Tipping the Velvet (39 page)

in a small hall, when you stepped out of the limes; and in Outside, the lobby was wonderfully quiet after all the my coat and my bow-tie, of course, I would be shrieking on the stage. At the coat-desk the Italian man sat conspicuous. How terrible it would be, to have Kitty see me with a paper. When I went over to him, he sniffed: 'He ain't as I watched her - to have her fix her eyes on mine, as she here,' he said, when I asked after Bill. 'He don't stay once sang to Walter!

the show starts. Did you want your cloak?'

So I went up to the gallery. The stairs were narrow: when I I said I didn't. I left the theatre, and headed for Drury Lane -

turned a corner and found a couple there, spooning, I had to very conscious of my suit, and the shine on my shoes, and step around them, very close. Like the girl in the booth, the flower at my lapel. When I reached the Middlesex I they gazed at my suit and, as she had done, they tittered. I found a group of boys outside it studying the programme could hear the thumping of the orchestra through the wall.

and commenting on the acts. I went and peered over their As I climbed to the door at the top of the staircase and the shoulders, looking for the names I wanted, and a number.

thumps grew louder, my own heart seemed to beat against Walter Waters and Kitty, I saw at last: it gave me a shock to my breast, in time to them. When I passed into the hall at know that Kitty had lost her Butler, and was working under 331

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last - into the lurid half-light, and the heat and the smoke Palace, with my fluttering heart and my gloves with the and the reek of the calling crowd -I almost staggered.

bows: it seemed a time immeasurably distant and quaint.

On the stage was a girl in a flame-coloured frock, twitching But, as I had used to do then, I clutched the sticky velvet of her skirts so her stockings showed. She finished one song my seat, and gazed at where, with a hint of drooping rope while I stood there, clutching at a pillar to steady myself; and dusty floorboard, the stage gave way to the wings, and I and then she started on another. The crowd seemed to know thought of Kitty. She was there, somewhere, just beyond it. There were claps, and whistles; and before these had the edge of the curtain, perhaps straightening her costume -

quite died down, I made my way along the aisle to an whatever that was; perhaps chatting with Walter or Flora; empty seat. It turned out to be at the end of a line of boys -

perhaps staring, as Billy-Boy told her of me - perhaps a bad choice, for, of course, when they saw me there in my smiling, perhaps weeping, perhaps saying only, mildly, opera suit and my flower, they nudged each other, and

'Fancy that!' - and then forgetting me ...

sniggered. One coughed into his hand - only the cough I thought all this, and the magician performed his final came out as Toff! I turned my face from them, and looked trick. There was another flash, and more smoke: the smoke hard at the stage. Then, after a moment, I took out a drifted as far as the gallery, and left the entire crowd cigarette and lit it. As I struck the match, my hand coughing, but cheering through their coughs. The curtain trembled.

fell, there was another delay while the number was The Cockney Chanteuse finished her set at last. There were changed, and then a quiver of blue, white and amber, as the cheers, then a brief delay, marked by shouts and shuffling limes-man changed the filter across his beam. I had finished and rustling, before the orchestra struck up with its my cigarette, and now reached for another. This time, the introduction for the next act - a tinkling, Chinese melody, boys in my row all saw me do it, so I held the case to them, which made a boy in the line along from me stand up, and and they each took a fag: 'Very generous.' I thought of call out, 'Ninky-poo!' Then the curtain rose on a magician Diana. Suppose the opera had ended, and she was waiting and a girl, and a black japanned cabinet - a cabinet not for me, cursing, beating her programme against her thigh?

unlike the one that sat in Diana's bedroom. When the Suppose she went back to Felicity Place, without me?

magician snapped his fingers, there was a flash, and a But then there came music, and the creak of the curtain. I crack, and a puff of purple smoke; and at that the boys put looked at the stage - and Walter was on it.

their fingers to their lips, and whistled.

He seemed very large - much larger than I remembered.

I had seen - or felt as if I had seen - a thousand such acts; Perhaps he had grown fatter; perhaps his costume was a and I watched this one now, with my cigarette gripped hard little padded. His whiskers he had teased with a comb, to between my lips, growing steadily more sick and more make them stand out rather comically. He wore tartan peg-uncertain. I remembered sitting in my box at the Canterbury top trousers and a green velvet jacket; and on his head was 333

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a smok-ing-cap, in his pocket a pipe. Behind him, there was sailor-suit -a baggy white blouse with a blue sash, white a cloth with a scene on it representing a parlour. Beside him knickerbockers, stockings, and flat brown shoes; and she was an armchair that he leaned on as he sang. He was quite had a straw hat slung over her back, on a ribbon. Her hair alone. I had never seen him in costume and paint before. He was rather longer, and had been combed into a curl. Now was so unlike the figure I still saw, sometimes, in my the band struck up another tune, and she joined her voice dreams - the figure with the flapping shirt, the dampened with Walter's in a duet.

beard, the hand on Kitty - that I looked at him, and The crowd clapped her, and smiled. She skipped, and frowned: my heart had barely twitched, to see him standing Walter bent and wagged a finger at her, and they laughed.

there.

They liked this turn. They liked seeing Kitty — my lovely, His voice was a mild baritone, and not at all unpleasant; saucy, swaggering Kitty - play the child, with her husband, there had been a burst of applause at his first appearance, in stockings to the knee. They could not see me, as I and there was another round of satisfied clapping now, and blushed and squirmed; they would not have known why I one or two cheers. His song, however, was a strange one: did it, if they had. I hardly knew it, myself; I only felt he sang of a son that he had lost, named 'Little Jacky'. There myself smart with a terrible shame. I could not have felt were a number of verses, each of them ending on the same worse if they had booed her, or pelted her with eggs. But refrain - it might have been, 'Where, oh where, is Little they liked her!

Jacky now?' I thought it queer he should be there, singing I looked at her a little harder. Then I remembered my opera such a song, alone. Where was Kitty? I drew hard on my glasses, and pulled them from my pocket and lifted them to cigarette. I couldn't imagine how she would fit into this my eyes, and saw her close before me, as close as in a routine, in a silk hat, a bow-tie and a flower . . .

dream. Her hair, though longer, was still nut-brown. Her Suddenly a horrible idea began to form itself in my mind.

lashes were still long, she was still as slender as a willow.

Walter had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and was She had painted out her own lovely freckles and replaced dabbing at his eye with it. His voice rose on the predictable them with a few comical smudges; but I — who had traced chorus, and was joined by not a few from the hall: 'But the pattern of them, so often, with my fingers - I thought I where, oh where, is Little Jacky now?' I shifted in my seat. I could catch the shape of them beneath the powder. Her lips thought, Let it not be that! Oh please, oh please, let the act were still full lips, and they gleamed as she sang. She lifted not be that!

her mouth and placed a kiss, between the verses, on But it was. As Walter called his plaintive question, there Walter's whiskers . . .

was a piping from the wing: 'Here's your Little Jacky, At that, I let the glasses drop. I saw the boys in the row Father! Here!' A figure ran on to the stage, and seized his looking enviously at them, so passed them along the line - I hand and kissed it. It was Kitty. She was dressed in a boy's think they got thrown, in the end, to a girl at the balcony.

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When I looked at the stage again, Kitty and Walter seemed I pulled my arm free. 'Diana,' I said, 'I feel wretched. Let very small. He had lowered himself into the chair, and had me alone.'

drawn Kitty down to sit upon his knee; she had her hands She seized me again. 'You feel wretched,' she said, with clasped at her breast, and her feet, in their flat boy's shoes, scorn in her voice. 'Do you think it matters to me, how you were swinging. But I could bear to see no more of it. I feel about anything? Get in my bedroom at once, you little started up. The boys called something - their words were bitch, and take your clothes off.'

lost. I stumbled up the darkened aisle, and found the exit.

I hesitated. Then: 'No, Diana,' I said.

Back at the Royal Opera I found the singers still shrieking She came closer. 'What?'

upon the stage, the horns still blaring. But I only heard this There is a way rich people have of saying What?: the word through the doors: I couldn't face picking my way across is honed, and has a point put on it; it comes out of their the stalls to Diana's side, and facing her displeasure. I gave mouths like a dagger coming out of a sheath. That is how my ticket to the Italian at the cloaks, then sat in the lobby Diana said it now, in that dim corridor. I felt it pierce me on a velvet chair, watching as the street filled up with through, and make me sag. I swallowed.

waiting hansoms, with women selling flowers, and with gay

'I said, "No, Diana.'" It was no more than a whisper. But girls, and renters.

when she heard it, she seized me by the shirt, so that I At last there came the cries of 'Bravo', and the shouts for stumbled. I said, 'Get off me, you are hurting me! Get off the soprano. The doors were thrown wide, the lobby filled me, get off me! Diana, you will spoil my shirt!'

with chattering people, and in time Diana, Maria, Dickie

'What, this shirt?' she answered. And with that, she put her and the dog emerged, and saw me waiting, and came up to fingers behind the buttons, and pulled it until it ripped, and yawn and scold and ask me what the trouble was. I said I my breasts showed bare beneath it. Then she caught hold of had been sick in the gentlemen's lavatory. Diana put a hand the jacket, and tore that from me too - all the time panting to my cheek.

as she did so, and with her limbs pressed close against my The excitements of the day have proved too much for you,'

own. I staggered, and reached for the wall, then placed my she said.

arm over my face -I thought she would strike me. But when But she said it rather coldly; and all through the long ride I looked at her at last I saw that her features were livid, not back to Felicity Place we sat in silence. When Mrs Hooper in fury, but in lust. She reached for my hand, and placed my had let us in and bolted the great front door behind us, I fingers at the collar of her gown; and, miserable as I was, walked with Diana to her bedroom, but then stepped past when I understood what it was that she wanted me to do, I her, towards my own. As I did so, she put a hand on my felt my own breath quicken, and my cunt gave a kick. I arm: 'Where are you going?'

pulled at the lace, heard a few stitches rip, and the sound worked on me like the tip of a whip, snapping against the 337

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haunches of a horse. I tore it from her, her gown of black

'Her bag. Then, she might have been going to the and white and silver, that came from Worth's to match my Cavendish Club. Didn't she say, that she was going to her costume; and when it was wrecked and trampled on the rug, club? Didn't she say when she'd be back?'

she had me kneel upon it and fuck her, until she came and

'Please miss, she didn't say a thing. She never does say a came again.

thing like that, to me. You might ask Mrs Hooper ..."

Then she sent me to my own room, anyway.

I might; but Mrs Hooper had a way about her, of gazing at I lay in the darkness and shook, and put my hands before me as I lay in bed, that I didn't quite care for. I said, 'No, it my mouth to keep from weeping. Upon the cabinet beside doesn't matter.' Then, as Blake bent to sweep my hearth and the bed, gleaming where the starlight struck it, lay my set a fire there, I sighed. I thought of Diana's rough kisses birthday gift, the wrist-watch. I reached for it, and felt it of the night before - of how they had stirred me, and cold between my fingers; but when I placed it to my ear, I sickened me, while my heart was still smarting after Kitty. I shuddered - for all that it would say was: Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.

groaned; and when Blake looked up I said, in a half-hearted

. .

sort of way: 'Don't you get tired, Blake, of serving Mrs I cast it from me, then, and put my pillow over my ears to Lethaby?'

blot the sound out. I would not weep. I would not weep! I The question made her cheeks flush pink. She looked back would not even think. I would only surrender myself, for to the hearth, then said, 'I should get tired, miss, with any ever, to the heartless, seasonless routines of Felicity Place.

mistress.'

So I thought then; but my days there were numbered. And I answered that I supposed she would. Then, because it was the arms of my handsome watch were slowly sweeping novel to talk to her - and because Diana had gone out them away.

without waking me, and I was peevish and bored - I said:

'So you don't think Mrs Lethaby a hard one, then?'

Chapter 14

She coloured again. 'They are all hard, miss. Else, how The morning after my birthday I slept late; and when I would they be mistresses?'

woke, and rang for Blake to bring me coffee, it was to find

'Well - but do you like it here? Do you like being a maid that Diana had gone out while I was slumbering.

here?'

'Gone out?' I said. 'Gone where? Who with?' Blake gave a

'I have a room to myself, which is more than most maids curtsey, and said she didn't know. I sat back against my get. Besides,' she stood, and wiped her hands on her apron, pillow, and took the cup from her. 'What was she wearing?'