The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,127

or I will simply—’

But Verrall produced them, and they retreated to the Ninepins’ empty dressing room across the hall to run the sketch through pronto. Clover could hear them through the flimsy walls: Verrall attempting to teach East, who had no idea how to hold a club.

VERRALL: No, no, now take the stick again in your hand and I’ll show you … you swing back like this—

EAST: Like this? (smashing sound as the club connects) A pause.

VERRALL: (very controlled) What are you going to do with that club now?

EAST: Hit around corners?

VERRALL: Stand over here—no, here, in front of me. I want to examine your form.

EAST: Examine my form?

VERRALL: Yes, now I’ll just stand behind you, and put my arms around yours like this, and my hands on your—

EAST: Hey! (smashing sound as the club connects)

VERRALL: (yelping) Hey! What did you do that for?

EAST: You don’t know me well enough for that yet. I think you need someone more—female—to teach! Hey, miss! miss!

Bella was a young golf widow searching for her husband with a bent club of her own. She told East and Verrall the whole sad story:

BELLA: My Archie played golf yesterday—he came home two hours late! He confessed the whole sordid tale: he said that a beautiful lady had jumped out of the bushes on the eleventh tee, dressed just as she came delivered from her Maker. She ravished him for hours, and he did not have the strength to refuse her, and he was very sorry.

EAST: He made a clean breast of it, in fact.

BELLA: He did indeeeeed.

VERRALL: And did you forgive him?

BELLA: Ha! I know him far too well for that—I hit him over the head with the rolling-pin. Lady, indeed! The wretch had played another nine holes!

Her mama had told her that she must take up golf herself, if she wanted to preserve her marriage, and she was there for a lesson. Verrall taught her about golf, and East taught her about love, ending in a completely ridiculous song, the lyrics of which descended to a thousand rapid repetitions of the word love.

Clover continued her work, putting Aurora’s hair up and tidying the dressing room, but it seemed to her that the song echoed and echoed in her own idiotic heart, love love love love love—and no one to answer it. No letter from Victor.

And now the rain had got into her eyes.

Lot’s Wife

At the eight-thirty show, the girls pranced on for Spring Song to the basso accompaniment of a colossal clap of thunder. At least, Bella thought it was thunder—

But as everyone in the house looked up, the middle rows of the audience were stung with a sliding shower of water. Then a shining sheet—then the roof parted, through the centre, and a waterfall fell through.

Aurora and Clover had raised their wreaths for Bella to duck through, and they all stopped still, stone statues of the Muses.

The audience began screaming, starting with the people directly under the waterspout. Luckily it was a paltry house again, and there was plenty of room to run up the aisles.

The bandleader in the pit turned when he saw the stricken look on the girls’ faces. He whipped his stick up in the air and shouted, ‘Out, boys!’ and the orchestra grabbed their instruments and hightailed it, the sudden ceasing of the music lost in the stampeding noise of the water still pouring down, and the ominous and quite dreadful shrieking of the ceiling.

The sidelights in the house went out, but the stage lights, wired separately in a new-built section, stayed on, so they could see it happen: the roof caving in. First the pressed-tin panels sagged, and a few drooped to the seats; then the great metal span bent down and down, and then it snapped, with another hideous wrenching noise, and more of the ceiling came down, in a terrific rush of smoking dust and water. The older girls huddled over Bella, but it did not occur to them to run. Teddy and his hands had come out to see the devastation. The stage was filling with silent gawping faces, turned audience themselves. The balcony emptied fast, but people were still streaming up the side aisles, some looking back like Lot’s wife, then yanked along by their friends.

‘Playing to the haircuts,’ Aurora said, and the other two could not help but laugh. That’s what was said when your act was so bad people left in the middle.

The fire curtain never did come down, as it was supposed