The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  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 li
ke.’

  ‘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.

  You’re What?

  To Clover’s surprise and relief, Victor appeared to watch her brief monologue set-up. His thin length leaning on the door frame gave her a surge of joy—she hoped it did not show in her face. He must have walked in from the farm, and he looked as if the sun had done him good. She was through in a moment, only her entrance and exit requiring cues, and ran down to stand beside him.

  ‘Harriet’s sleeping, and your mama is coming in with them after lunch,’ Victor said. ‘Let me watch in peace.’ He clasped her hand, kissed it, and waved her back
to work.

  Bella’s Flying Machine was the big number. Nando had adapted the prop aeroplane to fit it onto this small stage. Without flies there would be some effects missing. ‘But it’ll still be a whizz-bang,’ he promised. At the run-through the propellers dropped off one by one in perfect time, as Bella chanted mournfully, ‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not—Oh dear …’

  Another necessary modification was discovered in mid-rehearsal. While Nando cranked and adjusted, Bella filled in Clover and Aurora about their plans. ‘No point withering away outside the big-time any more—but Keith’s won’t book any act straight from the small-time now, even from Pan-time. You’ve got to have a whole new look to get in there.’

  A wrench dropped out of the sky, retrieved by Nell Barr-Smith, who had designated herself Nando’s assistant.

  ‘The Flying Machine will be a step up,’ Bella said. ‘Nando has all kinds of ideas for really big-time, flying out over the audience, dropping candy bombs, you name it.’

  Nando’s face appeared upside down, hanging from a wing. ‘Get me a roll of that cotton duck tape from the clinic, would you, Nell?’

  ‘But the thing is—’ Bella said, and then stopped.

  ‘The thing is, she’s not telling you the main thing,’ Nando said. ‘It puts a bit of a crimp in the Keith’s plan, for a while—I’m going to enlist.’

  Clover looked at him, at Bella.

  ‘I’ve got to,’ Nando said, apologizing. ‘I want to go for a flyer. I figure they’ll take me. I learned how for the pictures—wing-walked and flew a bit. Best thing in the world.’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Excepting Bella,’ he allowed. ‘I’m going to enlist up here, Royal Flying Corps.’

  Bella stared upwards. ‘It’s all butterfly, him and me,’ she told her sisters. ‘All bumble bee.’

  Clover turned abruptly, and got into the wings in time. That was the place for crying, and she felt dreadfully sick as well—There, the fire bucket was waiting for her, like it had waited for Aurora in the old times.