His brain was so loaded, it nearly exploded,
The poor girl would shake with alarm!
They twirled round the floor, the impresario and the girl he adored, but Aurora refused to shake with alarm.
Nor His Dinner
Mayhew danced with each of the girls, with Mama—who had continued to tidy up the champagne cup and asked Tony please to give her a slow song—and with Aurora again, and then the evening seemed to be over. Clover looked out the ballroom window into the still-falling snow and wondered what on earth they would do now. However well behaved they had been, the long day had clearly strained everyone’s optimism.
The storm had worsened, and Mayhew, his temper restored, announced there was no question of making their way back to Mrs. Hillier’s. ‘The honeymoon is a double suite,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Aurora won’t mind giving up one bedroom—will you, my dear?’
Far better, Clover thought, than to ask him to fork out for another suite, after all this waste.
Up in the suite, a blazing fire in the sitting room made things more cheerful. The same waiter who had served them in the ballroom appeared with a tea tray, and Mayhew poured brandy for himself and Mama. Aurora drank tea. Clover sat with Bella, wedged beside her on a small settee, and tried not to laugh or cry.
They had not been sitting for more than five minutes when, with a desperate lurch of delicacy, Mama rose and asked Bella and Clover to come with her to discover how palatial their bedroom might be. She could not settle, but walked about touching the lace curtains, the mantel cloth, the bedposts. Clover was very tired, but too tense to sleep; Bella, on the other hand, had drunk enough champagne while no one was watching that she could hardly keep her eyes open. Clover opened the bed for her, helped her to slip out of her blue dress and cami-band, and then Bella climbed up into the middle, exclaiming for a brief last waking moment over the softness of the sheets.
Clover slowly unfastened her own dress. An empty ewer stood on the washstand. She did not dare go into the bathroom, in case Mayhew might be there and might have forgotten to lock the door—but in an alcove round the corner of their wardrobe she discovered a sink. She filled the ewer with water from the hot tap, so piping hot that it burned her hand and she nearly dropped the jug. But did not. She wondered what Aurora would be doing, how the consummation would be. She touched her chest, unbuttoning her chemise to wash. Mayhew might ask Aurora to take off all her clothes, she supposed. It would be chilly.
Clover had only a hazy idea of what went on between a husband and wife. Or two who were not husband and wife—it would not matter to her, whether she and Victor were married. His family believed in Free Love and Vegetarianism, as part of their Fabian ideals. He would never make her into his property—nor his dinner, come to that.
‘I ought to have warned her,’ Mama suddenly said. ‘It is—unexpected—unless you love him, and then—oh, Clover—’
‘I think she expects it, Mama.’
‘If you love the man, you cannot conceive of how different—’ She stopped, and smoothed down her skirt. ‘Well, she does love him, of course, or she would not have agreed to marry him.’
Clover turned down the bed and climbed in beside Bella, who was already deep asleep, sprawled flat on her back, mouth open like a little flowerpot.
Mama sat in the chair by the window, her hand over her eyes.
A Balance Sheet
In the sitting room, Aurora watched as Fitz left the bottle of brandy on the table, and called to Flora to feel free, if she needed a nightcap; then he stretched out a hand to Aurora and opened the other bedroom door.
All this felt unreal. Ever since coming to Calgary, none of the days had felt real. They’d had no work to do, perhaps that was it. Fitz was unbuttoning his jacket, loosening his tie, pulling it off. The lamp was still on—would he leave it on?
He turned the mantel lamp down low. The firelight caught his legs, but left the rest of him in darkness. ‘That mother of yours will be snoring in a moment. She drank enough of the champagne.’
Aurora did not like him saying that. He had drunk enough of it himself.
‘Come, come to bed,’ he said, and then, ‘I am sorry. She’s a treasure. Only your family is a bit more present than I expected. And I will have to bunk in here with you tonight.’
‘I thought that was what one did,’ she said. ‘On a wedding night. Bunk in.’
He stopped, in the act of pulling his suspenders off his shoulders. Looked at her in the lowered lamplight, as if trying to make out what she meant.
She felt some danger, some amusement, in being so powerful. He was angry, she knew, because of the imbalance between them. He was too old. She was beyond him, except for his position and his money. This was no way to go about the beginning of being married.
She had one hand on the bedpost. She leaned forward, letting herself swing around in a slow arc, and pulled his head towards her, to lay her cheek against his. She could give him pleasure, and let him believe himself loved. Since what was love anyway, but a balance sheet of what one respected the other for, what one could do for the other, what one needed from the other? Perhaps a jot of the mysterious thing that caused attraction, but that was not the whole. Even with Jimmy the Bat, attraction was only part of why she liked him. He was a good hoofer, that was a great part of it—and Mayhew, oh, Mayhew was an excellent manager.
‘Will you kiss me first?’ she asked him. She knew she could make herself a little drunk with kisses.
It was only her body, nothing she could not stand.
Agamemnon
Flora went out to the sitting room for another brandy, and sat on the settee reading the Bible by firelight, the only book to hand. Another small brandy. She did not know how Arthur could have done it, could have left them, how he could have been so cowardly or so deep in despair as not to think of what his daughters would do without him. That ugly Old Testament father sacrificing his son on the hill in the thicket, that’s what she thought about, while she read the Psalms in the sitting room on the wedding night. But it was her own father she was thinking of, killing her before he went off to war. No, that was Agamemnon. In the other room she heard panting, shoving. No noise at all from Aurora. She never cried as a baby either.
The champagne and the brandy told on her. Before the sounds stopped, Flora had fallen asleep on the settee in the last of the firelight.
A White Knife
Clover found Mama on the settee an hour later. She covered her with an extra blanket from the chest, and sat watching her slackened face, shining a little in moonlight, now the snow had stopped falling. She has tried her best with us all, Clover thought, and she does not drink very often.
Then Aurora crept out, thin as a white knife in her shift, and padded to the bathroom. She stood in the middle of the tiled floor until Clover came and helped her into the bath. Her legs were shaking. Clover poured hot water over her head, down over her face, the silk hair sleek around her shoulders like otter’s fur, and they both tried not to look at Aurora’s poor underneath where pinkish blood kept seeping even after she was washed.
Clover dried her with a large, clean hotel towel. She braided her hair, wrapped her in the peignoir from her scant trousseau, kissed her cheek and went quietly back to bed. After a moment Aurora followed, sliding in on the other side of Bella, warm and soft. Bella sighed and turned on her side to make room, and the three of them curled together until dawn.
Then Clover watched Aurora glide back to the other room, to lie beside her husband as he woke.
But Can She Do This?
The snow was gone by Monday, not melted so much as evaporated in the dry prairie sun. By Tuesday it was spring again, almost summer, and the few trees loosed their tight-furled leaves like a girl might shake out her hair. The air was soft and smelled delicious. When they were not rehearsing, Bella and Clover walked out along the new-laid sidewalks as far as they stretched, not talking much. The subject closest to their hearts, Aurora and Mayhew, seemed disloyal to di
scuss—although Bella did tell Clover the reason that East and Verrall had not been at the wedding: because they had never received an invitation.
‘Like they were bad fairies at the christening,’ Bella said, indignant. ‘And just what you might expect from—’
Clover hushed her, saying, ‘It is a pity they were forgotten, but he had a great deal on his mind.’ (Although privately she thought Mayhew had calculated the usefulness of the two comics, and given their seats to pressmen instead.)
On Thursday they opened. The Starland was lit up with brand-new electric lights around the sign, every surface festooned with garlands and flowers, and although its facade was plain, Mayhew had ordered a huge banner to be hung with the playbill painted on it, and there they were, in beautiful ornate letters, the headliners:
LES TRÉS BELLES AURORES DE NOUVELLE FRANCE
Bella was so excited to see it up there, Clover could hardly drag her inside.
Mayhew had papered the house to the rafters—every pressman who had not turned up for the wedding was artfully blackmailed into attending the opening in recompense.
The lineup stretched around the block when the girls arrived at six. By the time the curtain went up there wasn’t an empty seat in the house, and a considerable crowd stood bunched at each arched entrance.
The openers, the Banjophiends, were playing their first gig in Calgary, although well known in the east. A self-contained little group who spoke only to each other, they stood glumly in the wings, one man tuning his instrument obsessively with soft plinks, until the stage manager gave the word, and off they trotted in a sudden froth of mirth.
Clover had crept up to watch, tucked into a corner by the hemp-bed. She laughed to see their sober frowns turn upside down as they hit the light and instantly cavorted. They played well, but it was the harum-scarum nature of the banjos that did the trick, and their wit. The leader and the littlest Banjophiend carried on a back-chat throughout their turn, about courage, which they called pluck, and how the little one could get up enough of it to finally propose to Miss Minnie Abernathy, the love of his life. At the end the little fellow did a soulful solo of Silvery Moon, and cried out in anguished ecstasy, ‘Good night, Miss Minnie Abernathy, I looove you!’
The audience, which had been slow to settle, was good-natured. They cat-called and whooped for Miss Abernathy and gave the Banjophiends plenty of applause.
Paul Conchas, the Military Hercules, had been readying behind the curtain all that time. It rose to display him in an Olympian marble arena (his own special Diamond Dye drop), attired in nothing but a large paper fig leaf, tied round his hips with an inadequate-seeming piece of string. His pale skin shone like the marble pillars of the backdrop. Clover stared in awe at the classical indentations of his musculature, particularly the fascinating downward-tending ridge of muscle which separated the torso from the thighs. She felt her own being concentrated in that corresponding area, and shook her head to dispel the sensation. She had seen Victor half-clad, changing for his act as he talked to her—he too had that ridge, not so prominent under his silky biscuit-coloured skin.
Bella came crowding into Clover’s corner, dressed in her saucy hotel uniform, an extra row of frills sprucing up her black serge skirt. Up next, East and Verrall squeezed in too, East blowing good-luck kisses to Clover and Bella and Verrall with great abandon. With no Julius, they had revamped the hotel sketch to lean more heavily on their own banter, and Bella was to come on later, to apply for a job. She and Clover watched East and Verrall begin with their own kind of classical indentation: two clerks who had worked the same shift for too long.
VERRALL: I’m afraid I’m going to leave you, East. I’ve found the love of my life.
EAST: But can she do this? (turning a triple pirouette while snapping fingers)
VERRALL: Well, yes, she can—she’s a Spanish dancer.
EAST: Can she bake a cherry pie, Verrall boy, Verrall boy? Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Verrall?
VERRALL: Well, East, but neither can you.
EAST: But, Verrall, I could learn.
Then Bella pranced on, after a quick kiss from Clover, to apply for the job soon to be left vacant by Verrall. Her eyes danced like her feet—any hotel would have been glad to have her on the front desk. But of course East wanted no one but Verrall, and was determined to make things difficult for her.
BELLA: I’ve come for the job you advertised in the paper.
EAST: Have you had any experience?
BELLA: (biting her lip and confessing) Once a fellow got me out in a car. He told me he ran out of gas …
Verrall kept dodging out of the restaurant to report on kitchen disasters, each worse than the last (‘The chef backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work …’), causing some in the audience to groan, and others to convulse with pleasure. ‘One important thing I’ve learned in the kitchens,’ Verrall told Bella, earnestly. ‘Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.’
During the sketch, Clover watched the slack-rope for the Ioleen Sisters being set up in three. The sisters walked back and forth along the rope, testing and retesting. They were like Amazons, Clover thought, their harsh Australian voices only adding to that impression. They wore lots of glitter but very little cloth, and in the blue backstage light they glowed.
But it was time to go down to the dressing room. Aurora would need help with her hair and her nerves. Clover did not wait for Bella to flounce offstage, but trotted down to find Aurora in a dreadful state, bone-white, very still, an occasional shudder passing through her body. Clover knew she had not eaten. She pulled out a folded napkin to give Aurora a torn bit of Mrs. Hillier’s homemade bread. Aurora turned her head away, shutting her eyes, but Clover persisted. ‘Once The Casting Couch is done, you will feel easier,’ she said.
Aurora nodded. She was not dressed, but had her Miss Sylvia costume half-on, bodice and sleeves folded down and protected with a light towel. Her makeup was done, but she looked tired and listless. Clover set to work quieting Aurora’s nerves.
The Play Unfolding
Flora sat out front with Mayhew to watch the second half. She did not entirely enjoy the melodrama, seeing herself as Sylvia’s aged and foolish mother. In lieu of Sybil, the part was now played by the violinist Alberick Heatherton’s maiden aunt, formerly on the legitimate; Flora had wondered whether Mayhew might ask her to do it herself, but Miss Heatherton got the nod.
Flora watched the little play unfolding, her hands nervously twisting in her lap. She had a band of pressure in her head and eyes, and often these days felt her heart pounding unexpectedly. As it pounded now, watching Aurora pleading with Malverley for her virtue. East was a devilish mimic, and had put something of Mayhew into his walk, even his voice. Flora hoped Mayhew would not notice—people often did not see themselves in caricature. It was cruel, and in any case inaccurate. Nobody had ever made Aurora do anything she did not want to do.
MALVERLEY: It is entirely your own fault for enflaming me, Sylvia—my heart has been yours since first setting eyes on you. Let me call you—my Own.
SYLVIA: (blushing) Oh, sir! Please, sir! Unhand me!
MALVERLEY: (aside) She maddens me! But her beaux yeux will not make me marry her …
But he had married her. It was a kind of triumph, Flora supposed, to have her daughter so well settled. The bothersome pressure behind her eyes made them prone to seeping. She dabbed at the wetness and smiled, as Sylvia and her mother confounded Malverley’s malevolence with a neat bit of foolery.
Now there was only the foppish violin to endure, and then it would be her dear girls, bursting upon the audience in all their loveliness.
Little Bird
Backstage, Bella stood in the wings behind the violinist Alberick Heatherton, the handsomest boy she had ever seen. Mercurial wings of dark hair swept above the most romantic brow, the darkest and most haunted eyes. She could feel something straining in her chest, like a bird struggling to be free—she must be in love,
she thought. She had watched him rehearse that morning, lost in a passionate dream of playing, swaying alone onstage, hairs flying wildly off his ferocious bow. He was so lonely, so sad—and his aunt, playing Sylvia’s aged mother in the melodrama, was a dried-up prune with no understanding of the artistic temperament, prone to scold.
Her heart squeezing, Bella stepped closer to Alberick and put a hand on his sleeve, meaning to wish him good luck.
‘Don’t!’ he exclaimed in a fierce whisper. ‘I must not be touched!’
‘Oh!’ she breathed. ‘I am sorry.’
He stared at her, all the fervour of his glare bent in hatred. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Of course! I only meant—’
She broke off. The stage manager had held up a hand to still their voices. Alberick hissed, his face jutting close to hers, ‘Don’t mean anything! Don’t come near me!’
Goodness. Bella swallowed, even that sounding loud. She nodded, not wanting him to have an utter tantrum, and backed away and out to the stairs. He was not romantic at all, but had something wrong with him, she thought.
Aurora came dashing offstage and hurried Bella in front of her. ‘Quick, quick! Oh quick!’ she cried in a quiet panic. ‘You are not dressed!’
Bella ran.
No Veil Between Them
In the applause that followed the violinist, Clover shifted from foot to foot, her lovely new slippers not quite broken-in to comfort yet. Aurora was pale but calmer; Bella (rushed into costume and pinked-up quickly in the cheeks) irrepressible but stoppered, like a shaken ginger-beer bottle. Clover let herself rest within their arms for an instant. They would be all right—headlining only differed from opening by how warm the audience was, how willing to be happy. She wished Gentry could be here to see them.
The Little Shadows Page 26