Tipping the Velvet (54 page)

the most uncanny fashion, on the same day as Diana's; and She was clad in her coat and hat, and had her satchel over as I smiled to see him opening his gifts, I remembered the her arm; but she was gazing at me as if - well, I had had too bust of Antinous, and wondered if it was still casting its many admiring glances come my way, in the years since I frigid glances over the warm transactions at Felicity Place, had first walked before Kitty Butler in a party-gown and and whether Diana ever looked at it and remembered me.

not known why it was she flushed to look at me, not to But by now I had grown so at home in Bethnal Green that I know why it was that Florence, studying me in my could barely believe I had ever lived anywhere else, or moleskins and my crop, flushed now.

imagine a time when Quilter Street routines were not my But, like Kitty, her desire seemed almost as painful to her own. I had become used to the neighbours' racket, and to as it was pleasant. When she caught my eye, she lowered the clamour of the street. I bathed once a week, like her head and walked into the house; and all that she would Florence and Ralph, and the rest of the time was content to say was: 'Why, what a shine you have put upon the glass!'

wash in a bowl: Diana's bathroom had become a strange And while it was glorious to know that - at last, and all and distant memory to me - as of paradise, after the fall. I unwittingly! - I had made her look at me and want me; kept my hair short. I wore my trousers, as I had planned, to while I had felt, for the second that her gaze had met mine, do the housework in -at least, for a month or so I did: after the leaping of my own new passion, and an answering that, the neighbours had

passion in her; and while that passion had left me giddy, all caught glimpses of me in them, and since I had become and aching, and hot, it was as much with nervousness as known in the district as something of a trouser-wearer, it with lust that I trembled and grew weak.

seemed rather a fuss to take the trousers off at night and put Anyway, when I met her later her eyes were dim and she a frock on. No one appeared to mind it; in some houses in kept them turned from me; and I thought, again, Why Bethnal Green, after all, it was a luxury to have any sort of 461

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clothes at all, and you regularly saw women in their the house quite noiselessly. As I put my parcels down upon husbands' jackets, and sometimes a man in a shawl. Mrs the kitchen floor I heard voices in the parlour - Florence's, Monks' daughters, next door, would run squealing when and Annie's. The doors between were all ajar, and I could they saw me. Ralph's union colleagues tended to look me hear them perfectly: 'She works at a printer's,' Annie was over, as they debated, and then lose the thread of their text.

saying. 'The handsomest woman you ever saw in your life.'

Ralph himself, however, would sometimes wander

'Oh Annie, you always say that.'

downstairs with a shirt or a flannel waistcoat in his hand,

'No, really. She was sitting at a desk at a page of text, and saying vaguely: 'I found this, Nance, in the bottom of my the sun was on her and making her shine. When she raised cupboard, and wondered, would the thing be any use to you her eyes to me I held my hand out to her. I said, "Are you

. . . ?'

Sue Bridehead? My name's Jude . . .'"

As for Florence - well, increasingly I seemed to catch her Florence laughed: they had all just been reading the latest gazing at me as she had gazed at me that day through the chapter of that novel, in a magazine; I daresay Annie would glass of the window; but always - always - she would look not have made the joke, had she known how the story away again, and her eyes would grow dark. I longed to keep would turn out. Now Florence said: 'And what did she say them fixed upon me, but didn't know how. I had made to that? That she wasn't sure, but thought Sue Bridehead myself saucy, for Diana's sake; I had flirted heartlessly with might work at the other office . . . ?'

Zena; but with Florence I might as well have been eighteen

'Not at all. What she said was: Allelujah! Then she took my again, sweating and anxious - afraid, of trespassing upon hand and — oh, then I knew I was in love, for sure!'

her fading sorrow. If only, I would think, we were mary-Flo laughed again - but in a thoughtful kind of way. After a annes. If only I were a renter again, and she some nervous second she murmured something that I did not catch, but Soho gent, and I could simply lead her to some shabby which made her friend laugh. Then Annie said, still with a shady place and there unbutton her . . .

smile to her voice: 'And how is that handsome uncle of But we were not mary-annes; we were only a couple of yours?'

blushing toms, hesitating between desire and the deed, Uncle? I thought, moving to warm my hands against the while the winter slid by, and the year grew slowly older -

stove. What uncle is that? I didn't feel like an eavesdropper.

and Eleanor Marx stayed fixed to the wall, grave and untidy I heard Florence give a tut. 'She's not my uncle,' she said -

and ageless.

she said it very clearly. 'She's not my uncle, as you well The change came in February, on quite an ordinary day. I know.'

went to Whitechapel, to the market - a very regular thing to

'Not your uncle?' cried Annie then. 'A girl like that - with do, I did it often. When I came home, I came through the hair like that - growling about in your parlour in a pair of yard; I found the back door slightly open, and so entered chamois trousers like a regular little bricksetter ..."

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At that, I didn't care if I were eavesdropping or not: I took a

'Bur Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a swift silent step into the passageway, and listened rather little . . . There is a new canary in your own front room, harder. Florence laughed again.

banging its handsome head against the bars.'

'I promise you,' she said, 'she's not my uncle.'

'Suppose I let the new one in,' said Flo then, 'then find I

'Why not? Why ever not? Florrie, I despair of you. It's don't care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose -

unnatural, what you're doing. It's like - like having a roast Oh!' I heard a thump. 'I can't believe that you have got me in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups here, comparing her to a budgie!' I knew she meant Lilian, of water. What I say is, if you're not going to make an uncle not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn't of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or somebody who will.'

two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and

'You ain't having her!'

stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the

'I don't want anyone, now I've found Sue Bridehead. But kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly.

there, you see, you do care for her!'

'Do you think it's true, though, what you said, about the new

'Of course I care for her,' said Florence quietly. Now I was canary and the bars . . . ?'

listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had lips.

to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that

'Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night' - I was moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea sure that's what she said. 'Bring her to the boy. You can was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a meet my Miss Raymond ..."

little thoughtfully.

'I don't know,' answered Florence. The words were Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of in a slightly different tone.

spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could

'You cannot grieve for her for ever,' she said. 'She would not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to never have wanted that. . .'

her books. We said good-night in our usual way, but then Florence tutted. 'Being in love, you know,' she said, 'it's not we both lay wakeful. I could hear her creaking about in her like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one bed upstairs, and once she went out to the privy. I thought sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace she might have paused on her way, outside my door, to her.

listen for my snores. I didn't call out to her.

'I thought that's exactly what you were supposed to do!'

Next morning I was too tired to study her terribly hard; but That's what you do, Annie.'

as I set the pan of bacon on the stove, she came to me. She came very close, and then she said, quite low - perhaps so 465

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that her brother, who was in the room across the

'I rather thought I might..."

passageway, might not hear: 'Nance, will you come out Then I'll certainly come,' I said - and had to look quickly to with me tonight?'

the pan of smoking bacon, and so didn't see whether she Tonight?' I said, yawning, and frowning at the bacon, which looked pleased, or satisfied, or indifferent.

I had put too wet into a too-hot pan, so that it hissed and I passed a fretful day, picking through my few dull frocks steamed. 'Where to? Not collecting subscriptions again, and skirts in the hope of finding some forgotten tommish surely?'

gem amongst them. Of course, there was nothing except my

'Not subscriptions, no. Not work at all, in fact, but -

work-stained moleskins; and these - while they might have pleasure.'

caused something of a sensation at the Cavendish Club - I

'Pleasure!' I had never heard her say the word before, and it thought must be rather too bold for an East End audience, seemed, all of a sudden, a terribly lewd one. Perhaps she so I cast them regretfully aside in favour of a skirt, and a thought the same, for now she blushed a little, and took up gentleman's shirt and collar, and a tie. The shirt and collar I a spoon and began to fiddle with it.

cleaned and starched myself, and rinsed in washing-blue to

'There's a public-house near Cable Street,' she went on, make them shine; the neck-tie was of silk - a very fine silk,

'with a ladies' room in it. The girls call it "The Boy in the with only a slight imperfection to the weave, which Ralph Boat. . .'"

had brought me from his workshop, and which I had had

'Oh yes?'

made up at a Jewish tailor's. The silk was of blue, and She looked once at me, and then away again. 'Yes. Annie showed off my eyes.

will be there, she says, with a new friend of hers; and I didn't change, of course, until after we had cleared the perhaps Ruth and Nora.'

supper things; and when I did - banishing poor Ralph and

'Ruth and Nora too!' I said lightly: they were the two Cyril to the kitchen while I washed and dressed before the girlfriends who had turned out sweethearts. 'Is it to be all parlour fire - it was with a kind of anxious thrill, an almost toms, then?'

queasy gaiety. For all that it was skirts and stays and To my surprise she nodded, quite seriously: 'Yes.'

petticoats that I pulled on, I felt as I thought a young man All toms! The thought sent me into a fever. It was twelve must feel, when dressing for his sweetheart; and all the time months since I had last passed an evening in a room full of I buttoned my costume, and fumbled blindly with my woman-lovers: I was not sure I still possessed the knack.

collar-stud and necktie, there came a creaking of the boards What would I wear? What attitude would I strike? All above my head, and a swishing of material, until at last I toms! What would they make of me? And what would they could hardly believe that it was not my sweetheart up there, make of Florence?

dressing for me.

'Will you still go,' I asked, 'if I don't?'

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When she pushed at the parlour door and stepped into the them over my head until the hair felt heavy, and the little, room at last, I stood blinking at her for a moment, quite at a overheated room was thick with scent. And all the time, loss. She had changed out of her work-dress into a shirt-Florence leaned against the frame of the parlour door and waist, and a waistcoat, and a skirt. The skirt was of some watched me; and when I had finished, she laughed.

heavy winter stuff, but damson-coloured, and very warm

'My word, what a pair of beauties!' This was Ralph, come upon the eye. The waistcoat was a lighter shade, the shirt-that moment along the passageway, with Cyril at his feet.

waist almost red; at her throat was pinned a brooch: a few

'We didn't recognise them, did we, son?' Cyril held up his chips of garnet, in a golden surround. It was the first time in arms to Florence, and she lifted him with a grunt. Ralph put a year that I had seen her out of her sober suits of black and his hand upon her shoulder and said, in an altogether softer brown, and she seemed quite transformed. The reds and tone, 'How fair you look, Flo. I haven't seen you look so damsons brought out the blush of her lip, the gold shine of fair, for a year and more.' She tilted her head, graciously; her curling hair, the whiteness of her throat and hands, the they might for a moment have been a knight and his lady, in pinkness and the pale half-moons at her thumb-nails.

some medieval portrait. Then Ralph looked my way, and

'You look," I said awkwardly, 'very handsome.' She smiled; and I didn't know who it was that I loved more, then flushed.

- his sister, or him.

'I have grown too stout,' she said, 'for all my newer clothes .

'Now, you will manage with Cyril, won't you?' said

. .' Then she gazed at my own gear. 'You look very smart.

Florence anxiously, when she had handed the baby back to How well that neck-tie becomes you - doesn't it? Except, Ralph and begun to button her coat.

you have tied it crooked. Here.' She came towards me, and

'I should think I will!' said her brother.

took hold of the knot to straighten it; the pulse at my throat