The Little Shadows (60 page)

And because Clover found that she was going to have a baby—in January, as well as she could count.

The chorus girls were cheerful in the dressing room, toasted by the reeking gas fire where they dried their washed-out stockings. After the heat and the noise, the silent walk home through dripping streets was a pleasure, but Clover often found herself tired and lonely. She could not tell Victor her news in a letter, and would not tell Madame or Aurora until he knew. The tiny knot of the baby inside her clutched and stretched, and she sometimes sang to it as she walked along. The London streets were dark with the Zeppelin blackout, yet she felt perfectly safe. She watched for a vast, ghostly shape moving through the skies, but never saw one. Only the great searchlights quartering the sky, and craters the bombs had left.

The baby was so much in the forefront of her mind that she almost told the gnome-like Felix Quirk as they were strolling away from the theatre one evening. But just then, in the grip of some necessity, he dodged into a public house for a quick snifter of brandy, leaving her to make her way home alone.

No. Not alone, for the child went with her.

Hole in the Heart

Late in September, Lewis Ridgeway invited Aurora to give a piano concert to the senior high-school girls. Remembering how she had longed for lovely clothes at that age, she wore the blue grosgrain afternoon gown with a linen jabot, and her best shoes; the half-mile walk would not ruin them. Mr. Ridgeway had asked for a mixed repertoire; she would sandwich two nocturnes around MacDowell’s
To A Wild Rose
, which the girls could play themselves. The brass zip on her leather music case ran smooth and cool. She missed working.

As she left the house she passed Mama standing on the porch with a watering can for the stone jars of marigolds. ‘O,
who would inhabit, This bleak world alone?’
Mama sang, eyes fastened on hers, desperate to convey a message.

Aurora pressed a kiss on her cheek, and told her Avery was in his cot with Mabel writing letters beside him. Her present strategy was to expect Mama to understand, to be perfectly capable, as if that might
make
her capable.

Mr. Ridgeway was waiting for her at the entrance to the brick high school. The school suited him—it was an oddly significant building for such a little town. Walking down the glossy-floored hall they passed several empty classrooms. She glanced into yet another large bare room, and he gave a sudden smile. ‘Yes, we have the facilities for a music room. Mrs. Gower has donated an instrument I think you’ll enjoy.’

He ushered her through the last double doors into a pleasant open hall with folding wooden chairs and, on a raised dais, a vast black concert grand.

Aurora went to examine the piano. The high-school girls trooped in, taking their seats with decorum, and Mr. Ridgeway introduced Aurora as a seasoned concert performer.

Feeling a ridiculous blush rise to her cheeks, she turned to the girls to say, ‘My sisters and I toured in vaudeville for several years …’ Then she fell silent, alone onstage, missing Clover and Bella—as if her arms were gone, whole portions of her body. What could these girls know about vaude, the real life and ordinary beauty of it?

Taking herself in hand, Aurora bowed and began. Halfway through the Field nocturne she wished she’d thought to turn the piano, so she could see the audience. The audience. Even a handful of schoolgirls was worth working for—it was not vanity or shallowness of mind, it was the desire to do one’s best by the music, and to—to elevate the listeners, or simply delight them.

She turned from the piano after
Wild Rose
, to find several of the girls in tears. ‘It’s
exquisite
!’ said a cherry-ribboned girl—Nell Barr-Smith, the Dean’s daughter. ‘But does it have words, could you sing it?’ And the others cried
yes, yes, please
.

Grateful and surprised, Aurora altered her plan and instead of the second Field piece gave them
Last Rose of Summer, a capella
. After singing it under-voice all these months to encourage Mama, it was a
pleasure to let her full voice out—but a pity to do without Clover’s mourning violin.

She sang, enjoying the song’s frank sentiment and the long afternoon light streaming in the tall windows. At the end, smiling down at the flowery faces, she sank into a formal curtsy, one hand over her heart, to please them. The girls came in twos and threes to thank her and make shy compliments.

As the room emptied, Aurora was left alone on the dais, packing her music away.

Mr. Ridgeway regarded her from his position by the windows, twenty feet away. Happy to have been able to play for the girls, she began to thank him for inviting her, but he waved a hand. They stood silent for a moment.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, his look too direct for light conversation.

‘About what?’

He turned his head away, then fixed his eyes on her again, across the room. ‘You must know already, your voice is—you are—beautiful.’

Aurora was not shocked, exactly, but entirely surprised. She stared back at him, not smiling, unsure herself what to say or do.

Hurrying footsteps sounded in the hall: two tall girls rushed in with a bucket of blackboard erasers. ‘All clean, sir,’ the taller girl said.

The spell was broken, and Aurora picked up her hat and music case.

‘Don’t go, Mrs. Mayhew,’ Mr. Ridgeway said, his voice very dry and scholarly. ‘Miss Frye will want to see you about the Christmas concert.’

The girls said goodbye to her again, and to Mr. Ridgeway; he made a show of ushering them out and then turned back to Aurora. ‘I should correct myself—’ He shook his head, raised his hands. ‘I cannot apologize. It was an observation of fact.’

She walked home deep in thought, conscious of a terrible appetite. Not for Lewis Ridgeway, who was so odd and angular—but for some flare of excitement. Maybe she was perfectly frozen, and never would love anyone. There were women like that, pathologically cold—one
heard about them. She had not been cold with Jimmy, but was never his, not really. Not the way Clover was Victor’s, unquestioningly, her whole heart open to him. Or Mabel, with her Aleck. For a moment Aurora wished very badly to have that. Perhaps one could be wholehearted with Lewis Ridgeway. Except that she was still married to Mayhew, so there was no point in thinking of—And she did not want to think of it, any of it. Better to be alone.

Not alone; with Avery. She could be whole in heart there. A hole in the heart, perhaps that is what she had.

Better and Better

Do you remember that time when you were sick backstage—that must have been the baby coming!—and I did Mrs. O’Hara? Well, I have been earning a bit of money doing monologues like that for the Gate variety theatre near here. Most of their comics have gone to the Front and they are starved for artistes. Good to have a jingle of coins in my pocket although Gali is kind and so is Madame. (But I think she is a little mad.)

Clover had taken to writing to Aurora in snatches—never able to sit long enough for a whole letter. Her mind was nervous and her body could not settle. Still no news from Victor. That was to be expected in wartime, but she wanted so badly to let him know her own news. Tying her apron above the small firm bulge of the baby, she longed to tell Aurora, to ask her about the tight feeling and whether it was all right to be so terribly sleepy all day long.

Clover went to beat carpets in the garden, a useful and therapeutic occupation, but found she had to sit down on the dead grass—crouch, really—and pant for a while. It was uncomfortably animal.

Through the window she could hear Victor’s mother in her bath, quietly chanting Coué’s auto-suggestion trick, ‘Every day, in every way,
I am better and better.’ It was not really allowed. Gali did not approve of other gurus. When she visited the astrologer, Madame wore a mysterious grey veil as a disguise. Clover gave a hiccuping laugh and felt the baby inside her jump, and laughed again. To keep herself from worrying about Victor, she was working on a monologue character called Madame Scrappati. Victor would not mind her using his mother’s eccentricity, even in the unlikely event that he was able to see the show.

The baby turned a somersault and kicked her hard in the ribs, and Clover determined to be more cheerful, more courageous, for its sake. Fear would hurt the baby. How brave Aurora had been, dancing right to the minute of Avery’s birth. She could do that. Getting up, she danced gently in the garden, stretching her arms out to the view of Wormwood Scrubs prison.
Better and better
, she sang to the baby inside her as they twirled.

Every Unspoken Wish

In Seattle, Bella got a new song by Irving Berlin, which brightened the November gloom. Pantages sent the song from San Diego in an envelope marked,
BELLA AVERY ONLY
, which she supposed was nice of him. Very silly, no sentimental bilge-distilling—Gentry Fox would approve. She thought of writing to tell Gentry so, but she did not have his address and he’d always liked Aurora best anyway. It was a lovely song, a girl explaining the hidden charms of her new boyfriend, and Bella knew just what to do with it: all her own surprise, a little measure of shock, a dab of relish and a bit of a laugh, more at herself than him.

‘He’s not so good in a crowd, but when you get him alone
You’d be surprised
,
He doesn’t look very strong, but when you sit on his knee
,
You’d be surprised!’

She was enjoying herself until she realized she was singing about Nando: ‘But
in a Pullman berth, you’d be surprised!
’ The song was a big hit. Rather than giving her a blue envelope for the innuendos, Kleinhardt,
the manager in Oakland, put her second-to-close in her own slot and changed the handbills that very week, with a paycheque all her own as well as her third of the E&V take.

Her grouch-bag was groaning, though she sent half of everything off to Qu’Appelle. Aurora wrote to say she had opened a bank account in Indian Head for a rainy day, and had wired money to Clover, and that Bella should be sure to buy herself nice things for ordinary as well as new costumes as required. Bella did need a new dress for the number, and she had the perfect thing made up. Mama would love this dress, she thought, and she had a photo taken to send to her: demure white lace, only six inches off the ground, with pink satin shoes and sash: a wallflower’s dress, in which she could suddenly transform to a girl who has had every unspoken wish fulfilled, along with some she didn’t know how to pronounce.

Mme Scrappati

Not trusting the British audience as she did the houses back home, Clover used herself, in the role of a naive traveller new to England, to introduce her monologues. She did Mrs. O’Hara regularly, and developed others: a gawky ballerina and an aging opera singer (a very free portrait of Miss Sunderland from Gentry’s theatre). Madame Scrappati went over best—though Clover thought it would not work at home, being a portrait of a type only seen in England.

Last week I met Madame Scrappati, an eccentric lady who teaches the violin to any number of unpleasant children, walking down Portobello Market. She carried an enormous basket, and from it fished a mutton bone for a dog that came whining, a penny for every poor waif she met, and a large bar of doubtful chocolate, which she offered to me. I proposed a cup of tea instead.

Having sketched Madame Scrappati’s basket and movements, Clover transformed into Madame herself, sweeping a vast magenta
velvet, marabou-edged stole about her shoulders as she turned to nestle herself, her draperies and her basket into an imaginary inglenook.
Dearest!
she began, in a breathy, overexcited voice: a hint of gin, polyglot phrasing, and every odd usage she was learning from the atelier.

I have had the most
profound
session with La Sombreuse—opening the stars to me in all their power and influence. But perhaps do
not
mention her to the dear Vicar, for he is not in sympathy with the esoteric wisdom. Of course
you and I
do not credit astrology, but one cannot help finding the accuracy quite astounding! La Sombreuse warns of a conjunction, Neptune the trickster and warlike Mars. She sees real possibility of
international conflict!

And then a rapid tour through various vultures of clairvoyants and charlatans, until:

Oh, darling, I will be late for my Tarot reading: Signora Esmeralda, a genius of the mystical cards—her pack was passed down to her from Ahasuerus and Sheba, and she has the most
fascinating
insights … But do not tell the dear Vicar,
cher amie
 … 
(Donning a grey veil, she totters off.)

It went over well, but audiences had little else to amuse them, with most male artistes gone to the Front. In Victor’s regiment there were four former variety artistes—Victor had once sent her a cartoon featuring himself, drawn by Bairnsfather: a private juggling grenades to the mixed entertainment and horror of his troopmates. ‘It was only tins of bully beef,’ Victor wrote at the bottom of the cartoon. ‘I would not care to waste a good grenade.’

Felix Quirk was the last remaining comic at the Tivoli. His withered arm was skilfully hidden, and his upper-class accent might even have been his own. He went Clover’s way after the last show, heading for
Notting Hill, and walked a different route with her each evening, introducing her to London’s geography. When he changed to the Vaudeville Theatre down on the Strand, he got Clover a few weeks’ engagement there so they could continue their walks. He made a pet of her, calling her the Little Canadian. But Quirk was a more dedicated drunkard even than Julius, and Clover reserved herself a little too.