the other bedroom door.
All this felt unreal. Ever since coming to Calgary, none of the days had felt real. They’d had no work to do, perhaps that was it. Fitz was unbuttoning his jacket, loosening his tie, pulling it off. The lamp was still on—would he leave it on?
He turned the mantel lamp down low. The firelight caught his legs, but left the rest of him in darkness. ‘That mother of yours will be snoring in a moment. She drank enough of the champagne.’
Aurora did not like him saying that. He had drunk enough of it himself.
‘Come, come to bed,’ he said, and then, ‘I am sorry. She’s a treasure. Only your family is a bit more present than I expected. And I will have to bunk in here with you tonight.’
‘I thought that was what one did,’ she said. ‘On a wedding night. Bunk in.’
He stopped, in the act of pulling his suspenders off his shoulders. Looked at her in the lowered lamplight, as if trying to make out what she meant.
She felt some danger, some amusement, in being so powerful. He was angry, she knew, because of the imbalance between them. He was too old. She was beyond him, except for his position and his money. This was no way to go about the beginning of being married.
She had one hand on the bedpost. She leaned forward, letting herself swing around in a slow arc, and pulled his head towards her, to lay her cheek against his. She could give him pleasure, and let him believe himself loved. Since what was love anyway, but a balance sheet of what one respected the other for, what one could do for the other, what one needed from the other? Perhaps a jot of the mysterious thing that caused attraction, but that was not the whole. Even with Jimmy the Bat, attraction was only part of why she liked him. He was a good hoofer, that was a great part of it—and Mayhew, oh, Mayhew was an excellent manager.
‘Will you kiss me first?’ she asked him. She knew she could make herself a little drunk with kisses.
It was only her body, nothing she could not stand.
Agamemnon
Flora went out to the sitting room for another brandy, and sat on the settee reading the Bible by firelight, the only book to hand. Another small brandy. She did not know how Arthur could have done it, could have left them, how he could have been so cowardly or so deep in despair as not to think of what his daughters would do without him. That ugly Old Testament father sacrificing his son on the hill in the thicket, that’s what she thought about, while she read the Psalms in the sitting room on the wedding night. But it was her own father she was thinking of, killing her before he went off to war. No, that was Agamemnon. In the other room she heard panting, shoving. No noise at all from Aurora. She never cried as a baby either.
The champagne and the brandy told on her. Before the sounds stopped, Flora had fallen asleep on the settee in the last of the firelight.
A White Knife
Clover found Mama on the settee an hour later. She covered her with an extra blanket from the chest, and sat watching her slackened face, shining a little in moonlight, now the snow had stopped falling. She has tried her best with us all, Clover thought, and she does not drink very often.
Then Aurora crept out, thin as a white knife in her shift, and padded to the bathroom. She stood in the middle of the tiled floor until Clover came and helped her into the bath. Her legs were shaking. Clover poured hot water over her head, down over her face, the silk hair sleek around her shoulders like otter’s fur, and they both tried not to look at Aurora’s poor underneath where pinkish blood kept seeping even after she was washed.
Clover dried her with a large, clean hotel towel. She braided her hair, wrapped her in the peignoir from her scant trousseau, kissed her cheek and went quietly back to bed. After a moment Aurora followed, sliding in on the other side of Bella, warm and soft. Bella sighed and turned on her side to make room, and the three of them curled together until dawn.
Then Clover watched Aurora glide back to the other room, to lie beside her husband as he woke.
But Can She Do This?
The snow