Until that moment Aurora had not realized that she ought to have mentioned the baby. All her telegrams had been of Mama, and the stroke that had befallen her, never the baby—he was her secret still, she suddenly understood.
‘This is Mabel,’ her uncle was saying. ‘My wife’s goddaughter, who is good enough to live with us and keep us company.’
His wife’s? But—Aurora had thought him a bachelor.
‘How d’you do,’ said Mabel, her eyes careful, unrevealing. She was neat and narrow.
‘And Elsie’s somewhere close by.
Else!
’ he shouted, suddenly parade-ground.
Another woman shadowed the screen door and came through: a warm face, brown braids pinned in a coronet; a round figure, well-corseted in a pretty flowered dress, with plump fluttering hands. A little older than Mama.
‘I hear you, Chum, no need to holler.’ She made a gentle buffer to his larger energy.
‘Here’s Aurora, and poor Flora, they’re here.’
‘I see them, Chum. What a long journey! But the best time of year for it.’
Mabel slipped back up the steps to help Aunt Elsie down, for she was lame in one foot, with a great-heeled black boot.
None of this was what Aurora had expected; her head was buzzing. And she had not mentioned the baby! People were apt to be doubtful about babies, when there was no father to be seen.
She set the basket down, shifted the blanket and lifted out her sleeping son, light as air, still curled into his fern-frond posture and gently complaining as the lifting roused him.
There was a small silence on the porch, on the steps, on the walk.
Mama moved, stepping closer to Aurora and raising her left arm to shield the baby, as if defending him. Aurora pressed her hand, whispering, ‘Good! You are stronger already!’
Then Aunt Elsie moved forward too, and Mabel, to see the baby more closely.
‘Oh! So
new
!’ Elsie said. Her finger traced the baby’s chin.
Chum was tall enough to see over his wife and niece, no need to move. He asked, ‘What is the child’s name?’
Aurora could not bear to admit that she had not named him yet. ‘Avery,’ she said—unable, though thinking she ought, to say
Chum
. ‘Avery Mayhew.’ She listened to the sound of that, wondering if it was any good. Poor babe, if it was not.
‘And your husband?’ Chum asked it gravely, as if expecting the worst.
‘No longer with us.’ Then, realizing that might cause them to think her a widow, she quickly added, ‘My husband left us, I’m sorry to say. His theatre was destroyed and he—decamped to the States.’ A military way to put it, perhaps that would be best.
Elsie gave a short sighing gasp, either sympathy or censure. Chum and Mabel looked at them without speaking for a few moments. Mama, who had been dully silent all day, looked up and tried to speak. Nothing emerged.
Mabel showed them up to a wide bedroom. A high spool bed, a dresser, a washstand with china bowl and pitcher, and a lidded pot
beneath. The room shone, evening sun pouring through two open windows. Mama stood at the west window and hummed a droning tune.
‘Mosquitoes aren’t much this year,’ Mabel promised, drawing the net curtains aside to show the view out over the prairie—nothing to see but grass and sky, and more of each beyond. ‘But we keep the screens in place anyhow. I could hold Avery for you, while you help your mother,’ she offered, with some awkwardness, and it was only fair for Aurora to hand him over.
Avery
. In Mabel’s arms she could see him better. It might suit.
When they had washed, Mabel took them down to supper in the quiet dining room: chicken stew and early greens from the garden, and rice pudding made plain without eggs.
This was a peaceful house. In lieu of children, Aunt Elsie kept fourteen cats in the kitchen, lolling close by the stove on a conglomeration of pillows, reminding Aurora of Swain’s Rats & Cats. They were never allowed in the rest of the house, but Mama was agitated by them. It was the first thing she wrote on her slate:
overlay?
Aurora laughed to see it, from relief that Mama had taken chalk in hand; kissing her mother, she promised faithfully not to allow the cats to overlay Avery.
The Dark Ship
In the darkness, the mass of people on the pier overwhelmed Clover, along with the smell, and the boat’s bulk in the nighttime. Thick black shadows claimed its upper half, past the reach of the dock lights. She laid one hand on her mouse-brown trunk, to keep up with the porter, and watched the massive planks beneath her feet. Her kid boots (bought new for the moon number) had narrow teetery heels that might fit in the gaps.
A column of uniformed soldiers swung through, slicing the crowd into halves that rejoined as they passed. Perhaps Victor had enlisted already—she did not even know if he would still be in England when she arrived.
The porter lurched forward and she lurched after him. They joined the queue moving towards the gangplank and stopped again; the porter slumped into conversation with one of his counterparts, in French that Clover could not follow.
The press of people was frightening—a nervous crowd, shadowed eyes shifting like fish. The
Lusitania
, torpedoed by a German U-boat, had sunk in eighteen minutes. Twelve hundred lives lost. At the wicket the Cunard purser offered her a more desirable outside cabin for half the fare, because so many people had cancelled their bookings. But she had no money to spare. He winked at her. ‘Ah, well, you’ll have the cabin to yourself, at any rate, miss, and that’s the best of all.’
The porter shoved against the shoving; Clover clung to the trunk. Pressed up against the rope at the water’s edge, she could smell the river and the planking stained with oil. The dark ship rose vertical above them. Between the boat and the pier was a narrow strip of greenish air; far below, green-black water with an oil slick on it, and a dank slopping noise she could hear even through the shouting of the crowd. Clover stared into the black and green, down to where the water caught the lamps and swayed like oil in a jar. If she fell between the dock and the ship, she would be crushed or drowned or merely trapped until the ship had gone, and her chance gone with it.
But the rope held and she felt her well-known trunk beneath her glove. She was not afraid. In another quarter of the globe Victor would meet her in London, where there was a high brick house and a wall, and pavement stones along the street. The air would be sweet. A pear tree in the garden and Victor doing scales, birds singing in the darkness.
The porter cried
hup!
It was their turn to climb the gangway. He set his shoulder and pushed the trunk. Clover went beside it up into the hulk of the ship, ready to cross the Atlantic, a blue map spiked with German submarines and danger.
But there was kindness in the world, too. Her assigned door opened to reveal an outside cabin, rather than an inside one. The purser had
switched her after all. She stepped over the high metal threshold, shut herself into the tiny cell, and lay on the bunk, vibrating gently in time with the unthinkable engine, all alone.
A Prodigy
At the end of their first week in Qu’Appelle, Aurora walked down to the clinic with Mabel to have the baby weighed and checked for various deficiencies, of which he had none. A healthy boy, perhaps a little early, was the verdict. The stern district nurse, Miss Peavey, broke into a gap-toothed smile: ‘Impatient to get here!’
Same teeth as Eleanor Masefield, same square forehead, but how nice this woman was, how well at ease in the world. Seeing the likeness took away some of the smart that had lasted all this time. Aurora wondered for an instant how Jimmy fared in New York, but Avery swam stomach-down on the white flannel sheet, trying to lift his head by furiously raising his eyebrows—far too early! a prodigy!—and that other life receded again.
A young Indian woman came in the door bringing a breeze with her, three leggy girls following and a bright snapping-eyed boy in her arms. One of the little girls darted over to look at Avery and touched his cheek. Miss Peavey looked quickly at Aurora, but Aurora put out a hand and touched the girl’s cheek, saying, ‘Pretty!’
Uncle Chum took Aurora out to the veranda after supper that evening and told her kindly that he and Elsie would be very happy to keep Avery with them, should she feel it urgent to return to her sister. ‘He’s a dear little chappie, and it’s good for Mabel to have the occupation,’ Chum said.
Aurora looked back through the French doors to Mama, frail in one corner of a sofa, lips moving in a mumbling song as she sat with Avery tucked into her stiff right arm.
On the Moon
Bella lay in the upper berth, behind cloistering Pullman curtains, and looked at the Belle Auroras publicity photo she’d stuck into her dressing-case lid, now that she and Nando had a new set.
Clover: straight nose, narrow face soft-rounding at the chin. Patient eyes. Too frail to travel alone. Only of course she would stay with Victor’s mother or that mad guru. Victor! Who could stand to live with his oddness all the time? He was like oysters: interesting, but not for every dinner. Unlike Nando, her daily bread. Fitz Mayhew had been rib steak, underdone; and Jimmy, champagne.
The cable from Aurora was tucked under the photo. Bella fished it out and read again:
CANNOT LEAVE MAMA YET. CARRY ON WITHOUT ME
.
WRITE SOON
.
Was that a promise that Aurora would write soon, or an order:
write to me soon?
Bella had answered by return, wiring money as well. But no letter had found her yet. The train wobbled on through the night, without her other souls, her sisters. How can one live all alone? Nando was no help, in a state of perpetual nerves about his dad.
Too hot in this berth. Nando’s mother in the berth below did not like the window cracked, and would fret if Bella turned over too many times. Myra had turned out to be considerable trouble: wistful and stubborn, only wanting Nando. Her ethereal face masked a hungry spirit, and no friendliness on Bella’s part could satisfy her. Nando was kept on the hop all the time, and Bella too—if she would not do to
talk
to, she served very well to fetch tea and run baths in the hotels.
Bella stared up at the dented ceiling cloth, feeling straitjacketed in the berth. Maybe Joe was kept in one of those canvas jails, in his sanatorium. If Papa had gone to the san when he was so ill, he would have been, because he was
non compos mentis
, the doctor had said. But Mama had kept him home, however sad and wild he became. For the first time
in ages Bella thought of Harry in his coffin, and Papa, and then the old thought followed that she too would be dead soon enough, lying under a low roof, under the creaking weight of earth.
Think of the prop moons instead. She sang on the golden moon now, a step up in the world. Nando had the silver. Myra on the green-cheese moon had not worked; her dreary delivery sent the whole number flat. The green moon was baggage, but no more trouble than the car. They had a big hit with
Bella’s New Car
. Pantages had taken them on—at a reduced rate, of course, as everything always went, but Nando’s booking agent said they’d still got a whacking good deal, seven-fifty a week to split between them, which amounted to three hundred each, once the expenses of touring the larger rig came off the top. Her grouch-bag was full to bursting—enough to send pots of money on to Aurora and Mama, and to Clover, if she needed it. Bella turned her face into the mingy Pullman pillow. Day after tomorrow was her sixteenth birthday. Nando would not remember. It would be shoddy to remind him. Aurora might think of her, if she was not too taken up with the baby. Clover would remember, on the ocean, as long as her ship was not sunk by Germans like the
Lusitania
. But it would not be, it would not.
Bella turned, her nightgown twisting into a shroud.
After a while she turned again, carefully, and pushed the curtain back to inspect the corridor. Nobody. She slipped her shoes on and manoeuvred down from the berth. The lower berth curtain did not stir.
Moving quickly down the corridor, she let herself through the connecting door (a burst of juddering noise and shaking, a rush of night air) and into the next carriage, where Nando’s berth was—he had a lower, thank heavens, with an open curtain and empty berth above him. She undid the snap and slid her hand in to pat his face.
‘Wha—!’ he said, huffing and snorting.
She had woken him. Serve him right, being so dozy. She swung herself in, and the curtain shut, in a jiff. He jumped and bumped his head on the upper bunk, but that did not matter. ‘Shh!’ she said.
‘What are you doing? Go back to your berth!’
Where was the boy who had kissed her in the tunnel of the Empress when they were children?
‘I wanted to be with you.’ She put her hand on his cheek in the twilight of the berth.
The moon was somewhere above the train, not visible but shining sometimes on the little ponds flashing by the window. Nando searched for his watch and held it to the window, tilting it impatiently to find the light. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ he said, giving up.
‘Don’t you want me here? Don’t you want to cuddle?’
‘No!’ He sounded very angry.
‘Don’t you love me?’
‘No!’ He caught her arms and shook her, but not like his father shook him. ‘You can’t do this, it’s not decent. Kisses are one thing but this—you must wait till we’re married.’
‘Will we be married?’ Bella was smiling in the dark; he did too love her.
‘No.’ He was hard-hearted. ‘I was dreaming! Why did you wake me up?’
‘Don’t make me go back, Nandy, it’s cold and I’m lonely.’
‘I’ve my dad to think of, and you’re too young to know what you’re doing anyhow.’
She started to cry, soft as a cat; he believed her, and opened the blanket. He thought he was the only one who could pretend! Much more comfortable under the blanket, even if he would not pet her or be sweet. He was so prickly. His father, and worry, had made him very ill-tempered.