The Little Shadows

11.

Together Again




JUNE 1917

Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan

Vancouver, British Columbia

Regina, Saskatchewan

After the band has rehearsed your music to your satisfaction, thank them kindly and retire. This is not necessary but customary and costs nothing, and is generally appreciated. It does no harm.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





The train announced itself at a distance, halved the distance, halved it again, and galloped into the station on a thousand horses, steaming and stamping. Aurora ran down the platform, looking for every opening door and hoping, and then there was Clover—wasn’t it?—backing down off the stairs, a child in her arms, turning to help—and Victor, with a cane, hopping awkwardly down to the platform.

Aurora stopped for a moment to look at them whole: Clover much older, her hair hidden under a dark felt hat, glancing towards Victor. She was carrying the baby girl, a fairy, thin legs in red Viyella leggings buttoned under nice brown shoes, her face hidden under a red tam and crammed down into Clover’s collar. Victor shook off Clover’s hand and pointed to Aurora. His face was so changed, Aurora could not take it in. His pant-leg was bunched around some contraption, and he leaned on a sturdy cane. She remembered him flying through the air, landing so lightly that the stage made no sound.

Then they were all together, she and Clover pressed to each other like flowers in a book, and the little Harriet making sleepy mews at being squashed.

Luggage mushroomed on the baggage cart, a porter loaded it into the Ford—which Uncle Chum, relenting, had taught Aurora to drive—and they went tooling back up the street. Clover pulled off Harriet’s tam, releasing springing dark curls, and then her own hat. Her hair, cut straight to the jaw, swung free.

‘London style,’ she said, at Aurora’s admiring gasp. ‘Fabian style, at least!’

Aurora pointed out landmarks (the church, Mrs. Gower’s, the school, the Opera House) and kept up a flow of welcoming babble until they had passed out of town into the countryside. Then she fell silent to let the air and sky and the thin strip of endless land at the bottom of the window do their work on Clover.

Everyone was out on the veranda to watch them arrive. When Aurora pulled up in the drive and waved, Mabel let go of Avery’s hand so he could hop down the steps to greet his long-lost aunt. Holding a limp bunch of white clover in his hand, he waited patiently for someone to get out of the car who might be her.

Harriet clung to her mother until she saw Avery, whereupon her eyes followed him, fascinated. Aurora saw him afresh, looking very grown up, suddenly, compared to Harriet. Chum called Elsie to come and see Arthur in the children; Elsie countered that she certainly saw Flora in the little girl—‘Look at those sweet brown eyes.’

By then, Mama had come haltingly down the stairs. She went round Chum in a slight hunch to find Clover. Once she had accepted Avery’s tribute, Clover turned—and Mama insinuated herself through the press to catch at her sleeve, kissing her; but joyfully, not in the mysteriously sad way she sometimes had. ‘Clover, Clover’ she was able to say, and then, overcome, she sang, ‘Wait till the darkness is over, wait till the tempest is done!’ Aurora saw that she used her right hand, as well as her left, to hold her dear lost daughter.

Mabel stayed in the background, as she did always. She had luncheon waiting on the veranda for the travellers. When they’d been fed, she and Aurora led Clover up to the bedroom waiting for her, and Mabel kindly helped her to settle Harriet for a nap.

‘Perhaps you’d like to rest yourselves, after the long journey,’ she said.

‘Victor will, I think,’ Clover said. ‘But I am not—’

Aurora got up from studying Harriet’s pale sleeping face. ‘No, no, not yet. Mama will want to sit with you a little longer.’

‘All right, then, Mrs.—’ Mabel stopped, agonized at her own clumsiness. ‘I mean—’

Clover kissed her reddening cheek and said cheerfully, ‘It’s all right, I don’t mind. You must call me Clover anyhow. I’m still Miss Avery, as you may know, but I think I should be Mrs. Saborsky here in Qu’Appelle. I don’t expect there are many Fabians around here to explain the concept of Free Love.’


What Every Wife Does

In the pearly evening Aurora and Clover walked down to the garden and stood looking over the neat rows of lettuce and spinach, the first green lace of carrot tops and young bean vines trellising up behind the cucumber hills.

Clover asked, ‘Did you miss the Paddockwood garden so much?’

Aurora laughed. ‘I do very little to help—all Aunt Elsie asks is that I play the piano sometimes. Mabel even darns Avery’s socks. She is much better at it than I.’

‘Not Mama?’

‘She cannot hold the needle well, it frustrates her. But she sorts beans and buttons, all the little things Dr. Graham suggested. She is still improving. You heard her singing Whispering Hope—it seems words come most easily from our old songs. She loves Avery; she will be very happy dandling Harriet too.’

Aurora turned Clover to walk back up the lawn towards the house. From a wicker chair that Mabel had brought out, Mama was watching the children play under a large spruce tree whose boughs hung down in places right to the ground.

‘Avery’s lair—he has play dishes and blocks there, to make a house or a fort. I hope Harriet won’t get too dirty,’ Aurora said.

‘Avery’s beautiful. I didn’t expect him to be so fair.’

‘His temper is mostly Mayhew, I think.’

Clover said, ‘It is a little like seeing Harry again, but not sad.’

As they climbed up to the veranda, a rhythmic shout caught Aurora’s ear: ‘Eleven to three, three to eight, eight to four—’ On a flat patch of grass, Victor was doing scales, reaching and swaying and turning himself in knots, the strange cup-brace hampering but not stopping him. The women stood watching him shift and twirl in the lowering sun. His shadow was huge along the lawn.

‘But what does it mean?’ Aurora asked.

‘Oh, it means I love you, Clover, over and over, of course. I love you, Harriet, I am your soul.’ Clover closed her eyes.

Aurora looked at her thin face. The skin colourless, tiny lines drawn round her eyes by the finest brush, not aging her, but setting a shadow over her face.

‘He is angry with me all the time,’ Clover said, looking up again.

Lilacs growing close to the house partly screened the veranda, and the low words would not carry to Victor. Aurora put her arm round her sister’s waist.

‘Going to sleep is the worst. He is afraid to sleep—not just the dreams, but the letting-go moment before sleep, when all the thoughts he’s kept at bay bleed in. So he stays up half the night until he falls into a heavy sleep, sitting in a chair or lying on the hearth-rug. It was just the same in London; I had to lie with Harriet to keep her warm. When he did come to bed, I was back and forth between them all night long.’

The veranda railing held Clover as she leaned slightly forward, her eyes always on Victor.

He had taken up a pair of ebony sticks and was working through a routine with them, sharp and graceful except when he had to shift from the sound leg to the crutch. Almost juggling, except the sticks slid and fell oddly. Sometimes a ball appeared between them and disappeared again.

‘Did you—do you know a lot about the war?’ Aurora asked. ‘I mean, what is really happening there?’

‘It is so close, the Front—like taking the train from Edmonton to Calgary, and there, right there, is the mud and the wire. But I did not know enough to help him at all. I ought to have gone for an ambulance driver, I would have liked that—no, not liked. I could have done it. I would have liked to see some of—’ Clover gritted her teeth, spoke more carefully. ‘Not liked. I wish I could have seen what he was seeing. But there was Harriet and I could not go.’

Aurora found Victor’s movements mesmerizing. ‘When he came back, was he—?’

‘Off his head? Not long. I think he might wish it had been longer. He was stuck with thinking. The nights are bad. You won’t hear us, we have become good at silence.’

On the grass, Victor stood still, in as straight a pose as his leg allowed, hands clasped. He ceased to move. His stillness was very restful.

‘I think of Mama living with the same thing, without the trigger of the war. But Papa was the same, you know he was, gripped by that hideous understanding of—the underlying horror of every single thing. Livid if Mama talked to Mr. Dyment in the street, you remember; suspecting that she gossiped of his weakness, or worse. How he squashed her frivolous mind, stopped her singing. I think of her.’

Aurora kissed the pale cheek, and smoothed Clover’s hair while she talked.

‘I am not always certain I can go on with him, living this way. It is bad for Harriet … and I must be so careful not to irritate or trouble him, or make everything worse by causing him anxiety. He can’t decide anything. He can’t choose what to eat in a restaurant. I just order for him as if that’s what every wife does. I think he has forgotten that it’s not.’ Clover shook her head to erase all that. ‘His leg, his wounds, are bad. But they will mend. He’ll work again. It’s merely a matter of my good sense to get us bookings again.’

She laughed suddenly, and all the heads turned to look up to the veranda, even Harriet peeking out from the spruce-boughs to see what had amused her mother. ‘I sound like Sybil, keeping Julius off the roller skates.’

Victor removed the strange cup-brace and came slowly back to the house, cane sliding on gravel. ‘I had some skill, once,’ he said, looking up at Aurora. ‘I seek to get it back.’


Spring Song

Next morning Mama taught the children to dance, just as she had taught the girls when they were small. A jaunty song that Clover had brought from England squawked on the Victrola: ‘Hello, Hello, Who’s your lady friend? Who’s the little girlie by your side?’

With her fresh eyes, Clover could see how well Mama had recovered—and after the horrors at the Wandsworth Hospital, Mama’s impairment seemed quite minor. She had a clever way of hiding the stiffness on her right side by holding a hand to her mouth as if musing: the left arm and leg did the dancing. Harriet was working hard to learn the waltz-step. Tall and sturdy at two-and-a-quarter, Avery danced very well already. Clover’s feet itched pleasantly.

She and Aurora left the children to Mama and Aunt Elsie and walked in to town with Mabel, three abreast down the empty road.

Breaking through her shyness, Mabel asked whether she had liked London, and a wave of bitterness flooded through Clover.

‘I hated everything about it,’ she said. Then checked herself: ‘Not London. It was the war I hated—the talk of glory and noble sacrifice, the self-righteous politicians safe at home. Even the men, how they love each other so as soldiers, and how girls love them too. I did myself, the boys in the hospital, the men coming home in pieces. It’s easier in England because all the men are in, anyone able-bodied, so everyone knows what you’re—well, they don’t look sideways at Victor when they see the crutch. People don’t understand here.’

‘We do,’ Aurora said, no doubt to protect Mabel. ‘Eight men from Qu’Appelle have been killed now, and many more wounded.’

Clover stopped herself from answering, streaming lines of ghosts in her mind. At that one hospital in Wandsworth, floors and floors of them, twenty boys in every room who ought to have been killed, who’d come out wrecked and maimed. The lucky ones. ‘How I hate the idea of sacrifice!’ she said, and then, her face burning, said to Mabel, ‘I mean—that it is asked of them, of us. I’m sorry, I have heard from Aurora about your fiancé being wounded.’

Mabel had retreated into herself, and Clover tried to repair it. She put a hand on Mabel’s muslin sleeve, warm with sun. ‘I know what that is like, the waiting. Aside from the war, London is—oh, beautiful. A riot of flowers, and the air! Like here, you know. The water is sweet too.’ She turned to Aurora. ‘I loved it there, and I love Victor’s mother, but I cannot work there. They will never let me be English, I’ll always be a colonial. Variety is vulgar, too, nothing like true vaudeville. In variety you must be a coquette, good at engaging rowdy crowds, and enjoy being ogled. It is much better here.’

In town, Mabel suggested they show Clover the Opera House, one of Qu’Appelle’s sights. Miss Peavey was closing the clinic door as they entered; she knew where the Opera House key was kept, and came along to keep them company.

The little theatre was charming and clean, with a border of advertisements round the proscenium stage—Clover laughed, her spirits rising, and pulled Aurora’s hand to go closer. ‘It’s like the David Theatre, in Camrose, do you remember?’

Their steps made no sound as they ran down the slight rake of the hall and up the side steps to the little stage. ‘Spring Song,’ Aurora said, and they wafted on, imaginary wreaths held high, and circled round and round, arms at each other’s waists, la-la-ing the tweedling melody.

‘We need Bella,’ Clover said, when they paused to make the bridge for Bella to pass under—it was this number they’d been doing, and just here that they’d stopped, when the Muse was flooded and destroyed. ‘Or waterfalls of rain …’

Aurora laughed, her face glowing. ‘We’ve had quite a good time, haven’t we?’

Here is what I have been missing all this time, Clover thought. She embraced Aurora, whispering, ‘You are my sister!’ as she kissed her velvet cheek.

Mabel and Miss Peavey broke into applause, and a man’s voice added, ‘Encore!’

Aurora’s arm tightened a little around Clover. She murmured in her ear, ‘Lewis Ridgeway, the schoolmaster. And Miss Frye, from the school. Come, I will introduce you.’

Miss Frye said excitedly, ‘Oh, Mrs. Mayhew! Is this your sister? How wonderful! We must have you both—do say you will!’

Mr. Ridgeway put a calming hand on Miss Frye’s elbow. ‘This is a lucky meeting. Miss Frye has an idea of getting up a concert for Dominion Day.’

‘You know Mrs. Gower thought of it last year, but then with her son’s tragic end—I thought, let’s us do it for her! Funds to send to our boys overseas, you know, war bonds, that sort of thing. But it would be meaningless without you, Mrs. Mayhew, so if we can persuade or entice you, or beg of you …’

Clover thought Miss Frye was shy, beneath the chatter. Aurora took pity on her, and said that since by lucky chance her sister (bows and introductions all round) was visiting, perhaps they could revive one of their old numbers? Miss Frye bubbled over in ecstasy and began to enumerate the other acts they had in mind: the dear girls’ chorus from the high school, a highly talented child flautist, and an exhibition of embroidery. Perhaps not a bill calculated to sell a superfluity of bonds.

Lewis Ridgeway gave Clover a penetrating look and took her hand. ‘Your sister has told me a little of your trouble—I’ve looked forward to meeting you and Mr. Saborsky.’

Clover nodded, examining his face as he did hers. Sombre, not much humour. Difficult to read. She hoped he had not been making Aurora unhappy.


Overflowing

On a sudden inspiration, Aurora cabled to Bella. Nothing but a brief line on a postcard had come from her since Easter, never more than Very well, happy, don’t be worried, more soon. The last note had been scribbled on the back of a list of tour dates, so she had some idea where Bella must be, and sent the cable to the Pantages theatres in both Edmonton and Calgary.

CONCERT TROOPS JULY I WITH CLOVER AND VICTOR, CAN YOU JOIN?

Many theatres went dark in July, there was a chance. She sent a prepaid answer, hoping that might ensure a reply, but did not mention it to Clover or Mama, for fear Bella would refuse. She did not allow herself to think how badly she wished for Bella’s wildness, her bountiful overflowing energy—and for her to see Avery, and Harriet.

And Bella would help Clover, who seemed sunk into an understandable despair that Aurora could see no way to lift.


Like a Soldier

Clover watched as Uncle Chum and Victor walked down to the garden, turning at the bean-row hedge; back up to turn again at the lilac bushes that sheltered the south porch, over and over. Clover sat on the porch with Harriet sleeping on her knee, screened from view but able to see her beloved as he walked to and fro.

Nearing the lilac bushes she heard Chum say, ‘What amazes me is that you were able to survive. I suppose the thought of your wife and child …’

She did not expect Victor to answer that. But as they reached the turn, she heard his voice: ‘I survived by acting like a soldier.’

That was like opening a letter, one Clover could not quite read. Perhaps he meant that he’d shut off his questioning, curious, independent self. That he had yielded to his training.

Chum said, ‘Yes.’ Nothing more. They turned and walked away.

All men who had been in battle knew things she would never know. She was eavesdropping. But she, waiting without word for weeks, being with Victor when the visions plagued him, knew things that men did not seem to remember.

Harriet stirred and sat up, bewildered and afraid. ‘It is all right, dear heart,’ Clover told her. ‘We are here in Saskatchewan.’

‘Dama?’ Harriet asked; she missed Madame still.

‘Come, let’s find Avery.’

The men were down at the hedge, Chum on the wooden bench and Victor standing, a cigarette in one thin hand. Harriet pulled on Clover’s hand, and they went inside.

Aunt Elsie had invited several people for dinner, wishing to present their guests to the town—and there was the Dominion Day concert to discuss. Mrs. Gower was coming with Lewis Ridgeway and Miss Frye from the high school, and since it was a dinner, the doctor and the Dean might as well be included.

Clover went to talk to Uncle Chum in his study that afternoon, remembering how he had seemed to understand Victor’s silence in the garden.

He put an arm over her shoulders, as if they knew each other well. ‘Don’t fuss, my dear. Victor will get along very well.’ As Clover hesitated, not even knowing how to ask for help, he added, ‘It’s nobody but the doctor, the Dean and Lewis Ridgeway—the Dean was in the Boer War, you know, distinguished himself. I’ve seen a deal of trouble myself, in various ways. If he is having difficulties, I’ll bring him in here for a bit of quiet. We won’t make the poor fellow uncomfortable, I can promise you. Men understand these things better than you’d think.’

But they didn’t know this war, Clover thought. She went away.


To Correct Myself

The doctor and Lewis Ridgeway were the first to arrive for the dinner party, while Aurora was still arranging tiger lilies in the big silver vase for the dining table; Clover and Victor had not yet come downstairs. Chum took Dr. Graham off to his sanctum; Aunt Elsie, smelling the cheese straws burning in the kitchen, pushed Lewis into the dining room, making a pleading face behind his back and saying, ‘Dear Aurora, here is our first guest!’

‘Hello, Mr. Ridgeway—will you mind if I carry on with these flowers?’ Aurora said, tension making her slide into ridiculous formality. Aunt Elsie vanished again.

Lewis stood against the wood panelling, not fully entering the room. ‘I would like to correct myself,’ he said. ‘I misspoke, about your sister.’

Oh dear, thought Aurora. ‘Lewis, that was so long ago! I promise I have forgotten it.’

‘Well, you have not forgotten,’ he said, looking at her carefully. ‘Or you would not have known which sister I meant.’

Aurora looked at his sharp, unhappy face; at his tired eyes. ‘It is I who ought to apologize,’ she said. ‘I am tigerish in defence of my sisters. I’m sorry I spoke that way.’

‘Your sister’s—Mrs. Saborsky’s—sterling quality is plain to see,’ Lewis said. ‘I made a wrong assumption about Miss Bella.’

He had better stop talking, Aurora thought. And always perceptive, he did.

She took up the last tiger lily, careful of its dusty black pollen. ‘Bella is flirtatious and rascally—that is her beauty, her goodness. More than anyone in the world, she is entirely honest!’ Unlike me, unlike Lewis, she thought.

He remained stiff. ‘I hope we can be friends again.’

Aurora put out a hand, smiling at him. ‘Yes, thank you, let’s. It will be much more comfortable for Aunt Elsie.’

Dinner was surprisingly peaceful, for all the tension beforehand. Mrs. Gower was in a lighter mood these days, interested in the concert and wanting to hear all the plans. She took a fancy to Harriet’s shining walnut curls, and offered to put up Victor and Clover if there wasn’t enough room here. ‘Don’t want your guests to feel cramped,’ she said, impervious to Elsie’s bristling.

The concert was the central topic of conversation, led by Mrs. Gower, with interpolations from Lewis and Aurora in turn. Mrs. Gower had decided that Mrs. Mayhew and her sister should sing several numbers, not just one, ‘Being as you are, in a way, semi-professional,’ she said. Aurora understood that to be a form of compliment, as one might say semi-professional prostitutes, and—not looking at Clover—she promised that they would work up a few songs.

‘Do a monologue.’ Victor raised his rusted voice to carry around the table.

Clover touched his sleeve and gave him a twinkling smile. ‘I will, if you’ll let me,’ she said to Lewis. ‘To keep my hand in. Perhaps Miss Sunderland, the thieving opera singer.’

Aurora burst out laughing and clapped her hands, saying it had to be in; Lewis promised to add her to the bill.

In a kind way that made Aurora like him afresh, Lewis talked to Victor, not troubling him for much of a reply but holding the burden of conversation himself; genuinely interested in what Victor did say. Uncle Chum nodded at Aurora once, when he caught her checking the progress of their talk, to let her know he was keeping tabs as well.

During the length of dinner, as Victor remained calm, Clover seemed to allow her vigilance to relax; a glass of wine brought a little tint of colour to her cheeks. Aurora looked at her—then at Lewis. She found herself smiling with him and erased it from her face. She liked him very much, but she had had three glasses of wine.


Another Gig

The Pantages in Regina was an old hell-hole. With a new Pantages set to open in the fall, no repairs were being carried out. Ropes regularly failed, letting massive Diamond Dye drops fall slithering to the ground. Nando spent hours before every show checking his and Bella’s equipment, with the professional fury he reserved for incompetence. He paced the dressing room nightly threatening to quit this tired outfit and haul Bella back to the movies, where if things were gimcrack and slipshod they’d know how to deal with it, and you’d only use a set once anyhow before you shot it to bits or burned it down or had a locomotive crash into it.

Then they’d go on and do their number to wild applause and find a bouquet in their dressing room from the manager, and he’d calm down again for the night.

‘Are you turning into your dad?’ Bella asked him one evening in mid-rant. ‘Just that I’d like to know.’

He glowered at her. ‘No!’

‘A week more, and we’re off. Do you think we’ll live that long?’

‘I don’t guarantee a thing.’

She threw herself into his arms and locked her mouth passionately on his, saying, ‘Then let us live tonight, my darling!’

He laughed then and stopped fussing, and sat in the armchair to hold her more freely; but they were interrupted by a knock on the dressing-room door.

A black bowler hat came into the room, trembling, and was joined round the edge of the jamb by another, lower down, and then the door burst open—to reveal East and Verrall.

Bella jumped up. ‘Back! I thought you had two more months!’

‘Australia, not a place you’d want to stay for long,’ East said. ‘But I got good boots there—see?’ He stuck out a pudgy leg and waggled a shining black pull-on boot.

‘Welcome home, welcome home,’ Bella said.

Verrall climbed in around East—the dressing rooms none too large in this antiquated house—and handed Bella a pair of fine leather gloves. ‘Doe kangaroo,’ he said. ‘Or I was terribly cheated.’

Nando was watching with a glint in his eye, and enjoyed the double-take when East discovered him. ‘You! Here!’ Verrall said, bemused, and East yelled, ‘Unhand that girl, sir!’

‘Can’t,’ said Nando. ‘We’re wed.’

That called for champagne. East sent one of the placard boys round to find beer at least, if champagne was not available, and they settled in for a good visit. Verrall told them that the tour had been cancelled halfway through, and they’d been lucky to get back. ‘This war puts a crimp in everything,’ he said. ‘And now, what with the conscription here and the U.S. jumping in, it’s enough to curl your liver. So I’m going to join up,’ he said. They had landed in Vancouver on the only steamer they could get, and were making their way to Minneapolis, which was where Verrall planned to enlist. ‘They won’t take East—his feet, you know,’ Verrall said. ‘But they’ll take me, and I think I shall enjoy it, in a quiet way.’

‘He’s all for adventure, you know Verrall,’ East said, looking so miserable that the joke fell flat.

Then they had to be told about Julius, which cast a pall over the party. Bella did not want to dwell on it, so she told how she and Nando had come to be touring together, and the new numbers they were working on now; they went through all the vaude news, and who was where: Nando said that Jimmy Battle was in town, for one, with a solo song-and-dance act, comedy songs and fancy footwork.

‘Finally pried himself loose from that harpy?’ East said. ‘She was a word, if you like.’

The placard boy came back with four bottles of beer, and a cable that had been forwarded for Bella. She opened it and laughed. ‘Boys,’ she announced, ‘you’ll have to pause one more time on your way to Minneapolis—we’ve got another gig.’


The Sweet Gay Life

Aurora watched the concert plan race like a riptide, once word came from Bella that not only she, but the famous comedy duo East & Verrall would donate their time to the cause. East sent a long telegram to Aurora, detailing what they’d need and what they’d bring with them, including a roster of musicians he promised to vouch for, travel only to come off the top of receipts (East was always practical). Band call was arranged for the morning of July 1; he and Verrall would arrive the night before, with Bella et al. A package came on the train with songs and music, new things East and Verrall had picked up on their travels—a George M. Cohan, written for the U.S. entry to the war in April, which East thought should be a company number at the end. ‘Big finale, use all the kiddies, and the soldier-happy old ladies will shell out’ was how he put it. Aurora planned to phrase it more circumspectly to Miss Frye and Mrs. Gower.

Clover and Aurora put their heads together over the bill, and showed it to Victor when he came through the empty dining room. ‘Not Danny Boy,’ he said. ‘Too hammer-nail now.’ So they cut that and replaced it with their true favourite, the limpid Per Valli, Per Boschi. As they worked they sang, in a trickle of sound that was very pleasing to them both.

Miss Frye was staggered when they took the proposed concert bill in to her at the lunch-hour next day. ‘This is! Far too—! East & Verrall!’ She wiped her mouth with a hanky. ‘I saw them in Regina in ’09. Are they particular friends of yours?’ Clover assured her that the stories of East and his thousand young ladies were merely apocryphal, publicity stunts in fact.

‘It’s rude to take over like this,’ Aurora told Lewis, keeping the paper close for a moment. ‘I think it’s the pleasure of performing together again that has taken wing.’

She placed the bill before him.

DOMINION DAY CONCERT



Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend? Qu’Appelle High School Girls’ Chorus

On the Banks of the Saskatchewan Mr. Geo. East, High School Girls’ Chorus

Per Valli, Per Boschi Miss Aurora Avery & Miss Clover Avery

A Recitation Mr. Lewis Ridgeway

Bella’s Flying Machine Miss Bella Avery

A Monologue Miss Clover Avery

The Golf Lovers East & Verrall

They Didn’t Believe Me Miss Bella Avery

Over There (a new song by George M. Cohan) East & Verrall, the Company

Lewis cast a cool eye down the sheet, and laughed. ‘A nine-item bill! You’ve turned our concert into polite vaudeville, Mrs. Mayhew.’ His own name caught his eye. ‘A recitation?’

‘I know you are a skilled elocutionist,’ Aurora said, seeing that he was pleased. ‘A valuable addition to the bill, if you could favour us.’

He bowed his head and said he would be honoured. ‘I may choose my material?’

‘Of course, you will choose best.’

‘And you’ll want to work with the girls beforehand?’

‘Yes! They’ll be wet rags by the time we’re finished with them. We’ll start this afternoon, learning the words and music—in a one-off revue like this their number should be more than just an opener.’

She saw that he looked blank, but it was not worth explaining.

Mabel met Aurora and Clover outside the school and walked with them to the Opera House, saying, ‘I hope it’s not too Machiavellian, but I’ve asked Mrs. Gower to take complete charge of the tea—she’ll be in here redirecting the numbers if you don’t keep her busy.’

‘Perfection.’ Clover gave Mabel a quick, surprising kiss. ‘But you are going to help us, not her?’

Taking Mabel’s other arm, Aurora agreed. ‘Mrs. Gower can’t have you. We need you for backstage mistress, if you are willing.’

Mabel was perfectly willing, and they went inside to measure and make more lists and wait for the high-school girls. By the time Aurora and Clover had driven them through an hour of singing practice and a strenuous hour of dance, all the little faces were red and puffing. Nell Barr-Smith gave a wild hoot at the end of one successfully executed set of steps, but the other girls were too winded.

‘We’ll have to bring Mama in tomorrow,’ Clover said. Aurora was interested to see that Clover often realized better than she what Mama could do, not being used to thinking of her as negligible. Clover had left Harriet in Mama’s care quite happily, for example, though she never left Harriet with Victor. It seemed to be doing Mama good.

Next day Mrs. Gower came by the theatre midway through rehearsal to announce that tickets had sold out, and they were going to add two more rows of seats.

‘Nobody will be comfortable,’ she said. ‘But it’s all in a good cause.’

The girls came trooping in for their first run-through, so Mrs. Gower sat and watched. ‘Sprightly does it,’ Aurora called. Twenty spines lifted, twenty chins came up.

‘Hello! Hello! Who’s your lady friend?

Who’s the little girlie by your side?

I’ve seen you with a girl or two.

Oh! Oh! Oh! I am surprised at you.’

Mama pulled at Clover’s sleeve, whispering, ‘Knife, steel!’ Clover executed the brushing movement of the entrechat more crisply—and the girls obediently sharpened up their motion.

‘Banks of the Saskatchewan, please,’ Aurora called, and the girls fluttered and regathered stage left. ‘This will be a very quick turnaround, you’ll have to be on your toes—’ She played the intro and they were off, dancing during the tenor’s verse, which Clover sang for now. East would do a lovely job of it.

‘By the banks of the Seine live girls so beautiful

It gives one pain to remain quite dutiful

And yet I’ve sworn by the stars above

Throughout my life to reserve my love,

for the girl by the Saskatchewan, the girl by the

Saskatchewan.’

At one end of the upright piano Lewis stood watching, with Miss Frye nodding her head gaily in time to the swooping music.

‘Lovely,’ Aurora called, as Clover gave the girls a round of applause for getting all the way through the steps. ‘We’d better take one more run at Hello, Hello, please.’

Miss Frye, recalled to the world, said, ‘Oh! The bandage-rolling is due to begin at five, and we’re in their space—I’ll just start setting up the tables.’

‘Hello, hello, stop your little games,

Don’t you think your ways you ought to mend?’

The girls stomped and wagged their fingers and had a hilarious time scolding Clover, then scurried in a swirling fan around her to carry her off.

Aurora began to fold the music away. Lewis put an arm over the piano to hold the sheets open. They looked at each other.

‘Do you know that I—’

She waited to hear what he would say.

‘I would give the world—if your circumstances were different,’ he said. ‘Or mine.’

‘Yes,’ she said. He had such a pretty brick house. She touched his hand lightly. ‘I know you would.’

‘How do we know love?’ he asked her.

Another of his difficult questions. She did not know the least thing about love. When she looked back, it seemed that she was always happiest alone. Not pretending, not folding herself small to fit in someone else’s grasp.

The girls were laughing, clanging the folding legs for the bandage tables into place. Clover gestured from the door to say she would walk home ahead rather than wait for the car. Her eagerness to return to Victor plainly showing.

Aurora brought her attention back to Lewis. ‘I think we know, already, the ones we love. It seems that people—recognize each other. Perhaps one just has to be patient.’


San Fairy Ann

Having no community duty, Clover walked back alone from the Opera House in evening sun, thinking of the chattering girls and the women winding bandages like tiny shrouds. Thinking too of Victor’s dream, which had woken him many times in terrible fear—that he was mistaken, that these corpses he was burying were not dead. Somehow their not being dead was more fearful. Burning of the bodies … He spoke only in fragments about it, and had only spoken twice, but she thought he had the dream often.

Tiny green bugs danced in the golden air as Clover walked. Her shadow fell very long, stalking into the fields beside the road. Perhaps she would still feel patriotic about the war if he had not come back a ghost. How could the eloquence she loved so much be gone? His romantic gall, his openness in declaring love—which had let her be open too, for the first time in her life.

At the door Elsie met her with a shushing finger: the children were already in bed, she whispered. Clover went up, making no noise.

Victor sat at the edge of the bed, talking quietly to the children to let them go to sleep. These days he could not seem to stop his hands from fiddling. He was stroking Harriet’s hair with one hand and playing, playing with the old prop compass in his other hand. Harriet’s eyes had half closed; in the cot Avery lay staring at the eastern wall, striped with long strands of late sun.

‘San fairy ann, they say out there. When my mother speaks in French, Harriet, you hear her say that: Ça ne fait rien. It matters nothing. But San Fairy Ann, she’s another thing altogether. She hovers over the world, sometimes sighing and sometimes laughing a little in her sleeve. Once long ago, San Fairy Ann went walking in a wood in France, where every leaf had fallen, but it was not winter. Bare trunks of trees stood up in serried rows and San Fairy Ann wound her way between them, looking for a lost child. That child’s name was Harry—don’t worry, Harriet and Avery were safe at home, being looked after by their mamas, but Harry had gone adventuring into the world, to find their three fathers, who had disappeared some time before.’

Close to sleep, Harriet’s breath was given up, as Gali said to do in his breathing work. Gentry had said that too, years ago, Clover remembered. Let the breath fall in, give it up. Avery’s eyes left the bars of light to watch his uncle’s face, grave in the twilight.

‘San Fairy Ann has a compass too—but hers can point to more than North. She set her compass for Harry, and the needle wobbled and wobbled, winding round until she bent her wrist and the arrow could point down. So then she knew that Harry had found some sign of his father, had gone into the maze of tunnels underground, where his father wandered lost and alone.’

Clover backed away from the room, going slow and light, so the wide plank floor did not creak. She felt light-headed, and a little sick. But she thought Victor had been working to make the story not frightening.

When Aurora and Mabel came back, Clover tugged Aurora’s sleeve, pulling her sister out with her for a last breath of air. They walked around the loop of the drive, grasshoppers leaping at mad angles from their feet, and talked over the concert, less than a week away. Their skirts, shorter these days, still flowed around their knees in the wind that rose off the grass. At the end of the drive they turned.

The warm house lay in front of them, windows rosy in the darkness.

Aurora said, ‘Don’t you think you could stay here for a while? A year, for Victor to get better—Uncle Chum asked me to tell you that you’d be welcome as long as you like.’

‘On charity? We haven’t got much left, after the trip. I’ve got to find a gig soon.’

‘There’s plenty of money in the Indian Head account. I haven’t needed anything but a little for Christmas presents. We could take a little house.’

‘I don’t want to live on Bella either! But it’s not the money. It’s—needing to go. Some people are citizens, and some are nomads, I think. We’ll be glad to be on the move again.’

Aurora did not try further persuasion.

‘Come too,’ Clover said. ‘When we leave, why don’t you come?’


Quiet

The coyotes were loud that night. After the excitement of the day it took some time for the house to settle. When it was quiet at last, and they were all in their beds, the ki-yi-ing started outside. Clover listened to Harriet breathing, tucked between them in the bed.

Victor lay rigid, not asleep. She did not dare to touch him.

Tired from long rehearsal, Clover drifted into a waking dream, then deeper into sleep. When she woke, the first faint light was coming in the window. Four o’clock, perhaps. The coyotes were so close, at first she thought they must have wakened her.

Victor was not in the bed. She lay still, not yet thinking.

She heard a rifle shot, and the coyotes’ yipping ceased.

Then everything was quiet.

Another minute she lay there. Then she thought, well, it would be quiet. If he was dead, there would be no more noise. I would lie here thinking how quiet everything was.

No conscious movement—but she was down the stairs and out onto the veranda, and there in the pale light saw Victor lying on the grass. Like a war memorial, the rifle on his chest with one hand holding it. Her mind looked for Papa’s black suit, and the blot of red opening out on the snow.

But it was grass. She knelt beside him.

He opened his eyes. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said.

‘No.’

She went inside and put the rifle under a pile of sheets on the top shelf of the linen closet, where the children could not reach it, and took out a blanket to wrap him in. He came with her willingly, using her instead of his forgotten crutch, and curled himself around Harriet in the bed. And finally he slept.


The Company Assembled

Early Sunday morning, Bella was due on the Regina train. Aurora could almost not imagine it, after so long. East and Verrall and a handful of musicians would come on the same train, for rehearsal—East had booked rooms at the hotel, but Mrs. Gower demanded that these be left to the musicians; Bella and the famous East and Verrall must stay at her house. And she insisted on hosting a light fork-luncheon after the rehearsal, which Mabel warned Aurora might be anything up to roast suckling pig.

Aurora and Clover took the Ford to the station and drew up just as the train blew in. They flew up the platform to the first-class carriage as Bella fell out the door, and then Nando. Clover hugged Bella while Aurora kissed Nando, crying, ‘Bella, you might have told us!’

‘Wanted to surprise you with everything,’ Bella said, moving Clover’s arm to free her mouth. ‘We even got married! Not high-minded like you, Clover!’ She kissed Aurora and wrapped her springy arms around both of them. Nando smiled and smiled, his face pulling into an unaccustomed shape. He managed, Aurora saw, to keep one hand connected to Bella the whole time.

Then Verrall came sliding down the step. Standing on the platform his head was at the level of East’s, poking out the door. There were more embraces and exchanges of best wishes, and complaints that the children were not present to be patted and compared.

‘Later,’ Aurora promised. ‘They are to attend the concert, of course.’

‘The concert!’ East cried. ‘I had forgot what we were here for. I must catch the baggage man—’ He fled down the train, and Verrall shrugged and loped after him.

‘We’ll take a wagon,’ Verrall called back.

The Opera House was an ants’ nest of girls and women already, but Mabel had the musicians in place, tuning their assorted instruments. The man at the piano, to Aurora’s great pleasure, was Mr. Mendel, from the Empress Theatre long ago.

‘Made the switch to Pantages, years back,’ he said. ‘Never regretted it. The man’s an ape but the theatre is run like clocks and I like my boys. I think you will too.’ His wrinkled face peered over the piano and he gave out an A for the others to tune to.

The programmes had arrived from the printer, in a large flat packet which Mabel took to her prompt corner to open; the giddy girls were in Miss Peavey’s clinic, which had been turned into the chorus dressing room for the duration. A banner hung across the proscenium: FOR OUR BOYS OVERSEAS. It was bright red on white silk, like that of a Red Cross hospital—but never mind that, Aurora thought.


Riding a Bicycle

Bella and Nando did the visiting royalty business with the helpers, but with Bella royalty could never be completely serious—she felt a simmering, shimmering laugh under everything she did these days.

‘Oh, there’s one more thing that I forgot,’ she said to Aurora. ‘And here he is.’

The auditorium door was ajar, and in the arch stood Jimmy the Bat, posing like an advertisement for cigarettes, in a white linen motoring coat over a sylph-like suit.

It seemed to Bella, watching closely, that Aurora was holding her breath.

Jimmy walked down the rake of the main aisle. Nobody ever more graceful. At Bella’s nod the musicians started up The Double-Glide Walk, and Aurora laughed and moved forward to greet him.

‘Let’s dance it one more time,’ he said, reaching out a hand.

In the cleared space where the seats would be put up, they met and clung and held the pose—and then were off, circling circling, Aurora’s lily foot flicking up from time to time in the most carefree way, as if she’d done nothing in her life but dance.

Clover turned away, white-faced, probably sick with nostalgia; Bella was not so sappy. She kept a sharp eye on what those two were doing: it seemed to her that they were chiefly having a very good time. But of course that was the whole purpose of that dance, and it might not be real. What the hell, she thought, it was worth a shot—I shouldn’t be the only happy one in the family.

As the dance finished Jimmy and Aurora bowed to the musicians with a flourish. Aurora broke away, but kept hold on Jimmy’s elbow. ‘I’m winded!’ she said, loud enough for the rest to hear. ‘You are in top form, but it’s two years since I danced.’

‘Like riding a bicycle,’ Jimmy said. His every gesture, thought Bella, was easy and cool as shaved ice.

Mabel came forward to show off the programmes from the printer, with Nando’s name by Bella’s, and the dance number in place: Miss A. Avery & Mr. Jimmy Battle: The Double-Glide Walk & Oh, You Beautiful Doll, between Clover’s monologue and East & Verrall.

Aurora took the parchment programme. ‘Et tu, Mabel? Bella, you’re a genius!’

There was one more task. Bella did not want to shirk the last thing she could do for Julius. Seeing Clover in a quiet corner, Bella took Aurora over to tell them together that Julius had died, keeping it very bare: ‘He’d been out of sorts for ages, and then he died—it was the drink, of course. He said to give you his dear love, Clover, and a little to spare for the beautiful Aurora.’

She buried her face in her sisters’ shoulders, both to hide his true death and for her own comfort. They could not have made it better if they had been there, after all.