Devil chuckled. ‘A young girl then?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t be nosy.’
They both laughed and Nancy forgot her anxieties. She loved the rare occasions when she had her father to herself. She handed him his cocoa mug and he thoughtfully sipped.
‘It would taste much better with a splash of brandy.’
She ignored him.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘Do I have a nice young girl?’
Devil had the grace to look slightly abashed.
‘I’d like to see you with a couple of admirers. You’re young and pretty. You should be having some fun and misbehaving, kissing someone under a full moon, instead of going off to work every day at your printers and coming home to your mother and me and Neelie. Eh?’
He sandwiched her feet between his on the rag rug.
She smiled. ‘Misbehaving? Is that what fun is?’
Until tonight the only men Nancy had known were just back from the war, no longer eager to snatch every opportunity for a kiss and a joke. Now they were home for good they seemed aware of an uncertain future.
Gil Maitland was different, and she thought he was thrillingly unlike any male she had ever encountered. Unfortunately there had been no glimpse of any moon, and he had not been remotely eager for a kiss.
Devil raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course. What’s wrong with dancing to jazz bands, may I ask? Dressing up and drinking cocktails?’
‘Nothing at all.’
She told him about having tea and a jam biscuit with Jinny, and the puddle of rain on the steps that looked like mercury. She wanted to keep the Daimler and its owner to herself. Nor did she say I saw a ghost. Maybe two.
Devil didn’t notice any reticence. He loved to reminisce about his old tricks.
‘Mercury, eh? Ah, that was a good illusion, the Melting Wand. Maybe I should bring back some of the old favourites. Nostalgia plays well, or it used to. Listen to me, I’m getting old. Modern is what counts nowadays, isn’t it?’
‘Was it a decent house tonight?’
Like Eliza, Devil had gone grey. It was only when he smiled that he looked as rakishly handsome as ever. He didn’t smile now.
‘No,’ he admitted.
The Palmyra was going through a particularly thin time. Public tastes had changed, and it seemed that spectacular magic shows belonged to a happier and less cynical age.
‘Are you worried, Pa?’
He tried to shrug off the question. ‘Luckily I am not the worrying kind. Otherwise I’d have worn myself into the grave long ago.’
Nancy couldn’t remember a time when even the air they breathed had not been clouded with uncertainty about the theatre. But their impending poverty was usually Eliza’s refrain, and Devil’s chorus had always been that they should spend money and leave the making of it to him.
Tonight was different, though, in so many respects.
‘What can we do?’
‘My lovely girl. Thank you for that “we”, but the Palmyra is your old dad’s concern. Always has been.’
Once it had been his and Eliza’s together. Nowadays his wife was too infirm. Cornelius couldn’t help, and Arthur was doubly absent because they had chosen to make him inviolate. Arthur was now an army officer, with a classical education. He would never be allowed to step back across the divide into a disreputable and precarious life in the theatre.
A quick rush of love for her father caught in Nancy’s throat. To hide her emotion she gathered up the empty cups and took them to the sink.
‘How was your mama this evening?’
‘She wasn’t very well. I saw her into bed.’
Devil leapt to his feet.
‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’
His wife, and the theatre. Always Devil’s true, twin poles.
‘She’s asleep now.’
‘I’ll go up to her. Goodnight, my girl.’
His lips brushed her forehead and he hurried away.
Nancy washed up the saucepan and crockery and left them on the scrubbed draining board. She damped the fire, and looked around the room for what needed to be done in the morning before she quietly made her own way to bed.
Devil came to Nancy’s room long before daylight.
He said hoarsely, ‘Your mother is ill.’
Nancy pushed back the bedcovers and ran. She found Eliza sweating and semi-delirious. When she put her hand to her forehead she moaned and twisted in the soaking sheets.
Devil asked, ‘Where has she been? What did she do yesterday?’
Nancy’s mouth went dry with fear. There had been a woman who coughed like a walrus. Cornelius had raised his head at the word.
‘She went to Chapel Market.’
A crowded place, ripe for the spreading of infection.
Eliza’s skin had taken on a strange blue tinge and she fought to draw in air through lungs that audibly bubbled with mucus. The intervals between each breath and the next seemed endless.
Father and daughter stared at each other across the tumbled bed. Neither of them uttered the word, but they didn’t need to. Devil’s face turned the colour of clay.
Through her rising terror Nancy tried to speak calmly. She would have to take charge of the situation; instinctively she knew that her father could not. ‘We must cool her down and help her to breathe. Bring me some water, washing cloths, towels.’
He hurried away, his slippers flapping on the linoleum of the landing.
Nancy slipped her arm beneath Eliza’s shoulders, and her heart twisted with love as well as fear as she supported their negligible weight. Eliza clutched at her wrist. Her eyes were wide and wild with fever.
‘Carlo?’ she gasped. And then another word that might have been Christmas.
‘Hush, Ma. Just try to lie still and breathe. We’re taking care of you.’
Devil returned as Nancy peeled away the sodden bed-clothes.
‘Now bring some dry sheets and a clean nightdress.’
He seemed relieved to do whatever he was told. She heard him fling open the doors of the big linen press on the landing.
Nancy wrung out a washcloth in an enamel bowl. She sponged her mother’s forehead and chest and then drew the sheet from beneath her before wrapping her in the towels. All the time she murmured as if to a distressed child, there, let’s get you dry, we’ll take care of you, I know it hurts.
She held her close, her lips against her burning forehead. Already the skin was pearled with fresh sweat. Nancy’s eyes met Devil’s.
‘You must go for the doctor.’
His nod held all their misgivings. Medical attention was not easy to find. Many doctors were still in France, attending to soldiers who couldn’t yet be brought back home. Others had dispersed to the overflowing military hospitals, and the voluntary nurses as well as the paid ones had mostly followed them.
Devil pulled on trousers over his pyjamas. ‘I’ll