The Little Shadows

2.

First Night




JANUARY 1912

The Empress, Fort Macleod

… and there we were, not on the list.

FRED ASTAIRE





Snowlit wind, brilliant with ice-chips, swirled them along paths shovelled like tunnels through the drifts. Without the bunched baby-doll petticoats, the cold cut sharper. Aurora could feel it chafing to bright red the bare skin above her stocking tops. She breathed through her muff to keep her voice from freezing.

Clover held fingers over her eyes, leaving only a narrow slit to see through, as her father had said the Esquimaux did in the farthest North. A shorter journey to the theatre today because they knew the way—Clover had noticed that before. Or because she was dreading this a little, the band call and how that would be.

Bella walked through the snow thinking of Gerda’s trail to the Snow Queen. Except Bella and her sisters were glad to be trapped in this palace. They would sing and dance for their supper because they were the luckiest, and too bad for poor Mr. Konigsburg. Her boots said Konigsburg-Konigsburg crunching over the snow. She wondered what Julius and Sybil were doing, where they had gone.

Mama’s tight, black-gloved hand was on the handle, but the door flew open of its own accord, and there was the Ninepins’ broom-boy, Nando Dent.

‘Mendel sent me to look out for you,’ he said, flat-planed face cracking into a creased grin. ‘Welcome, ladies!’

‘We are not behind time?’ Mama asked, anxious.

‘No, no, he wants to give you an extra bit, that’s all.’ Nando hurried them, still snow-dazzled, through the lobby, encouraging and clucking as if he were shooing chickens. He swung the inner door open, and the girls stopped in a clump—the velvet darkness again assailing them with its complicated smell and music. A little band assembled at the left in front of the stage was twiddling away: fiddle, clarinet, piano, one uncertain double bass. Another player, stretching his slide trombone to oil the long brass bones of it, inserted himself behind an array of odd percussion. Would they be heard over all that? Clover caught her cheek in her teeth and then let go. They were on their way. Her chest felt tight, and she could see the pulse jumping in Aurora’s tender neck. Bella did not seem at all affected.

‘It will be all right,’ Mama said, softer-toned. ‘You are very good girls and good performers, there is nothing to fret about.’

Her black hands pushed them in.

Bella skipped round the others and went first, Nando Dent bounding to run beside her down the slightly sloping floor to the small clear space in front of the stage. Half the chairs had been set up; part of the noise was the rest of them being crashed into place by a couple of skinny hands. Up on the stage Mr. Cleveland stood barking some order up into the fly gallery, then calling for ‘Silence!’

Which fell without delay, musicians and chair-movers milling around the house all stilled and expectant. Cleveland came forward to the lip of the stage and peered down, looking for Mendel. ‘When you are ready, Mr. Mendel, we may begin?’

‘Uno momento,’ Mendel called up from the piano.

Aurora watched Cleveland make his way down the moveable stairs and midway up the house to his station at a two-legged table propped on seat-backs, strewn with papers and props; a squat, ugly man sat scribbling there already and looked up to murmur something.

The musicians huddled around Mendel once more. Nando danced back and pulled at Mama’s sleeve. ‘Your sides? The band arrangements?’

‘Oh, mercy! I forgot. Here!’ Mama held out the worn piano music, and then (with a grimace, for she knew it betrayed their lack of experience) brand-new sides, on very crisp paper, for violin, woodwind and double bass. ‘But stay—is there a programme?’

He pulled one out of his pants pocket and bestowed it like a rose on the beloved, and Flora laughed and smacked at him affectionately, as if he were one of Arthur’s big-boy students. A nice boy, with easy manners and some thought for the feelings of others.

They took their seats in the front row, crowded with other artistes waiting their turn. Aurora, in the middle, held the programme so they could all see. A long slim booklet of flimsy pinkish paper, with Cleveland’s Empress Theatre on the front. She flipped over the pages, sifting through the rich black, decoratively lettered words, and finally—there—on the first page, all alone in a sea of advertisements, their new name:

THE BELLE AURORAS, ART SONGS OLD & NEW

So it must be real, Aurora thought.

‘Openers, yes, but we’ll work our way up from that, you’ll see!’ Mama whispered.


Pretty Little Gal

Aurora sat beside Clover and breathed through a light commotion in her stomach. This was only the band call—nothing, nothing to worry about.

Mendel’s hand rose and the musicians dodged back to their stands, and they broke into a roistering little march, a lovely encouraging come-in-and-enjoy-this piece. Too soon for Aurora, Mendel’s hand rose again and the band straggled to a stop, the violinist a bit behind the others, having had his eyes closed. The musicians were dressed in tight old suits, the patina of long use on knees and sleeves. One, the trombone player, had a slight dusting of flour all down his right side, which he brushed at whenever he was not playing. Perhaps he was a baker the rest of the time.

‘Cut to … eight bars from the end,’ Mendel said. ‘Belle Auroras?’

‘Present!’ said Aurora, then blushed. Present, as if they were girls at school.

They ran up the backstage stairs and found another stagehand waiting there, who cried out to Mendel, ‘In place!’ The band struck up the cantering march and rode it to a happy crash of cymbals—a brief pause—then the opening bars of the Whispering Hope intro began. The stagehand motioned them to go, go!—and on they went. The stage was dusty and dirty, but Aurora could see the marks painted to show where to stand to do it in one. They arranged themselves sufficiently ahead of the marks to let the curtains swing closed behind them, and (brushing down their skirts into pretty order) stood still, breathed in all at the same moment, and sang—

Mendel’s hand shot up on their third note, and the band stopped. Only Bella kept on singing, her wobbling voice echoing through the hall on An-gel … But she stopped when Clover’s hand pinched her waist, and clamped her mouth shut with one hand, and the little audience of performers laughed, kindly enough.

Mendel consulted his sides: ‘And then Bow-Wow—I thought we cut the Bow-Wow?’

Mama hastened onstage, explaining, ‘Well, my dear sir, Mr. Cleveland required a twenty-minute length, and without that number we come in just a trifle under eighteen.’

‘Better short than long,’ Mr. Cleveland intoned from the worktable, waxy face gleaming in the lamplight as he leaned forward. ‘Anyhow, Bow-Wow is Simple Soubrettes material. Clear the stage except performers.’

Mama’s gloved hand waved frantically at Aurora and she vanished back into the wings, where Aurora could see her shifting from foot to foot in a small circle, like a lost bee.

Aurora turned to Mendel. ‘Then we’ll go straight to Buffalo Gals, with Don’t Dilly-Dally after, and save Last Rose of Summer for the closer.’

Mendel considered, nodded, and made a pencil dash across his sheet. ‘On to it then, boys, bridge from last four bars of Whispering Hope, vamp until I sign you in to Buffalo Gals.’

The band struck up at once, sliding from sorrowful minor thirds into the jaunty Buffalo Gals. Aurora and Clover darted into promenade steps behind Bella, who did the first verse in speak-song, her funny voice perking up the place. The waiting performers lifted their heads in sudden attention when she squeaked out, ‘A pretty little gal I chanced to meet, Oh, she was fair to see!’

Mendel called out, ‘Last four bars—’ and the girls skated into their final positions, to sing, ‘… and dance by the light of the moon …’ They took it to their bow, and on into the intro for Dilly-Dally. Bella and Clover retreated, and Aurora moved up for her solo.

To demonstrate her professionalism, Aurora looked up to the lighting-booth window above the balcony and called out, ‘Now the follow-spot should move to me alone.’

‘I’m right here, you don’t got to shout,’ said the squat man sitting beside Cleveland.

Aurora went white. Amateur! She ought to have known that the lighting man would not be in the booth during band call.

‘I got your notes right here, anyways,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow you all right.’

‘Of course,’ she said politely, and bowed a little—even more stupid. ‘Very sorry.’

Mendel, pressed for time, swung the band on into the lilt and sway of Dilly-Dally, crashed it to a halt and skipped to the end, when the girls came back to stand together in a nice tableau for Last Rose. ‘When true hearts,’ he prompted.

‘When true hearts lie withered, and loved ones are flown.’ Aurora took the rising trill solo at the end of that, and then their voices subsided together into the peaceful sighing ending—‘Oh, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?’

‘And the bow—and off you go, girls.’ Dismissing them completely, Mendel turned to the band. ‘Wonder Dogs, no vamps, long set-up so we riff the whole of The Chicken Dance.’


Not Simple

Four girls, preening and fluffing, had taken over the dressing room: too-short white skirts, dashing slippers with no stockings, lips kissing air in the mirror. A thin older one, strong-looking with a sharp, vivid face; two pudgy ones with blonde curls; and a thin little one, whose mouth was pulled into a tight knot on one side by an old scar. She had sparkling eyes.

Mama had spread their own things over a bench in front of one of the mirrors, the only space left untenanted. She bustled importantly, hanging up tartan shawls and pulling tissue out of dancing slippers. Clover took the tissue and folded it along its original lines, watching Aurora take a few quick steps into the room as the strong girl, the oldest one, turned from the mirror to meet her. Aurora stared into her eyes.

‘Mercy,’ the girl said, holding out her hand.

‘Oh! Aurora Avery,’ Aurora said. She took the narrow hand, held it for a moment.

They were enemies, they must be, Clover thought, but they had a brightness in common. Mercy laughed and looked away.

‘Simple Soubrettes?’ Mama asked.

‘That’s us. Fifth up, right before the break. Bring ’em back alive, Cleveland says.’ Mercy laughed again, immoderately. Like a boy’s, her voice was deep and hoarse.

The larger blonde turned from the mirror and asked, ‘Dumb act?’

‘Not dumb!’ Mama was quick to refute it. ‘The Belle Auroras, a selection of simple airs to recall tenderer years gone by.’

‘Not simple,’ the blonde said, puzzled. ‘We’re Simple Soubrettes, so you can’t be.’

Mercy turned her back to the mirror, hands on the big girl’s shoulders. ‘Old songs, that’s all they mean, Patience. And this,’ she said, tapping on the prettier blonde girl’s arm, ‘is my sister Temperance, and the little one is Joyful.’

Clover folded another sheet of tissue, a chirp of laughter in her head—such ridiculous names for flip-skirted foamy dancers.

Mama said, ‘Plymouth Brethren?’ and the older girl, Mercy, nodded.

‘A great escape for the lot of you, then,’ Mama said, nodding too. ‘My aunt, not by blood, was Plymouth Brethren. She wanted me to be renamed, but Thankful I was not. Clover, you carry on here while I run back to the hotel to fetch the pincushion. I knew there was something I’d left behind, and ten to one we’ll need it.’ Wrapping a scarf around her neck, she was gone almost before the words were out.

With the same brisk command, Mercy said, ‘Joy, go show that youngest girl where the necessary is and how to do the latch stage right so you can get back in. Mrs. C. will not have shown them.’

Of course she hadn’t, thought Clover. Nobody’d said a thing about the arrangements.


Scampering Mice

Bella was very glad to go exploring. She wanted to see the Nando boy again, so she ran up the stairs with Joy like they were scampering mice. In the theatre the Living Statuary (willowy ladies and men in scandalous skin-coloured clothes) were setting up their props in three, on the last slice of stage. The backcloth showed an Italian courtyard in clumsy perspective. The girls sidled to the rear of the stage where a door stood inched ajar, latch hooked back in the jamb and a cloud of cold white air curling in.

Joy whispered, ‘Someone’s out there already, see, so that’s useful too, then you don’t wander out and have to wait there freezing. It’s a two-hole biffy, but only if you go out together—nobody knocks if the door is shut. People are very cultured here.’

The biffy out the back of the schoolhouse and teacherage had four seats, and was only too often chock full of girls. Bella had no interest in seeing another. When they were famous she would only ever have an indoor toilet, ever. ‘But I thought it was stage right?’

‘This is stage right,’ Joy said.

But it was on the left, on the side that their dressing room was on.

Joy laughed, the scar-knot lifting her cheek, even her eyelid. ‘You have to think of it from onstage, not from as if you was watching. It’s from our eyes that they named the two sides, because we’re the simple ones!’

The Belle Auroras were not simple. Even if Joy and her sisters might be, in their saucy skirts and no stockings. ‘Aren’t your bare legs awfully cold?’ Bella asked—then she and Joy both laughed, because it was such a silly, mean thing to say.

‘Bone-chilled! But in the show when it gets so hot, when all the people come, I’ll have to flap my skirts for air,’ Joy said. She tugged Bella’s sleeve to pull her behind a velvet curtain, so a stone plinth could be rolled on for the Living Statuary—stone in appearance only, Bella realized, because the stagehand was pushing two and pulling another on a string.

‘This change is taking too long,’ thundered Cleveland out of the darkness.

Everyone onstage jumped. Music crashed in, ending the underlying murmur that had been Mendel talking to the band. Joy and Bella clutched each other behind the curtain, trying not to shriek because everything was so funny, especially the men suddenly moving very quickly, like toys wound too tight.


Pincushion

Flora scuttled along the cleared path through the snow. Her left boot had a thin place and the cold seemed to come up in a fiery line straight through to her hip. ‘Pincushion, pincushion,’ she sang to herself beneath her breath—not wanting to find herself in the hotel room, unable to recall why she had come. Her head ached, and after the theatre’s darkness the morning sun was dazzling, sun-dog prisms glittering too bright to be borne. She put her gloved hand up to shade her eyes. One eye was not behaving properly; she ought not to have spent so long out with Sybil and Julius last night, and then she had been plagued with dreams.

What joy to see her girls onstage. Cleveland was one to watch out for, though; and he had eyed Aurora too openly, which would earn them all Mrs. C.’s dislike. Flora had seen enough of that. Aurora was too unseasoned to realize how careful she must be, but—

A patch of black ice nearly sent Flora tumbling—phew! A broken leg at this juncture would be disastrous!

More slowly, she stepped along the snowy edge of the path. Life on the stage was like a pincushion, she thought. Sharp points all around: useful, but you needed a silver thimble to manage. She must keep her thimble over her girls. The thought of Cleveland forcing himself on Aurora made her face break into a fearful heat, even in this prickling cold. Behind her black glove she could see it happening, an upsetting vision of Cleveland tugging at Aurora’s hand, pressing it to his trousers—oh! Flora shook her head to clear it and redoubled her speed.

It was an advantage that she knew the way of the vaudeville world very well, its blessings as well as its dangers. She must simply be determined, and not let weakness or tiredness, or useless visions, distract her from keeping all her girls safe and sound.


An Instant Liking

‘How’d you get the gig?’ Mercy asked Aurora. Clover was there too, but Mercy did not bother with her, seeing at once who was in charge of the Belle Auroras, and speaking to her equivalent number.

‘Auditioned yesterday,’ Aurora said, as brief as possible.

Silence. Tongue out in concentration, Temperance drew on a crescent of eyebrow.

No reason not to be honest, Aurora judged. ‘We didn’t get it, but Cleveland was angry with Julius Foster Konigsburg, so then he had no opener and called us back.’

Mercy was kind, though. ‘Oh, he could have used Maximilian the Bird Magician, if he’d been desperate. Maxie can do it in one if he’s got to—less comfy for the birds, is all.’

Aurora gave way to an instant liking for Mercy. Her soldierly air, her lean arms, her eyes which were both sharp and melting. Her lips, too: full, but cut cleanly around the arching edge. Little chin. What was their life like, with no mother or manager to be seen?

‘How did you get the gig?’

‘Gave him a French job under the lighting table.’

Aurora looked blank.

‘Where he sits with Lights. Sent Lights off to check for a burnt bulb.’ Mercy laughed at the look on Aurora’s face, at Clover staring too. ‘It’s not so bad—quick work, and no danger, you know. I’d far rather that than the other.’

Aurora did not want Mercy to see that she did not know what a French job might be. Whatever it was, how had it come about? How had Mr. Cleveland introduced the subject—or had Mercy? Would she herself be expected to do whatever it was? But she had Mama. She would have to watch out for Bella and Clover. She looked up and caught Clover’s eye, and saw that she too was speculating as to what exactly it might be.

Clover rose and slid out of the room, the knuckles of her hand grazing the back of Aurora’s neck gently on her way by.

Mercy said, drawing her own brows, ‘Well, see you keep the gig now you’ve got it! Mrs. C. will ding you with her carving knife if she catches you at hanky-panky. She sent poor Melvin packing this morning, and his Tina, only because she was getting big in front.’

‘Is that Neville Melvin Reads Your Subconscious Mind?’ Aurora turned pages in the programme to find him, there, fourth on the bill.

‘Yes. East & Verrall are coming. Cleveland got them on their way down to the Death Trail.’

‘I love East,’ Temperance said. The only thing she’d said so far. Her eyes were thick-rimmed with black, and she was painting a line of palest blue along the soft pink inner edge of her eyelid. She was spectacularly pretty, if you liked an armful. ‘He gives you fudge.’

Mercy nodded. ‘No girl with them. We wouldn’t want to follow a girl.’

‘Comics?’

‘Double act, three hundred dates a year, but they run down to the Montana circuit to make that many. But what do they do with the money? They never seem to have any.’

Aurora watched Mercy paint her eyes. It was peaceful in that warm dark rabbit-hole of a room, while the work went on above them. In a droning, listless voice, Patience sang, ‘What’s my name? Poon’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell you the same.’


Living Snake

Dogs were surging up the stairs stage left as Clover went to look for Bella. A moving river of white and black fur flowed onstage behind the curtain. Bella was there, watching the fray. Mama had returned, and she did not like dogs. Holding the pincushion out like a bone to tempt them, she backed away. One little dog, a ball of white fluff, snapped up at her with pointed white teeth.

‘Oh, help! Save us!’ Mama cried, and the Wonder Dogs man ran up behind the dogs and called them to order with a quiet whistle.

He avoided Mama’s eyes, but grunted, ‘Thorry,’ and dealt with the dog by a short punch on the nose, his expressionless face rough but soft, like bread-dough torn into halves. Was he mad, a little? He must be, to have cut that living snake away. Clover shuddered. She was glad Bella had not heard what he’d done to himself, the poor man.

Mama gathered Bella’s hand, clutched tight, and pulled her back down to the dressing room. Clover stopped to adjust her stocking (Mama’s—too big, it sagged gradually down, however tight she tied her garter) and stayed to watch the dogs: twelve of them lined up on a row of stools behind a long table. Mendel pulled the curtain aside and said in a careful voice, as if talking to someone slow or deaf, ‘Take that new opener all the way through, Juddy, Lights hasn’t seen it yet … Make it an Italian if that suits the dogs, but go through the whole dinner party—after that we’ll skip from cue to cue.’

Mama had made them do an Italian run of their songs at the hotel, speaking very quickly, to make sure that everyone remembered the lyrics. Nothing more inexcusable than forgetting lyrics, she said; some acts might be able to make them up, but the audience would know their old favourites, and any false word would jar. Clover was cold with dread that she might forget.

The Wonder Dogs man sat in the middle of the table, a row of dogs behind, led by a cock-eared black terrier. He whistled and they settled, with that same tight attention and excitement that Clover felt herself when standing ready to perform.

As the curtain opened, Juddy rang a brass bell for service and a maid-dog entered, prancing on hind legs, dressed in a darling little white cap and apron. As she set a plate in front of Juddy, a tiny poodle, nosed by the black terrier, jumped from the row of boxes behind and stood quivering upon the table. The maid-dog chased him off—but the same rascally black terrier nudged another onto the table, and another, until the maid found a whisk broom under the table and whisked the little dogs off, chasing them right offstage.

Juddy rang the bell again. No answer but a blat from the trombone, so he flung his dinner napkin down and went haring off after the maid-dog.

As soon as he’d gone, up jumped that rascally terrier—the instigator, Clover thought—and began to wolf down the abandoned dinner. Some commotion occurred offstage and the dog looked up, one ear cocked. He jumped down, grabbed a new dog, a hairy Pekinese-looking thing, by the scruff of her neck and plumped her down beside the plate.

Then the black dog nipped back to his box and sat, angelic—just in time, for his master came storming back in. When he saw the Pekinese at the half-eaten plate, Juddy lost his temper, scolding it in a torrent of hideous triple-speed curses, stamping his feet in a rage, then drawing a pistol and training it on the poor pup.

Clover was frightened. She thought Juddy truly was mad, and was going to kill his own dog like that, shoot him right there on the stage, for having ruined his number. The gun was very black and real. The substitute thief shrank, cowering, a masterpiece of abject apology, as Juddy cocked the pistol and prepared to execute the poor little creature.

But the black dog leaped up from his box and jumped onto the table between the gun and the Peke, begging piteously for his master to spare its life. Juddy dragged him off the table onto the floor, and instead—oh no! He shot the black dog!

The dog rocked back on his hind legs as if he were a man, and staggered about the stage, one paw over the wound, the other across his eyes. His whimpering was loud above the suddenly hushed music, and then—he died.

Appalled by what he had done, Juddy fell to his knees weeping. A huge dog—the biggest dog Clover had ever seen, in a police jacket and helmet—came in and grabbed Juddy from behind, nipping him on the seat of the pants, and dragged him offstage, straight to pokey where he belonged for killing his clever little dog. From the wings Clover could see how Juddy looked like he was being dragged when he was actually pushing himself along; he was very convincing even so. She was so sorry for the dead black dog—until, after a long funereal trombone blast, he jumped up onto the table and coolly finished his dinner.

‘Right!’ called Mendel. ‘Out of time for you, Juddy—we’ll wing it with part two.’ He turned back to his band. ‘Minou’s up next, vamp sixty-four bars while they strike the dogs.’

The curtains swirled shut, and the stage was a welter of hands shifting stools and plinths in the blue working lamp, silent under a winding French café tune from the band.

Out of the darkness close beside Clover, a man said softly, ‘Fresh blood?’

She jumped, then stood very still.

‘New to this the-ayter, I mean to say? Humbug?’ He proffered a paper bag to entice her. He had reddish hair and bright eyes that looked blue in the bluish light.

Another man emerged from the velvet curtain’s shadow. ‘Now, East, don’t tease the lady.’

‘This is no lady, she’s a soubrette,’ said East. They stood very near.

‘Oh, I think not, I think she is not—I’d lay you odds she’s as prim as you please.’

‘Verrall, you back away slow and you won’t get hurt. I’ve got dibs on this young miss.’ East ran his arm behind Clover and pulled her quite close, but not close enough to be serious. There was a joke in everything he said, you could not be cross with him—besides, Clover was never subjected to this kind of attention, standing beside Aurora as she always did, and she found it interesting.

Verrall extended one long thin finger at East and twitched it side to side like Papa’s metronome. ‘Mrs. C. is watching. You’ll find yourself in hot water with the management, my dear old East,’ he said.

‘D’you think? When he needs us ever so desperately?’ East squeezed Clover’s waist, measuringly, and then used both his hands to set her a little apart, like a doll he was putting back in the toy box. ‘But perhaps he don’t need you so desperately, my tidy tenderfoot, and it would never do to get you canned.’

Still Clover had not spoken a word. She could not say anything at all witty, so she tore herself away from watching Madame Minou’s Statuary and trotted down the stairs to the dressing room as if she were quite confident and pert. Only her legs, trembling slightly, showed the lie.


The Doorstep

Aurora watched the Soubrettes running out as Clover ran in, and shortly back again, their call brief because they’d been with Cleveland’s so long.

The Italian Boys had the last band call, coming next-to-close, before the pictures. Here at the Empress those were little more than a magic lantern show to harry the audience out of their seats, Cleveland saying that if the Keith–Albee circuit didn’t bother with them he didn’t see why he should pay through the nose for bad celluloid. The current picture was A Natural History Study Showing Fifteen Phases of Bee Culture; not even Bella wanted to see it. The girls were free to stay by the stove and keep warm for the hour before the first show.

But Aurora could not sit. Wrapping her shawl around herself she went up the stairs and outside as if to the privy, then turned round the side of the theatre and kept walking as far as she could in the cold. She took quick strides on the packed-snow path and watched her new boots peeping in and out beneath her swaying skirt, and thought of a blank blue sky over their old home in Paddockwood, of lying on the stone fence by the schoolhouse after all the others had gone in to supper; her father’s shuttered face, bent over papers at his desk on the dais, when she went to call him in long after supper was cold.

‘What a voice you’ve got,’ he’d said one evening, after the Victoria Day concert. ‘Wherever it came from.’ Mama had never had much voice. Everybody said so, it was not disloyal. Aurora had more talent, and more beauty, but Mama had fiery energy and gumption, and those things counted high. Talent was only a tenth of it.

Aurora’s feet were ice-lumps, so she turned and strode back. It was exciting, she told herself. It was—the doorstep of their professional lives. She took one last breath of cold air, feeling the well-known shock as the cold’s bite reached down her chest.

The heat of the theatre warmed her skin on her way in. She passed grey-banged, whey-faced Mrs. Cleveland, but shy of being thought to have been at the outhouse, Aurora went on without speaking, aware of those flat eyes swinging to watch. She walked, in consequence, very straight and smooth.


Openers

At ten to two the lobby doors opened and the house came in. The audience made a breathing noise, a subtle tidal movement beneath the excited chatter and the noise of Mendel’s band playing warm-up music.

Openers, the girls stood dressed and ready in the wings: Aurora with her eyes closed, Clover looking a bit pinched but calm enough. Bella leaned up against the proscenium facade, peeping through an unstitched line in the velvet curtains to see what waited out there for them. People of every kind, wide and middling and narrow, anxious-looking or happy, in groups or by twos or alone, moving down the aisles to find a good spot, shuffling through the crowd to get to an empty seat in the middle.

All those velvet seats filling, all the feet trampling, all there to hear them—Bella was lifted up, buoyant deep in her belly with the pleasure of what was to come. Here we go, she thought, and it seemed like her whole life had been waiting for this particular minute. She turned to see how her sisters were—Aurora had not yet thrown up but Mama had brought up a slop pail and set it behind the second leg. Poor stuff! Bella was glad not to have a queasy stomach. Had she smudged her lip on the curtain?

They could hear Mendel winding his little orchestra down, and then there was a pause, and then it would be them. Aurora turned blindly in the dark. Clover pushed the slop pail to her, Aurora threw up quickly, and Mama wiped her mouth.

And then the stagehand was holding back a fold of curtain and the music rose, and it was time to go on. Clover went first, Bella second, and then Aurora, out into the liquid brilliance of the footlights, drinking it like wine or how they imagined champagne must be. Bits of people’s heads and eyes and teeth showed in the darkness, that same breathing noise continuing, the swell and ebb of the audience’s desire to be pleased.

Third bar of the intro, fourth bar of the intro. Now the climbing notes that made a ladder into the song:

‘Soft as the voice of an angel,

breathing a welcome unheard,

Hope with her gentle persuasion

whispers a comforting word …’

Were they loud enough? There was still some talk and some movement, but that was all right, that was to be expected, since they were the openers. Mama had coached them to carry on good-naturedly even if it seemed that no one was listening at all. ‘We won’t be in this spot for long, dear chickens,’ she’d said. ‘But make the best of it while visiting.’

Clover’s dark, steady voice split for the chorus, her gentle low notes letting Aurora reach upward and keeping Bella grounded—‘Why should the heart sink away?’ Aurora was so gratefully fond of Clover that she could not help smiling at her, and then she could feel, almost like the press of a hand, the returned pleasure of the audience in their singing, and in their liking for one another.

‘Making my heart, making my heart

In its sorrow rejoice …’

They did not make too much of a meal out of the ending, but allowed the audience to remember being sad and then feeling a bit better. No going up on that last note, as some singers did; Mama felt anything show-offy ruined the song’s genuine sentiment.

After that, how enjoyable to feel the tempo change to Buffalo Gals, and slip behind Bella while she glided forward, close to the glowing footlights that cast such a rosy shine onto their faces, Bella’s now mischievous, happy to be in the blushing light, the limelight. She knew she was a very good gal, clowning: she found the crowd happy as she was herself, on her gangly feet.

‘Her feet took up the whole sidewalk,

And left no room for me.

Oh-oh-oh! Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight …’

Aurora and Clover danced shuffling swoops behind her, almost mocking her—but that was just what the song had in mind, for someone to poke a bit of cheerful fun at themselves. She was the gal with the hole in her stocking whose heel kept a-knocking, and weren’t they all lucky to be having such a good time? But wait, Bella seemed to say, when she waved a flip goodbye at the end, because here’s the real treat! The band swept into Don’t Dilly-Dally. Many people in the audience perked up and started to hum along. ‘Not too much of that,’ Mama had warned. ‘Cleveland won’t like it if you turn his vaudeville into a common music hall, but you don’t have to squelch them either.’

Aurora grabbed the birdcage from behind the downstage leg and went into the spotlight all forlorn, a lost girl in the city. ‘My old man said, “Follow the van, And don’t dilly-dally on the way …’ ” Nice as it was to be centre stage, taking sympathy from the sea of faces down below, Aurora disliked this song. She wended through long verses about chamber pots (which they’d ditch tomorrow if Mrs. Cleveland happened to carp), into the chorus again. But by then the crowd was turning its attention to the programme, wondering what came next. She could see them shift in their seats, and only managed to keep panic from entering her voice by pushing it louder, which did not work.

Chorus again, this one the last: ‘My old man said, Follow the van, don’t dilly-dally on the way!’—and then, a terrible blank.

The music went on alone. She had forgotten the lyrics.

She looked over at Mendel in a panic and saw his head swivel quickly to look at her, and then an eyebrow lifted—he reached the end of the bar and swung his hand around in a circle to the band as if he’d meant to do that all along. A cheerful broad-faced lady in the audience took that as encouragement and sang along gaily, ‘My old man,’ and when they got to the second line it came back into Aurora’s head and she sang on, ‘Off went the cart with our home packed in it, I walked behind with my old cock linnet,’ while cold horror ran through her: she had forgotten the words. The stupidest of sins.

Bella nudged Clover to join in, and they sang along with the lady in the front row, rising up into a loud triumph on ‘Can’t find my way home!’ Aurora bobbed a curtsy to thank her for the lines, and knocked her head to show that it was empty.

Then the audience was all clapping, as much for their own woman as for the girls.

It was over. Except that they still had one song to go, and it was mostly hers to sing. So Aurora had to put despair aside. The Last Rose of Summer was Papa’s favourite. She knew the words inside her bones, because the sentences made perfect sense; it was the saddest song in the world, except you could not let the audience feel so much sadness, so you tempered it a little.

‘So soon may I follow when friendships decay

And from love’s shining circle the gems drop away.

When true hearts lie withered and fond ones are flown

O, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?’

Papa had not waited to follow, he had gone before them. His true heart lay withered in the Paddockwood graveyard and Aurora knew it was only because she was good at pretending that she could sing the song at all, hating him as she did for leaving them. Effortlessly, as if it required only to be unleashed, she let her clearest voice soar up above Clover and Bella, flying into the clouds on flown, and then sinking back to inhabit this bleak world alone.

Not alone, though. Together they were bowing, the lights dazzling in their eyes as their heads and backs dipped forward, their skirts curdled into curtseys.


Drop the Other One

A respectable amount of applause, Clover thought, but Aurora was prostrate with humiliation. She sat with her cheek down on the dressing-table, a shawl over her head to shade her eyes. So Clover took Bella with her, creeping into the wings to watch East & Verrall, the Sidewalk Conversationalists. Seeing the act from behind meant mostly the backs of their bowler hats, but from time to time one would turn to fit in some false teeth or twiddle a prop out of a pocket, and he (carrot-topped, rascally East, or darker, gentlemanly Verrall) would wink at them, which made both girls feel deliciously at home in this new world.

East was the good-natured fool, Verrall the educated man. They wore tidy black boots, and their black suits were too tight: East’s too short in the legs, Verrall’s too long.

‘Well, I don’t know nothing, Mr. Verrall,’ said East, rudely, when Verrall schooled him in some little fact or other.

‘I don’t know anything, Mr. East!’ said Verrall back, trying to teach him better grammar.

Delighted, East crowed, ‘You neither? I thought not!’

They walked along in front of a backdrop painted with a seafront scene, a promenade on a summery afternoon. Their walking was cleverly, expansively done: long legs moving in a loping stride, but each foot placed down only an inch in front of the other, so they made hardly any progress at all and could spend five minutes sauntering across the stage.

Talking about their lodgings, Verrall undertook to correct East again: ‘I say, East, you must be less noisy tonight. The sick man in the room below us is so dreadfully nervous, he jumps out of his skin at a sudden noise. When you pull off your boots, don’t drop them down the clattering way you always do! Set each one down soft.’

‘Well, I tried that, Verrall, my old companion, because I remembered you saying that. I was careful as could be, creeping upstairs, inching open the door … I read for a minute and smoke my cigar, and then, phew, I’m sleepy, so I blows out the lamp, and—’

They had reached a handy park bench and East sat, suiting the action to the words.

‘And I pulls off’—pulling off his boot with a tremendously agile flourish that took his leg nearly to vertical—‘my boot—bam!’

The boot crashed to the floor with a great bang, helped by the percussion man. Verrall flinched and jumped, as if he were the nervous man himself. ‘Ahh, but then I remembers!’ East said, calming his friend with a soothing hand on his sleeve, then attending to his second boot. ‘So I pulls the next one off easy—and slow—and sets it down so feather-soft it could not be heard at all … and off I goes to sleep.’

He arranged himself on the bench, forgetting to say his prayers, and then, poked by Verrall, murmuring and crossing himself piously. Taking off his bowler very carefully, he lay down in peaceful rest with the hat for a pillow. Then sprang bolt upright again: ‘Four in the morning there’s a terrible banging from the floor below and the sick man shouts out, Say! Pull off that other boot! I’ve been waiting for four mortal hours! I can’t sleep till you drop the other one!’ And Verrall, nodding and grimacing at the ripeness of the line, said it at the same time: ‘Drop the other one.’

Even Clover and Bella had heard that one, but they had not heard East tell it, so droll and innocent and misjudged. They laughed so loud a stagehand shushed them.

‘Enough of your nocturnal adventures!’ said Verrall. ‘We’ve been asked to keep it very clean here in Fort Macleod, because this is Refined Vaudeville at its most elegant.’

East had his boots back on and nodded, jumping up with an absurd flurry of his skinny legs, to begin their walk again. ‘Yes, and so I have a biblical query for you, Mr. Verrall: Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert?’

‘I suppose the Great Desert is a place where many a man has starved to death, East.’

‘Ah, you would think so, Mr. Verrall, but no! A man can never starve in the Great Desert, because he can eat the sand which is there.’

‘But what brought the sandwiches there?’

‘Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.’

‘Oh, Mr. East, oh, Mr. East, I fear you tread the boundaries of decency. Bred, indeed!’

‘Man cannot live by breeding alone, you know, Mr. Verrall—much as we might like to,’ said East, with such a roll of his eyes that Clover worried the lady in the front row might have an apoplexy and stop the show.

‘Mr. East, I beg you, beg you—conform to the niceties of polite discourse.’

‘Oh, Mr. Verrall, absolutely. I look up to you as the arbiter of all politesse, noblesse oblige, et ceteratera.’ Then East shouted, with a comic-spasmodic helter-skelter jump of sweet alarm, ‘Drop the other one!’


The Fancy of the Management

The foaming rush of the Soubrettes flooded onstage, baby-doll frills and cross-tied black slippers, their skirts hiked up a good deal farther than Mama would have allowed, Bella thought.

Mama came up after the Soubrettes and stood watching beside Bella; Clover went down to see if Aurora would like to walk back to the hotel to rest before the second show. Bella thought it very sad that Aurora should be so overset by a tiny mistake.

‘They’re graceful enough,’ Mama remarked, as the Soubrettes began Pony, their skittish bare-knee–baring second number.

‘Marry me, carry me, right away with you.

Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, whoa! My Pony Boy.’

‘And pretty—you can see why they’ve taken the fancy of the Management.’ (By which, Bella knew, Mama meant not Mrs. but Mr. Cleveland.) ‘Those routines are nothing more than ballroom steps. They hardly sing, they certainly don’t act. It’s all costume and knees.’

Poor strange Patience stayed in the back row, watched by Joyful at her side. Mercy was the main singer, but Temperance did a bit to help, with a lisping babyish poetry recitation. She closed her mouth with carefully pursed lips at the end of every line—Bella made a note to herself not to do that. Anything tight or ungenerous became tiresome very quickly, she had noticed.


Exquisite

Aurora told Clover to go away, that she was going to die under this shawl but would be better presently if only she could be alone, so Clover went back up to watch. In a minute the door clicked open again and Aurora twitched the shawl off her head in a violent temper, whispering passionately, ‘Can you not leave me in peace?’ as she whirled around to strike at Clover.

But it was not Clover.

‘I did not intend to disturb you—’ the elegant young man said. He was very well turned out, in a Bohemian suit with a flowing neck-tie.

Aurora turned away, blushing, and found herself staring straight at his drawing of the King of Whiskeys bottle, looking quite friendly and familiar there on the wall. She couldn’t turn to face him. ‘No, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my sister.’

‘I’m Jimmy Battle,’ he said. ‘Jimmy the Bat, they call me. And you’re the Belle Auroras.’

‘Did you see our number?’

‘Nicely done, I thought,’ he said carefully. ‘The way you got out of that little mishap.’

She looked up and saw him smiling in the mirror.

‘I was so stupid,’ she said, without any airs.

‘Happens.’

‘Not to me, never before.’

‘Well, you wasn’t a professional before, then.’

The door opened again, and again it was not Clover. A tall woman flowed into the room on a wind of perfume and glamour. Dark hair clouded around her face, which was broad and open, with dark-hollowed eyes outlined in soot and a short nose above a very wide, mobile mouth. She must be Eleanor Masefield, the actress in the play. She wore something wonderful, a shimmering dark blue travelling costume in dull satin, elaborately cut and trimmed, but playing second fiddle to her magnificent head.

Jimmy the Bat jumped this time, standing almost at attention, some way off from Aurora.

‘Oh, I’m early,’ the apparition breathed, in a smoky whisper. She smelled of flowers.

Aurora tried to vanish back into her corner, but the woman’s head turned gracefully and she fixed Aurora in a charming stare, with a glimmer of a laugh. Of mockery?

‘You were the opener! You have an ex-quisite voice, my dear.’

Aurora found herself standing, and almost curtsying. Bah! She stood straight.

The woman turned from Aurora, dropping her out of the clutch of her attention to find the young man.

‘Jimmy, good—I’ve left my fur wrap in the carriage, and it’s gone back to Bell’s Hotel. Sprint along and get it. It’s cold in here. And give me your arm up those unspeakable stairs. I shouldn’t be down here before the interval, those galloping girls will be back.’

He bowed very slightly, a gentleman even while being a flunky. As he helped with the sweeping skirt’s exit he looked up at Aurora, a difficult expression on his face. Help! it said, and yet, Don’t worry, I’ve got her wound around my thumb! Rueful, and partly apologetic. It made Aurora quite sad to see that lowly apprentice look, but she was still lightly vibrating from Eleanor Masefield’s electric presence. ‘Ex-quisite!’ She must find Clover to tell her.

At the bottom of the stairs, Aurora bowed again to the rickety steps, the bow she should have given at the end of their turn. Strong beginning, strong end, doesn’t matter what happens in the middle, Mama said, and that was right. She looked up, and there was Jimmy the Bat, smiling down at her over the banister. He applauded, hands not quite touching, and threw her an invisible rose before leaping off to do Miss Masefield’s bidding.

Then Aurora had to dash herself, because the tunnel door opened and there was Mrs. C. with her bucket, come to do the dressing-room floor. Aurora hoped she had not seen the bow.