‘Yes,’ she said at last, breaking off and clapping her hands. ‘That will be quite the thing. I expect you will kill at the Palace.’
The Walk
Mama decided Aurora must have a new frock for the number, and sent Bella and Clover haring all over Winnipeg to dressmakers for the right weight of white lawn: ‘Something with a sheen, nothing too transparent—it must float, you know, girls.’
Late at night she swept the bedroom floor carefully and cut out dress pieces. Bella hated the sound of the scissors creaking and clacking on the floorboards. Mama stitched away by day and night: peering at the sketch she had made, from time to time sighing or giving a small shriek when a sleeve turned out to be sewn in backwards. Aurora tried on the basted version, early one morning: it was a marvel. A suggestion of panniers, wide three-quarter sleeves so that it had a country air: a china shepherdess. The skirt, almost hobbled, rose quite ten
inches off the ground, showing Aurora’s graceful ankles and shins and her delicate white-heeled dancing slippers. She looked like an illustration from a fairy tale, Bella thought.
At breakfast, East told Bella that the Ninepins had arrived, booked for three weeks at the Orpheum, and her pleasure at this treat made her feel kindly towards her sisters, who had recently been difficult to live with—for perfectly good reasons, she understood. Aurora was an angel of grace and beauty, well deserving of Jimmy, and Clover was her darling and would always be so, however cross she became because Victor wanted to enlist.
The war was on everyone’s lips. Another Canadian contingent of soldiers was being raised, but really Bella did not see that it concerned them. They were not citizens, they were of the vagabond company. No one would expect an artiste to enlist. East and Verrall (of complicated citizenry, but brought up in New York) were debating going to Australia for a prolonged tour they’d been offered: at least, East was debating it. Verrall waffled. Whereupon East clapped his hands and said, ‘That’s it, then—we’ll get Julius to come join us for the Pantages dates, and run down into the States. Meanwhile, let’s take Bella for a walk down to Mrs. Howell’s to see her kid.’
Bella ran for her coat; there was time before orchestra rehearsal.
The wind had died down, and she pranced along with the two men, liking herself as a bright robin between two crows. In Mrs. Howell’s parlour (an icebox, stiff with old horsehair furniture), they found Nando at the window, himself as always. Bella flew to him and jumped into his arms, as happy as she could ever remember, and they kissed—it was delightful, his nice mouth, and their two chests glued together. Mrs. Dent coughed and Nando took Bella’s hands to push her gently away, grinning as if he was the broom-boy, the day they first met. He winked at his mother, and leaned forward to kiss Bella again.
Bella gave her hand to Mrs. Dent, and asked after Joe.
‘We’re here alone,’ Myra Dent said, lips hardly parting over dark-edged teeth. Her hair had paled from ash-yellow to ash-grey. She took Bella’s offered hand, and her eyes closed.
‘Dad’s off in the sanatorium,’ Nando told them all. ‘Last month down in Philly it got to be too much, and he saw it himself, so we signed him into Clifton Springs. It’s only a couple of months.’
East sat on the sliding horsehair beside Myra Dent and patted her knee. He pulled a box of lemon drops out of his vest pocket, then stuffed them back in, perhaps feeling it was not the right moment. ‘All the better for it,’ he promised. ‘Every time I go myself I’m glad I did.’
Bella was not sure she believed that East had been to a sanatorium, but Myra let up a little on looking like Death had come for them all. Bella considered it was a very good thing for Joe Dent to dry out; perhaps then he would stop lambasting his wife so badly—Bella could not credit how women did stick with brutal husbands. Like Mrs. Black in Paddockwood, covered with bruises, but would not hear a word said about Mr. Black, even when Papa had offered to help her. ‘He is not hard on the boys’ was all she said, in a saintly way that made Bella feel uncomfortable.
Verrall had perched himself on the piano stool, more crowlike than ever. ‘But, pardon me, but—how are you to continue the Ninepins?’
‘Yes, we was fussing about that,’ Nando said. ‘I’ve had an offer to make movies, but that’s low class and the pay’s to match, no point in slumming. A solo number’s in the works, a trick wagon that breaks apart, only Dad never liked the idea. It is a bit fussy with the props.’
Nando’s mother lifted her face, as if reminded of something. She had the prettiest blue eyes. ‘Nando, I meant to say, they’ve brought the auto back.’
‘Well, that’s one good thing!’ Nando jumped up and grabbed Bella’s arm to pull her out the door, leaving his mother to East and Verrall. ‘Let me take you out for a spin—you’re warm enough dressed—we have our own flivver now, just like Misery Mayhew. I’ll deliver you to the theatre in style, I promise you.’
Bella did not know how much of Mayhew’s downfall Nando knew about. Perhaps nothing. She wondered what to tell him. He had not grown taller but had a different stride, a sort of maturity that surprised her, maybe from his father being gone. He helped her climb into the
cushioned leather seat of the bright green runabout (an open car, its black cloth hood pulled up against the winter), then cranked the engine six or seven times till it caught. He jumped in beside her, worked the pedals, and they set off through the snowy streets.
‘This is very nice!’ Bella exclaimed, bouncing a bit to test the seats.
‘An ’08 Model T, a treasure, good as gold, needs a little adjustment from time to time. Just got her back from the blacksmith; he’s been fixing the bumper and a few other things …’
There was a terrible grinding noise, and the motion stopped—and something sprang hissing from the hood of the car and flew up into the windscreen. Bella screamed.
‘No, no! Nothing to fear!’ His face still blank as a doormat, Nando jumped out again and went round to fasten the hood-cap back down. The windscreen had a crack in it; Bella did not think it had been there before but did not like to point it out.
He jumped back in, released the handbrake and started the car forward again.
‘She’s a beauty, we—’ Another bang. Stuttering from the engine.
‘What a pleasant thing it is to take a drive,’ Bella said, gamely.
‘Shut up!’
‘How can you speak so unkind? I was only being pleasant!’
‘Nothing pleasant about it. Someone’s got something that matters to them and you make jokes. You’re no different from your brother-in-law.’
‘He’s not my—’ Well, she supposed he was, technically speaking. ‘At least—Sybil said he was married already anyway, and never married Aurora at all! Besides, he’s run off to the States and took everything we had, and left Aurora high and dry, so he’s no more
your
enemy than he is
mine.’
She ought not to have said all that. Not even Nando ought to know about the other wife. And poor Sybil was dead—Nando probably had not heard that, either. A cold finger of guilt crept up her neck. She turned her head away from Nando, who appeared to have paid not the least attention to all this news, but was swearing and attempting something complicated with the levers. The car limped along another few
yards and then coughed and stopped, unpleasant-smelling steam curling in a weak spiral from the engine. Or perhaps it was smoke.
They sat in the cold, the silence.
East and Verrall, walking to the Orpheum for their own rehearsal call, passed by. East called, ‘Get a horse!’ Verrall gave a frivolous waggle of his glove, still careful with his hurt shoulder.
‘Go piss yourselves,’ Nando called back.
‘Thank you
very
much for your considerate offer,’ Bella said. ‘I will walk with my friends. I see that they are going to be on time for their call and I fear if I stay with you, I shall not be.’
‘Stay where you are.’ Although he was as angry as she’d ever seen him, Nando’s face stayed flat and calm, as if he didn’t care at all what she did—even after kissing her, and being happy.
Bella cried, ‘Ugh!’ in exasperation and gathered her skirt, but Nando put out a quick strong hand and held her down.
Violent in her indignation, Bella stood up and smacked into the cloth hood. With a dreadful tearing noise her head went right through the roof. She pulled at her hat brim and sat down again, a ripple of hysterical giggles beginning in her chest.
She tried to keep it in. It was nothing to laugh at, the ruin of poor Nando’s car.
But then he smacked a hand on the steering wheel and started to laugh himself. ‘Your hat!’ he said. ‘I think it is worse off than the roof.’
There! She knew he was lovely. It was just his father being off in the sanatorium that made him grouch at life. Perhaps he would kiss her again.
Beneficence
After only a few days, sewing had to be interrupted on Aurora’s frock, when Mama came down with a crushing headache. For several hours she blinked and scrubbed at her blurring eyes and made herself continue, trying to finish the long seam, but at last could sew no longer. Only Clover’s gentle fingers stroking the papery eyelid skin seemed to help, and poppy syrup. Mama was loath
to use laudanum because of dependence, but nothing else would do. She begged Clover to sit watch. She had a horror of being heard in a snore, which laudanum could produce, but her eyes were drooping, and her mouth too. ‘Please, please do not leave me! If I should be noisy—Aunt Queen, you know, was a trumpet-major for snoring, and I cannot bear to—But I must be still for a little.’
Clover did not, naturally, tell Mama that she snored most nights, but doled out the drops with care and sat quietly, reading papers left by other boarders in the dining room, till Mama drowsed off and ceased her murmured complaints.
War news dominated the papers. Clover studied the map of the fighting line in Flanders and made herself read every word, trying to imagine the reality behind the accounts. The Germans had declared British waters a war zone, and anyone sailing to England would be at peril. She refused to think further about that.
Mama stirred and said in a fretful voice, ‘Clover? You won’t leave me, will you?’
‘I am here, Mama. Go to sleep.’
‘Thank you, dearest—you won’t leave, though?’
Nothing could truly reassure her, not since Papa’s death. Perhaps the fear was even getting worse, lately. ‘I am here, sweetheart,’ Clover said. She opened the dividing door, so Mama could see her from the bed, and be calm.
The German dead: 971,042 ‘not
counting Bavarian, Saxon, Wurtemberg and the naval lists.’
A million dead! How could that be true? But it was printed there, in the war diary. Every day as they walked to and from the theatre they saw groups of soldiers, natty in olive drab. More and more racing off to the Front.
Clover had a bump of patriotism, inherited from her father, that made her weep during the anthem. She had always mistrusted it. But it was impossible not to cheer the bravery of those honourable officers, and the Tommies slopping through muck, cocking a snook at the vile Prussians. Clover ran her eye down the columns, hurrying through accounts of sinkings and torpedoings. The first Canadian soldiers had
been killed. Her cold foreboding was warmed by pride in Victor’s need to be part of this enterprise, however great the cost. He was the best of men, best in the world.
The Double Act
For a week, Aurora and Jimmy rehearsed the double act in the back parlour at Mrs. Jewett’s. Twice with Mama playing piano for them, once with Clover—but the fourth time, Mama’s head was too bad and she wanted Clover to sit with her; Bella was out for a spin with Nando and Verrall, Nando having sworn that he’d fixed whatever was wrong with the Model T. Aurora said not to fret, she could sing the tune while she and Jimmy ran through the steps.
When Jimmy arrived Aurora took him to Mrs. Jewett’s back parlour where the old piano was, then pulled the pocket doors back along their runner till the two sides met tight, and locked them top and bottom, brass sliding into brass in a silky glide and drop.
He opened the piano and set out the sheet music. Turning, he watched as she went first to one window, then the other, pulling down the blinds. It was just past ten in the morning and the house was quiet for a spell, boarders gone off to work or in their rooms, Mrs. Jewett and the help busy in the kitchen, baking pies for the boarders’ dinner.
She took the big cushions from the window seat and threw them down onto the floor with soft flumps, and she undid her blouse with fingers that trembled and fumbled and worked fast.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, walking over the polished floor towards her.
‘There is not much time, don’t waste it.’ Her blouse fell, the ribbon cummerbund fell, and she stepped out of her skirt, but there was still so much fabric to get through. She kicked at the pool of froth and linen on the floor, and said, ‘Please help me, please.’
He untied the waistband of her petticoat and knelt to draw it down, and buried his face in the smell and warmth of her, and she put her
hands on his head. She hummed the tune as loudly as she could, and knelt beside him, and they sank together onto the pile of clothes and pillows—and really, Aurora thought, it was about time.
Turning her head away so as not to deafen him, she sang,
‘I never envied the rich millionaires, I never wanted to have what was theirs, I never bother about their affairs … All that I want is a chance to be glad, I’ve grown so tired of being so sad, There’s only one thing I wish that I had, That’s you, just you.’
As he pushed inside her, she had to stop singing or it would become an ululation.
Silent, then. Silence, silence, breathing carefully in and out, his arms under her hands and the fiery rage that he created spreading through her whole body, more than the blaze of the butterfly wings had been, spearing her or maybe going clear through her, their spirits dissolving into each other or knifing through and between, and there was no stopping it, their bodies in some trance of perfect time and beat, and beat, everything running between them like electricity, to shock them and to run the engines of them forward, until they died.