Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  It was also, unlike my letter, very short - so short that, to my great dismay and all unwillingly, I find that I remember it, even now, in its entirety.

  ‘Dear Nancy,’ it began.

  ‘Your letter was both a shock to me and no surprise at all, for I have been expecting to receive something very like it from you, since the day you left us. When I first read it I did not now whether to weep or throw the paper away from me in temper. In the end I burned the thing, and only hope you will have sense enough to burn this one, likewise.

  ‘You ask me to be happy on your behalf. Nance, you must know that I have always only ever had your happiness at my heart, more nearly even than my own. But you must know too that I can never be happy while your friendship with that woman is so wrong and queer. I can never like what you have told me. You think you are happy, but you are only misled - and that woman, your friend “so-called”, is to blame for it.

  ‘I only wish that you had never met her nor ever gone away, but only stayed in Whitstable where you belong, and with those who love you properly.

  ‘Let me just say at the last what you must I hope know. Father, Mother and Davy know nothing of this, and won’t from my lips, since I would rather die of shame than tell them. You must never speak of it to them, unless you want to finish the job you started when you first left us, and break their hearts completely and for ever.

  ‘Don’t burden me, I ask you, with no more shameful secrets. But look to yourself and the path that you are treading, and ask yourself if it is really Right.

  ‘Alice.’

  She must have kept her word about not telling our parents, for their letters to me continued as before - still cautious, still rather fretful, but still kind. But now I got even less pleasure from them; only kept thinking, What would they write, if they knew? How kind would they be then? My replies, in consequence, grew shorter and rarer than ever.

  As for Alice: after that one brief, bitter epistle, she never wrote to me at all.

  Chapter 6

  The months, that year, seemed to slide by very swiftly; for, of course, we were busier now than ever. We continued to work our hit - the song about the sovereigns and the winks - all through the spring and summer, but there were always new songs, new routines to labour over and perfect, new orchestras to grow familiar with, new theatres, and new costumes. Of the latter, we acquired so many that we found we couldn’t manage them without help, and took on a girl to do my old job - to mend the suits and to help us dress in them, at the side of the stage.

  We grew rich - or rich, at least, as far as I was concerned. At the Star, in Bermondsey, Kitty had started on a couple of pounds a week, and I had thought my own, small dresser’s share of that quite grand enough. Now I earned ten, twenty, thirty times that figure, on my own account, and sometimes more. The sums seemed unimaginable to me: I preferred, perhaps foolishly, not to think of them at all, but let Walter worry over our wages. He, in response to our great successes, had found new agents for his other artistes and was now our manager full-time. He negotiated our contracts, our publicity, and held our money for us; he paid Kitty and she, as before, gave me whatever little cash I needed, when I asked her for it.

  It was rather strange with Walter, now that Kitty and I had grown so close. We saw him quite as often as we had before; we still went driving with him; we still spent long hours with him at Mrs Dendy’s piano (though the piano itself had been changed, to a more expensive one). He was as kind and as foolish as ever - but a little dimmed, somehow, a little shadowy, now that the blaze of Kitty’s charms was more decidedly turned my way. Perhaps it only seemed so to me; but I was sorry for him, and could not help but wonder what he thought. I was sure he hadn’t guessed that Kitty and I were sweethearts - for, of course, we were rather cool ourselves, in public, now.

  As rich as we became that year, we were never quite rich enough to be so very choosy about the kind of halls we sang in. For the whole of September we played at the Trocadero - a very smart theatre, and one of the ones that Walter had pointed out to us on our first, giddy tour of the West End, more than a year before. When we left the Troc, however, it was to drive to Deacon’s Music Hall, in Islington. This was an altogether different place: small and old, with an audience drawn from the streets and courts of Clerkenwell - and inclined, in consequence, to be rather rough.

  We didn’t mind a rowdy crowd, as a rule, for it could be unnerving to work the prim West End theatres, where the ladies were too gentle or well-dressed to bang their hands together or to stamp, and where only the drunken swells of the promenade really whistled and shouted as a proper music-hall audience should. We had never worked Deacon’s before, but we had once done a week at Sam Collins’, up the road. There the crowd had been humble and gay - working-people, women with babies in their arms - the kind of audience I liked best of all, because it was the kind of which, until very recently, I had myself been a member.

  The Deacon’s crowd were noticeably shabbier than the folk at Islington Green, but no less kind; if anything, indeed, they were inclined to be kinder, jollier, more willing to be moved and thrilled and entertained. Our first week there went well - they packed the hall for us. It was on the Saturday night of the second week that the trouble came - on a Saturday night at the end of September, a night of fog - one of those grey-brown evenings, when all the streets and buildings of the city seem to waver a little at the edges.

  The roads are always choked on such a night, and on this particular evening the traffic between Windmill Street and Islington was horribly slow, for there had been an accident along the way. A van had overturned; a dozen boys had rushed to sit upon the horse’s head, to stop the beast from rising; and our own carriage could not pass for half an hour or more. We arrived at Deacon’s terribly late, to find the place as wild as the street we had just left. The crowd had had to wait for us, and were impatient. Some poor artiste had been sent on to sing a comic song and keep them occupied, but they had started to heckle him quite mercilessly; at last - the fellow had begun a clog dance - two roughs had jumped upon the stage and pulled the boots from him, and tossed them up to the gallery. When we arrived, breathless and flustered but ready to sing, the air was thick with shouts and bellows and screams of laughter. The two roughs had hold of the comic singer by the ankles, and were holding him so that his head dangled over the flames of the footlights, in an attempt to set fire to his hair. The conductor and a couple of stage-hands had hold of the roughs, and were trying to pull them into the wings. Another stage-hand stood nearby, dazed, and with a bleeding nose.

  We had Walter with us, for we had arranged to eat with him later, after the show. Now he looked at the scene before us, aghast.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘You cannot go on with them in such a mood as this.’

  As he spoke, the manager came running. ‘Not go on?’ he said, appalled. ‘They must go on, or there will be a riot. It is entirely because they did not go on when they were meant to that the damn trouble - excuse me, ladies - started.’ He wiped his forehead, which was very damp. From the stage, however, there were signs that the scuffling, at last, was subsiding.

  Kitty looked at me, then nodded. ‘He’s right,’ she said to Walter. Then, to the manager: ‘Tell them to put our number up.’

  The manager pocketed his handkerchief and stepped smartly away before she could change her mind; but Walter still looked grave. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked us. He glanced back towards the stage. The roughs had been successfully carried off, and the singer had been placed in a chair in the wing across from us and given a glass of water. His clogs must have been thrown back on to the stage, or else some kind soul had delivered or retrieved them; at any rate, they now stood rather neatly beneath his chair and beside his bruised and naked feet. There were still some shrieks and whistles, however, from the hall.

  ‘You don’t have to do it,’ Walter went on. ‘They may hurl something; you might get hurt.’

  Kitty straightened her collar. As she did so we heard the
great roar, and the thunder of stamping feet, that told us that our number had gone up. In a second, rising doggedly over the din, there came the first few bars of our opening song. ‘If they hurl something,’ she said quickly, ‘we’ll duck.’ Then she took a step, and nodded for me to follow.

  And after all the fuss, indeed, they received us very graciously.

  ‘Wot cheer, Kitty?’ someone shouted, as we danced our way into the beam of the limes. ‘Did you lose your way in the fog, then, or what?’

  ‘Shocking awful traffic,’ she called back - the first verse was about to begin, and she was slipping further into character with every step she took -‘but not so bad as a road my friend and I were a-walking on the other afternoon. Why, it took us quite half a day to get from Pall Mall to Piccadilly...’ And effortlessly, seamlessly - and with me beside her, closer and more faithful than a shadow - she led us into our song.

  When that was over we headed back into the wing, to where Flora, our dresser, waited with our suits. Walter kept his distance, but clasped his hands together before his chest when we emerged, and shook them, in a gesture of triumph. He was pink-faced and smiling with relief.

  Our second number - a song called ‘Scarlet Fever’, for which we dressed in guardsmen’s uniforms (red jackets and caps, white belts, black trousers, very smart) - went down a treat; it was during the next routine that all turned sour. There was a man in the stalls: I had noticed him earlier, for he was large, and clearly very drunk; he slept noisily in his seat, with his knees spread wide, his mouth open and his chin glistening slightly in the glow from the stage. For all I know, he might have slept through all the rumpus with the clog-dancer; now, however, by some horrible mischance, he had woken up. It was a very small theatre and I could see him quite distinctly. He had stumbled over his neighbours’ legs to get to the end of his row, swearing all the way, and drawing answering curses from everyone he stepped on. He had reached the aisle at last - but there he had grown confused. Instead of heading for the bar, the privy, or wherever it was that he had made up his gin-or whisky- soaked mind to make for, he had wandered down to the side of the stage. Now he stood, peering up at us, with his hands over his eyes.

  ‘What the devil - ?’ he said; he said it during a lull between verses, and it sounded very loud. A few people turned away from us to look at him, and to titter or tut-tut.

  I exchanged a glance with Kitty, but kept my voice and steps in time with hers, my eyes still bright, my smile still broad. After a second the man began to curse even louder. The crowd - who were still, I suppose, rather ready for a bit of sport - began to shout at him, to quieten him down.

  ‘Throw the old josser out!’ called someone; and, ‘Don’t you pay no mind to him, Nan, dear!’ This was from a woman in the stalls. I caught her eye, and tipped my hat - it was a boater; we were wearing the Oxford bags and boaters, now - and saw her blush.

  All the shouting, however, only seemed to enrage and confuse the man still further. A boy stepped up to him, but was knocked away; I saw the fellows in the orchestra begin to gaze a little wildly over the tops of their instruments. At the back of the hall two door-men had been summoned and were squinting into the gloom. Half a dozen hands waved and pointed to where the man leaned over the footlights, his whiskers fluttering in the heat.

  He, now, had started banging on the stage with the heel of his hand. I suppressed an urge to dance up to him and stamp upon his wrist (for, apart from anything else, I thought he was quite capable of seizing my ankle and dragging me into the stalls.) Instead, I took my cue from Kitty. She had hold of my arm, and had pressed it, but her brow was smooth and untroubled. At any moment, I thought, she would slow the song, launch into the man, or call for the door-men to come and remove him.

  But they, at last, had spotted him, and had begun their advance. He, all unknowing, ranted drunkenly on.

  ‘Call that a song?’ he shouted. ‘Call that a song? I want my shilling back! You hear me? I want my bleeding shilling back!’

  ‘You want your bleeding arse kicked, is what you want!’ answered someone from the pit. Then someone else, a woman, yelled, ‘Stop your row, can’t you? We can’t hear the girls for all your racket.’

  The man gave a sneer; then he hawked, and spat. ‘Girls?’ he cried. ‘Girls? You call them girls? Why, they’re nothing but a couple of - a couple of toms!’

  He put the whole force of his voice into it - the word that Kitty had once whispered to me, flinching and shuddering as she said it! It sounded louder at that moment than the blast of a cornet - seemed to bounce from one wall of the hall to another, like a bullet from a sharp-shooter’s act gone wrong.

  Toms!

  At the sound of it, the audience gave a great collective flinch. There was a sudden hush; the shouts became mumbles, the shrieks all tailed away. Through the shaft of limelight I saw their faces - a thousand faces, self-conscious and appalled.

  Even so, the awkwardness might have lasted no longer than a moment; they might have forgotten it at once, and grown noisy and gay again - but for what happened, simultaneous with their silencing, upon the stage.

  For Kitty had stiffened; and then she had stumbled. We had been dancing with our arms linked. Now her mouth flew open. Now it shut. Now it trembled. Her voice - her lovely, shining, soaring voice - faltered and died. I had never known it happen before. I had seen her sail, quite at her ease, through seas of indifference, squalls of heckling. Now, upon that single, dreadful, drunken cry, she had foundered.

  I, of course, should have sung all the louder, swept her across the stage, jollied the audience along; but I, of course, was only her shadow. Her sudden silence stopped my throat, and stunned me into immobility, too. I looked from her to the orchestra pit. There, the conductor had seen our confusion. The music had slowed and faded for a second - but now picked up, more briskly than before.

  But the melody affected neither Kitty nor the audience. At the side of the stalls, the door-men had reached the drunken man at last, and had hold of his collar. The crowd looked not at him, however, but at us. They looked at us, and saw - what? Two girls in suits, their hair close-clipped, their arms entwined. Toms! For all the efforts of the orchestra, the man’s cry still seemed to echo about the hall.

  Far off in the gallery someone called something that I could not catch, and there was an awkward answering laugh.

  If the shout cast a spell over the theatre, the laughter broke it. Kitty shifted, then seemed to see for the first time that our arms were joined. She gave a cry, and drew away from me as if in horror. Then she put her hand to her eyes and stepped, with her head bowed, into the wing.

  For a second I stood, dazed and confounded; then I hurried after her. The orchestra rattled on. There were shouts from the hall, at last, and cries of ‘Shame!’ The curtain, I think, was rung hurriedly down.

  Back stage, everything was in a state of the greatest confusion. Kitty had run to Walter: he had his arm about her shoulders and looked grave. Flora stood by with a shoe unlaced and ready, shocked and uncertain but desperately curious. A knot of stage-hands and fly-men looked on, whispering amongst themselves. I stepped up to Kitty and reached for her arm; she flinched as if I had raised my hand to strike her, and instantly I fell back. As I did so the manager appeared, more flustered than ever.

  ‘I should like to know, Miss Butler, Miss King, what the blazes you mean by -’

  ‘I should like to know,’ interrupted Walter harshly, ‘what the blazes you mean by sending my artistes on before that rabble you call your audience. I should like to know why a drunken fool is allowed to interfere with Miss Butler’s performance for ten minutes, while your men gather their scattered wits together, and make up their minds to remove him.’

  The manager stamped his foot: ‘How dare you, sir!’

  ‘How dare you, sir -!’

  The debate went on. I didn’t listen to it, only looked at Kitty. Her eyes were dry, but she was white-faced and stiff. She hadn’t taken her head from Walter’s shoulder, and s
he had not glanced towards me, at all.

  Finally Walter gave a snort, and waved the blustering manager away. He turned to me. He said, ‘Nan, I am taking Kitty home, at once. There’s no question now of you going on for your final number; I’m afraid, too, that we must forfeit our supper. I shall hail us a hansom; will you follow with Flora and the gear, in the carriage? I should like to get Kitty back to Ginevra Road as swiftly as possible.’

  I hesitated, then looked at Kitty again. She raised her eyes to mine at last, very briefly, and nodded.

  ‘All right,’ I said. I watched them leave. Walter took up his cloak, and - though it was far too large for her, and trailed upon the dusty floor - he placed it over Kitty’s slender shoulders. She clasped it tight at the throat, then let him usher her away, past the angry manager and the knot of whispering boys.

  By the time I reached Ginevra Road - after having gathered our boxes and bags together at Deacon’s, and delivered Flora to her own house in Lambeth - Walter had gone, our rooms were dark, and Kitty was in bed, apparently asleep. I bent over her, and stroked her head. She did not stir, and I didn’t like to wake her to perhaps more upset. Instead, I simply undressed, and lay close beside her, and placed my hand upon her heart - which beat on, very fiercely, through her dreams.

  The disastrous night at Deacon’s brought changes with it, and made some things a little strange. We did not sing at the hall again, but broke our contract - losing money on the deal. Kitty became choosier about the theatres we worked at; she began to question Walter, too, about the other acts that we must share the bills with. Once he booked us to appear alongside an American artist - a man called ‘Paul or Pauline?’ whose turn was to dance in and out of an ebony cabinet, dressed now as a woman, now as a man, and singing soprano and baritone by turns. I thought the act was a good one; but when Kitty saw him work, she made us cancel. She said the man was a freak, and would make us seem freakish by association ...