Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  Kitty herself, however, though she also smiled when the barber displayed me, smiled more broadly when the plait was re-affixed. ‘That’s more like it,’ she said, when I stood and brushed my skirts down. ‘What a fright you looked in short hair and a frock!’

  Back at Ginevra Road we found Walter waiting for us, and Mrs Dendy dishing up lunch; and it was here that I was given a new name, to match my bold new crop.

  For our debut at Camberwell we had thought that our ordinary names would do as well as any, and had been billed by the chairman as ‘Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley’. Now, however, we were a hit: Walter’s manager friend had offered us a four-week contract, and needed to know the names he should have printed on the posters. We knew we must keep Kitty‘s, for the sake of her successes of the past half-year; but Walter said ‘Astley’ was rather too common, and could we think of a better one? I didn’t mind, only said I should like to keep ‘Nan’ - since Kitty herself had re-christened me that; and we took our lunch, in consequence, with everybody volunteering names they thought would match it. Tootsie said ‘Nan Love’, Sims ‘Nan Sergeant’. Percy said, ‘Nan Scarlet - no, Nan Silver - no, Nan Gold ...’ Every name seemed to offer me some new and marvellous version of myself; it was like standing at the costumier’s rail and shrugging on the jackets.

  None, however, seemed to fit - till the Professor tapped the table, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Nan King’. And although I should like to be able to say - as other artistes do - that there was some terribly clever or romantic story behind the choosing of my stage-name - that we had opened a special book at a certain place, and found it there; that I had heard the word ‘King’ said in a dream, and quivered at it - I can give no better account of the matter than the truth: which was only that we needed a name, and the Professor said ‘Nan King’, and I liked it.

  It was as ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’, therefore, that we returned to Camberwell that evening - to renew, and improve upon our success of the night before. It was ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that appeared on the posters; and ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that began to rise, rather steadily, from middle-billing, to second-billing, to top-of-the-list. Not just at the Camberwell hall but, over the next few months, at all the lesser London halls and - slowly, slowly - some of the West End ones, too ...

  I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that we were novel: for though in later years we were rather freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as Walter had predicted - that the sight of a pair of girls in gentlemen’s suits was somehow more charming, more thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go handsomely together -Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender angularity of my frame with girlish curves.

  Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous. Our wages rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver would yell, ‘I’ve got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, can’t you ? - and the other drivers would shift a little to let us through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, for requests and autographs, and letters...

  It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new capacity for pleasure - for pleasure in performance, display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs - that shocked and thrilled me most. I had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now, becoming Kitty, I fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat and so sleek. I adored my legs - my legs which, while they had had skirts about them, I had scarcely had a thought for; but which were, I discovered, rather long and lean and shapely.

  I sound vain. I was not - then - and could never have been, while Kitty existed as the wider object of my self-love. The act, I knew, was still all hers. When we sang, it was really she who sang, while I provided a light, easy second. When we danced, it was she who did the tricky steps: I only strolled or shuffled at her side. I was her foil, her echo; I was the shadow which, in all her brilliance, she cast across the stage. But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.

  It was very far from vanity, then, my satisfaction. It was only love; and the better the act became, I thought, the more perfect that love grew. After all, the two things - the act, our love - were not so very different. They had been born together - or, as I liked to think, the one had been born of the other, and was merely its public shape. When Kitty and I had first become sweethearts, I had made her a promise. ‘I will be careful,’ I had said - and I had said it very lightly, because I thought it would be easy. I had kept my promise: I never kissed her, touched her, said a loving thing, when there was anyone to glimpse or overhear us. But it was not easy, nor did it become easier as the months passed by; it became only a dreary kind of habit. How could it be easy to stand cool and distant from her in the day, when we had spent all night with our naked limbs pressed hot and close together? How could it be easy to veil my glances when others watched, bite my tongue because others listened, when I passed all our private hours gazing at her till my eyes ached of it, calling her every kind of sweet name until my throat was dry? Sitting beside her at supper at Mrs Dendy’s, standing near her in the green-room of a theatre, walking with her through the city streets, I felt as though I was bound and fettered with iron bands, chained and muzzled and blinkered. Kitty had given me leave to love her; the world, she said, would never let me be anything to her except her friend.

  Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and in silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty, and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act the audience thinks it: beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you go too fast - not there, but here - that’s good - that’s better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards, and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it! As Kitty had said, when I had whispered that wearing trousers upon the stage would only make me want to kiss her: ‘What a show that would be!’ But, that was our show; only the crowd never knew it. They looked on, and saw another turn entirely.

  Well, perhaps there were some who caught glimpses...

  I have spoken of my admirers. They were girls, for most part - jolly, careless girls, who gathered at the stage door, and begged for photographs, and autographs, and gave us flowers. But for every ten or twenty of such girls, there would be one
or two more desperate and more pushing, or more shy and awkward, than the rest; and in them I recognised a certain - something. I could not put a name to it, only knew that it was there, and that it made their interest in me rather special. These girls sent letters - letters, like their stage door manners, full of curious excesses or ellipses; letters that awed, repelled and drew me, all at once. ‘I hope you will forgive my writing to say that you are very handsome,’ wrote one girl; another wrote: ‘Miss King, I am in love with you!’ Someone named Ada King wrote to ask if we were cousins. She said: ‘I do so admire you and Miss Butler, but especially you. Could you I wonder send a photograph? I would like to have a picture of you, beside my bed ...’ The card I sent her was a favourite of mine, a picture of Kitty and me in Oxford bags and boaters, in which Kitty stood with her hands in her pockets and I leaned with my arm through hers, a cigarette between my fingers. I signed it ‘To Ada, from one “King” to another’; and it was very odd to think that it would be pinned to a wall, or put in a frame, so that unknown girl might gaze at it while she fastened her frock or lay dreaming.

  Then there were other requests, for odder things. Would I send a collar-stud, a button from my suit, a curl of hair? Would I, on Thursday night - or Friday night - wear a scarlet necktie - or a green neck-tie, or a yellow rose in my lapel; would I make a special sign, or dance a special step? - for then the writer would see, and know that I had received her note.

  ‘Throw them away,’ Kitty would say when I showed her these letters. ‘They’re cracked, those girls, and you mustn’t encourage them.’ But I knew that the girls were not cracked, as she said; they were only as I had been, a year before - but braver or more reckless. That, in itself, impressed me; what astonished and thrilled me now was the thought that girls might look at me at all - the thought that in every darkened hall there might be one or two female hearts that beat exclusively for me, one or two pairs of eyes that lingered, perhaps immodestly, over my face and figure and suit. Did they know why they looked? Did they know what they looked for? Above all, when they saw me stride across the stage in trousers, singing of girls whose eyes I had sent winking, whose hearts I had broken, what did they see? Did they see that - something - that I saw in them?

  ‘They had better not!’ said Kitty, when I put my idea to her; and though she laughed as she said it, the laughter was a little strained. She didn’t like to talk about such things.

  She didn’t like it, either, when one night in the change-room of a theatre we met a pair of women - a comic singer and her dresser - who, I thought, were rather like ourselves. The singer was flashy, and had a frock with spangles on it that must be fastened very tightly over her stays. Her maid was an older woman in a plain brown dress; I saw her tugging at the frock, and thought nothing of it. But when she had the hooks fastened tight, she leaned and gently blew upon the singer’s throat, where the power had clogged; and then she whispered something to her, and they laughed together with their heads very close ... and I knew, as surely as if they had pasted the words upon the dressing-room wall, that they were lovers..

  The knowledge made me blush like a beacon. I looked at Kitty, and saw that she had caught the gesture, too; her eyes, however, were lowered, and her mouth was tight. When the comic singer passed us on her way to the stage, she gave me a wink: ‘Off to please the public,’ she said, and her dresser laughed again. When she came back and took her make-up off, she wandered over with a cigarette and asked for a light; then, as she drew on her fag, she looked me over. ‘Are you going,’ she said, ‘to Barbara’s party, after the show?’ I said I didn’t know who Barbara was. She waved her hand: ‘Oh, Barbara won’t mind. You come along with Ella and me: you and your friend.’ Here she nodded - very pleasantly, I thought - to Kitty. But Kitty, who had had her head bent all this time, working at the fastenings of her skirt, now looked up and gave a prim little smile.

  ‘How nice of you to ask,’ she said; ‘but we are spoken for tonight. Our agent, Mr Bliss, is due to take us out to supper.’

  I stared: we had no arrangement that I knew of. But the singer only gave a shrug. ‘Too bad,’ she said. Then she looked at me. ‘You don’t want to leave your pal to her agent, and come on alone, with me and Ella?’

  ‘Miss King will be busy with Mr Bliss,’ said Kitty, before I could answer; and she said it so tightly the singer gave a sniff, then turned and went over to where her dresser waited with their baskets. I watched them leave - they didn’t look back at me. When we returned to the theatre the next night, Kitty chose a hook that was far from theirs; and on the night after that, they had moved on to another hall ...

  At home, in bed, I said I thought it was a shame.

  ‘Why did you tell them Walter was coming?’ I asked Kitty.

  She said: ‘I didn’t care for them.’

  ‘Why not? They were nice. They were funny. They were - like us.’

  I had my arm about her, and felt her stiffen at my words. She pulled away from me and raised her head. We had left a candle burning and her face, I saw, was white and shocked.

  ‘Nan!’ she said. ‘They’re not like us! They’re not like us, at all. They’re toms.’

  ‘Toms?’ I remember this moment very distinctly, for I had never heard the word before. Later I would think it marvellous that there had ever been a time I hadn’t known it.

  Now, when Kitty said it, she flinched. ‘Toms. They make a - a career- out of kissing girls. We’re not like that!’

  ‘Aren’t we?’ I said. ‘Oh, if someone would only pay me for it, I’d be very glad to make a career out of kissing you. Do you think there is someone who would pay me for that? I’d give up the stage in a flash.’ I tried to pull her to me again, but she knocked my hand away.

  ‘You would have to give up the stage,’ she said seriously, ‘and so would I, if there was talk about us, if people thought we were — like that.’

  But what were we like? I still didn’t know. When I pressed her, however, she grew fretful.

  ‘We’re not like anything! We’re just - ourselves.’

  ‘But if we’re just ourselves, why do we have to hide it?’

  ‘Because no one would know the difference between us and - women like that!’

  I laughed. ‘Is there a difference?’ I asked again.

  She continued grave and cross. ‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what’s wrong or right, or good ...’

  ‘I know that this ain’t wrong, what we do. Only that the world says it is.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s the same thing,’ she said. Then she fell back upon her pillow and closed her eyes, and turned her face away.

  I was sorry that I had teased her - but also, I am ashamed to say, rather warmed by her distress. I touched her cheek, and moved a little closer to her; then I took my hand from her face and passed it, hesitantly, down her night-dress, over her breasts and belly. She moved away, and I slowed - but did not stop - my searching fingers; and soon, as if despite itself, I felt her body slacken in assent. I moved lower, and seized the hem of her shift and drew it high - then did the same with my own, and gently slid my hips over hers. We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell - you couldn’t have passed so much as the blade of a knife between us. I said, ‘Oh Kitty, how can this be wrong?’ But she did not answer, only moved her lips to mine at last, and when I felt the tug of her kiss I let my weight fall heavily upon her, and gave a sigh.

  I might have been Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown.

  It was true, I suppose, what she said - that I didn’t understand her. Always, always, it came down to the same thing: that however much we had to hide our love, however guardedly we had to take our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing that was - as she herself admitted - so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anyone who cared for me would be anything but happy for me, if only they knew.

  I was, as I have said before, very young. The next day, whil
e Kitty still slept, I rose and made my noiseless way into our parlour. There I did something that I had longed for months to do, but never had the courage. I took a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote a letter to my sister, Alice.

  I hadn’t written home in weeks. I had told them, once, that I had joined the act; but I had rather played the matter down - I feared they wouldn’t think the life a decent one for their own daughter. They had sent me back a brief, half-hearted, puzzled note; they had talked of travelling to London, to reassure themselves that I was quite content - and at that I had written at once to say, they must not think of coming, I was too busy, my rooms were too small ... In short - so ‘careful’ had Kitty made me! - I was as unwelcoming as it was possible to be, this side of friendliness. Since then, our letters had grown rarer than ever; and the business of my fame upon the stage had been quite lost - I never mentioned it; they did not ask.

  Now, it was not of the act that I wrote to Alice. I wrote to tell her what had happened between Kitty and me - to tell her that we loved each other, not as friends, but as sweethearts; that we had made our lives together; and that she must be glad for me, for I was happier than I had ever thought it possible to be.

  It was a long letter, but I wrote it easily; and when I had finished it I felt light as air. I didn’t read it through, but put it in an envelope at once, and ran with it to the post-box. I was back before Kitty had even stirred; and when she woke I didn’t mention it.

  I didn’t tell her about Alice’s reply, either. This came a few days later - came while Kitty and I were at breakfast, and had to stay unopened in my pocket until I could make time to be alone and read it. It was, I saw at once, very neat; and knowing Alice to be no great penwoman, I guessed that this must be the last of several versions.