The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,187

making her unfit for work. Avery’s hair was growing in, bright gold. His fingers worked on her breast, muddling her thoughts, and they fell asleep together, as they did most afternoons at Katepwa.

A King of Vaude

Bella lay watching, in an unlucky tilt of the dressing-table mirror, Mr. Pantages’s heels pushing backwards against the polished bed-foot, his bandy legs in boots. He hadn’t even taken off his boots. Black pants flurried around his ankles, caught his legs, tangled them, all lard fatness and the wool serge wrinkling. And in between his gasping—a sow searching out something rotten. She did not believe that Mayhew would have been so piggy, but comforted herself that Mayhew was only a faker, not a true King of Vaude.

Pantages went ahhh! in one high-pitched squeal and then he slacked, he slumped, he pushed again, groaning and kicking the bed, and then he huffed, like the train engine coming into Paddockwood and stopping—you know that lurch is coming, and it comes.

Although it hurt more than she had expected, she did not make any complaint. All that lather and steam out of him and not a note from her.

That was that, then. Bella closed her eyes.

In the morning, waking with the sun spiking through a tear in the blind, her first thought was that she’d lived through it. How perfect a coincidence it was, that the sun would rise in that exact trajectory to blind her. Her eyes were sore and sandy from the night before. His leg was heavy over hers: girly-soft white skin, massive in the thigh, dwindling to a hard skinny shin. She supposed that she must love him or something, to notice that. But no, she hated him in fact and never wished to see his pasty face again. And she would have to smile or get cancelled, and she had East and Verrall to think of.

This was a no-good comedown for her. She was not the Belle Auroras any more.

She slid out from under Pantages—no reaction, he seemed unconscious rather than asleep—and padded into the marble temple of the bathroom, turning the brass lock. Mirrors filled the wall about the bath. This place had tone. Her body looked the same. If she pulled in her belly she could look quite pretty, rounded at the hip and bust but with a little bird waist, almost like Aurora. Perhaps she was going to have a baby now too; it could happen so suddenly. She felt stupid and also uncomfortable and did not want to identify exactly why. You do what you have to do, Mama had said. But where Mama had been was a vacant space Bella could not bear to think about. She sat for a while on the tiles in the clean morning light. It would be nice to cry.

Pantages took her to luncheon; then he flicked her on the chin and left, heading for St. Louis and San Francisco. What was the point, Bella wondered, if he was just going to drop her? Maybe she was not very good at that sort of thing, or she was not pretty enough.

Well, cat piss to that. She gave herself a good scolding, and decided to ignore how pretty or not-pretty she was from now on. She was different from Aurora, she never would be beautiful that way, but she could fool people into wanting her. The trick was not to let them follow through.

She had to write to Aurora, but she used a postcard, to make it short.

We are staying put here in Chi for a while loonger becasue Mistrr Pantages says so.

LOVE YOUR BELLA

The Tiny Knot

Clover managed to get hired as a dancer in a revue at the Tivoli: the show was not merely shabby but off-colour, a tired old Saucy Soubrette kind of gig. But she made a friend of the sole remaining comic on the bill, a wizened fellow named Felix Quirk. Perhaps because he reminded her of Julius, she told Quirk that she wanted to try her hand as a monologuist, and he offered to call a few pals and get her an audition. He was a haggard but functioning drunk who had been rejected for service. The theatre, indeed the whole of England, was full of drunks, to Clover’s eyes. The streets as she walked home after the theatre were lousy with semi-conscious men, often in khakis, tottering from lamppost to lamppost, or being herded up drunk and disorderly by the police van. They were never troublesome to her, and