She felt a fretful, pestering hunger for company, a loneliness as grey as the November evening. Restless and not at all tired, instead of turning in to the Nortonia, she walked down towards Mrs. Kay’s hoping to catch East still at cards in the parlour; it was only just past midnight. She did love East, and he liked her too, however brisk he might be.
Everyone knew Verrall loved Aurora, but maybe East could like
her
best—he liked so many girls, why not her most of all? She was no longer a child, after all. Perhaps he would come back to the Nortonia with her, just this once.
A fast clip down cold, echoey pavement warmed her. Through hedge-grown back streets she arrived at Mrs. Kay’s from the side and could see, across the grass, the lighted square of East’s and Verrall’s window—not asleep, then.
No, there was East in his shirt-sleeves moving about. Verrall stood behind him, brushing a coat with careful strokes. It was like the picture screen. Bella stood watching.
Taking off his shirt, his chest vulnerable and thin in the lamplight, East laughed at something Verrall had said. Just quietly, a joke between the two of them. Verrall wore a grin of calm pleasure, having pleased his friend. He came to the window—he would see her watching.
No, he turned back, hand on the curtain, to say something, and East came forward and laid his hand on Verrall’s neck. An easy gesture. But it came to Bella, watching them, that East was Verrall’s, and Verrall East’s.
That it had always been so, whatever nonsense East might spout about imaginary ladies, whatever bonbons he might dole out.
Verrall pulled the curtain across.
Bella turned and made her way back through empty streets to the hotel.
Suffit
Victor had been wounded at the Somme. In November the official letter came, before any word from Victor. Both Clover and Madame stood for a long while in the gloomy front hall, trying to read the telegram. Three heads close together in the hall mirror when Clover raised her eyes. Madame’s dark little head—how fond she had become of it—and Harriet’s, remarkably similar.
‘Wait,’ Clover said, and stepped across to push the brass light switch. Before she could return to the paper, Madame had read it and fainted flat on the worn carpet.
Clover read it for herself and then sat down beside Madame, back against the wall and legs out in front of her, still holding Harriet. It was a relief, in a way, that it said
wounded in action
. That it had come, the thing she knew would be coming.
Harriet climbed off her lap and patted Madame’s face, saying, ‘Dama! Dama!’
In January 1917, Victor was sent to a London hospital, his leg badly infected. The pins the field surgeons had inserted to hold his leg together were causing a great deal of pain; the swelling was terrible to see, and the scar livid. Clover went to Wandsworth Hospital every day, a complicated trip involving two changes on the underground and several buses. Two hours, to be allowed ten minutes with Victor—‘until his condition improves to my liking,’ the ward sister said.
He was not always himself. He did not want to speak, but might return the pressure of her hand. Sometimes there would be a delay, and Clover counted the seconds until the faint squeeze came. The ward was full of men in worse case, very few in better. It was not a peaceful place, but they kept up the cheer—Victor’s next-cot neighbour (who’d lost one leg at the thigh and one at the knee, but was game as a pebble) told her they had ‘a few infectious spirits who rouse all the others: a very gay ward here,
very
gay.’ She was grateful to him for trying to rouse her own spirits.
Once they left Harriet with Heather Jakes, so Madame could come. But the visit led to three days’ hysterical weeping from Madame, and was clearly painful for Victor as well; they did not repeat the experiment.
Slowly, in snatches, he began to talk. One day as Clover bent over to kiss his marble face he said, ‘I can’t—’ She stayed bent over his bed, close enough to hear. ‘Tell them—you’ll have to telegraph them. I can’t go back.’
‘All right,’ she said. As if it ever could be all right again.
For days he kept his eyes shut. The nurse, and later the doctor, assured Clover that there was nothing wrong with his eyes. So she thought perhaps he did not want to see her. She visited anyway. Weeks progressed; his leg went from one infection to another as they pondered taking it off, alternately threatening or promising to do so.
At home, Madame was frantic. She often woke Clover, and Harriet, screaming in the night; she denied having nightmares but called them visions. She had been ‘vouchsafed to know the possibilities’ and Victor was not,
not
, to return to the Front when his leg had been patched together. Walking the floor with Harriet (who cried constantly these days, a colicky stomach or teething or the accumulating strain of everyone around her), Clover tried to reassure Madame—but the only reassurance she had in her quiver was Victor’s leg, which seemed so bad to her that he would never walk on it again.
‘Suffit!
’ Madame shrieked, finally. ‘I will speak to Gali.’
After the Ball
Lewis often drove out with Dr. Graham, who found distraction in puzzling out new ways to tempt Mama into using her reluctant right side. Lewis always brought something for Mabel, a new book of poems or a bottle of Pelikan ink, hard to obtain these days, for her letters; cigars for Chum; something sweet for Aunt Elsie; a toy for Avery.
‘Christmas every day,’ Aurora said, watching him hand out presents.
She wanted Lewis to come, she found his visits energizing; she wished he would never come again. Each time he reawakened in her some vague dream of a peaceful life, an honourable husband. She had even mooned over Lewis’s nice brick house—and that made her truly angry with herself—when Uncle Chum pointed it out one day in town.
In January, Lewis came for dinner and found Dr. Graham already in the parlour. Mama had Avery on display there, entertaining Uncle Chum and the doctor with his precocious tricks; she had been demonstrating Avery’s command of the naval jig. Hands on hips, Avery followed Mama’s beat, surprisingly controlled for a child not yet two. Mama motioned Aurora to dance with him and they did an exhibition waltz: step-two-three, twirl together, twirl apart, around the room as Mama sang,
‘After the ball is over, after the break of dawn …’
Mabel looked in from the kitchen, hair curled into tendrils by the heat of the stove. Aurora left off dancing and went to help her, but Mabel saw Lewis there and shooed Aurora back to the parlour.
Newly returned from a Christmas trip to Winnipeg, Lewis had brought a stack of sheet music for Aurora. He handed the pile to her with some diffidence, saying he’d asked for the newest songs in the shop. She was delighted with the gift, and looked through the sheets at once.
The third sheet down was
You’d Be Surprised!
—the cover a ravishing photo of Bella in a pink-sashed dress, powdering her nose with an arch sideways glance to the reader.
‘It is Bella!’ Aurora cried. ‘My sister!’
Lewis came to look more closely. ‘She doesn’t resemble you,’ he said—as if disputing that they could be sisters.
Looking up quickly, Aurora saw that he was disturbed. ‘Does the photograph offend you?’ she asked. It was a very demure dress, compared to most.
‘It is vulgar, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They have tinted the photograph with too vivid a colour. Nothing like you.’
Aurora laughed. ‘No, no, that’s Bella! She was probably brighter in real life.’
Mama came to see, and took the sheet. She seemed to be about to speak, then lifted the paper to touch Bella’s photograph to her cheek. Aurora put her arm around Mama and kissed her soft hair. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘She will come to see us soon. I’ll write again.’ She turned to take Mama up to their room.
Lewis was watching her, unsmiling.
At the stairs, seeing that Mama had the banister railing, Aurora looked back, her voice pitched to him alone, not even angry.
‘You would not be judging my sister, would you?’
Mama had stopped on the stairs; she kept her face resolutely turned away, but Aurora thought she was listening.
‘My father the schoolmaster had some difficulty with my mother’s life in vaudeville,’ Aurora said to Lewis. ‘I wouldn’t stomach that for an instant, in anyone I respected or whose respect I valued.’
For some while after that, Lewis did not visit.
Like the Rose
As Bella headed north on the long leg into Canada, Pantages headed to Seattle, to take his wife across-country, scouting for theatres to swallow up. He gave Bella a diamond brooch and signed her six-month contract as a solo artiste, till July 1917: a thousand a week for two comic numbers and one straight.
So she was rich. Surprising how flat she felt.
Then East & Verrall—disturbed by recent talk of the United States entering the war after all—announced they were stepping into an Australian tour that Julius and Sybil had had booked years ahead, but of course could not fulfill. Verrall felt they should not leave Julius behind; but East was heart-hardened.
‘We’ve carried him more than a year, to what avail? He doesn’t want to buck up, he wants to lie down in the road and die. Time to wash our hands and let him—he’s on Pan-time all the way to Edmonton till his contract runs out in May. And don’t think, Bella my girl, we’re leaving you in charge of him, because that is not the case.’
Well, they were. Somebody would have to look out for him. Julius was eating again, pretending to be on the mend, but offstage he was still alarmingly disconnected. And he’d never taken to her. Nobody loved her, in fact, but that did not matter.
Nothing mattered. People kept company with other people just because the thought occurred to them, and only innocents or bumpkins
followed the old society laws or worried, as Mama always had, about their virtue. Nobody cared, in the vaude world, if a person was pure. Perhaps it was different in the old days. But thinking about some things Mama had let slip, she did not think so. Drinking was nothing—she had a very hard head and could drink all evening and never feel it. Or if she felt it a bit, it did not matter. Only her stomach troubled her, and sometimes she had to lie in a warm bath for an hour before she could make herself dress for the theatre. She was no fatter, and she still had her monthlies, but everything hurt down there.
Anyway, off they went.
From the hotel in Butte, Bella wrote to Aurora and to Clover, whose shades she seemed to see on every street corner; she lay in bed till noon most days, staring at nothing. Julius gave her some reason to get up—he had to be hustled into dressing and got down for late breakfast or he would not eat, and if he missed another show from ‘illness’ she thought he might get canned. Without East and Verrall, he’d switched to an older number, the Sad Philosophizer. He ran with it for the rest of their tour, a lamentation on life and death that Bella could hardly bear to watch. The bit ended with a song,
Life’s a Funny Proposition After All
, which was enough to send you searching for the razor blades.
‘With all we’ve thought and all we’re taught
,
All we seem to know
Is we’re born, and live a while, and then we die.’
Spare me, she thought, the first time she watched. Julius pulled out all the stops: adding blue shadows to his own sunken eyes and cheeks, accenting his well-worn lines with carmine into a ghastly tragedy mask. But he was painfully funny, as the hobo preparing for bed in a fleabag hotel. His disrobing for bed was the peeling of his defences, the revealing of his starveling soul: horribly sad, and horribly entertaining. The melody unwound on drums and a squeezebox, as played by the monkey in the park. Julius prepared to lay him down to sleep as if for the last time, making the bed tenderly,
praying, finally setting a bud vase with a gorgeous full-blown rose on the upturned night-soil bucket. He pulled the sheet down gently, like a shroud, then heeled back, his shock making clear that the bed was alive with bugs. He brushed them one way and the other, counted, gave up counting, shook hands with a few of them and asked permission to join their party, and gingerly climbed in.
‘We’re born to die, but don’t know why, or what it’s all about
,
Young for a day, then old and gray;
Like the rose that buds and blooms … and fades and falls away
,
Life’s a very funny proposition, anyway.’
Last of all, he pulled a concealed string, and the petals fell from the rose. And then the lights went out.
Though Bella resisted, and hated him for it, the number caught her every time. Why do we die? Papa; Harry, who had faded from her memory until he was just a flash of blue jacket running up the road; Sybil. She hated death and knew her own would come too soon. So did everyone’s. It gave her a deep trembling in her legs, wanting to see Aurora and Clover, Mama and Avery—and Clover’s Harriet—but she must keep working, to keep them all afloat. Maybe next summer, maybe when her Pantages contract ended in June.
Loneliness swamped her, in the darkness of the wings, but there was no one to joke or give her a candy or have a good time with. She waited for Julius to come offstage, and she said
left ’em gasping in the aisles with that one, you killed, you’re a marvel
—all the things he needed to have said, that Sybil had once said for him. Then she walked him up the stairs to his dressing table, and ran down again in time for her own number. It was all a very funny proposition, after all.
Bright Dark Red
Julius died in Edmonton.
Bella had got used to money. For their two weeks in April she’d booked
a suite at the MacDonald, the limestone chateau on the bluff above the river where the Galician immigrants had lived like bears in their caves (it was of them that Bella always thought when Clover mentioned Galichen). Very handy for the Pantages. The suite was huge. Bella and Julius rattled in it like two dry beans in a can; the bathroom was a palace of marble.