vanishing last. It was quieter in the hall then, so they could hear the slopping and brushing of the woman washing the lobby floor on her hands and knees behind them.
‘Well—off we go,’ Mama said. She made a complicated good-luck gesture, nipped at some fluff on Aurora’s sleeve and gripped Bella’s hand again, and they set off across the empty expanse of the hall. Their feet made no clatter at all on the shiny wooden floor, as Mama had taught them.
A stout man in a black coat stood mending a chair close to the stage. Mama stopped before him. ‘The Three Graceful Avery Girls are here to audition,’ she said, very haughty.
The man looked up at her, then at the girls. His black eyes shone in a long white tombstone face, and he looked them all over, staring the longest at Aurora, at the shine of her gold hair under the black hat, the huge velvet rose. Then he jerked his lipless mouth into a sideways, considering purse. ‘Be a while. Stove in the dressing room,’ he said. ‘Stan’ll fetch them when we’re ready.’
Mama nodded and led the girls to the left side of the stage, where a hidden door now stood ajar into a bare brick passage open to the stage and the back workings. A little drift of snow lay in the bright patch of light along the back of the stage, where the flies above had been opened to the sky. Twenty feet along, stairs led up on the right, to the stage; down on the left, to the cellar under the stage. Aurora would not touch the makeshift splintery railing with her new mauve gloves, but the other girls held tight, stumbling down the steep steps after Mama.
Someone shouted as they were descending—‘Maximilian! You’re up!’—and a skinny dark man rushed up the stairs, pushing past, each one at a time having to endure him, a smelly man carrying a birdcage and a box, and both those things banged into the girls but he murmured, Oh dear, oh so, so sorry, as he went, clearly in a panic, so they could not mind him.
Except that Mama said, ‘Oh! Never cross on the stairs!’ and stared up after him, frightened. This was a day for good luck.
On Our Uppers
At the bottom of the stairs was a close dark space. Mama found the door and Aurora went first, into a warm room glowing with light from the oil-stove and a lamp or two, a cozy room with benches set in front of tables lining the walls, mirrors showing a crowd of people—but half those people were themselves again, redoubled in the glass. Still, the room was crammed, and very warm, with a strong smell of heating oil.
‘Flora!’ A little shriek, and then a pink hand clapped to a round pink mouth. A woman waved from one of the benches and leaned forward—so small was the room—to pat at Mama’s arm urgently.
Mama peered through the glittering shadows, and then cried, in a whisper, ‘Sybil! Of all delightful things! Now this makes me much easier in my mind—and you as pretty as—’
The woman got up (but was not much taller standing up) and hugged Mama. She was wearing bright-spangled pink artificial silk, very full in the skirt, which brushed too near the stove. Her eyes were shiny black sequins in a doll’s face. ‘You are a thousand years older now, Flora, and so am I. And who are these with you? Are they your daughters?’
‘Aurora’—pulling her forward—‘Sixteen! But we say eighteen, of course, and here is Amelia, not even a year younger, we call her Clover, her papa’s pet name for her—Girls, this is Sybil Sutley, you’ll remember me speaking of. Where are you, Bella? Arabella, she’s the baby, now—thirteen, but sixteen, wink-wink, for the Gerry Society.’ Mama patted them into order as she spoke, adjusting Aurora’s hat around her face and pulling at the velvet flower’s petals.
‘And this is what came of your schoolmaster?’
‘Yes, the very same, and very sad—’ Mama broke off. She gritted her teeth and turned her face to one side, the palm of her small hand over her eyes and nose. An ugly gesture. Aurora turned to help, but Clover put an arm around Mama’s waist as she continued, ‘And my little Harry as well. But there, not now.’ Then Mama was upright again, and Clover slid back into the shadow by the dressing-screen.
Bella was edging away, too, Aurora saw. Bella hated to hear Mama say