The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,109
He was so lonely, so sad—and his aunt, playing Sylvia’s aged mother in the melodrama, was a dried-up prune with no understanding of the artistic temperament, prone to scold.
Her heart squeezing, Bella stepped closer to Alberick and put a hand on his sleeve, meaning to wish him good luck.
‘Don’t!’ he exclaimed in a fierce whisper. ‘I must not be touched!’
‘Oh!’ she breathed. ‘I am sorry.’
He stared at her, all the fervour of his glare bent in hatred. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Of course! I only meant—’
She broke off. The stage manager had held up a hand to still their voices. Alberick hissed, his face jutting close to hers, ‘Don’t mean anything! Don’t come near me!’
Goodness. Bella swallowed, even that sounding loud. She nodded, not wanting him to have an utter tantrum, and backed away and out to the stairs. He was not romantic at all, but had something wrong with him, she thought.
Aurora came dashing offstage and hurried Bella in front of her. ‘Quick, quick! Oh quick!’ she cried in a quiet panic. ‘You are not dressed!’
Bella ran.
No Veil Between Them
In the applause that followed the violinist, Clover shifted from foot to foot, her lovely new slippers not quite broken-in to comfort yet. Aurora was pale but calmer; Bella (rushed into costume and pinked-up quickly in the cheeks) irrepressible but stoppered, like a shaken ginger-beer bottle. Clover let herself rest within their arms for an instant. They would be all right—headlining only differed from opening by how warm the audience was, how willing to be happy. She wished Gentry could be here to see them.
The music began, Florian’s Song. Hands clutched, on they went, right foot first, in the chain-step of the village maidens, ‘Ah, s’il est dans votre village …’ The backdrop was charming and they were charming, and the audience was led into the French countryside. When the dirndl skirts flew off as they went round a maypole, and they transformed into Moulin Rouge petticoat girls with that funny-sad song Mon Homme, the crowd went there too. Clover and Aurora slid off stage left, where Mama was waiting for them with their quick change into the Lakmé costumes. They could look over their shoulders, in between ducking and fastening, to see Bella still translating Mon Homme, making it both sadder and funnier than she ever had before, maintaining a hint of a French accent in the English version.
‘Two or three girls has he that he likes as well as me
But I love him!
I don’t know why I should—he isn’t true—he beats me, too—
What can I do?’
She will be very good someday, Clover thought, letting Mama swing the pearl-beaded Lakmé dress over her tiny hoop. She already is!
Bella drooped off stage right, betrayed and downtrodden but with some inexhaustible sprig of optimism still springing in her gait, and the lights swirled through a transformation.
Scrim forest-panels descended to the cello-swoops of Delibes, and revealed a Brahmin princess and her maid-servant, gathering flowers and singing the interweaving, looping, many-petalled duet—Aurora finally at rest on the wings of this absurdly pretty song, Clover happy to serve her: the two of them able to sing to each other with no veil between them, as there had been ever since the wedding night.
‘Sous le dôme épais où le blanc jasmin,
Ah! descendons ensemble!’
Their voices, sweeter in tandem than they could ever be apart, twined on as they descended, together, together … The flowering lights dimmed, and the audience took that priceless moment to pause and remember, and then broke into a wave of applause.
As the wave went on and on, the girls were rushed back onstage for another bow, all three of them—they had no encore ready, and in the fluster of the moment did not dare return to one of their non-French old favourites in case Mayhew might disapprove, so they merely bowed again, apologetically, and danced off, and the pictures began.
A conquest, Mayhew declared. He appeared in their dressing-room doorway within minutes of the final curtain, bearing in one hand a bottle of champagne, and in the other silver-wrapped boxes for each of the girls.
Mama came close behind him, weeping a little with the excitement—her girls, their first night as headliners! She admired the pretty coral beads that Bella pulled out of her box, and the pearls curled in Clover’s, and gasped at Aurora’s box: diamonds set in small flower clusters, pretty as falling water when Mayhew clasped the necklace round Aurora’s neck.
The crowd descended, and Mayhew drew Aurora out into the