‘Dimando di lei
I call for him
ogn’ aura tacendo
out of the silent air
ogn’ aura piangendo
out of the weeping air
sen passa da me?
whither has he gone?’
She sang for Victor. For whom did Aurora sing? Not Mayhew, watching in his box. For Gentry; or perhaps for Jimmy Battle, who was far, far away, under the aegis of Eleanor Masefield. Maybe she sang for Papa, and Harry. Or only for the idea of gone.
‘Sweet echo replyeth, he is far, far away …’
What Vicissitudes
Next morning, before it was light, Flora woke from a feverish vision and lay still, piecing together the dream: the empty house, bees clustering at the eyes of the dead woman, a policeman coming up the step: it seemed she was being lied to.
She moved her head, away from the dawn bleaching the window.
About Arthur, as always. But this was the Arlington. There was no one lying on the front walk, eyes staring at the ground. Arthur was a skeleton now, in his cold earth in Paddockwood, and Harry beside him … The police had wanted in the front door but she wouldn’t let them enter in the afternoon, so they came back in the evening and there was a little blood by the back door, and the bees.
No, that was from the dream, not from life. Bees meant a secret and death. The police: a secret, and possibly death. Blood, oddly, could be a journey.
She shook her head to dispel the fog, and wished Mayhew had not ordered the third bottle of wine at supper. A kind and generous host, no matter what vicissitudes. She fell asleep again.
Cheats and Whores
Later, the rasping apartment bell twisted and twisted. After a minute there was a rapping knock, then more twisting. It was ten, but only Clover was properly up—Bella was still in her nightgown, stirring scrambled eggs. At first Clover thought they should ignore what must be a peddler or the brush-man—unless it could be Aurora, needing milk for morning tea? Clover put her eye to the peephole and then stood back on her heels. After an instant she tiptoed backwards down the hall to the kitchen.
‘Sybil and Julius!’ she told Bella, who popped her eyes wide open and glanced round the kitchen at the truly dreadful mess they’d let build up since the maid had last been. Clover dodged into the parlour, where Mama lay tangled in blankets on the Murphy bed.
‘Mama!’ she whispered. ‘It is Sybil at the door. And Julius!’
Mama opened one eye, then the other. Clover could see her trying to focus.
Then Mama jumped out of bed, flung the bedclothes towards the centre, shoved the Murphy bed back up into its niche and dashed for the bathroom, snatching her wrapper and a tangled assortment of sewing notions from the chair as she ran. ‘Wait, just wait!’ she whispered, and whisked the door shut, opening it again to release the sash of her wrapper. Her wild eye showed through the crack, and she nodded.
Clover opened the apartment door. ‘Why, hello!’ she said. ‘Dear ma’am, dear sir—how pleasant to see you after this long while!’
‘Yes, you’d think so! Sixteen months, as I count,’ Sybil said, biting the words out. Her face was pinched and strange, not at all her eager, unsquashable self. She drew back her upper lip to display tight-clenched teeth. Julius looked at the ceiling.
Bella came from the kitchen, where she had been bundling dirty dishes quietly into the oven. She had tied a bib apron over her nightgown, and her feet were crammed into Clover’s other shoes. ‘Julius!’ she cried, giving him a warm embrace; she turned to Sybil, but stopped in time.
‘We are here to see Flora,
if
you please,’ Sybil said, frost sharp in her voice and face.
The girls fell back and Clover showed their guests into the parlour. There they all stood awkwardly. The Murphy bed’s rise had left the room disordered. Clover flicked the carpet into place and adjusted the armchair and the small table by the window. She opened the drapes to let in pale autumn sun.
Nobody spoke; there was only the wheeze of Julius breathing.
Then Mama was at the door, her hair tidied, girdle snug and everything dainty about her, as if she’d never had a bad night in her life. ‘Dear Syb! And Julius,’ she cried, her hands outstretched as she came forward. ‘Here you are in cold old Edmonton, what a pleasure!’
Sybil tittered. ‘Yes, here we are, back again like a bad penny.
Two
bad pennies!’ Clover saw her eyes dart over Mama, taking in the new lace-point collar, the dove kid slippers peeping out under the silk morning-gown wrapper—noting, no doubt, the undeniable air of
prosperity. ‘We
thought
you would find it a pleasure,’ Sybil said. The splotches of colour on her cheeks worried Clover.
Julius shambled to the single armchair and settled his bulk. One eyebrow waggled. Enjoying himself, Clover thought, the old scallywag. She sent Bella for more chairs.
‘Got your address from Teddy Vickers at the Muse. We ourselves are staying at Mrs. Springer’s, where the food is very decent—very. Performing later this week, Professor Konigsburg’s Ventri-lectricity—at the Princess, south of the river …’ He subsided, at a glance from Sybil.
‘They’ll know where the Princess is, Julius,’ she said, with the sweetest of trills. ‘Even though they theirselves are at the up-tone Muse, above our touch. Took us this long to get to Edmonton, to find a theatre that would book us here, but we made it.’
Bella came back, dressed, with two wooden chairs from the kitchen. She set them carefully for the ladies, but Sybil would not sit, so neither could Mama. Clover, queasy from the excess of ire in the room, saw that Sybil’s eyes showed white all round the pupils.
There was a silence.
‘When we left Helena so abruptly—’ Mama began, but Sybil would not let her finish.
‘Swanning it pretty well up here, are you? Cats that swallowed the cream?’
Mama turned her head in distaste.
‘Oh, is that too coarse for you? Too materialistic for your fine sensibility?’
‘You—I don’t know what you mean,’ Mama said. ‘I’m sorry if you—’
‘Hist!
’ Sybil said sharply. ‘None of that! We need no apology from you!’
Julius turned from the window, pulling his chair beneath him without troubling to lift its feet. It set up a painful screech in the suddenly silent room. ‘Sybil, my dear,’ he said, mild as milk. ‘Can it be you harbour some rancour towards our dear Flora?’
Sybil pounced on that: ‘Oh, can it be? But how should I rancourize? You and I left high and dry without a gig and without a pay packet—Mayhew having come to Jay cap in hand
that very afternoon
, to ask for the
loan of a hundred to tide him over to meet payroll! Fifty dollars he got off him! And if Jay had had more in pocket, we’d have been out all that as well, sure as shooting.’
Mama put out her hand towards Sybil, who leaped back as if the hand were a hot poker. ‘Oh no! Don’t you come the friendly with me now. Never a word we had from you, nor from Fitz Mayhew, not that I’d have expected it from him—and Jay ought to have known better—we’ve had enough words over that, thank you
very
much. But no word of warning that everything was done up! How much would that have cost you?’
Mama sat down quickly on the kitchen chair, as if her knees were not obeying her.
Bella had crept forward to Clover’s elbow and now tugged very slightly on her sleeve, making bulgy eyes to pull her out of this. Clover was grateful—she knew Bella herself could stand the music and if there was to be a fight would not want to miss the fireworks, but Clover was likely to faint if she was too close to the action.
‘I’d like to know how you could betray me so,’ Sybil continued as the girls edged away. ‘That had been your friend from olden days and forward, and would have gone to the ends of the earth for you—left with egg all over my face!’
The girls had reached the doorway; Clover halted there, feeling cowardly to leave Mama alone. But Mama was rising to the attack, cheeks flushed and eyes bright as if she’d been dancing.
‘I thought it was you who had your finger on all the pulses, always up to snuff, queen of the prying noses—knew anything there was to know, long before
we
knew it, Sybil Sly.’
Julius leaned back in his chair, applauding this rejoinder. ‘One to the solar plexus!’
Now Mama turned on Julius: ‘You introduced my daughters to Fitz Mayhew in the first place, as I recall it, you old Pander.’
Sybil milled back in. ‘So we did, as a favour, and look what good it’s done her! And you!’
‘If you call it
good
, for her to be tied to an old goat more than twice her age. Whom you now—when it suits your story—call unscrupulous.’
In the doorway Clover clung to Bella. Thank God, she thought, Mayhew is not here to add to this. Mama waved a hand at the girls, ordering them from the room. But Clover stayed rooted to the spot, as Sybil, towering to her full five feet, jabbed her jaw forward furiously. ‘I don’t say he’s
unscrupulous
—I say he’s a damned cheat, and I’ll be damned if we’ll ever work with him again!’
Julius hummed, his demon tickled by this excitement. ‘Well, now, my dear Syb, where would we be in vaudeville if we refused to work with cheats and whores!’
Mama turned on him in a fury. ‘And who are you calling a whore?’
There was a moment of silence in the room. But Julius never backed away from a fence. ‘I suppose, dear lady, that I was referring to your eldest daughter.’
Mama stared at him, her eyes dark caves, her mouth fallen off its usual line.
Sybil cracked a sudden laugh. ‘You’d rather he was talking of you?’
‘That’s enough!’ Mama dashed her hand across her eyes to clear them and advanced on Sybil, step by step. Her wrapper had come untied, Clover saw, and the slip underneath drooped, revealing her slackened chest. ‘After what you did to me!
Such a good friend
in those olden days—you made trouble between me and Arthur that nearly dished me, talking to Chum as if I was no better than a trollop.’
Sybil sobbed. ‘I never meant to,’ she said, ‘I never meant it.’
‘Well, you ought to have meant
not
to! You were jealous as a cat, and you are still, and you near as nothing ruined my life.’
Sybil gave a bleat of anguish and fell to her knees.
‘Do you know how hard that was to fight against?’ Mama demanded. ‘He never truly believed me again—his whole
life—’
She looked at Clover and Bella, seeming to see them there for the first time. Her voice cracked and her fists flew through her hair, disarranging it.
‘Girls, out!’ She pointed to the apartment door. ‘Go to Aurora.’
They ran.
Outside in the stair-hall, Bella and Clover stood shivering, almost laughing, unable to climb the flights to Aurora and Mayhew’s suite.
Bella rang the button, but the elevator banged and clanged down in the basement region.
‘Whore!’ Bella said, behind her hand, her eyes bright and scared.
Clover put her arm around Bella. ‘Oh, fish! Any girl in vaudeville might be called that. Even in the legitimate, to some people’s mind.’
‘I thought he liked us!’
‘Think of Mr. Tweedie in Paddockwood,’ Clover said. ‘Everybody had him over to supper and felt so sorry for him because he was a bachelor and a sidesman. But nobody talked to Lily Bain or even let her come to church.’
‘Well, but Lily Bain went with
all
the men.’
‘Why should that make a difference? All the men went with her!’
‘She looked like a scrag-end of mutton.’
‘And Mr. Tweedie an old goat, they were well-suited that way.’
Bella laughed. ‘All those scrawny goat-kid children!’
‘I don’t see why when a woman does that, she’s a whore. When a man does it, there’s no bad name to call him.’
The elevator came trundling up at last.
The apartment door behind them opened and Julius slid out, then shut the door again on a confused babble of women’s voices. ‘I’ve a mind to see Mayhew,’ he said, with a bob of his massy head. ‘And Miss Aurora—the virtue of whom has never been impugned, to my knowledge. Regrets! My devilish tongue cannot resist a quarrel.’
So Clover held the gate open, and let Julius ride up with them.
Charlatan
On the fifth floor Aurora was in perfect order, her rooms fresh as iced water after the overheated atmosphere downstairs. Bella and Clover vanished into the kitchenette, in fits of horrified laughter after attempting to convey the situation.
Aurora made a polite effort to entertain Julius—with whom she’d never had a cordial friendship, his heart having been given to Clover. She had noticed it often: people picked one or another sister to like,
not understanding how closely they were twined. There was no point in his partisanship for Clover, because Clover herself was hopelessly partisan for Aurora and Bella, and they for her.
She sought for some subject that might interest him. ‘We had a delightful dinner with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle last summer, perhaps you have met him on your travels? I know he is fond of vaudeville.’
Julius gave a snort of mingled derision and amusement.
‘Phoo!
A charlatan, I believe. Authors always are. But I confess, I enjoy the humbuggery of his stories. A fascinating instance of Art surpassing the frail human who creates it—who is the conduit for it, more like.’
Since that had been Aurora’s own estimate of Conan Doyle, she could not help laughing. ‘It was only a month before war was declared, yet all he could talk of was those uppity suffragettes and his moony wife. He is a champion storyteller, though.’
The girls came in with a tea tray, and Aurora sighed as she saw that Clover was thoughtfully carrying Fitz’s good whiskey by its neck.
Some time later, when Julius had succumbed to the whiskey and lay snoring in a corner of the upholstered sofa, Mama brought Sybil up to see Aurora’s flat and all her nice things. They had made up, by the mysterious alchemy of long knowledge of each other. Aurora marvelled at the cozy way the ladies walked arm-in-arm through the suite, conferring over the latest rising salaries in the big-time.