The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,131

rascal has decamped—merely frivolous! He’s a crook, that’s all.’

He poured himself a glass of whiskey and knocked half of it back.

‘Besides, he’d be a fool,’ he added. ‘Greatest beauty in vaudeville, why would he desert la belle Aurore for a previous marital error? Excess baggage, my dear, excess baggage.’

A Gig from a Pool Hall

As they sat in limbo, it snowed and snowed and snowed.

Used to this, the city dug in under a goose-feather blanket. Enough to drive you mad, Bella thought, when you had no work and had to stare at snow the live-long day. The furnace clanked through the building, loud as the elevator; pipes hissed and spat, and Bella discovered that if you whirled the radiator tap unwarily, a powerful stream of water hissed out and soaked your dress and burned your hand.

She was so glad they were leaving this stupid town. She had had no answer to her letters to Nando, so perhaps the Ninepins had not got to Seattle yet; or perhaps Joe had been thrown out of another gig. Nando ought to have written.

Glaring out the window, she decided that the real trouble was they did not yet know enough people in vaudeville. The only other person they knew was Jimmy the Bat, and he was in Winnipeg at the Pantages—the theatre where C.P. Walker, who had liked Aurora so well at Mayhew’s last dinner party, was the boss. Bella stared into the bald white field towards the ice-bound river, thinking about Jimmy’s face as he had stood talking to Aurora in the hall of the Calgary theatre. Then she put on her coat and boots.

Going down the stairs she met East and Verrall coming up, shaking snow from their bowler hats, dank hair sticking up in spikes where they had dashed the snow away.

‘You need better hats than that for this horrid winter,’ she said, laughing at them.

‘We need to be elsewhere!’ East shouted, and she hushed him, looking back to see if the apartment door would fly open and one of her sisters burst out to stop her going anywhere.

East and Verrall had leaped straight over to the Pantages, missing only one night’s work after the flood—they were employable anywhere. East could wangle a gig from a pool hall if need be. A funeral hall. She ought to have asked his advice earlier.

‘Come along,’ she said to East and Verrall. ‘I’m going to send a cable, and you’d like a walk.’

‘We just had a walk,’ East protested, but Verrall patted his (entirely flat) stomach and said he could use the exercise. They went back out into the snow-silenced street.

Dreadful Frozen City

Aurora had moved a cot down to the third floor and shoved Bella and Clover’s bed right against the wall to make room. She could not share the Murphy bed with Mama, who was spending longer and longer hours in bed, in a state of sherry-induced stupefaction. Better to be back in the room with her sisters. Everything was tranquil now. And something would come up. If she held to that, she could manage.

But her bone-china composure broke one night. She woke from her first fitful sleep and lay in the little bed, choked by her nightgown, remembering Mayhew’s hand moving down her side from shoulder to arm, slipping over her flank and down her legs, the bulk of him always behind her. The thousand countless humiliations of lying with him and never being loved, or known, only being of use to him, all mocked and redoubled now by the hopeless absurdity of missing him.

She broke into painful tears, seeing with eye-pricking clarity that Mayhew was gone for good, was a rascal. Worse: that she had dragged her sisters and Mama into the muck and was wholly responsible for them being stranded in this dreadful frozen city, probably forever, until they were obliged to find work as domestics.

When Clover, waking, slid into the cot and put her arms around her, she whispered all of that, unable to find the breath to speak out loud.

‘No, no,’ Clover said, pulling her fingers gently through Aurora’s hair to comfort her. ‘We are all much better off, even stuck here penniless, than we were in Montana. We ought not to be moving southwards, we need to go East, to where things really matter in vaude. To Chicago, and New York. Come, let me braid your hair for you, and you will sleep better.’

Aurora clasped her sister’s narrow body close, remembering her wedding night, and how Clover had