The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,221

Mrs. Gower clapped, raising her hands to show her appreciation.

‘Huzzah! Yes, but I don’t know who will plaster my corns for me now … It may be some time before he sees these shores again, so let’s show him what he’s got in store for him in gay Paree!’

Music wound out again, a clarinet taking the lead, pinging chimes. East trilled, ‘By the banks of the Seine live girls so beautiful …’ And here came the lovely Saskatchewan girls, with a poignant refrain, ‘Flow, river, flow, down to the sea,’ and then more of the thrills of French life, absurd but entertaining. Mrs. Gower found herself keeping time with one heavily ringed finger.

‘When you live by the Seine you suffer awfully

If you refrain from enjoying, lawfully,

the sweet gay life in a gay sweet way …’

Backstage, Mabel watched Clover and Aurora put their heads together for a moment, humming quietly before their number. Mabel allowed herself to love, for a brief span of time, everything about them. Their grace, their children, their closeness. Their mother, broken as she was. Mabel wondered how Chum and Elsie would manage without them all; it was perfectly plain to her that Aurora would go with her sisters when they left. She did not know how she could bear it herself. They stood straight again, arms around each other’s waists, and then the music began. Clover walked out first—but Aurora turned to see Mabel watching, and sent her a wink and a blown kiss. Mabel waved, and Aurora flew onstage to join Clover in the fast-flowing duet.

At rehearsals they had sung in half-voice. And Mabel had heard Aurora sing many times over the last two years, in the confines of church or parlour, but she had never heard this soaring and reaching. The blending of the alto and soprano line was both exact and smudged, as if their two voices blurred into each other slightly, like the flow blue on Aunt Elsie’s good china. Mabel clasped her list and listened.

‘I know,’ Bella said beside her. ‘Aren’t they good?’

Mabel turned to her, tears threatening to overflow her eyelids. Bella handed her a hanky. ‘Take mine,’ she said. ‘I never need it.’

Lewis Ridgeway was behind Bella, next up, and it seemed to Bella that he was also moved. She had no second hanky—she hoped he’d keep it bottled up.

Mabel motioned Lewis to the podium that had been set up stage left, in one.

In the audience Miss Frye and Miss North gathered themselves to listen dutifully to the part of the programme that was good for you. Mr. Ridgeway opened his book, as they had seen him do so often in the classroom, and ran a finger down the page to flatten it. He began very quietly, his tone no different from the last song’s lonely finish, non ve, non ve …

‘The night is come, but not too soon;

And sinking silently,

All silently, the little moon

Drops down behind the sky.’

What a fine figure of a man he is, thought Miss Frye; it makes one proud. If one had to work for a man, which was inevitable within the scholastic profession, what pleasure to work for one so upright, so intelligent, and in whom stern justice was ever diluted by the milk of human kindness. She would have liked to repeat this to her friend Miss North, but thought it better to wait till the intermission.

‘There is no light in earth or heaven

But the cold light of stars;

And the first watch of night is given

To the red planet Mars.’

In the wings stage right, Aurora crept up to the first curtain-leg to watch Lewis reading. This had been one of Maurice Kavanagh’s selections, Longfellow’s mysterious Light of Stars. Lewis had none of the false, high-flown passion of Kavanagh. Instead he read with awareness of the war and the soldiers in the room, as a cool, measured directive.

‘The star of the unconquered will,

He rises in my breast,

Serene, and resolute, and still,

And calm, and self-possessed.’

If she had heard this five years ago, she wondered, instead of Kavanagh’s excesses, before she’d married Mayhew, what then?

Lewis’s profile as he looked up to the audience was straight and definite. His ordinary purity made her wish, for a moment, that she had met him then. But Avery—no regret or reforming of the past was possible if it denied her Avery.

Ignoring the stodgy poetry, Nell Barr-Smith ran to the back of the auditorium to be ready for the Flying Machine. Having worked on it, being backstage, she knew just