Tipping the Velvet (5 page)

and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was

'I work in an oyster-house,' I said.

just a girl's: melodious and strong and clear, but just a

'An oyster-house!' The idea seemed to tickle her. Still Kentish girl's voice, like my own.

rubbing at her cheeks, she began to hum, and then to sing Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had very low beneath her breath.

feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing

'As I was going down Bishopgate Street, An oyster-girl I it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I happened to meet -'

thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am A swipe at the crimson of her lip, the black of her lashes.

in love with you.

'Into her basket I happened to peep, To see if she'd got any Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette oysters . . .'

smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to She sang on; then opened one eye very wide, and leaned her hair. 'I had better change,' she said, almost shyly. I took close to the glass to remove a stubborn crumb of spit-black 35

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the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against couple of steps with me to the door.

the cloth. 'Will you come and see me again, Miss

'Thank you, Miss Astley,' she said - she already had my Mermaid?' she asked. Her tone was light; incredibly, name from Tony - 'for coming to see me.' She held out her however, she seemed to mean it. I said, Oh yes, I should hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then like that very much, and she nodded with something like remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows satisfaction. Then she made me another little bow, and we upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and said good-night; and she closed the door and was gone.

offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the I stood quite still, facing the little 7, the hand-written card, gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her Miss Kitty Butler. I found myself unable to move from in back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her front of it - quite as unable as if I really were a mermaid lips.

and had no legs to walk on, but a tail. I blinked. I had been I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and sweating, and the sweat, and the smoke of her cigarette, had knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of worked upon the castor oil on my lashes to make my eye-liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had lids very sore. I put my hand to them - the hand that she had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many kissed; then I held my ringers to my nose and smelled years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had through the linen what she had smelled, and blushed again.

thrust them beneath Kitty Butler's nose! I felt ready to die In the dressing-room all was silent. Then at last, very low, of shame.

came the sound of her voice. She was singing again the I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast song about the oyster-girl and the basket. But the song in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over came rather fitfully now, and I realised of course that as she the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite was singing she was stooping to unlace her boots, and interpret.

straightening to shrug her braces off, and perhaps kicking

'You smell,' she began, slowly and wonderingly, 'like -'

free her trousers . . .

'Like a herring!' I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now All this; and there was only the thickness of one slender and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think door between her body and my own smarting eyes!

she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.

It was that thought which made me find my legs at last, and

'Not at all like a herring,' she said gently. 'But perhaps, leave her.

maybe, like a mermaid ..." And she kissed my fingers Watching Miss Butler perform upon the stage after having properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, spoken to her, and been smiled at by her, and had her lips and I smiled.

upon my hand, was a strange experience, at once more and less thrilling than it had been before. Her lovely voice, her 37

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elegance, her swagger: I felt I had been given a kind of invitation, and been treated by her like a friend, she was secret share in them, and pinked complacently every time impressed. I worked harder than ever at my kitchen duties; I the crowd roared their welcome or called her back on to the filleted fish, washed potatoes, chopped parsley, thrust crabs stage for an encore. She threw me no more roses; these all and lobsters into pans of steaming water - and all so briskly went, as before, to the pretty girls in the stalls. But I know I barely had breath for a song to cover their shrieks with.

she saw me in my box, for I felt her eyes upon me, Alice would say rather sullenly that my mania for a certain sometimes, as she sang; and always, when she left the person at the Palace made me dull; but I didn't speak to stage, there was that sweep of her hat for the hall, and a Alice much these days. Now every working day ended, for nod, or a wink, or the ghost of a smile, just for me.

me, with a lightning change, and a hasty supper, and a run But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen to the station for the Canterbury train; and every trip to beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to Canterbury ended in Kitty Butler's dressing-room. I spent have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have more time in her company than I did watching her perform no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again - yet upon the stage, and saw her more often without her make-also feared to. She had invited me, but she hadn't named a up, and her suit, and her footlight manner, than with them.

time; and I, in those days, was terribly anxious and shy. So For the friendlier we grew the freer she became, and the though I went as often as I was able to my box at the more confiding.

Palace, and watched and applauded her as she sang, and

'You must call me "Kitty",' she said early on, 'and I shall received those secret looks and tokens, it was a full week call you - what? Not "Nancy", for that is what everyone before I made my way again back stage, and presented calls you. What do they call you at home? "Nance", is it?

myself, all pale, sweating and uncertain, at her dressing-Or "Nan"? '"Nance",' I said.

room door.

'Then I shall call you "Nan" - if I might?' If she might! I But when I did so, she received me with such kindness, and nodded and smiled like an idiot: for the thrill of being chided me so sincerely for having left her unvisited so long; addressed by her I would gladly have lost all of my old and we fell again to chatting so easily about her life in the name, and taken a new one, or gone nameless entirely.

theatre, and mine as an oyster-girl in Whitstable, that all my So presently it was 'Well, Nan . . . !' this, and 'Lord, Nan . . .

old qualms quite left me. Persuaded at last that she liked

!' that; and, increasingly, it was 'Be a love, Nan, and fetch me, I visited her again - and then again, and again. I went me my stockings ..." She was still too shy to change her nowhere else that month but to the Palace; saw no one else clothes before me, but one night when I arrived I found that

- not Freddy, not my cousins, not even Alice, hardly - but she had had a little folding screen set up, and ever her. Mother had begun to frown about it; but when I went afterwards she used to step behind it while we talked, and home and said that I had gone back stage at Miss Butler's hand me articles of her suit as she undressed, and have me 39

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pass her the pieces of her ladies' costume from the hook that waistcoat and trousers that I had taken from her the night she had hung them on before the show. I adored being able before; to hold the powder-box while she dusted out her to serve her like this. I would brush and fold her suit with freckles, to dampen the brushes with which she smoothed trembling fingers, and secretly press its various materials -

out the curl in her hair, to fasten the rose to her lapel.

the starched linen of the shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and The first time I did all this I walked with her to the stage the stockings, the wool of the jacket and trousers - to my afterwards, and stood in the wing while she went through cheek. Each item came to me warm from her body, and her set, gazing in wonder at the limes-men who strode, with its own particular scent; each seemed charged with a nimble as acrobats, across the battens in the fly-gallery; strange kind of power, and tingled or glowed (or so I seeing nothing of the hall, nothing of the stage except a imagined) beneath my hand.

stretch of dusty board with a boy at the other end of it, his Her petticoats and dresses were cold and did not tingle; but arm upon the handle that turned the rope that brought the I still blushed to handle them, for I couldn't help but think curtain down. She had been nervous, as all performers are, of all the soft and secret places they would soon enclose, or and her nervousness had infected me; but when she stepped brush against, or warm and make moist, once she had into the wing at the end of her final number, pursued by donned them. Every time she stepped from behind the stamping, by shouts and 'Hurrahs!', she was flushed and gay screen, clad as a girl, small and slim and shapely, a false and triumphant. To tell the truth, I did not quite like her plait smothering the lovely, ragged edges of her crop, I had then. She seized my arm, but didn't see me. She was like a the same sensation: a pang of disappointment and regret woman in the grip of a drug, or in the first flush of an that turned instantly to pleasure and to aching love; a desire embrace, and I felt a fool to be at her side, so still and to touch, to embrace and caress, so strong I had to turn sober, and jealous of the crowd that was her lover.

aside or fold my arms for fear that they would fly about her After that, I passed the twenty minutes or so that she was and press her close.

gone each night alone, in her room, listening to the beat of At length I grew so handy with her costumes she suggested her songs through the ceiling and walls, happier to hear the that I visit her before she went on stage, to help her ready cheers of the audience from a distance. I would make tea herself for her act, like a proper dresser. She said it with a for her - she liked it brewed in the pan with condensed kind of studied carelessness, as if half-fearful that I might milk, dark as a walnut and thick as syrup; I knew by the not wish to; she could not have known, I suppose, how changing tempos of her set just when to set the kettle on the dreary the hours were to me, that I must pass away from her hearth, so the cup would be ready for her return. While the

. . . Soon I never stepped into the auditorium at all, but tea simmered I would wipe her little table, and empty her headed, every night, back stage, a half-hour before she was ashtrays, and dust down the glass; I would tidy the cracked due before the footlights, to help her re-don the shirt and and faded old cigar-box in which she kept her sticks of 41

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grease-paint. They were acts of love, these humble little She had been born, she said, in Rochester, to a family of ministrations, and of pleasure - even, perhaps, of a kind of entertainers. Her mother (she did not mention a father) had self-pleasure, for it made me feel strange and hot and died while she was still quite a baby, and she had been almost shameful to perform them. While she was being raised by her grandmother; she had no brothers, no sisters, ravished by the admiration of the crowd, I would pace her and no cousins that she could recall. She had taken her first dressing-room and gaze at her possessions, or caress them, bows before the footlights at the age of twelve, as 'Kate or almost caress them - holding my fingers an inch away Straw, the Little Singing Wonder', and had known a bit of from them, as if they had an aura, as well as a surface, that success in penny-gaffs and public-houses, and the smaller might be stroked. I loved everything that she left behind her kinds of halls and theatres. But it was a miserable sort of

- her petticoats and her perfumes, and the pearls that she life, she said - 'and soon I wasn't even little any more. Every clipped to the lobes of her ears; but also the hairs on her time a place came up there was a crush of girls queuing for combs, the eyelashes that clung to her sticks of spit-black, it at the stage door, all just the same as me, or prettier, or even the dent of her fingers and lips on her cigarette-ends.

perter - or hungrier, and so more willing to kiss the The world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since Kitty chairman for the promise of a season's work, or a week's, or Butler had stepped into it. It had been ordinary before she even a night's.' Her grandmother had died; she had joined a came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left dancing troupe and toured the seaside towns of Kent and ringing with music or glowing with light.

the South Coast, doing end-of-pier shows three times a By the time she returned to her dressing-room I would have night. She frowned when she spoke about these times, and everything tidy and still. Her tea, as I have said, would be her voice was bitter, or weary; she would place a hand ready; sometimes, too, I would have a cigarette lit for her.

beneath her chin, and rest her head upon it, and close her She would have lost her fierce, distracted look, and be eyes.

simply merry and kind. 'What a crowd!' she'd say. 'They

'Oh, it was hard,' she'd say, 'so hard . . . And you never wouldn't let me leave!' Or, 'A slow one tonight, Nan; I made a friend, because you were never in one place long believe I was half-way through "Good Cheer, Boys, Good enough. And all the stars thought themselves too grand to Cheer" before they realised I was a girl!'

talk to you, or were afraid you would copy their routines.

She would unclip her necktie and hang up her jacket and And the crowds were cruel, and made you cry . ..' The hat, then she would sip her tea and smoke her fag and –