Tipping the Velvet (10 page)

‘Miss Butler!' he cried when he reached us. ‘What a pleasure! What a pleasure! I feared I would be late; but here you are exactly as we planned, and even more charming than before.' He turned to me, then removed his hat - the silk, again - and made me a low, theatrical bow. ‘“Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wrench!'” he said, rather loudly. ‘Miss Astley - late of Whitstable, I believe?' He took my hand and gripped it briefly. Then he snapped his fingers at the porter, and offered us each an arm.

He had left a carriage waiting for us on the Strand; the driver touched his whip to his cap when we approached, and jumped from his seat to place our luggage on the roof. I looked about me. It was a Sunday and the Strand was rather quiet - but I didn't know it; it might have been the race-track at the Derby to me, so deafening and dizzying was the clatter of the traffic, so swift the passage of the horses. I felt safer in the carriage, and only rather queer, to be so close to a gentleman I did not know, being transported I knew not where, in a city that was vaster and smokier and more alarming than I could have thought possible.

There was much, of course, to look at. Mr Bliss had suggested we take in the sights a little before we headed for Brixton, so now we rolled into Trafalgar Square - towards Nelson on his pillar, and the fountains, and the lovely, bone-coloured front of the National Gallery, and the view down Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament.

‘My brother,' I said, as I pressed my face to the window to gaze at it all, ‘said I would be run down by a tram in Trafalgar Square, if ever I came to London.'

Mr Bliss looked grave. ‘Your brother was very sensible to warn you, Miss Astley - but sadly misinformed. There are no trams in Trafalgar Square - only buses and hansoms, and broughams like our own. Trams are for common people; you should have to go quite as far as Kilburn, I'm afraid, or Camden Town, in order to be struck by a tram.'

I smiled uncertainly. I did not know, quite, what to make of Mr Bliss, to whom my future and my happiness had been so recently, and so unexpectedly, entrusted. While he addressed himself to Kitty, and directed our attention every so often to some scene or character in the street beyond, I studied him. He was a little younger, I saw, than I had taken him to be at first. That night in Kitty's dressing-room I had thought him almost middle-aged; now I guessed him to be one- or two-and-thirty, at the most. He was an impressive, rather than a handsome, man, but for all his flash and his speeches, rather homely: I thought he must have a little wife who loved him, and a baby; and that if he did not - which, in fact, was the case - that he should have. I knew nothing, then, of his history, but learned later that he came from an old, respectable, theatrical family (his real name was no more Bliss, of course, than Kitty's was Butler); that he had left the legitimate stage when he was still a young man, in order to work the halls as a comic singer; and that he managed, now, a dozen artistes, but still, on occasion, took a turn before the footlights - as ‘Walter Waters, Character Baritone' - for sheer love of the profession. I knew none of this that day in the brougham - but I began to guess a little of it. For we had reached Pall Mall and turned into the Haymarket, where the theatres and the music halls begin; and as we rumbled past them he raised his hand and tilted the brim of his hat in a kind of salute. I have seen old Irishwomen, passing before a church, do something similar.

‘Her Majesty's,' he said, nodding to a handsome building on his left: ‘my father saw Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, make her debut there. The Haymarket: managed by Mr Beerbohm Tree. The Criterion, or Cri: a marvel of a theatre, built entirely underground.' Theatre upon theatre, hall upon hall; and he knew all their histories. ‘Ahead of us, the London Pavilion. Down there' - we squinted along Great Windmill Street - ‘the Trocadero Palace. On our right, the Prince's Theatre.' We passed into Leicester Square; he took a breath. ‘And finally,' he said - and here he removed his hat entirely, and held it in his lap - ‘finally, the Empire and the Alhambra, the handsomest music halls in England, where every artiste is a star, and the audience is so distinguished that even the gay girls in the gallery - if you'll pardon my French, Miss Butler, Miss Astley - wear furs, and pearls, and diamonds.'

He tapped on the ceiling of the brougham, and the driver drew to a halt at a corner of the little garden in the middle of the square. Mr Bliss opened the carriage door, and led us to its centre. Here, with William Shakespeare on his marble pedestal at our backs, we gazed, all three of us, at the glorious facades of the Empire and the Alhambra - the former with its columns and its glinting cressets, its stained glass and its soft electric glow; the latter with its dome, its minarets and fountain. I had not known there were theatres like this in the world. I had not known that there was such a place as this, at all - this place that was so squalid and so splendid, so ugly and so grand, where every imaginable manner of person stood, or strolled, or lounged, side by side.

There were ladies and gentlemen, stepping from carriages.

There were girls with trays of flowers and fruit; and coffee-sellers, and sherbet-sellers, and soup-men.

There were soldiers in scarlet jackets; there were off-duty shop-boys in bowlers and boaters and checks. There were women in shawls, and women in neck-ties; and women in short skirts, showing their ankles.

There were black men, and Chinamen, and Italians and Greeks. There were newcomers to the city, gazing about them as dazed and confounded as I; and there were people curled on steps and benches, people in clothes that were crumpled or stained, who looked as if they spent all their daylit hours here - and all their dark ones, too.

I gazed at Kitty, and my face, I suppose, showed my amazement, for she laughed, and stroked my cheek, then seized my hand and held it.

‘We are at the heart of London,' said Mr Bliss as she did so, ‘the very heart of it. Over there' - he nodded to the Alhambra - ‘and all around us' - and here he swept his hand across the square itself - ‘you see what makes that great heart beat: Variety! Variety, Miss Astley, which age cannot wither, nor custom stale.' Now he turned to Kitty. ‘We stand,' he said, ‘before the greatest Temple of Variety in all the land. Tomorrow, Miss Butler - tomorrow, or next week, or next month, perhaps, but soon, soon, I promise you - you will stand within it, your feet upon its stage. Then it will be you that sets the heart of London racing! You that makes the throats of the city shout,
“Brava!”'

As he spoke he lifted his hat, and punched the air with it; one or two passers-by turned their faces towards us, then looked away quite unconcerned. His words, I thought, were marvellous ones - and I knew Kitty thought so, too, for she gripped my hand at the sound of them, and gave a little shudder of delight; and her cheeks were flushed, as mine were, and her eyes, like mine, were shining and wide.

We didn't linger very long in Leicester Square after that. Mr Bliss hailed a boy, and gave him a shilling to fetch us three foaming glasses from the sherbet-seller, and we sat for a minute in Shakespeare's shadow, sipping our drinks and gazing at the people who passed us by, and at the notices outside the Empire, where Kitty's name, we knew, would soon be pasted in letters three feet high. But when our glasses were empty, he slapped his hands together and said we must be off, for Brixton and Mrs Dendy - our new landlady - awaited; and he led us back to the brougham and handed us to our seats. I felt my eyes, that had been so wide and dazzled, grow small again in the gloom of the coach, and I began to feel, not thrilled, but rather nervous. I wondered what kind of lodgings he had found for us, and what kind of lady Mrs Dendy would be. I hoped that neither would be very grand.

I need not have worried. Once we had left the West End and crossed the river, the streets grew greyer and quite dull. The houses and the people here were smart, but rather uniform, as if all crafted by the same unimaginative hand: there was none of that strange glamour, that lovely, queer variety of Leicester Square. Soon, too, the streets ceased even to be smart, and became a little shabby; each corner that we passed, each public house, each row of shops and houses, seemed dingier than the one before. Beside me, Kitty and Mr Bliss had fallen into conversation; their talk was all of theatres and contracts, costumes and songs. I kept my face pressed to the window, wondering when we should ever leave behind these dreary districts and reach Greasepaint Avenue, our home.

At last, when we had turned into a street of tall, flat-roofed houses, each with a line of blistered railings before it and a set of sooty blinds and curtains at its windows, Mr Bliss broke off his talk to peer outside and say that we were almost there. I had to look away from his kind and smiling face, then, to hide my disappointment. I knew that my first, excited vision of Brixton - that row of golden make-up sticks, our house with the carmine-coloured roof - was a foolish one; but this street looked so very grey and mean. It was no different really, I suppose, from the ordinary roads that I had left behind in Whitstable; it was only strange - but therefore slightly sinister.

As we stepped from the carriage I glanced at Kitty to see if she, too, felt any stirrings of dismay. But her colour was as high, and her eyes as damp and shining, as before; she only gazed at the house to which our chaperon now led us, and gave a little, tight-lipped smile of satisfaction. I understood, suddenly - what I had only half perceived before - that she had spent her life in plain, anonymous houses like this one, and knew no better. The thought gave me a little courage - and made me ache, as usual, with sympathy and love.

Inside, too, the house was rather cheerier. We were met at the door by Mrs Dendy herself - a white-haired, rather portly lady, who greeted Mr Bliss like a friend, calling him ‘Wal', and offering him her cheek to kiss - and shown into her parlour. Here she had us sit and remove our hats, and bade us make ourselves quite cosy; and a girl was called, then swiftly dispatched to bring some cups and brew some tea on our behalf.

When the door was closed behind her Mrs Dendy gave us a smile. ‘Welcome, my dears,' she said - she had a voice as damp and fruity as a piece of Christmas cake - ‘Welcome to Ginevra Road. I do hope that your stay with me will be a happy, and a lucky one.' Here she nodded to Kitty. ‘Mr Bliss tells me that I'm to have quite a little star twinkling beneath my eaves, Miss Butler.'

Kitty said modestly that she didn't know about that, and Mrs Dendy gave a chuckle that turned into a throaty cough. For a long moment the cough seemed to quite convulse her, and Kitty and I sat up, exchanging glances of alarm and dismay. When the fit was passed, however, the lady seemed just as calm and jolly as before. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve, and wiped her lips and eyes with it; then she reached for a packet of Woodbines from the table at her elbow, offered us each a cigarette, and took one for herself. Her fingers, I saw then, were quite yellow with tobacco stains.

After a moment the tea things appeared, and while Kitty and Mrs Dendy busied themselves with the tray I looked about me. There was much to look at, for Mrs Dendy's parlour was rather extraordinary. Its rugs and furniture were plain enough; its walls, however, were wonderful, for every one of them was crowded with pictures and photographs - so crowded, indeed, that there was barely enough space between the frames to make out the colour of the wallpaper beneath.

‘I can see you are quite taken with my little collection,' said Mrs Dendy as she handed me my tea-cup, and I blushed to find all eyes suddenly turned my way. She gave me a smile, and lifted her yellowed fingers to fiddle with the crystal drop that hung, on a brass thread, from the hole in her ear. ‘All old tenants of mine, my dear,' she said; ‘and some of them, as you will see, rather famous.'

I looked at the pictures again. They were all, I now saw, portraits - signed portraits most of them - of artistes from the theatres and the halls. There were, as Mrs Dendy had claimed, several faces that I knew - the Great Vance, for instance, had his photograph upon the chimney-breast, with Jolly John Nash, posed as ‘Rackity Jack', at his side; and above the sofa there was a framed song-sheet with a sprawling, uneven dedication: ‘To Dear Ma Dendy. Kind thoughts, Good wishes. Bessie Bellwood'. But there were many more that I did not recognise, men and women with laughing faces, in gay, professional poses, and with costumes and names so bland, exotic or obscure - Jennie West, Captain Largo, Shinkaboo Lee - I could guess nothing about the nature of their turns. I marvelled to think that they had all stayed here, in Ginevra Road, with comely Mrs Dendy as their host.

We talked until the tea was drunk, and our landlady had smoked two or three more cigarettes; then she slapped her knees and got slowly to her feet.

‘I dare say you would like to see your rooms, and give your faces a bit of a splash,' she said pleasantly. She turned to Mr Bliss, who had risen politely, when she had. ‘Now, if you could just apply your obliging arm to the young ladies' boxes and things, Wal ...' Then she led us from the parlour, and up the stairs. We climbed for three flights, the stairwell growing dimmer as we ascended, then lightening: the last set of steps were slim and uncarpeted, and had a little skylight above them, a quartered pane streaked with soot and pigeon-droppings, through which the blue of the September sky showed unexpectedly vivid and clear - as if the sky itself were a ceiling, and, climbing, we had come nearer to it.

At the top of these steps there was a door, and behind this a very small room - not a bed-sitting room as I had expected, but a tiny parlour with a pair of ancient, sagging armchairs set before a hearth, and a shallow, old-fashioned dresser. Beside the dresser was another door, leading to a second chamber which a sloping roof made even smaller than the first. Kitty and I stepped to its threshold and stood, side by side, gazing at what lay beyond: a wash-hand stand; a lyre-backed chair; an alcove with a curtain before it; and a bed - a bed with a high, thick mattress and an iron bedstead, and beneath it a chamber-pot - a bed rather narrower than the one I was used to sharing with my sister at home.