to cross the Atlantic, a blue map spiked with German submarines and danger.

But there was kindness in the world, too. Her assigned door opened to reveal an outside cabin, rather than an inside one. The purser had switched her after all. She stepped over the high metal threshold, shut herself into the tiny cell, and lay on the bunk, vibrating gently in time with the unthinkable engine, all alone.


A Prodigy

At the end of their first week in Qu’Appelle, Aurora walked down to the clinic with Mabel to have the baby weighed and checked for various deficiencies, of which he had none. A healthy boy, perhaps a little early, was the verdict. The stern district nurse, Miss Peavey, broke into a gap-toothed smile: ‘Impatient to get here!’

Same teeth as Eleanor Masefield, same square forehead, but how nice this woman was, how well at ease in the world. Seeing the likeness took away some of the smart that had lasted all this time. Aurora wondered for an instant how Jimmy fared in New York, but Avery swam stomach-down on the white flannel sheet, trying to lift his head by furiously raising his eyebrows—far too early! a prodigy!—and that other life receded again.

A young Indian woman came in the door bringing a breeze with her, three leggy girls following and a bright snapping-eyed boy in her arms. One of the little girls darted over to look at Avery and touched his cheek. Miss Peavey looked quickly at Aurora, but Aurora put out a hand and touched the girl’s cheek, saying, ‘Pretty!’

Uncle Chum took Aurora out to the veranda after supper that evening and told her kindly that he and Elsie would be very happy to keep Avery with them, should she feel it urgent to return to her sister. ‘He’s a dear little chappie, and it’s good for Mabel to have the occupation,’ Chum said.

Aurora looked back through the French doors to Mama, frail in one corner of a sofa, lips moving in a mumbling song as she sat with Avery tucked into her stiff right arm.


On the Moon

Bella lay in the upper berth, behind cloistering Pullman curtains, and looked at the Belle Auroras publicity photo she’d stuck into her dressing-case lid, now that she and Nando had a new set.

Clover: straight nose, narrow face soft-rounding at the chin. Patient eyes. Too frail to travel alone. Only of course she would stay with Victor’s mother or that mad guru. Victor! Who could stand to live with his oddness all the time? He was like oysters: interesting, but not for every dinner. Unlike Nando, her daily bread. Fitz Mayhew had been rib steak, underdone; and Jimmy, champagne.

The cable from Aurora was tucked under the photo. Bella fished it out and read again:

CANNOT LEAVE MAMA YET. CARRY ON WITHOUT ME.

WRITE SOON.

Was that a promise that Aurora would write soon, or an order: write to me soon? Bella had answered by return, wiring money as well. But no letter had found her yet. The train wobbled on through the night, without her other souls, her sisters. How can one live all alone? Nando was no help, in a state of perpetual nerves about his dad.

Too hot in this berth. Nando’s mother in the berth below did not like the window cracked, and would fret if Bella turned over too many times. Myra had turned out to be considerable trouble: wistful and stubborn, only wanting Nando. Her ethereal face masked a hungry spirit, and no friendliness on Bella’s part could satisfy her. Nando was kept on the hop all the time, and Bella too—if she would not do to talk to, she served very well to fetch tea and run baths in the hotels.

Bella stared up at the dented ceiling cloth, feeling straitjacketed in the berth. Maybe Joe was kept in one of those canvas jails, in his sanatorium. If Papa had gone to the san when he was so ill, he would have been, because he was non compos mentis, the doctor had said. But Mama had kept him home, however sad and wild he became. For the first time in ages Bella thought of Harry in his coffin, and Papa, and then the old thought followed that she too would be dead soon enough, lying under a low roof, under the creaking weight of earth.

Think of the prop moons instead. She sang on the golden moon now, a step up in the world. Nando had the silver. Myra on the green-cheese moon had not worked; her dreary delivery sent the whole number flat. The green moon was baggage, but no more trouble than the car. They had a big hit with Bella’s New Car. Pantages had taken them on—at a reduced rate, of course, as everything always went, but Nando’s booking agent said they’d still got a whacking good deal, seven-fifty a week to split between them, which amounted to three hundred each, once the expenses of touring the larger rig came off the top. Her grouch-bag was full to bursting—enough to send pots of money on to Aurora and Mama, and to Clover, if she needed it. Bella turned her face into the mingy Pullman pillow. Day after tomorrow was her sixteenth birthday. Nando would not remember. It would be shoddy to remind him. Aurora might think of her, if she was not too taken up with the baby. Clover would remember, on the ocean, as long as her ship was not sunk by Germans like the Lusitania. But it would not be, it would not.

Bella turned, her nightgown twisting into a shroud.

After a while she turned again, carefully, and pushed the curtain back to inspect the corridor. Nobody. She slipped her shoes on and manoeuvred down from the berth. The lower berth curtain did not stir.

Moving quickly down the corridor, she let herself through the connecting door (a burst of juddering noise and shaking, a rush of night air) and into the next carriage, where Nando’s berth was—he had a lower, thank heavens, with an open curtain and empty berth above him. She undid the snap and slid her hand in to pat his face.

‘Wha—!’ he said, huffing and snorting.

She had woken him. Serve him right, being so dozy. She swung herself in, and the curtain shut, in a jiff. He jumped and bumped his head on the upper bunk, but that did not matter. ‘Shh!’ she said.

‘What are you doing? Go back to your berth!’

Where was the boy who had kissed her in the tunnel of the Empress when they were children?

‘I wanted to be with you.’ She put her hand on his cheek in the twilight of the berth.

The moon was somewhere above the train, not visible but shining sometimes on the little ponds flashing by the window. Nando searched for his watch and held it to the window, tilting it impatiently to find the light. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ he said, giving up.

‘Don’t you want me here? Don’t you want to cuddle?’

‘No!’ He sounded very angry.

‘Don’t you love me?’

‘No!’ He caught her arms and shook her, but not like his father shook him. ‘You can’t do this, it’s not decent. Kisses are one thing but this—you must wait till we’re married.’

‘Will we be married?’ Bella was smiling in the dark; he did too love her.

‘No.’ He was hard-hearted. ‘I was dreaming! Why did you wake me up?’

‘Don’t make me go back, Nandy, it’s cold and I’m lonely.’

‘I’ve my dad to think of, and you’re too young to know what you’re doing anyhow.’

She started to cry, soft as a cat; he believed her, and opened the blanket. He thought he was the only one who could pretend! Much more comfortable under the blanket, even if he would not pet her or be sweet. He was so prickly. His father, and worry, had made him very ill-tempered.

‘May I touch you here?’ She did, without permission. He made no sound, but his whole body stiffened, not just the bit she had hold of. ‘Just let me lie with you for a while, you would like me to,’ she whispered. ‘I want you to, please do, Nandy, please?’

They were like snakes twining then, his hands touching her all over and on her bosom where she thought they must leave traces like red paint, it felt so delicious. His mouth glued to hers kept them quite quiet, and they said no words even when he pushed his stiffness at her, trying to fit in, and pushed, and then—he gasped, and pushed himself up so fast he hit his head on the ceiling again. He swung her legs through the curtain and pushed her out, only her head left looking at him.

‘No!’ she cried. Her bare bottom was cold in the passageway.

‘Shh!’ he said in great irritation. ‘Go back to your bunk!’

‘But I love you, Nando!’

‘You are a baby, and I won’t do it.’ He flung himself down on his side, turning away from her. She stared at his stupid back, his pig head. Then she hauled down her nightie and slammed the curtain along the rod, and slipped through the carriage and back to her own berth, furious to find herself so hurt.


Grave

In vaudeville, Sunday was the day for doing laundry. Church made a change, Aurora thought. She and Mama went with the household to the pretty brick Pro-Cathedral. So called because Qu’Appelle was meant to have been the capital of Saskatchewan—Uncle Chum described the ins and outs of the capital heist as they walked, calling Regina by its old name, Pile o’ Bones, until a series of nine cataclysmic sneezes from Avery distracted him and he forgot ire.

Aurora wore her new afternoon dress, a bell-shaped skirt of Saxe blue over corded silk, ordered after the thousand-a-week contract and delivered just as she and Mama were leaving town. It was lovely, but the brilliant June sunshine made Aurora want to walk the fields in her old muslin dress, left behind long ago at some hotel. To stretch out on grass, to be pressed into the grass by—But the thought of Jimmy brought the face of Miss Masefield, and Aurora stopped thinking. Her body was her own, or at least belonged only to Avery.

The darkness inside was cool and smelled of hymn books. Mabel’s father had been Rural Dean at St. Peter’s before the present incumbent; Aurora saw her shyness dropping away as they entered her territory. She quietly introduced Aurora and Avery to the ladies of the parish, while Mama sat beside Elsie, prim in a pew. One prow-fronted, important dame, Mrs. Gower, looked exactly as Aurora imagined Mama’s Aunt Queen.

This was a very proper place: exquisitely embroidered vestments, stained glass, the lessons read by men with strong English accents. Canon Barr-Smith gabbled through Morning Prayer at speed, but his sermon was thoughtful and Aurora had no need to feign attention. She felt she must be more proper than anyone, since she carried the thrilling taint of vaudeville, and a baby without a visible husband.

After the service the family joined the congregation in assorted wagons and carriages for the annual Sunday School picnic, jostled up beside more people to whom Elsie and Mabel introduced Mama and Aurora. Mama stared out at the scenery, or into her lap, but did not seem physically uncomfortable.

The picnic was laid out at the cemetery north of town, down an avenue of pines. An established place, unlike most windblown prairie graveyards. Fine stones had pressed down into the earth, and wild roses rioted between the rows.

After the ice cream and cake had been wolfed, a gang of tall boys set up races: egg-and-spoon, three-legged, sack. Mabel, who had taken the blue in last year’s sack race, spread a rug in a bit of shade near the finish line for Mama and Elsie, with Avery between them, and went off to compete.

Aurora walked through the graves alone, not caring if she stained her white slippers in the bright grass. This was an ice-cream world, she thought, insulated by good behaviour and agreeable surroundings—even Aunt Elsie’s chickens were clean and white as hens in a picture book. Paddockwood had been realer. Vaudeville too, with all its pretense, was mixed up in the grubby world, alive.

Among the headstones, Aurora paused to read inscriptions. Her arms felt pleasantly empty, not carrying Avery. Sunlight lay hot and fluid among the graves. A pretty place to sleep under the ground: she wished Papa could have been buried here, and dear Harry.

‘You have such a look of my brother. I miss him,’ Uncle Chum said behind her, startling her by his presence and the coincidence of their thoughts. Not unnatural to be thinking of the dead, she supposed.

‘I miss my brother, too,’ she said. ‘He died when he was four.’ She had not spoken of Harry for years. In the glancing sunlight, she saw it was not her father that Chum reminded her of, but Harry: his square, pleasant face and calm assurance.

Her uncle took her arm to walk on through the grass. At a pressure from his hand, they stopped by a small grave marker. ‘Our little son,’ Chum said. ‘Only lived a day.’

ELMORE ARTHUR AVERY, the plaque read. SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN—1905.

Tears sprang to Aurora’s eyes, so quickly it seemed they would spring out to water the grass.

‘No, no, you must not grieve, nor fear for your own babe. Elsie was well on in years; I dithered too long before marrying her. His lungs were weak, you know. It was God’s will.’

Aurora turned her head so her uncle would not see anger spring into her face as the tears had. That was what the minister had said at Papa’s funeral, with a solemn face, as if he did not know Papa had taken his own life. Not God’s will, his own will.

‘Arthur and I were close,’ Chum was saying. ‘Not as boys, you know, for he was twelve years younger. But when we first came out to Canada, then we were. Worked like slaveys on a farm in Ontario, had a spree or two together once we’d done with that. I was with him the night he met your mother. I hoped he would join the redcoats with me, but schoolmastering was more to his taste.’

Aurora found she could hardly remember her father any more, or be sure her memories were true. He had been melancholy so long, and not himself.

‘We have a good schoolmaster here,’ Chum said, pointing back towards the picnic. ‘Talking to the Dean by the lintel-gate. The principal of the high school, Lewis Ridgeway. A learned man, I’ll introduce him to you and your mother.’

Chum waved to Mr. Ridgeway, a spare man with dark hair, straight shoulders in a dark suit. Shadows round his eyes gave him a patient look. He looked up and smiled, lighting the gravity of his face, then came across the grass, a hand held out to Aurora so that his coat-sleeve displayed a creamy linen shirt cuff. No celluloid cuffs for this schoolmaster, at least on Sundays.

‘Mrs. Mayhew, I believe?’

She inclined her head in a demi-bow (internally amused that no matter how minor the audience, she could not help trying to present well), as Chum put an arm round her, saying, ‘Aurora has come to stay with us while my poor sister recovers from an apoplectic episode.’

Mr. Ridgeway seemed to know all about that. ‘Your mother is making a good recovery, it seems. I saw her reach for her slate, although she did not write. She watches the passing show with interest … A good sign.’

Aurora flushed with gratitude, and asked if he was familiar with the effects of stroke.

Her uncle clapped his hands. ‘Ridgeway is up on all the latest! An educated intellect. Is Dr. Graham back, d’you know?’

Mr. Ridgeway tilted his head as if consulting an aerial calendar. His strong forehead and cheekbone stood out, caught by the noonday sun. ‘Mid-July. He will be pleased to consult, he has a strong interest in apoplexy and ischemia—he’ll be out to see Mabel when he returns, I’m certain.’

Aurora did not question, but her uncle explained: ‘Mabel is engaged to Dr. Graham’s son, Aleck, who is at the Front. Has she not told you? He farms near Indian Head. Yes, Lewis, we’ll have Graham see if he can make Flora’s lot easier. Your sisters worry me too,’ Chum said, turning to Aurora. ‘Their lives will be unsettled, alone and far away—now you and Flora are comfortable here, won’t you write and ask them to come home too?’

Kind of him to call it home, Aurora thought. Kind to think of her sisters. Maybe this placid ice-cream life would be better for them. ‘We are grateful for your help,’ she said. ‘But I believe the girls are happy as they are. My youngest sister Bella remains on the vaudeville circuit, Mr. Ridgeway, touring with friends of ours, in great demand. I do not think I could drag her away! My other sister has gone to England to stay with her fiancé’s mother.’

‘Were you frightened for her after the Lusitania’s sinking?’ Mr. Ridgeway asked.

She glanced quickly up—it was almost too intimate a question. ‘Very much. Clover was on the Ausania, which sailed a few days afterwards. I was glad my mother could have no grasp of the disaster. But the Ausania has come to no harm.’

‘She may be unable to leave England for some protracted time, if shipping is halted.’

Aurora nodded; she could feel the light going out of her face and eyes.

‘Lewis takes an interest in the war,’ Chum said. ‘He was at Cambridge, you know.’

‘More immediately, Aleck Graham is a friend of mine. But I’d follow the progress of hostilities without any added stake. It is the proper study for all men, as long as the conflict continues.’

‘You think—but it will not continue long, though?’ Aurora asked, surprised.

‘Now that both sides have dug in, I fear it will. This is not last century’s war.’

Chum took Mr. Ridgeway’s arm, saying, ‘Aurora won’t want to hear about all that.’

‘Won’t she?’ Mr. Ridgeway said, looking at her closely. Seeing her glance at the grave marker for Chum’s little son, he nodded.

‘It seems wrong to speak of the war in this quiet place,’ she said, grateful for his understanding.

Mr. Ridgeway walked away, with a word or a brief smile to one person or another as he went. He had Mayhew’s breadth, but not Mayhew’s expansiveness. A schoolmaster, all right.

Against her will Aurora felt suffocated in this peaceful, orderly place. The air was still, yet the noise of grasshoppers and birds trembled beneath every conversation, every thought. But amiable sociability was the least she owed Uncle Chum for taking them in. Money had not yet been mentioned. Before she rejoined Bella, they would have to work out a stipend for Mama’s board.

Aurora went out of the shadow of the pines, back to the races and the blanket where Avery lay on his back in the grass watching Mama. She was singing to him as his bare legs kicked the air. In this week he had uncurled, showing his true length. He would be tall, like Mayhew. But not a man like Mayhew. She would see to that.

‘I heard a maiden singing in the va-alley below …’

Mama was singing words. Aurora stood still, listening.


Free Love

A letter came from Clover in the first week of July, sooner than Aurora had expected or hoped. The British mails, Chum boasted, were terrifically efficient, even in wartime. ‘Delay would have been in Montreal,’ he said, shaking his paper to turn the page at breakfast.

Aurora skimmed the letter at the table, then ran up to read it to Mama, who was still drowsing in bed, Avery lying beside her making an interesting variety of conversational noise. Mabel had suggested that Mama might like tea and toast on a tray for breakfast, like Aunt Elsie had, rather than rushing in the morning. That allowed Uncle Chum to have his breakfast in peace, with only Mabel and Aurora for company.

Aurora did not read the whole letter to Mama, only the first two pages about the English air and the narrow brick house where Victor’s mother lived, next door to Galichen’s atelier, ‘with a fine view of Wormwood Scrubs prison behind.’ There was a great deal about Victor, very little about Clover herself. Aurora did not read the next page aloud.

… he is filled with joyful purpose to be doing what he knows he must. As I am. I hope you have forgiven me, but I don’t know if Bella ever will.

Victor met my ship at Plymouth—we had three days in a cottage on the edge of Dartmoor, did not stir beyond the garden except out to the moor each day. It is not like the prairie but made me homesick anyway, except that now my home is him. I was already his wife, his true wife. I cannot talk about that in a letter, only to say that I had not known before that love poems are real. I thought they made it all up, but now I see that it is true.

(Do not read that to Mama.)

He is to embark on Friday. I cannot say more about that either, but the Front is so close—he is promised leave at home. His mother has been kind …

Aurora wondered if Victor’s mother was treating Clover badly. The stressing of has been kind gave a faint suggestion of unkindness, but his mother was a Fabian after all, a believer in Free Love. Aurora could hardly be shocked by Clover’s decision to live irregularly. Her own marriage was purely opportune, nothing like the love Clover had for Victor; their parents’ marriage, full of passionate storms, had been no model. Seeing Uncle Chum, she also saw how unlike him Papa had been, how rash and wild.

No storms left in Mama now, so tiny in the bed. But she would improve, Aurora told herself. Avery reached for her, his face breaking open in a dripping smile when he caught her eye. She unpinned her bodice again, took him up, and began composing a letter to Clover as they rocked.


A No-Hoper

The Minneapolis bill was chock-a-block even in summer, from Chinese jugglers to a horse act, and the best magician Bella had ever seen, Harlan the Great. Harlan had adored Nando’s mother when Myra was a girl down in Florida; in his company she was less despondent, basking in nostalgic admiration. As a bonus, East and Verrall were at the Regent, the other Pantages theatre, with Julius. They were all staying at the same hotel, patronized by Pantages folk; it made for cozy visits. But it was hard for Bella to see Julius so thin, legs like two sticks covered with cloth, his chest fallen. He did not meet her eyes but talked in a rambling way about Clover.

Julius only made one show in three, Verrall told Bella in a quiet corner. ‘But he is right on the money when he manages to stay vertical.’

‘Making almost enough to keep himself in gin,’ East said, as he passed with a bottle. East had brought Bella a new song, Pretty Baby, which she and Nando were working up as a dolly comedy. Everybody loves a baby, that’s why I’m in love with you … I’d like to be your sister, brother, dad and mother too, Pretty Baby of mine!

At the end of their first week in Detroit, a telegram came to the dressing room Bella shared with Myra, addressed to N. Dent. Myra pretended to think that was an M, opened it, and went straight into hysterics. Bella knew better by then than to fool with her, but ran for Nando. He dropped his greasestick and stepped across the hall to dash a cup of water in his mother’s face, reducing her to fishlike gasps.

His face went tight when he read the telegram—he passed the yellow sheet to Bella:

PATIENT J DENT NO LONGER COMPLIANT. REMOVE

AT EARLIEST CONVENIENCE.

GEO STURGIS, DIRECTOR, CLIFTON SPRINGS

SANATORIUM, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Myra sobbed helplessly (consoled by Harlan and other members of the company, who knew Joe’s reputation all too well) long into the night at their hotel. In the morning she was out on the street, hailing a cab, when Bella and Nando found her.

Nando grabbed her suitcase and pulled her back to the curb. ‘We’ve got to do three shows today, Ma, and talk to Burt. We’ll take the train to Philly Sunday morning.’

Myra made no answer, but dissolved into a further wash of tears.

Harlan the Great came down the steps, his own valise in hand, and took Myra’s case from Nando. ‘She’s coming with me,’ Harlan said. ‘Don’t make it hard on her, laddie.’

Bella, standing in the doorway, thought her stomach would come right out her mouth. She hated Harlan and Myra equally. No, she despised Myra more, seeing her swoon on the big magician’s arm. The quickness of his hand deceived the eye: he bundled her and the baggage into the cab and barred the door to Nando.

‘I’m taking her to Florida,’ Harlan announced. ‘Where she’ll be happy for a change. You’re a good lad, don’t waste your own life with that worthless drunk.’

Bella thought Nando might die right there on the pavement. She went down to stand beside him while the cab wheeled off, and pulled him gently out of the street.

‘Well, I’ve got to go get Dad, anyhow,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

He would not meet her eyes.

She squeezed his elbow, all she could get hold of. ‘He’ll be glad to see us! We can do A Good Night Out, you know—I could do it easy!’

‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not without Ma, you can’t travel with us.’

She gave a shocked laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Anyway, I don’t want you.’ He went up the steps, and would not say another word.

Best to let him alone till they went to the theatre, she thought, remembering Papa on his darker days.

Between the first and second shows, Nando had a word with George Burt, the Detroit manager, who looked fussed and said he’d deal with it after the second. As Bella was wiping the dust off her face and bosom from the New Car explosion-finale, Burt turned up, ushering in the big boss, Mr. Pantages. Burt went across to fetch Nando.

Bella shrieked and dodged behind her screen, and Pantages laughed. His heavy eyes creased, smooth as unbaked buns. ‘Nice little number,’ he said, peering over the screen. She turned her back but could not resist giving him just a very brief view of her pretty bodice. It could not hurt to keep the boss intrigued.

Nando came into the room and asked Pantages shortly what he could do for him.

‘It’s you wants to see me, boy,’ Pantages said, good-naturedly enough. His shining hair was parted in the middle over a very white scalp. ‘I hear you wants out your contract.’

‘Can’t help it, sir,’ Nando said, stiff as a plank. He gave Bella not one glance. ‘My old dad’s in trouble and there’s only me to help him.’

‘And me,’ Bella said behind the screen.

‘I’ve got to head for Philly in the morning,’ Nando said, doggedly ignoring her.

Pantages examined a hand full of rings. ‘And that leaves me where?’

‘I know it’s putting you out, but I got no choice,’ Nando said. ‘If it means I’m sunk in this business, I still got to go.’

‘Oh you’ll be sunk, if you cross me,’ Pantages promised, still genial, and glossy as shellac.

‘Well, I got an offer for the movies and I’ll take that. My dad and me together. It’s the coming thing, it’ll beat out vaudeville, you’ll see!’

Bella ducked her head below the screen to hide her shock—Nando had baldly refused to have anything to do with the pictures before this.

‘If that’s all right with you, boy,’ Pantages said. ‘And what about your missus here?’

‘She’s not my missus, she’s just a baby. She’s not in on this. She’s a good girl and a trouper—I know East & Verrall have been trying to get her for their new number over at the Regent, she’ll be all right with them. I’m sorry you’re out an act.’

He’s arranging my next jump as if I was props, Bella thought, but she kept silence. As long as he didn’t send her straight to Qu’Appelle to wither into dust.

Pantages stared at Nando for a beat, eyes like jet beads. ‘I know your dad, he’s a no-hoper.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Your funeral, boy,’ the boss said, and he went.

After a minute Nando said to the screen, ‘I’ll talk to East. You’ll be safe with them.’

There’s only so much you can do, Bella thought, to throw yourself at someone who doesn’t want you. She stayed behind the screen, pulling on her clothes, every piece of her body hurting like she’d been beaten up, and when she came out Nando had gone.

They did the third show. They yelled at each other as the car fell to pieces, and near the end of the number Bella hauled off and slugged him straight in the eye as hard as she could.

She sat back, aghast, looking at the eye already starting to swell. The audience broke into delighted hoots.

Nando pulled the string that set off the final explosion, and under it he said, quite quietly, ‘Guess that’s that, then. See you in the funny papers.’

‘I hate you so much,’ Bella said, and the car fell apart.