The Little Shadows (34 page)

Folderol

Aurora stood on the vast parquet ice-field, a floating sensation invading her head and chest. For a moment she felt again the peace that had come over her, looking out that morning at the snow which would make the wedding impossible.

What ought to be done, just now, to help? She wondered in a detached way how much money Mayhew had laid out on this, or would have to, when the bill came round. A thousand dollars, perhaps. How many months she and her sisters could have lived on that in small-time vaudeville, doing their own work, thinking their own thoughts, trying to be better. What a folderol this was.

She bent to pick up a broken shard of china cake-pillar, and it nicked her finger. A minuscule drop of blood welled out, trembled for an instant on her fingertip, then dotted the wedding veil she had not yet removed. Very red on the white net. She looked up and saw Fitz staring at her, his face crimson as rare beef and his eyes deeply unhappy.

‘Oh, Fitz,’ she said. ‘Don’t—It doesn’t matter. It was the storm, my dear.’

He nodded.

‘And here are all the people I’d have wanted—except perhaps for East and Verrall, and Julius and—’ She stopped. None of this was helping. ‘Tony!’ she called, looking back over her shoulder. ‘Strike up the band, please! We need a waltz.
Casey
would be good!’

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 discuss—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?