The Little Shadows (16 page)

His own focus was ferocious. Aurora nodded but did not dare speak.

‘Use it like the violin, your voice-box. Do not draw those strings tight so that they squawk and squeak—let them vibrate freely, with firm
control, flowingly.’ Then Gentry slammed the end of his stick down on the stage, making the girls jump. He shouted, ‘Mr. Caspar? Are you there?’ and the mousey bandleader ran down to the pit. ‘
Early One Morning,’
Gentry barked to him, and almost instantly the piano intro began.

Aurora stepped forward into her usual position and the girls began, following the song until Aurora took it alone: ‘O
don’t deceive me, O never leave me,’
she sang, with the rise and plaintive fall of ‘
How could you use a poor maiden so?
’

‘Stop, stop!’ Gentry’s stick hit the stage again. ‘Why is this so hollow? Why so icy? Come! It is not enough to sing on key. You must give me something from your—’

He paused, seeming not to want to say
heart
, although he was pounding his chest. ‘From your own pain. Don’t you have some sorrowful love in your past? Has no one ever betrayed you?’

Aurora stood still.

Gentry came close to her. ‘If no one has, rest assured that someone will. Imagine it.’

She looked into his face, below her own. He seemed to be trying to convey something vital to him and so she put aside her resistance and her pride, and let out a breath.

‘Well, I am only young, still, sir,’ she said. She gave a great smile, suddenly, and said, ‘And still quite pretty.’

At that his ferocity broke, and he laughed and opened his arms wide, bowing to her. ‘You are a brave girl, and an honest one, you rascal,’ he said. ‘As you sing that song, think of the poor girl who has been done wrong, rather than of your own safe prettiness.’

He turned away, saying, ‘And give me a little of your father, and your young brother, in that dying fall.’

They none of them moved or spoke. But their silence felt charged, as if the sisters and their mother stood together against him.

Gentry paused. Then he turned back to Aurora, and bowed slightly, in what might have been some rare species of apology. ‘All right. We need more of you. I want you to do a new song tonight, so some hard work this morning.’

She kept her astonishment carefully to herself. Clover and Bella said nothing either, although she could feel them tremble on either side of her.

‘My Rosary
?’ Mama suggested, hurriedly searching through her music case for those pieces for which she had sides. ‘We have a sweetly pretty arrangement for three voices, by Nevin himself.’

‘My Rosary
!’ Gentry seethed to a dangerous boil all over again. ‘A bastard get of the popular song—unbearably pretentious, pandering to the crowd, with the finicking touch of “Art” which makes all things false and vulgar. A sentimental bilge-distiller.’

Mama shut her case with a ridiculous little bob of apology and the girls stood frozen, waiting for the end of Gentry’s rant.

‘So, a new song!’ Gentry said—suddenly, bewilderingly cheerful. ‘
I Can’t Do the Sum
from
Babes in Toyland
. Victor Herbert, who has never written an original strain and is a plagiarist from first to last, whose music is execrable—but not, per se, immoral.’

He banged his cane again and Mattie rolled a large blackboard onto the stage, deposited a chunk of chalk on its ledge, and handed the girls their music. The jaunty little tune started up. They allowed the music to move them out of their stillness, and they sang.

Oh! Oh! Oh!
Put down six and carry two, Gee, but this is hard to do
,
You can think and think and think, till your brain goes numb
—
I don’t care what Teacher says, I can’t do the sum!’

Gentry decreed that Bella take the first verse, as a little girl trying to solve arithmetic stumpers; she could wear baby-girl and a giant bow. A quick change after the song, therefore a couple of minutes for Clover and Aurora to fill with a dance number—Mama recalled the
Musical Snuff-Box
routine from the last school concert before Papa died. They could easily work around Bella’s absence.

Gradually, gradually, Aurora thought, their minutes were extending. From two songs to three, now a dance interlude. Unless Gentry turned it down for sentimental bilge.

He did not, again praising Mama’s attention to their steps and telling the girls they were luckier than they knew to have such a fine instructor. By noon he seemed tired, and they were happy to run out of the theatre and back to the Pioneer. Bella would need her baby-doll shirtwaist and perhaps the prop lollipop. ‘If we were paying for this,’ Mama told Aurora, hurrying them along the cleared walks, ‘we would not be able to. Whatever the cost to your self-pride.’

‘Yes, it is worth it. At least he is not too hard on the others.’

Clover took Aurora’s left hand as they ran, and Bella took the right.

A Living Hell

At the dressing mirror Aurora took great pains with her hair and eyes, and was made up before Julius finished his opening turn at the first show. She perched on the edge of the makeup table in a state of light carbonation, one eye on the hallway through the open door.

Sybil fretted, afraid that Julius had gone too far the day before in quarrelling with Miss Sunderland and might go farther today. Duetto Paradiso—a new placard had been made the day before, Miss Sunderland refusing to perform under the name Excursion of Song ever again—was warming up in half-voice across the hall. Sybil confided to Mama, in a stage whisper, that Julius had touched a drop at breakfast, and that Italians always set him off.

Neither singer was truly Italian, Aurora considered saying, but she left it.

‘Everybody
knows
it is necessary to get along with all the artistes in a company, and Jay has never done such a pointed thing before—why should he have taken against them so? Except that Miss Sunderland does a little resemble Jay’s mother, who was a terrible tyrant and made his early years a living hell,’ Sybil continued, in a running commentary that soon drove Aurora out into the hall.

She leaned against the doorjamb, staring at the piece of publicity letterhead Kavanagh had pinned to his dressing-room door:
Maurice MacKenna Kavanagh, Elocutionist
, in glossy black letters above his sketched
profile. Remembering (with a delightful swoop of dizziness) his nose on her cheek, his black beard-shadow and the sharp cleft in his chin, she thought that the Belle Auroras needed some publicity letterhead of their own. Clover could draw their three profiles, that would be stylish. She wanted to see his face. His fingers had hurt her, but she had not said so; it was necessary to be brave. His glinting eyes were navy blue.

She could not linger in the doorway. He would think she was waiting for him when he came, as he must do very quickly, or be fined for missing his half-hour call. She started up the stairs on quick feet, planning to find a quiet corner where she could watch the show and not be seen at all.

But—her heart jumped—Kavanagh thundered through the backstage door above. He came pelting down the stairs towards her, his hair dull and tousled.

Aurora flattened against the railing, twinkling up at him (with just the right laughing touch of
aren’t you late, rascal!)
as he brushed past.

He glanced at her, then aside. She put out a hand to catch his sleeve, and he knocked it away roughly, saying, ‘Get the fuck out of it. Leave me be!’

Her legs trembled so, she thought she might fall. He was in a hurry (she heard herself telling herself), late for his call. The railing felt very shaky.

Kavanagh slammed through the door of his dressing room and swore again.

There was no place to be in the theatre that was dark enough. After a minute Aurora walked up the halls past the dressing rooms (his door not quite closed, she could see him grinding greasepaint stick into the palm of his hand, dark head bent over the job) and, grasping at any door, went into the coal cellar—where she stood on the cleared space of floor waiting to catch her breath. She wanted more than anything to walk casually back and open his door to say something fine and witty, some little remark to let him see that she was perfectly unaffected; but she could not trust herself to get it right. It had been—displeasure. In his eyes, at seeing her.

Not displeasure,
disgust
.

She felt quite stupid, trying to think.

He had smelled strongly of liquor. And he had looked away, aggrieved that she would be in his way, demanding something of him. The coal dust left on the scraped floor would ruin her white skirt, she had to keep it heaped into her hands—as he had lifted her skirts, last night. A deep worm crawled and turned in her belly. But she would not be sick.

She gathered her skirts in one hand, opened the coal-cellar door with the other, and walked out, back straight and a dainty smile on her face. She went up to the wings to listen to his turn.

His elocution was as brilliant as before.

A Poor Maiden So

Coming into the dressing room Aurora took a fistful of cold cream and covered her face, rubbing it in for what seemed to Clover like a long time, and wiped it off, leaving a clean canvas. Then she began afresh, giving herself more colour by an extra screw of number 5 in the palm of her hand. Once she had her complexion perfect, she made her eyes magnificent.

Clover watched Aurora draw on her eyebrows (which she always thought too light) in delicate strokes, a long arch down to the bottom edge of her eye, and finally add two dots of crimson lake in the inner corners of her eyes to give them brilliance. She stared at herself blank-faced.

Then she re-did Clover’s eyes, which needed it, and looked about for Bella. When Mama came to adjust her lace collar she gently pushed her hand away and did it herself. A powerful pall had descended on the cozy little room. They had all heard Kavanagh cursing.

Julius Foster Konigsburg surged out of his dressing-room door and caught Clover’s wrist, delaying her, as the girls were going up for their turn. He leaned down from his height and murmured, in a richly articulated aside, ‘Listening out my door just now—that Kavanagh bag of wind is a reprobate, a degenerate, and manifestly a popinjay, if you like that sort of thing … 
Not
the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Caution
the rosy-fingered Dawn.’ He coughed and bobbed his head, winking heavily, a conspirator.

Clover smiled at him, but did not answer.

Their new number went over big, Sybil said. She and Mama had gone round to the audience to watch them close the first show. The blackboard was wheeled on at the end of the pictures, making the audience expect a dull lecture to go with the pictograph,
South Sea Adventures with the Turtles
. But instead Bella appeared, puzzling out the numbers while her governesses Clover and Aurora added more arithmetical riddlers—till they all gave up and danced instead, a frisky jig of frustrated abandon. The older two were prim and Bella was joyful, and her joy gradually infected them so that they all danced like mad.

Mama had added a firecracker rolling-wheel kick that looked very hard to do until you got the hang of it, and at the end Bella went twirling-whirling offstage to do her quick change, the blackboard zoomed off, and the older girls paused as the music segued, then waltzed into their sashaying dance number.

After that, there was a quick shift of mood into
Early One Morning
. Aurora had been wondering how that would work. Up there in the light and warmth, with the audience warm too from Bella’s charm and their tinkling
Snuff-Box
dance, she stood in the extended pose and thought,
Well, it’s all right—I can use this. Here you are, all of you: I’ve been betrayed
. She let the damage to her pride rise almost to the surface for a moment, and looked in her mind’s eye at Kavanagh’s clever, romantic face.

Clover began alone, gravely, as one who had witnessed a sad thing. ‘
 … just as the sun was rising, I heard a maid singing in the valley below.’

Then Aurora stepped forward. She took a breath and thought of Gentry Fox’s maxims, let it all go, and sang about the brick-walled passage last night, and the small room upstairs at Jenny’s house, and even a tinge of how much of the punch she had drunk.

‘O, don’t deceive me, O, never leave me
,
How could you use a poor maiden so?’

As she sang she dipped into the deep reservoir of how dreadful she felt, however little there was to complain of, really, in what Maurice Kavanagh had done. She had gone with him perfectly willingly. He had not forced her or even had to ask her. But she was bewildered and made miserable. And life was miserable enough already.

‘Remember the vows that you made to your Mary
,
Remember the bower where you vow’d to be true …’

Of course he had not vow’d to be true, not for a second. She kept telling herself how it was her own choice and her own doing, but she was pure, plain miserable—and yet it could go into the song instead and be used. That was good.

Gentry Fox was waiting backstage when they came off, and he laid a light hand on Aurora’s shoulder. ‘That’s the ticket, my love’ was all he said.

Here You Miss

Miss Sunderland had been watching in the wings as well; she gave Gentry a cold nod, and one to Aurora. The other girls went clattering down to the dressing room with Mama and Sybil congratulating them on the
Sum
song, no need to be quiet since the show was over and the audience clumping obediently out above them.

Aurora followed more slowly, a bit numb now that they’d come off all right.

At the bottom of the stairs Maurice stood waiting for her, lustrous eyes beseeching her forgiveness, asking a humorous question along the lines of
Isn’t all this love business droll?