The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,126

there were steep, five pairs of rackety narrow flights, ten landings to the attics—where they found Galichen waiting with freshly muddied boots, in which he stomped and slid downstairs so that they had all to do again. There was some lesson in there, but Clover decided she was too asleep, or too sensible, to see it.

There had been no news since the enlisting letter.

Mama stirred again in the bed and propped herself up on one pointed white elbow, smoothing a hand across her chest. She stared at the rain-smeared window, her hair crazy with curl-papers from the night before, half of them come undone.

‘I’ve irritated poor Fitz,’ she confided, picking at her lip with one unsteady hand. ‘I must go in today and see if I can mend our fences … Bees in the caragana, and a stone leaning sideways in the churchyard. Collapsed because of the rain, it had flooded out the grave, you know. That would mean a change of scene.’

Mama always told her dreams in the morning now, as she searched for warnings. Clover put the kettle on again and brought a warm towel and Mama’s wrapper, wondering if she ought to tell Aurora how unsteady Mama was these days. Her rough, misshapen feet peeped out of the bedclothes; Clover slipped carpet-shoes on them, and together they made their way down the hall to the bathroom.

‘You ought not to spend so much time with Victor, dear Clover. It is not suitable,’ Mama said, as Clover closed the bathroom door on her.

‘I am nearly eighteen, Mama. I have not seen Victor for two months, I don’t know why you’re saying this.’

‘Mooning over him. Just that one must be so careful—think of Julius, the other day, and how the least suspicion can destroy—You do not know how harsh the world can be.’

Clover thought that, actually, she did. Through the bathroom door, Mama had gone back to dream-recounting. ‘One stone leaning, another crashed down … Moss grown into the letters, a missive gone astray.’

Papa’s gravestone, she must be thinking of, or Harry’s. Clover ran her hands over her face. The rain had got into her head.

Flood

It rained and rained and rained. A percussion pattered under all the numbers in the matinee. Water dripped from weak places in the roof, and steamed up from the pitifully sparse audience, who sat drying in the communal warmth. The wet-dog smell was terrific.

Between shows Teddy the stage manager took a couple of hands up onto the roof to sweep the water from the worst places that had pooled and begun to leak; wherever they pushed the water over, the white stone front of the theatre stained grey. Clover watched Mayhew stalk the aisles, directing one or other of the cleaning women to towel up wet patches or blot a seat down. Morose, distracted, he failed to respond at all to Mama’s damp curtsy and trill of greeting, after she’d ventured out for buns from the Whyte Avenue tea room. Mama scuttled back up to the dressing room, Clover following; Mama found her needle again by jamming it into her thumb, but did not curse. The room was silent in the humming hive of the Muse, each sister locked in her own thoughts and Mama too anxious to sing.

But East and Verrall brightened the day when they knocked on the door, fresh in on the northbound Flyer from Montana. They’d come in early to replace the Ninepins, to start that night, although Friday was the usual bill-change day. Bella shrieked and jumped up to tell them the true story of the sacking of Joe and the others, which shocked Verrall.

East professed to have seen it coming, of course. ‘Can’t blame Mayhew,’ he said. ‘Joe isn’t hardly fit for human consumption. He’s a brute and treats that boy like a rented mule, and the sooner they start losing bookings, the faster Nando’s going to jump ship.’

‘He cannot leave his mother,’ Flora said. ‘He is too loyal and good a boy for that.’

East glowered at her, and said pointedly, ‘She made her bed, and has lain on it these many years of her own choosing. What’s the boy to do, submit to endless beatings? Kill his old dad?’

Clover intervened before they could brangle, asking how the golf sketch had shaped up. East clapped his hands. ‘Capital, capital, we’re ready to try it out tomorrow if you’re game, Belle of All the World? Verrall has your sides—where are they, Verrall? Don’t say you left them in the train