by Sarah Waters
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.
‘You won’t mind doubling up, of course,’ said Mrs Dendy, who had followed us to the bedroom. ‘You’ll be quite on top of each other in here I’m afraid - though not so tight as my boys downstairs, who only have the one room. But Mr Bliss did insist on a decent bit of space for the two of you.’ She smiled at me, and I looked away. Kitty, however, said very brightly: ‘It’s perfect, Mrs Dendy. Miss Astley and I will be as cosy here as two peg-dolls in a dolls’ house - won’t we, Nan?’
Her cheeks, I saw, had grown a little pink - but that might have been from the climb up from the parlour. I said, ‘We will’, and lowered my gaze again; then moved to take a box from Mr Bliss.
Mr Bliss himself did not stay long after that - as if he thought it indelicate to linger in a lady’s chamber, even one he was paying for himself. He exchanged a few words with Kitty regarding her appointment on the morrow at the Bermondsey Star - for she had to meet the manager, and rehearse with the orchestra, in the morning, in prepar
ation for her first appearance in the evening - then he shook her hand, and mine, and bade us farewell. I felt as anxious, suddenly, at the thought of him leaving us, as I had done a few hours before at the prospect of meeting him at all.
But when he had gone - and when Mrs Dendy, too, had closed the door on us and wheezed and coughed her way downstairs behind him - I lowered myself into one of the armchairs and closed my eyes, and felt myself ache with pleasure and relief simply to be alone at last with someone who was more to me than a stranger. I heard Kitty step across the luggage, and when I opened my eyes she was at my side and had raised a hand to tug at a lock of hair which had come loose from my plait and was falling over my brow. Her touch made me stiffen again: I was still not used to the easy caresses, the hand-holdings and cheek-strokings, of our friendship, and every one of them made me flinch slightly, and colour faintly, with desire and confusion.
She smiled, then bent to tug at the straps of the basket at her feet; and after a moment of idling in the armchair, watching her busy herself with dresses and books and bonnets, I rose to help her.
It took us an hour to unpack. My own few poor frocks and shoes and underclothes took up little enough space, and were stowed away in a moment; but Kitty, of course, had not only her everyday dresses and boots to unpack and brush and straighten, but also her suits and toppers. When she started on these, I moved to take them from her. I said, ‘You must let me take charge of your costumes now, you know. Look at these collars! They all need whitening. Look at these stockings! We must keep a drawer for the ones that have been cleaned, and another for the ones that need mending. We must keep these links in a box or they will be lost ...’
She stepped aside, and let me fuss over the studs and gloves and shirt-fronts, and for a minute or two I worked in silence, quite absorbed. I looked up at last to find her watching me; and when I caught her eye she winked and blushed at once. ‘You cannot know,’ she said then, ‘how horribly smug I feel. Every second-rate serio longs to have a dresser, Nan. Every hopeful, tired little actress who ever set foot upon a provincial stage aches to play the London halls - to have two nice rooms, instead of one, miserable one - to have a carriage to take her to the show at night, and drive her home, afterwards, while other, poorer, artistes must take the tram.’ She was standing beneath the slope of the ceiling, her face in shadow and her eyes dark and large. ‘And now, suddenly, I have all these things, that I have dreamed of having for so long! Do you know how that must feel, Nan, to be given your heart’s desire, like that?’
I did. It was a wonderful feeling - but a fearful one, too, for you felt all the time that you didn’t deserve your own good fortune; that you had received it quite by error, in someone else’s place - and that it might be taken from you while your gaze was turned elsewhere. And there was nothing you would not do, I thought, nothing you would not sacrifice, to keep your heart’s desire once you had been given it. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same - only, of course, about different things.
I should have remembered this, later.
We unpacked, as I have said, for an hour, and while we worked I caught the sound of various shouts and stirrings in the rest of the house. Now - it was six o‘clock or so - there came the creak of footsteps on the landing beneath ours, and a cry: ‘Miss Butler, Miss Astley!’ It was Mrs Dendy, come to tell us that there was a bit of dinner for us, if we wanted it, in the downstairs parlour - and ‘quite a crowd, besides, that’d like to meet you’.
I was hungry, but also weary, and sick of shaking hands and smiling into strangers’ faces; but Kitty whispered that we had better go down, or the other lodgers would think us proud. So we called to Mrs Dendy to give us a moment, and while Kitty changed her dress I combed and re-plaited my hair, and beat the dust from the hem of my skirt into the fireplace, and washed my hands; and then we made our way downstairs.
The parlour was a very different room, now, to the one that we had sat and taken tea in on our arrival. The table had been opened out and pulled into the centre of the room, and set for dinner; more importantly, it was ringed with faces, every one of which looked up as we appeared and broke into a smile - the same quick, well-practised smile which shone from all the pictures on the walls. It was as if half-a-dozen of the portraits had come to life and stepped from behind their dusty panes to join Mrs Dendy for supper.
There were eight places set - two of them vacant and waiting, clearly, for Kitty and me, but the rest all taken. Mrs Dendy herself was seated at the head of the table; she was in the process of dishing out slices from a plate of cold meats, but half rose when she saw us, to bid us make ourselves at home, and to gesture, with her fork, to the other diners - first to an elderly gentleman in a velvet waistcoat who sat opposite to her.
‘Professor Emery,’ she said, without a hint of self-consciousness. ‘Mentalist Extraordinary.’
The Professor rose then, too, to make us a little bow.
‘Mentalist Extraordinary, ah, as was,’ he said with a glance at our landlady. ‘Mrs Dendy is too kind. It has been many years since I last stood before a hushed and gaping crowd, guessing at the contents of a lady’s purse.’ He smiled, then sat rather heavily. Kitty said that she was very pleased to know him. Mrs Dendy pointed next to a thin, red-headed boy on the Professor’s right.
‘Sims Willis,’ she said. ‘Corner Man — ’
‘Comer Man Extraordinary, of course,’ he said quickly, leaning to shake our hands. ‘As is. And this’ - nodding to another boy across the table from himself - ‘this is Percy, my brother, who plays the Bones. He’s also extraordinary.’ As he spoke Percy gave a wink and, as if to prove his brother’s words, caught up a pair of spoons from the side of his plate, and set them rattling upon the tablecloth in a wonderful tattoo.
Mrs Dendy cleared her throat above the noise, then gestured to the pretty, pink-lipped girl who had the seat next to Sims. ‘And not forgetting Miss Flyte, our ballerina.’
The girl gave a simper. ‘You must call me Lydia,’ she said, extending a hand, ‘which is what I am known as at - do cheese it, Percy! - what I am known as at the Pav. Or Monica, if you prefer, which is my real name.’
‘Or Tootsie,’ added Sims, ‘which is what her pals all call her - and if you’ve read Ally Sloper’s I’ll leave you to work out why. Only let me say, Miss Butler, that she was in half a panic when Walter told us he was moving you in, lest you turn out to be some flashy show-girl with a ten-inch waist. When she learned you were a male impersonator, why, she turned quite gentle with relief.’
Tootsie gave him a push. ‘Pay no mind to him,’ she said to us, ‘he is always teasing. I am very pleased to have another girl about the place - two girls, I should say - flashy or otherwise.’ As she spoke she gave me a quick, satisfied glance that showed plain enough which kind she thought I was; then - as Kitty took. the seat beside her, leaving me with Percy for a neighbour - she went on: ‘Walter says you will be very big, Miss Butler. I hear you’re to start at the Star tomorrow night. I remember that as a very fine hall.’
‘So I’ve heard. Do call me Kitty...’
‘And what about you, Miss Astley?’ asked Percy as they chatted. ‘Have you been a dresser for long? You seem awful young for it.’
‘I’m not really a dresser at all, yet. Kitty is still training me up-’
‘Training you up?’ This was Tootsie again. ‘Take my advice and don’t train her too well, Kitty, or some other artiste’ll take her from you. I’ve seen that happen.’
‘Take her from me?’ said Kitty with a smile. ‘Oh, I couldn’t have that. It is Nan that brings me my good luck...’
I looked at my plate, and felt myself redden, until Mrs Dendy, still busy with her platter, held a piece of quivering meat my way and coughed: ‘A bit of tongue, Miss Astley dear?’
The supper-talk was all, of course, theatrical tittle-tattle, and terribly dense and strange to my ears. There was no one in that house, it seemed, who had not some link with the profession. Even plain little Minnie - the eigh
th member of our party, the girl who had brought us tea on our arrival and had returned now to help Mrs Dendy dish and serve and clear the plates - even she belonged to a ballet troupe, and had a contract at a concert hall in Lambeth. Why, even the dog, Bransby, which soon nosed its way into the parlour to beg for scraps, and to lean his slavering jaw against Professor Emery’s knee - even he was an old artiste, and had once toured the South Coast in a dancing dog act, and had a stage name: ‘Archie’.
It was a Sunday night, and nobody had a hall to rush to after supper; no one seemed to have anything to do, indeed, except sit and smoke and gossip. At seven o‘clock there was a knock upon the door, and a girl came halloo-ing her way into the house with a dress of tulle and satin and a gilt tiara: she was a friend of Tootsie’s from the ballet at the Pav come to ask Mrs Dendy’s opinion of her costume. While the frock was spread out on the parlour rug, the supper-things were carried off; and when the table was cleared the Professor sat at it and spread a deck of cards. Percy joined him, whistling; his tune was taken up by Sims, who raised the lid of Mrs Dendy’s piano and began to strike the melody out on that. The piano was a terrible one - ‘Damn this cheesy old thing!’ cried Sims as he hit at it. ‘You could play Wagner on it, and I swear it would come out sounding like a sea-shanty or a jig!’ - but the tune was gay and it made Kitty smile.
‘I know this,’ she said to me; and since she knew it she couldn’t help but sing it, and had soon stepped over the sparkling frock upon the floor to lift her voice for the chorus at Sims’s side.
I sat on the sofa with Bransby, and wrote a postcard to my family. ‘I am in the queerest-looking parlour you ever saw,’ I wrote, ‘and everybody is extremely kind. There is a dog here with a stage-name! My landlady says to thank you for the oysters...’
It was very cosy on the sofa, with everyone about me so gay; but at half-past ten or so Kitty yawned - and at that I gave a jump, and rose, and said it was my bedtime. I paid a hasty visit to the privy out the back, then ran upstairs and changed into my nightgown double-quick - you might have thought I had been kept from sleeping for a week and was about to die of tiredness. But I was not sleepy at all; it was only that I wanted to be safely abed before Kitty appeared - safely still and calm and ready for that moment that must shortly come, when she would be beside me in the dark, and there would be nothing but the two flimsy lengths of our cotton nightgowns to separate her own warm limbs from mine.
