Tipping the Velvet (52 page)

‘I think I would rather be delicate,' I said, ‘than do it.'

‘Oh, but it's marvellous work! It's only now and then I have to peer into sewers, as I did today. Mostly I measure, and talk to workers, and see if they are too hot or too cold, have enough air to breathe, enough lavatories. I have a government order, and do you know what that means? It means I can demand to see an office or a workshop, and if it's not right, I can demand that it be put right. I can have buildings closed, buildings improved ...' She waved her hands. ‘Foremen hate me. Greedy masters from Bow to Richmond absolutely loathe the sight of me. I wouldn't swap my work for anything!' I smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice; she might be a sanitary inspector, but she was also, I could tell, something of an actress. Now she took another mouthful of tea. ‘So,' she said, when she had swallowed it, ‘how long have you been a friend of Florrie's?'

‘Well,
friend
isn't quite the word for it, really...'

‘You don't know her terribly well?'

‘Not at all.'

‘That's a shame,' she said, shaking her head. ‘She's not been herself, these past few months. Not been herself at all...' She would have gone on, I think, if there had not, at that moment, come the sound of the front door opening, and then of feet upon the parlour floor.

‘Oh
hell
!' I said. I put my cup down, gazed wildly about me for a second, then ran past the girl to the pantry door. I didn't stop to think; I didn't say a word to her or even look at her. I simply hopped inside the little cupboard, and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I put my ear to it, and listened.

‘Is there someone out there?' It was Florence's voice. I heard her stepping, cautiously, into the kitchen. Then she must have seen her friend. ‘Annie, oh, it's you! Thank goodness. For a moment I thought - what's the matter?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Why do you look so queer? What's going on? What has happened to the step at the front of the house? And what's this mess on the stove?'

‘Florrie -'

‘What?'

‘I think I might as well tell you; indeed, I really think I'm quite obliged to tell you...'

‘What?
You're frightening me.'

‘There's a girl in your pantry.'

There was a silence then, during which I swiftly surveyed my options. They were, I found, very few; so I decided on the noblest. I took hold of the handle of the pantry door, and slowly pushed it open. Florence saw me, and twitched.

‘I was just about to leave,' I said. ‘I swear it.' I looked at the girl called Annie, who nodded.

‘She was,' she said. ‘She was.'

Florence gazed at me. I stepped out of the pantry and edged past her, into the parlour. She frowned.

‘What on earth have you been doing?' she asked, as I searched for my hat. ‘Why does everything look so strange?' She picked up a box of matches, and lit the two oil-lamps and then a couple of candles. The light was taken up by a thousand polished surfaces, and she started. ‘You have cleaned the house!'

‘Only the downstairs rooms. And the yard. And the front step,' I said, in increasing tones of wretchedness. ‘And I made you supper.'

She gaped at me.
‘Why!'

‘Your house was dirty. The woman next door said you were famous for it ...'

‘You met the woman next door?'

‘She gave me some tea.'

‘I leave you in my home for one day and you quite transform it. You get yourself in with my neighbours. You're thick, I suppose, with my best friend. And what has
she
been telling you?'

‘I haven't told her anything, I'm sure!' called Annie from the kitchen.

I pulled at a thread that had come loose at my cuff. ‘I thought you would be pleased,' I said quietly, ‘to have a tidy house. I thought -' I had thought that it would make her like me. In Diana's world, it would have. It, or something similar.

‘I liked my house the way it was,' she said.

‘I don't believe you,' I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!'

She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!'

‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.' I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John's Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work.
I
wouldn't give him laudanum when he cried!'

Now Florence's eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I'm sure I couldn't let you do all those things!'

‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It's natural, ain't it? If I was your wife - or Ralph's wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.'

Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that's possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.' As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other.

‘My word,' he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.' He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?' - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all this! I haven't come into the wrong parlour, have I?'

Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry. I went to her, and - with terrible boldness, for the last baby I had held had been my cousin's child, four years before: and he had screamed in my face - I said, ‘Give him to me, babies love me.' She handed him over and, through some extraordinary miracle - perhaps I was holding him so inexpertly, the grip quite stunned him - he fell against my shoulder, and sighed, and grew calm.

I might have thought, if I had had more experience in the matter, that the sight of her foster-son content and still in another girl's arms would be the last thing to convince a mother to allow that girl to stay in her own house; and yet, when I looked at Florence again I saw that her eyes were upon me, and her expression - as it had been once, last night - was strange and almost sad, but also desperately tender. One curl had worked its way out of her knot of hair, and hung, rather limply, over her brow. When she raised a hand to brush it from her eye, it seemed to me that the finger came away a little damp at the tip.

I thought: Blimey, I was wasted in male impersonation, I should have been in melodrama. I bit my lip, and gave a gulp. ‘Good-bye, Cyril,' I said, in a voice that shook a little. ‘I must put on my damp bonnet now, and head off into the darkening night, and find some bench to sleep on...'

But this, after all, proved too much. Florence sniffed, and her face grew stern again.

‘All right,' she said. ‘You may stay - for a week. And if the week works out, we shall try it for a month: you may have a share of the family salary, I suppose, for the sake of watching Cyril and keeping house. But if it does not work, then you must promise me, Miss Astley, that you will go.'

I promised it. Then I hitched the baby a little higher at my shoulder, and Florence turned away. I didn't look to see what her expression was, now. I only smiled; and then I put my lips to Cyril's head - he smelt rather sour - and kissed him.

How thankful I was then, that I had lied about Diana! What did it matter, that I was not all that I pretended? I had been a regular girl once; I could be regular again - being regular, indeed, might prove a kind of holiday. I thought back over my recent history, and gave a shudder; and then I glanced at Florence, and was glad - as I had been glad once before - that she was rather plain, and rather ordinary. She had taken out a handkerchief, and was wiping at her nose; now she was calling out to Ralph, to put the kettle on the stove. My lusts had been quick, and driven me to desperate pleasures: but she, I knew, would never raise them. My too-tender heart had once grown hard, and had lately grown harder - but there was no chance of it softening, I thought, at Quilter Street.

O
ne of the ladies who had come dressed as Marie Antoinette to Diana's terrible party had come clad, not as a queen, but as a shepherdess, with a crook: I had heard her tell another guest (who had mistaken her for Bo Peep, from the nursery poem) about how Marie Antoinette had had a little cottage built in the garden of her palace, and had thought it droll to play in it, with all of her friends dressed up as dairy-maids and yokels. I remembered that story, in the first few weeks of my time at Quilter Street, a little bitterly. I think I had felt rather like Marie Antoinette, the day that I put on an apron and cleaned Florence's house for her and cooked her supper; I think I even felt like her, the second day I did it. By the third day, however - the third day of waiting in the street for the stand-pipe to spit out its bit of cloudy water, of black-leading the fireplaces and the stove, of whitening the step, of scouring out the privy - I was ready to hang up my crook and return to my palace. But the palace doors, of course, had been closed on me; I must work, now, in earnest. And I must work, too, with a baby squirming on my arm - or rolling about the floor, cracking his head against the furniture - or, more usually, shrieking out, from his crib upstairs, for milk and bread-and-butter. For all my promises to Florence, if there had been gin in the house, I think I would have given it to him - or else, I might have swallowed some of it myself, to make the chores a little gayer. But there was no gin; and Cyril stayed lively, and the chores remained hard. And I could not complain, not even to myself: for I knew that, dreary as they were, they were not so dreary as the habits I should have to learn if I left Bethnal Green to try my luck, all friendless and in winter, upon the streets.

So, I did not complain; but I did think, often, of Felicity Place. I thought of how quiet and how handsome that square was; of how grand Diana's villa was, how pleasant its chambers, how light, how warm, how perfumed, how polished - how different, in short, to Florence's house, which was set in one of the poorest, noisiest quarters of the city; had one dark room to do duty as bed-chamber, dining-room, library and parlour; had windows that rattled and chimneys that smoked, and a door that was continually opening, shutting, or being banged by a fist. The whole street, it seemed to me, might as well be made of india rubber - there was such a passage of shouts and laughter and people and smells and dogs, from one house to its neighbours. I should not have minded it - after all, I had grown up in a street that was similar, in a house where cousins thundered up and down the stairs, and the parlour might be full, on any night of the week, with people drinking beer and playing cards and sometimes quarrelling. But I had lost the habit of enduring it; and now it only made me weary.

Then again, there were so
many
people who came calling. There was, for example, Florence's family: a brother and his wife and children; a sister, Janet. The brother was the oldest of the sons in the family portrait (the middle one was gone to Canada); he worked as a butcher, and sometimes brought us meat; but he was rather boastful - he had moved to a house in Epping, and thought Ralph a fool for remaining in Quilter Street, where the family had all grown up. I didn't like him much. Janet, however, who called oftener, I took to at once. She was eighteen or nineteen, big-boned and handsome; a born barmaid I had thought her when studying her photograph - so I was rather tickled to learn that she worked as a tapstress in a City public-house, lodging with the family who ran it, in their rooms above the bar. Florence fretted over her like anything: their mother had died while the sisters were still quite young (their father had died many years before that), Florence had had all the raising of the girl to do herself and, like older sisters everywhere, was sure that Janet would be led astray by the first young man who got his hands on her. ‘She will marry without giving it a second's thought,' she said wearily to me, when Janet paid her first visit after I moved in. ‘She'll be dragged down having babies all her life, and her good looks will be spoiled, and she'll die worn out at forty-three, like our own mother did.' When Janet came for supper, she stayed the night; then she would sleep up in Florence's bed, and I'd hear their murmurs and their laughter as I lay in the parlour below - the sound made me terribly restless. But Janet herself seemed marvellously unsurprised to see me dishing up the herrings at the breakfast-table, or putting her brother's linen, on a wash-day, through the mangle. ‘All right. Nancy,' she would say - she called me ‘Nancy' from the start. The first time we met I still had the bruise at my eye, and when she saw it, she whistled. She said, ‘I bet it was a girl done that - wasn't it? A girl always goes for the eyes every time. A bloke goes for the teeth.'