The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,202
until the faint squeeze came. The ward was full of men in worse case, very few in better. It was not a peaceful place, but they kept up the cheer—Victor’s next-cot neighbour (who’d lost one leg at the thigh and one at the knee, but was game as a pebble) told her they had ‘a few infectious spirits who rouse all the others: a very gay ward here, very gay.’ She was grateful to him for trying to rouse her own spirits.
Once they left Harriet with Heather Jakes, so Madame could come. But the visit led to three days’ hysterical weeping from Madame, and was clearly painful for Victor as well; they did not repeat the experiment.
Slowly, in snatches, he began to talk. One day as Clover bent over to kiss his marble face he said, ‘I can’t—’ She stayed bent over his bed, close enough to hear. ‘Tell them—you’ll have to telegraph them. I can’t go back.’
‘All right,’ she said. As if it ever could be all right again.
For days he kept his eyes shut. The nurse, and later the doctor, assured Clover that there was nothing wrong with his eyes. So she thought perhaps he did not want to see her. She visited anyway. Weeks progressed; his leg went from one infection to another as they pondered taking it off, alternately threatening or promising to do so.
At home, Madame was frantic. She often woke Clover, and Harriet, screaming in the night; she denied having nightmares but called them visions. She had been ‘vouchsafed to know the possibilities’ and Victor was not, not, to return to the Front when his leg had been patched together. Walking the floor with Harriet (who cried constantly these days, a colicky stomach or teething or the accumulating strain of everyone around her), Clover tried to reassure Madame—but the only reassurance she had in her quiver was Victor’s leg, which seemed so bad to her that he would never walk on it again.
‘Suffit!’ Madame shrieked, finally. ‘I will speak to Gali.’
After the Ball
Lewis often drove out with Dr. Graham, who found distraction in puzzling out new ways to tempt Mama into using her reluctant right side. Lewis always brought something for Mabel, a new book of poems or a bottle of Pelikan ink, hard to obtain these days, for her letters; cigars for Chum; something sweet for Aunt Elsie; a toy for Avery.
‘Christmas every day,’ Aurora said, watching him hand out presents.
She wanted Lewis to come, she found his visits energizing; she wished he would never come again. Each time he reawakened in her some vague dream of a peaceful life, an honourable husband. She had even mooned over Lewis’s nice brick house—and that made her truly angry with herself—when Uncle Chum pointed it out one day in town.
In January, Lewis came for dinner and found Dr. Graham already in the parlour. Mama had Avery on display there, entertaining Uncle Chum and the doctor with his precocious tricks; she had been demonstrating Avery’s command of the naval jig. Hands on hips, Avery followed Mama’s beat, surprisingly controlled for a child not yet two. Mama motioned Aurora to dance with him and they did an exhibition waltz: step-two-three, twirl together, twirl apart, around the room as Mama sang, ‘After the ball is over, after the break of dawn …’
Mabel looked in from the kitchen, hair curled into tendrils by the heat of the stove. Aurora left off dancing and went to help her, but Mabel saw Lewis there and shooed Aurora back to the parlour.
Newly returned from a Christmas trip to Winnipeg, Lewis had brought a stack of sheet music for Aurora. He handed the pile to her with some diffidence, saying he’d asked for the newest songs in the shop. She was delighted with the gift, and looked through the sheets at once.
The third sheet down was You’d Be Surprised!—the cover a ravishing photo of Bella in a pink-sashed dress, powdering her nose with an arch sideways glance to the reader.
‘It is Bella!’ Aurora cried. ‘My sister!’
Lewis came to look more closely. ‘She doesn’t resemble you,’ he said—as if disputing that they could be sisters.
Looking up quickly, Aurora saw that he was disturbed. ‘Does the photograph offend you?’ she asked. It was a very demure dress, compared to most.
‘It is vulgar, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They have tinted the photograph with too vivid a colour. Nothing like you.’
Aurora laughed. ‘No, no, that’s Bella! She was probably brighter in real life.’