by Sarah Waters
We were much complimented, Kitty and I, on our new dresses; and over me, in particular, people smiled and exclaimed - mouthing at me across the noisy hall, ‘How fine you look!’ One woman - the conjuror’s assistant - took my hand and said, ‘My dear, you’re so grown-up tonight, I didn’t recognise you!’: just what Mrs Dendy had said an hour before. Her words impressed me. Kitty and I stood side by side all evening but when, some time after midnight, she moved away to join a group that had gathered about the champagne tables, I hung back, rather pensive. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as a grown-up woman, but now, clad in that handsome frock of blue and cream, satin and lace, I began at last to feel like one - and to realise, indeed, that I was one: that I was eighteen, and had left my father’s house perhaps for ever, and earned my own living, and paid rent for my own rooms in London. I watched myself as if from a distance - watched as I supped at my wine as if it were ginger beer, and chatted and larked with the stage-hands, who had once so frightened me; watched as I took a cigarette from a fellow from the orchestra, and lit it, and drew upon it with a sigh of satisfaction. When had I started smoking? I couldn’t remember. I had grown so used to holding Kitty’s fag for her while she changed suits, that gradually I had taken up the habit myself. I smoked so often, now, that half my fingers - which, four months before, had been permanently pink and puckered, from so many dippings in the oyster-tub - were now stained yellow as mustard at the tips.
The musician - I believe he played the cornet - took a small, insinuating step my way. ‘Are you a friend of the manager’s, or what?’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you in the hall before.’
I laughed. ‘Yes you have. I’m Nancy, Kitty Butler’s dresser.’
He raised his eyebrows, and leaned away to look me up and down. ‘Well! and so you are. I thought you was just a kid. But here, just now, I took you for an actress, or a dancer.’
I smiled, and shook my head. There was a pause while he sipped at his glass and wiped at his moustache. ‘I bet you dance a treat, though, don’t you?’ he said then. ‘How about it?’ He nodded to the crush of waltzing couples at the back of the stage.
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t. I’ve had too much cham.’
He laughed: ‘All the better!’ He put his drink aside, gripped his cigarette between his lips, then put his hands on my waist and lifted me up. I gave a shriek; he began to turn and dip, in a clownish approximation of a waltz-step. The louder I laughed and shrieked, the faster he turned me. A dozen people looked our way, and smiled and clapped.
At last he stumbled and almost fell, then put me down with a thump. ‘Now,’ he said breathlessly, ‘tell me I ain’t a marvellous dancer.’
‘You ain’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve made me giddy as a fish, and’ - I felt at the front of my dress - ‘you have spoiled my sash!’
‘I’ll fix that for you,’ he said, reaching for my waist again. I gave a yelp, and stepped out of his grasp.
‘No you won’t! You can push off and leave me in peace.’ Now he seized me, and tickled me so that I giggled. Being tickled always makes me laugh, however little I care for the tickler; but after several more minutes of this kind of thing he at last gave up on me, and went back to his pals in the band.
I ran my hands over my sash again. I feared he really had spoiled it, but couldn’t see well enough to be sure. I finished my drink with a gulp - it was, I suppose, my sixth or seventh glass - and slipped from the stage. I made my way first to the lavatory, then headed downstairs to the change-room. This had been opened tonight only so that the ladies should have a place to hang their coats, and it was cold and empty and rather dim; but it had a looking-glass: and it was to this that I now stepped, squinting and tugging at my dress to pull it straight.
I had been there for no longer than a minute when there came the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond, and then a silence. I turned my head to see who was there, and found that it was Kitty. She had her shoulder against the doorframe and her arms folded. She wasn’t standing as one normally stands - as she usually stood - in an evening gown. She was standing as she did when she was on stage, with her trousers on - rather cockily. Her face was turned towards me and I couldn’t see her rope of hair, or the swell of her breasts. Her cheeks were very pale; there was a stain upon her skirt where some champagne had dripped upon it from an over-spilling glass.
‘Wot cheer, Kitty,’ I said. But she did not return my smile, only watched me, levelly. I looked uncertainly back to the glass, and continued working at my sash. When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk.
‘Seen something you fancy?’ she said. I turned to her again in surprise, and she took a step into the room.
‘What?’
‘I said, “Seen something you fancy, Nancy?” Everybody else here tonight seems to have. Seems to have seen something that has rather caught their eye.’
I swallowed, unsure of what reply to make to her. She walked closer, then stopped a few paces from me, and continued to fix me with the same even, arrogant gaze.
‘You were very fresh with that horn-player, weren’t you?’ she said then.
I blinked. ‘We were just having a bit of a lark.’
‘A bit of a lark? His hands were all over you.’
‘Oh Kitty, they weren’t!’ My voice almost trembled. It was horrible to see her so savage; I don’t believe that, in all the weeks that we had spent together, she had ever so much as raised her voice to me in impatience.
‘Yes they were,’ she said. ‘I was watching - me and half the party. You know what they’ll be calling you soon, don’t you?’ “Miss Flirt”.’
Miss Flirt! Now I didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh.
‘How can you say such a thing?’ I asked her.
‘Because it’s true.’ She sounded all at once rather sullen. ‘I wouldn’t have bought you such a fine dress, if I’d known you were only going to wear it to go flirting in.’
‘Oh!’ I stamped my foot, unsteadily - I was as drunk, I suppose, as she was. ‘Oh!’ I put my fingers to the neck of my gown, and began to fumble with its fastenings. ‘I shall take the dam’ dress off right here and you shall have it back,’ I said, ‘if that’s how you feel about it!’
At that she took another step towards me and seized my arm. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said in a slightly chastened tone. I shook her off and continued to work - quite fruitlessly, since the wine, together with my anger and surprise, had made me terribly clumsy - at the buttons of my frock. Kitty took hold of me again; soon we were almost tussling.
‘I won’t have you call me a flirt!’ I said as she tugged at me. ‘How could you call me one? How could you? Oh! If you just knew -’ I put my hand to the back of my collar; her fingers followed my own, her face came close. Seeing it, I felt all at once quite dazed. I thought I had become her sister, as she wanted. I thought I had my queer desires cribbed and chilled and chastened. Now I knew only that her arm was about me, her hand on mine, her breath hot upon my cheek. I grasped her - not the better to push her away, but in order to hold her nearer. Gradually we ceased our wrestling and grew still, our breaths ragged, our hearts thudding. Her eyes were round and dark as jet; I felt her fingers leave my hand and move against my neck.
Then all at once there came a blast of noise from the passageway beyond, and the sound of footsteps. Kitty started in my arms as if a pistol had been fired, and took a half-dozen steps, very rapidly, away. A woman - Esther, the conjuror’s assistant - appeared on the other side of the open doorway. She was pale, and looked terribly grave. She said: ‘Kitty, Nan, you won’t believe it.’ She reached for her handkerchief, and put it to her mouth. ‘There’s some boys just come, from the Charing Cross Hospital. They are saying Gully Sutherland is there’ - this was the comic singer who had appeared with Kitty at the Canterbury Palace - ‘they are saying Gully is there - that he has got drunk, and shot himself dead!’
It was true - we all heard, next day, how horribly true it was. I should nev
er have suspected it, but had learned since coming to London that Gully was known in the business as something of a lush. He never finished a show without calling into a public-house on his way home; and on the night of our party he had been drinking at Fulham. Here, all hidden in a corner stall, he had overheard a fellow at the bar say that Gully Sutherland was past his best, and should make way for funnier artistes; that he had sat through Gully’s latest routine, and all the gags were flat ones. The bar-man said that when Gully heard this he went to the man and shook him by the hand, and bought him a beer, then he bought beer for everyone. Then he went home and took a gun, and fired it at his own heart ...
We didn’t know all of this that night at Marylebone, we knew only that Gully had had a kind of fit, and taken his life; but the news put an end to our party and left us all, like Esther, nervous and grave. Kitty and I, on hearing the news, went up to the stage - she seizing my hand as we stumbled up the steps, but in grief now, I thought, rather than anything warmer. The manager had had all the house-lights lit, and the band had lain their instruments aside; some people were weeping, the cornet-player who had tickled me had his arm about a trembling girl. Esther cried, ‘Oh isn’t it awful, isn’t it horrible?’ - I suppose the wine made everybody feel the shock of it the more.
I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn’t think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap between us. She hadn’t looked at me since then, and now she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the news of Gully’s suicide. After a moment, however, I saw her shake her head and step away, and seem to search for me; and when she saw me - waiting for her, in the shadows of the wing - she came and sighed. ‘Poor Gully. They say his heart was shot right through...’
‘And to think,’ I said, ‘it was for Gully’s sake that I first went to Canterbury and saw you ...’
She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure.
When I said that we should go - since other people were now leaving - she nodded. We returned to the change-room for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age. It was two o‘clock or later before we started on our journey home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty repeating only, now and then: ‘Poor Gully! What a thing to do!’, and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, but still uncertain.
It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber.
At length we reached Lambeth Bridge, where Kitty and I had stood only a few weeks before and gazed at the pleasure-boats below. Now, with our faces pressed to the carriage window, we saw it all transformed - saw the lights of the Embankment, a belt of amber beads dissolving into the night; and the great dark jagged bulk of the Houses of Parliament looming over the river; and the Thames itself, its boats all moored and silent, its water grey and sluggish and thick, and rather strange.
It was this last which made Kitty pull the window down, and call to the driver, in a high, excited voice, to stop. Then she pushed the carriage door open, pulled me to the iron parapet of the bridge, and seized my hand.
‘Look,’ she said. Her grief seemed all forgotten. Below us, in the water, there were great slivers of ice six feet across, drifting and gently turning in the winding currents, like basking seals.
The Thames was freezing over.
I looked from the river to Kitty, and from Kitty to the bridge on which we stood. There was no one near us save our driver - and he had the collar of his cape about his ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling.
It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me.
‘How cold it must be!’ I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across it?’
Kitty shivered, and shook her head. ‘The ice would break,’ she said. ‘We would sink and drown; or else be stranded and die of the cold!’
I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer. I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a pancake.
The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the driver gave a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving - and both of us, finally, rather grave.
At last Kitty gave a whisper. ‘Ain’t it queer,’ she said.
I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it.
I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to warm them with my breath.
I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river. Then, ‘Nan,’ she said, very low.
I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the water below.
I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a whisper : ‘You won’t tell a soul, Nan - will you?’
I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at last! - that there was something to be told. And then I dipped my face to hers, and shut my eyes.
Her mouth was chill, at first, then very warm - the only warm thing, it seemed to me, in the whole of the frozen city; and when she took her lips away - as she did, after a moment, to give a quick, anxious glance towards our hunched and nodding driver - my own felt wet and sore and naked in the bitter December breezes, as if her kiss had flayed them.
She drew me into the shadow of the carriage, where we were hidden from sight. Here we stepped together, and kissed again: I placed my arms about her shoulders, and felt her own hands shake upon my back. From lip to ankle, and through all the fussy layers of our coats and gowns, I felt her body stiff against my own - felt the pounding, very rapid, where we joined at the breast; and the pulse and the heat and the cleaving, where we pressed together at the hips.
We stood like this for a minute, maybe longer; then the carriage gave a creak as the driver shifted in his seat, and Kitty stepped quickly away. I could not take my hands from her, but she seized my wrists and kissed my fingers and gave a kind of nervous laugh, and a whisper: ‘You will kiss the life out of me!’
She moved into the carriage, and I clambered in behi
nd her, trembling and giddy and half-blind, I think, with agitation and desire. Then the door was closed; the driver called to his pony, and the cab gave a jerk and a slither. The frozen river was left behind us - dull, in comparison with this new miracle!
We sat side by side. She put her hands to my face again, and I shivered, so that my jaws jumped beneath her fingers. But she didn’t kiss me again: rather, she leaned against me with her face upon my neck, so that her mouth was out of reach of mine, but hot against the skin below my ear. Her hand, that was still bare of its glove and white with cold, she slid into the gap at the front of my jacket; her knee she laid heavily against my own. When the brougham swayed I felt her lips, her fingers, her thigh come ever more heavy, ever more hot, ever more close upon me, until I longed to squirm beneath the pressing of her, and cry out. But she gave me no word, no kiss or caress; and in my awe and my innocence I only sat steady, as she seemed to wish. That cab-ride from the Thames to Brixton was, in consequence, the most wonderful and most terrible journey I have ever made.
At last, however, we felt the carriage turn, then slow, and finally stop, and heard the driver thump upon the roof with the butt of his whip to tell us we were home: we were so quiet, perhaps he thought we slumbered.
I remember a little of our entry into Mrs Dendy’s - the fumbling at the door with the latch-key, the mounting of the darkened stairs, our passage through that still and sleeping house. I remember pausing on the landing beneath the skylight, where the stars showed very small and bright, and silently pressing my lips to Kitty’s ear as she bent to unlock our chamber door; I remember how she leaned against it when she had it shut fast behind us, and gave a sigh, and reached for me again, and pulled me to her. I remember that she wouldn’t let me raise a taper to the gas-jet - but made us stumble to the bedroom through the darkness.
And I remember, very clearly, all that happened there.
The room was bitter cold - so cold it seemed an outrage to take our dresses off and bare our flesh; but an outrage, too, to some more urgent instinct to keep them on. I had been clumsy in the change-room of the theatre, but I was not clumsy now. I stripped quickly to my drawers and chemise, then heard Kitty cursing over the buttons of her gown, and stepped to help her. For a moment - my fingers tugging at hooks and ribbons, her own tearing at the pins which kept her plait of hair in place - we might have been at the side of a stage, making a lightning change between numbers.
