The Little Shadows (6 page)

Mama’s gloved hand waved frantically at Aurora and she vanished back into the wings, where Aurora could see her shifting from foot to foot in a small circle, like a lost bee.

Aurora turned to Mendel. ‘Then we’ll go straight to
Buffalo Gals
, with
Don’t Dilly-Dally
after, and save
Last Rose of Summer
for the closer.’

Mendel considered, nodded, and made a pencil dash across his sheet. ‘On to it then, boys, bridge from last four bars of
Whispering Hope
, vamp until I sign you in to
Buffalo Gals.’

The band struck up at once, sliding from sorrowful minor thirds into the jaunty
Buffalo Gals
. Aurora and Clover darted into promenade steps behind Bella, who did the first verse in speak-song, her funny voice perking up the place. The waiting performers lifted their heads in sudden attention when she squeaked out, ‘A
pretty little gal I chanced to meet, Oh, she was fair to see!
’

Mendel called out, ‘Last four bars—’ and the girls skated into their final positions, to sing,
‘… and dance by the light of the moon …’
They took it to their bow, and on into the intro for
Dilly-Dally
. Bella and Clover retreated, and Aurora moved up for her solo.

To demonstrate her professionalism, Aurora looked up to the lighting-booth window above the balcony and called out, ‘Now the follow-spot should move to me alone.’

‘I’m right here, you don’t got to shout,’ said the squat man sitting beside Cleveland.

Aurora went white.
Amateur!
She ought to have known that the lighting man would not be in the booth during band call.

‘I got your notes right here, anyways,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow you all right.’

‘Of course,’ she said politely, and bowed a little—even more stupid. ‘Very sorry.’

Mendel, pressed for time, swung the band on into the lilt and sway of
Dilly-Dally
, crashed it to a halt and skipped to the end, when the girls came back to stand together in a nice tableau for
Last Rose
. ‘When
true
hearts,’ he prompted.

‘When true hearts lie withered, and loved ones are flown.’
Aurora took the rising trill solo at the end of that, and then their voices subsided together into the peaceful sighing ending—‘Oh,
who would inhabit this bleak world alone?
’

‘And the bow—and off you go, girls.’ Dismissing them completely, Mendel turned to the band. ‘Wonder Dogs, no vamps, long set-up so we riff the whole of
The Chicken Dance.’

Not Simple

Four girls, preening and fluffing, had taken over the dressing room: too-short white skirts, dashing slippers with no stockings, lips kissing air in the mirror. A thin older one, strong-looking with a sharp, vivid face; two pudgy ones with blonde curls; and a thin little one, whose mouth was pulled into a tight knot on one side by an old scar. She had sparkling eyes.

Mama had spread their own things over a bench in front of one of the mirrors, the only space left untenanted. She bustled importantly, hanging up tartan shawls and pulling tissue out of dancing slippers. Clover took the tissue and folded it along its original lines, watching Aurora take a few quick steps into the room as the strong girl, the oldest one, turned from the mirror to meet her. Aurora stared into her eyes.

‘Mercy,’ the girl said, holding out her hand.

‘Oh! Aurora Avery,’ Aurora said. She took the narrow hand, held it for a moment.

They were enemies, they must be, Clover thought, but they had a brightness in common. Mercy laughed and looked away.

‘Simple Soubrettes?’ Mama asked.

‘That’s us. Fifth up, right before the break. Bring ’em back alive, Cleveland says.’ Mercy laughed again, immoderately. Like a boy’s, her voice was deep and hoarse.

The larger blonde turned from the mirror and asked, ‘Dumb act?’

‘Not dumb!’ Mama was quick to refute it. ‘The Belle Auroras, a selection of simple airs to recall tenderer years gone by.’

‘Not
simple,’
the blonde said, puzzled. ‘
We’re
Simple Soubrettes, so you can’t be.’

Mercy turned her back to the mirror, hands on the big girl’s shoulders. ‘Old songs, that’s all they mean, Patience. And this,’ she said, tapping on the prettier blonde girl’s arm, ‘is my sister Temperance, and the little one is Joyful.’

Clover folded another sheet of tissue, a chirp of laughter in her head—such ridiculous names for flip-skirted foamy dancers.

Mama said, ‘Plymouth Brethren?’ and the older girl, Mercy, nodded.

‘A great escape for the lot of you, then,’ Mama said, nodding too. ‘My aunt,
not
by blood, was Plymouth Brethren. She wanted me to be renamed, but Thankful I was not. Clover, you carry on here while I run back to the hotel to fetch the pincushion. I knew there was something I’d left behind, and ten to one we’ll need it.’ Wrapping a scarf around her neck, she was gone almost before the words were out.

With the same brisk command, Mercy said, ‘Joy, go show that
youngest girl where the necessary is and how to do the latch stage right so you can get back in. Mrs. C. will not have shown them.’

Of course she hadn’t, thought Clover. Nobody’d said a thing about the arrangements.

Scampering Mice

Bella was very glad to go exploring. She wanted to see the Nando boy again, so she ran up the stairs with Joy like they were scampering mice. In the theatre the Living Statuary (willowy ladies and men in scandalous skin-coloured clothes) were setting up their props in three, on the last slice of stage. The backcloth showed an Italian courtyard in clumsy perspective. The girls sidled to the rear of the stage where a door stood inched ajar, latch hooked back in the jamb and a cloud of cold white air curling in.

Joy whispered, ‘Someone’s out there already, see, so that’s useful too, then you don’t wander out and have to wait there freezing. It’s a two-hole biffy, but only if you go out together—nobody knocks if the door is shut. People are very cultured here.’

The biffy out the back of the schoolhouse and teacherage had four seats, and was only too often chock full of girls. Bella had no interest in seeing another. When they were famous she would only ever have an indoor toilet,
ever
. ‘But I thought it was stage right?’

‘This is stage right,’ Joy said.

But it was on the left, on the side that their dressing room was on.

Joy laughed, the scar-knot lifting her cheek, even her eyelid. ‘You have to think of it from
on
stage, not from as if you was watching. It’s from our eyes that they named the two sides, because we’re the simple ones!’

The Belle Auroras were not simple. Even if Joy and her sisters might be, in their saucy skirts and no stockings. ‘Aren’t your bare legs awfully cold?’ Bella asked—then she and Joy both laughed, because it was such a silly, mean thing to say.

‘Bone-chilled! But in the show when it gets so hot, when all the people come, I’ll have to flap my skirts for air,’ Joy said. She tugged Bella’s
sleeve to pull her behind a velvet curtain, so a stone plinth could be rolled on for the Living Statuary—stone in appearance only, Bella realized, because the stagehand was pushing two and pulling another on a string.

‘This change is taking
too long,’
thundered Cleveland out of the darkness.

Everyone onstage jumped. Music crashed in, ending the underlying murmur that had been Mendel talking to the band. Joy and Bella clutched each other behind the curtain, trying not to shriek because everything was so funny, especially the men suddenly moving very quickly, like toys wound too tight.

Pincushion

Flora scuttled along the cleared path through the snow. Her left boot had a thin place and the cold seemed to come up in a fiery line straight through to her hip.
‘Pincushion, pincush
ion,’ she sang to herself beneath her breath—not wanting to find herself in the hotel room, unable to recall why she had come. Her head ached, and after the theatre’s darkness the morning sun was dazzling, sun-dog prisms glittering too bright to be borne. She put her gloved hand up to shade her eyes. One eye was not behaving properly; she ought not to have spent so long out with Sybil and Julius last night, and then she had been plagued with dreams.

What joy to see her girls onstage. Cleveland was one to watch out for, though; and he had eyed Aurora too openly, which would earn them all Mrs. C.’s dislike. Flora had seen enough of that. Aurora was too unseasoned to realize how careful she must be, but—

A patch of black ice nearly sent Flora tumbling
—phew!
A broken leg at this juncture would be disastrous!

More slowly, she stepped along the snowy edge of the path. Life on the stage was like a pincushion, she thought. Sharp points all around: useful, but you needed a silver thimble to manage. She must keep her thimble over her girls. The thought of Cleveland forcing himself on Aurora made her face break into a fearful heat, even in this prickling
cold. Behind her black glove she could see it happening, an upsetting vision of Cleveland tugging at Aurora’s hand, pressing it to his trousers—oh! Flora shook her head to clear it and redoubled her speed.

It was an advantage that she knew the way of the vaudeville world very well, its blessings as well as its dangers. She must simply be determined, and not let weakness or tiredness, or useless visions, distract her from keeping all her girls safe and sound.

An Instant Liking

‘How’d you get the gig?’ Mercy asked Aurora. Clover was there too, but Mercy did not bother with her, seeing at once who was in charge of the Belle Auroras, and speaking to her equivalent number.

‘Auditioned yesterday,’ Aurora said, as brief as possible.

Silence. Tongue out in concentration, Temperance drew on a crescent of eyebrow.

No reason not to be honest, Aurora judged. ‘We didn’t get it, but Cleveland was angry with Julius Foster Konigsburg, so then he had no opener and called us back.’

Mercy was kind, though. ‘Oh, he could have used Maximilian the Bird Magician, if he’d been desperate. Maxie can do it in one if he’s got to—less comfy for the birds, is all.’

Aurora gave way to an instant liking for Mercy. Her soldierly air, her lean arms, her eyes which were both sharp and melting. Her lips, too: full, but cut cleanly around the arching edge. Little chin. What was their life like, with no mother or manager to be seen?

‘How did
you
get the gig?’

‘Gave him a French job under the lighting table.’

Aurora looked blank.

‘Where he sits with Lights. Sent Lights off to check for a burnt bulb.’ Mercy laughed at the look on Aurora’s face, at Clover staring too. ‘It’s not so bad—quick work, and no danger, you know. I’d far rather that than the other.’

Aurora did not want Mercy to see that she did not know what a French job might be. Whatever it was, how had it come about? How had Mr. Cleveland introduced the subject—or had Mercy? Would she herself be expected to do whatever it was? But she had Mama. She would have to watch out for Bella and Clover. She looked up and caught Clover’s eye, and saw that she too was speculating as to what exactly it might be.

Clover rose and slid out of the room, the knuckles of her hand grazing the back of Aurora’s neck gently on her way by.

Mercy said, drawing her own brows, ‘Well, see you keep the gig now you’ve got it! Mrs. C. will ding you with her carving knife if she catches you at hanky-panky. She sent poor Melvin packing this morning, and his Tina, only because she was getting big in front.’

‘Is that Neville Melvin Reads Your Subconscious Mind?’ Aurora turned pages in the programme to find him, there, fourth on the bill.

‘Yes. East & Verrall are coming. Cleveland got them on their way down to the Death Trail.’

‘I love East,’ Temperance said. The only thing she’d said so far. Her eyes were thick-rimmed with black, and she was painting a line of palest blue along the soft pink inner edge of her eyelid. She was spectacularly pretty, if you liked an armful. ‘He gives you fudge.’

Mercy nodded. ‘No girl with them. We wouldn’t want to follow a girl.’

‘Comics?’

‘Double act, three hundred dates a year, but they run down to the Montana circuit to make that many. But what do they do with the money? They never seem to have any.’

Aurora watched Mercy paint her eyes. It was peaceful in that warm dark rabbit-hole of a room, while the work went on above them. In a droning, listless voice, Patience sang, ‘
What’s my name? Poon’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell you the same.’

Living Snake

Dogs were surging up the stairs stage left as Clover went to look for Bella. A moving river of white and black fur
flowed onstage behind the curtain. Bella was there, watching the fray. Mama had returned, and she did not like dogs. Holding the pincushion out like a bone to tempt them, she backed away. One little dog, a ball of white fluff, snapped up at her with pointed white teeth.

‘Oh, help! Save us!’ Mama cried, and the Wonder Dogs man ran up behind the dogs and called them to order with a quiet whistle.

He avoided Mama’s eyes, but grunted, ‘Thorry,’ and dealt with the dog by a short punch on the nose, his expressionless face rough but soft, like bread-dough torn into halves. Was he mad, a little? He must be, to have cut that living snake away. Clover shuddered. She was glad Bella had not heard what he’d done to himself, the poor man.

Mama gathered Bella’s hand, clutched tight, and pulled her back down to the dressing room. Clover stopped to adjust her stocking (Mama’s—too big, it sagged gradually down, however tight she tied her garter) and stayed to watch the dogs: twelve of them lined up on a row of stools behind a long table. Mendel pulled the curtain aside and said in a careful voice, as if talking to someone slow or deaf, ‘Take that new opener all the way through, Juddy, Lights hasn’t seen it yet … Make it an Italian if that suits the dogs, but go through the whole dinner party—after that we’ll skip from cue to cue.’