legs in cans of kerosene to stop the bugs invading nightly.
No hard feelings, tell Mayhew. He’s a hard man, but Dad’s head is harder than anything.
Spokane is just till November, then we’re booked straight to Christmas, so don’t be blue. Up to Winnipeg in January, two weeks at the Pantages, fine old Pan-time.
See you in the funny papers, and don’t forget that you are my, and I
your sweetheart,
N. DENT
Bella declared secret war on Mayhew from that moment.
And he was making Aurora miserable too. In the morning, as soon as Bella was sure Mayhew would have left for the Muse, she went up to the top floor to get her bee wings, leaving Clover to wake and dress Mama. She found Aurora still in the bedroom, her head down on the burl maple dressing table. Still in her nightgown, cloudy hair in a bad tangle.
Bella picked up the comb and began to work through it. Having to be gentle made her calmer, and she told Aurora about Nando’s letter, including the bit about Nando having no hard feelings. ‘But I do!’
‘Fitz is in trouble, Bell, it’s not—it’s not his real nature, to ditch them that way.’
‘What trouble?’ She pulled the comb through another long unknotted section.
‘Oh, too many things to say.’
Aurora bent her head to let Bella reach the last of the tangles, and to rest her forehead again on the cool glass protecting the wood. She spoke from within the dark shade her arm and head made. ‘He left a hotel bill as long as your arm in Helena, for which both the Placer and the Ackermans are chasing him, and another in Calgary only half paid. All those dinners.’
Bella whistled. She let the ends of Aurora’s hair curl around the comb, satin once again, and patted her neck.
‘You comb so well, with your light hands,’ Aurora said, turning her head to kiss Bella’s wrist. ‘He says it is perfectly justified, that everything was for the betterment of the theatres, even the wedding. All press is good press—you know what he says.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Yes.’
In the grey morning, rain drenching the windows, the bedroom was ugly, untidy. Tangled sheets on the floor. Bella began to set things in order again, ready for the maids to clean. She watched her sister lift her head and stare into the mirror, blank eyes making a cold assessment of her face; at least it was not the dumbstruck tragedy mask she’d been wearing when Bella came in.
Aurora opened a little pot and added a tinge of purplish ochre to one eyelid. ‘The thing is, he is not a scrupulous person.’
‘I know.’
‘I think he will make us all do a bunk in the night. Don’t tell Clover, it would make her unhappy.’
Bella nodded, coming to have her own eyes done. She spat into the little pot and stirred, then held out the mascara stick and leaned forward so Aurora could do her lashes.
‘Hold still,’ Aurora warned. She took the pin to separate the clotted lashes. ‘He is not precisely bad,’ she said, in a light, objective tone as she pricked and dabbed. ‘He just does not operate under the same code—he was trained by Ziegfeld, and he goes on the way they do there. For these Ackerman circuit types to be slandering him is pretty rich.’
‘They can’t slang anyone more than they’ve been slanged themselves,’ Bella agreed. She kept her head as still as marble.
Rain
Rain made the rooms at the Arlington cold, so that early October felt like November. Clover lit the gas fire and made tea before waking Mama. At first waking, as usual, Mama came back from the distance of her dreams, eyes moving frantically under tight-closed papery lids. ‘Mama,’ Clover said gently. ‘Mama, here is your tea.’
She watched as Mama’s eyes opened, rolled, trying for focus. She reached for a sip of tea and then pushed the cup away and turned back (bedsprings squeaking like a thousand baby mice) to catch at her dream, murmuring in a slurred, furred voice, ‘One more minute …’
Fire within, rain without, suited Clover’s mood. She sat at the window, rereading a letter from Victor about Galichen, the guru Victor’s parents had espoused. How he demanded unthinking obedience from his followers, and often gave them ridiculous or conflicting orders ‘to set their orderly brains at odds, so they might wake from what he calls their sleep.’ Once, Gali had made Victor’s parents the floor-washers at his tall, thin house in Ladbroke Grove, a part of London. The stairs