The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘He could be the man in the moon!’

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

  ‘We can! Easy!’

  ‘Nando—can he even sing?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ACT FOUR

  10.

  Per Valli, Per Boschi

  JUNE 1915–AUGUST 1917

  Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan

  London, England

  The Pantages Circuit, United States

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

  FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE

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

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

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

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

  It was hot. Grasshoppers creaked their gates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Dark Ship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A Prodigy

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

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

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

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

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