by Sarah Waters
The self-consciousness did not diminish as I walked, on Father’s arm, the little distance to our oyster-shop. The house, I thought, was shabbier than ever. The weather-boards above the shop showed more wood, now, than blue paint; and the sign - Astley’s Oysters, the Best in Kent - hung on one hinge, and was cracked where the rainwater had soaked it. The stairs we climbed were dark and narrow, the room into which I finally emerged smaller and more cramped than I could have believed possible. Worst of all the street, the stairs, the room, the people in it, all reeked of fish! It was a stink that was as familiar to me as the scent of my own armpit; but I was startled, now, to think that I had ever lived in it and thought it ordinary.
My surprise, I hope, was lost in the general bustle of my arrival. I had expected Mother and Alice to be waiting for me; they were - but so were half-a-dozen other people, each one of whom exclaimed when I appeared, and stepped forward (except for Alice) to embrace me. I had to smile and submit to being squeezed and patted until I grew quite breathless. Rhoda - still my brother’s sweetheart - was there, looking perter than ever; Aunty Ro, too, had come along to welcome me back, together with her son, my cousin George, and her daughter, Liza, and Liza’s baby - except that the baby was not a baby at all now, but a little boy in frills. Liza, I saw, was large with child again; I had been told this in a letter, I believe, but had forgotten it.
I took off my hat once all the welcomes had been said, and my heavy coat with it. Mother looked me up and down. She said, ‘My goodness, Nance, how tall and fine you look! I do believe you’re taller, almost, than your Father.’ I did feel tall in that tiny, overcrowded room: but I could hardly, I thought, have really grown. It was just that I was standing rather straighter. I gazed around - a little proud, despite my awkwardness - and found a seat, and tea was brought. I still had not exchanged a word with Alice.
Father asked after Kitty, and I said that she was well. Where was she playing now? they asked me. Where were we living? Rosina said, there had been talk that I had gone upon the stage myself -? And at that I only answered, that I did ‘sometimes join Kitty in the act’.
‘Well, fancy that!’
I cannot say what squeamishness still made me keep the fact of my success from them. It was, I think, because the act - as I have said - was so entangled with my love: I could not bear to have them pry at it, or frown at it, or pass the idea of it on to others, carelessly ...
It was, I suppose now, a kind of priggishness; indeed, I hadn’t been amongst them more than half-an-hour before George, my cousin, gave a cry: ‘What’s happened to your accent, Nance? You’ve gone all lardy-dah.’ I looked at him in real surprise, then listened hard next time I spoke. It was quite true, my voice had changed. I was not posh, as he had claimed, but there is a certain lilt that theatre people have - a rather odd, unpredictable mixture of all the accents of the halls, from coster-man to lion comique; and I, all unknowingly, had picked it up. I sounded rather like Kitty - occasionally, even like Walter. I had never realised it till now.
We drank our tea; there was a lot of fussing over the little boy. Someone handed him to me for me to nurse - when I took him, however, he cried.
‘Oh dear!’ said his mother, tickling him. ‘Your Aunty Nance will think you a real cry-baby.’ She took him from me, then held him near my face: ‘Shake hands!’ She seized his arm and waved it. ‘Shake hands with Aunty Nancy, like a proper little gent!’ He jerked at her hip, like some great swollen pistol that at any second might go off; but I dutifully took his fingers in my own, and squeezed them. Of course, he snatched his hand away at once, and only wailed the louder. Everybody laughed. George caught the baby up and swung him high, so that his hair brushed the cracked and yellowed plaster of the ceiling. ‘Who’s a little soldier, then?’ he cried.
I looked at Alice, and she glanced away.
The baby quietened at last; the room grew warmer. I saw Rhoda lean towards my brother and whisper, and when he nodded, she coughed. She said, ‘Nancy, you won’t have heard our bit of good news.’ I looked at her properly. She had her jacket off and her feet, I noticed, were bare but for a pair of woollen stockings. She seemed very much at home.
Now she held out her hand. On the second finger from the left there was a narrow strip of gold, with a tiny stone - sapphire or diamond, it was too small to tell - mounted upon it. An engagement ring.
I blushed - I don’t know why - and forced a smile. ‘Oh, Rhoda! I am glad. Davy! How nice for you.’ I was not glad; it was not nice; the thought of having Rhoda as a sister-in-law - of having any kind of sister-in-law! - was peculiarly horrible. But I must have sounded pleased enough, for they both grew pink and smug.
Then Aunt Rosina nodded towards my own hand. ‘No sign of a ring on your finger yet, Nance?’
I saw Alice shift in her seat, and shook my head: ‘Not yet, no.’ Father opened his mouth to speak; I could not bear, however, for the conversation to run down that particular road. I got up, and retrieved my bags. ‘I’ve bought you all some things,’ I said, ‘from London.’
There were murmurs and little interested ‘Oh’s at that. Mother said I shouldn’t have, but reached for her spectacles and looked expectant. I went to my Aunt, first, and handed her a bag full of packages. ‘These are for Uncle Joe, and Mike and the girls. This is for you.’ George next: I had bought him a silver hip-flask. Then Liza, and the baby ... I went all around the crowded room, and finished up at Alice: ‘This is for you.’ Her parcel - a hat, in a hat box - was the biggest. She took it from me with the smallest, straightest, stiffest smile you ever saw, and began slowly and self-consciously to pull at its ribbons.
Now everybody had a gift but me. I sat and watched as they tore at their packages, chewing at my knuckle and smiling into my hand. One by one the objects appeared, and were turned and examined in the late morning light. The room grew quite hushed.
‘My word, Nancy,’ said Father at last, ‘you have done us proud.’ I had bought him a watch-guard, thick and bright as the one that Walter wore; he held it in his hand, and it seemed brighter than ever against the red of his palm, the faded wool of his jacket. He laughed: ‘I shall look quite the thing in this, now, shan’t I?’ The laugh, however, didn’t sound quite natural.
I looked at Mother. She had a silver-backed brush and a hand-glass to match: they sat in their wrappers, in her lap, as if she were afraid to pick them up. I thought at once - what had never occurred to me in Oxford Street - how queer they would look beside her cheap coloured perfume bottles, her jar of cold-cream, on her old chest of drawers with its chipped glass handles. She caught my eye, and I saw that she had thought the same. ‘Really, Nance ...’ she said; and her words were almost a reproof.
There were murmurs, now, from all around the room, as people compared presents. Aunt Rosina held up a pair of garnet earrings, and blinked at them. George fingered his flask, and asked me, rather nervously, whether I had won the sweep-stakes. Only Rhoda and my brother seemed really pleased with their gifts. For Davy I had bought a pair of shoes, hand-sewn and soft as butter: now he rapped on their soles with his knuckles, then stepped over the discarded paper and strings to kiss my cheek. ‘What a little star you are,’ he said. ‘I shall save these for my wedding-day and be the best-shod bloke in Kent.’
His words seemed to remind everybody of their manners, and suddenly they all rose to kiss and thank me, and there was a general, embarrassed shuffling. I looked over their shoulders to where Alice still sat. She had taken the lid from the hat-box, but had not removed the hat, only held it, listlessly, in her fingers. Davy saw me looking. ‘What’ve you got, Sis?’ he called. When she reluctantly tipped up the box for him to see, he whistled: ‘What a stunner! With an ostrich feather and a diamond on the brim. Aren’t you going to try it on?’
‘I will, later,’ she said.
Now everyone turned to look at her.
‘Oh, what a beautiful hat!’ said Rhoda. ‘And what a lovely shade of red. What shade of red do they call that, Nancy?’
‘“Buffalo Red”,’ I said miserably; I could not have felt more of a fool if I had given them all a pile of trash - cotton-reels and candle-stubs, toothpicks and pebbles - wrapped up in tissue and ribbons and silks.
Rhoda did not notice. “‘Buffalo Red”!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Alice, do be a sport and give us a look at it on you.’
‘Yes, go on, Alice.’ This was Rosina. ‘Nancy’ll think you don’t like it, otherwise.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. ‘Let her try it later.’ But George had jumped over to Alice’s chair, taken the hat from her, and now tried to set it on her head.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to see if you look like a buffalo in it.’
‘Leave off!’ said Alice. There was a scuffle. I closed my eyes, heard the rip of stitches, and when next I looked my sister had the bonnet in her lap, and George had half the ostrich feather in his fingers. The chip of diamante had flown off, and been lost.
Poor George began to gulp and cough; Rosina said sternly that she hoped that he was satisfied. Liza took the hat and the feather and tried awkwardly to reunite them: ‘Such a pretty bonnet,’ she said. Alice started to sniff, then placed her hands before her eyes and hurried from the room. Father said, ‘Well, now!’; he still held his gleaming watch-guard. Mother looked at me and shook her head. ‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘Oh Nancy, what a shame!’
In time Rosina and the cousins left, and Alice, still rather swollen-eyed, went out to call on a friend. I took my bags up to my old room, and washed my face; when I came down a little later, the presents I had brought had all been tidied out of sight, and Rhoda was helping Mother peel and boil potatoes in the kitchen. They shooed me away when I offered to join them, and said I was a guest; and so I sat with Father and Davy - who seemed to think that keeping to their usual habits, and hiding themselves behind the Sunday papers, would put me at my ease.
We had our dinner, then took a walk to Tankerton and sat pitching stones into the water. The sea was grey as lead; far out upon it there were a couple of yawls and barges - bound for London, where Kitty was. What was she doing now, I wondered, apart from missing me?
Later there was tea, after which more cousins appeared, to thank me for their presents and to beg for a look at my handsome new clothes. We sat upstairs and I showed them my frocks, my hat with the veil upon it, and my painted stockings. There was more talk about young men. Alice, I learned - they were surprised she hadn’t told me this - had finished with Tony Reeves from the Palace, and had started stepping out with a boy who worked at the shipyard; he was much taller, they said, than Tony, but not as funny. Freddy, my old beau, was also seeing a new girl, and seemed likely to marry her ... When they asked me, again, if I was courting, I said I wasn’t; but I hesitated over it, and they smiled. There was someone, they pressed - and just to keep them quiet, I nodded.
‘There was a boy. He played the cornet in an orchestra ...’ I looked away, as if it made me sad to think of him, and felt them exchange significant glances.
And what about Miss Butler? Surely she had a young man? ‘Yes, a man named Walter ...’ I hated myself for saying it - but thought, too, How Kitty will laugh at this, when I tell her!
I had forgotten what early hours they all kept. The cousins left at ten; at half-past everybody else started yawning. Davy saw Rhoda home, and Alice bade the rest of us good-night. Father rose and stretched, then came to me and put his arm about my neck. ‘It’s been a treat for us, Nance, to have you home again - and you grown into such a beauty!’
Then Mother smiled at me - the first real smile that I had seen upon her face that day; and I knew then how really glad I was to be at home, amongst them all.
But the gladness didn’t last long. In a few minutes more I said my own good-nights, and found myself alone, at last, with Alice, in our - her - room. She was in bed, but the lamp was still high, and her eyes were open. I did not undress, but stood with my back to the door, quite still, until she looked at me.
‘I’m sorry about the hat,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ I stepped to the chair by the fireplace, and began to unbutton my boots.
‘You shouldn’t have spent so much,’ she went on.
I pulled a face: ‘I wish I hadn’t.’ I stepped out of the shoes, kicked them to one side, and started on the hooks of my dress. She had closed her eyes, and seemed disinclined to say anything else. I slowed my hand, and looked at her.
‘Your letter,’ I said, ‘was horrible.’
‘I don’t want to talk about any of that,’ she answered quickly, turning away. ‘I told you what I think. I haven’t changed.’
‘Neither have I.’ I tugged harder at the hooks and stepped free of the dress, then slung it over the back of the chair. I felt peevish and not at all tired. I went to one of my bags and got out a cigarette, and when I struck the match to light it Alice raised her head. I shrugged: ‘Another nasty little habit Kitty taught me.’ I sounded just like some hard-faced bitch of a ballet-girl.
I took off the rest of my clothes, then pulled my night-gown over my head - then remembered my hair. I could not sleep with the plait still fastened to me. I glanced towards Alice again - she had paled at my words, but still watched - then pulled at the hairpins until the chignon came loose. From the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fall open. I ran my fingers through my flat, shorn locks; the action - and the cigarette that I had just smoked - made me feel wonderfully calm.
I said: ‘You can’t tell, can you, that it’s a false one?’
Now Alice sat up with the blankets gripped before her. ‘You needn’t look so horrified,’ I said. ‘I told you all, I wrote and told you: I’ve joined the act; I’m not Kitty’s dresser any more. I’m on the stage myself, now, doing what she does. Singing, dancing...’
She said, ‘You never wrote it like it was really true. If it was true we would have heard! I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’
She shook her head. ‘Singing,’ she said. ‘Dancing. That’s a tart’s life. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t...’
I said, ‘I do’; and just to show her that I meant it, I lifted my nightie and did a little shuffle across the rug.
The dance seemed, like the hair, to frighten her. When she spoke next it was with a show of bitterness - but her voice was thick with rising tears. ‘I suppose you lift your skirts like that, do you? and show your legs, on stage, for all the world to look at!’
‘My skirts?’ I laughed. ‘Good heavens, Alice, I don’t wear skirts! I didn’t get my hair cut off to wear a frock. It’s trousers I wear: I wear gentlemen’s suits -!’
‘Oh!’ Now she had begun to cry. ‘What a thing to do! What a thing to do, in front of strangers!’
I said. ‘You thought it good enough when Kitty did it.’
‘Nothing she did was ever good! She took you off, and has made you strange. I don’t know you at all. I wish you’d never gone with her - or never come back!’
She lay down, pulled the blankets to her chin, and wept; and since I don’t know a girl who is not moved to tears by the sight of her own sister weeping, I climbed in beside her, and my own eyes began to sting.
But when she felt me close she gave a jerk. ‘Get off me!’ she cried, and wriggled away. She said it with such real passion, such horror and grief, I could do nothing but what she asked, and let her lie at the cold edge of the bed. Soon she ceased her shaking, and fell silent; and my own eyes dried, and my face grew hard again. I reached for the lamp, and put it out; then lay on my back and said nothing.
The bed, that had been chill, grew warmer. I began at last to wish that Alice would turn, and talk to me. Then I began to wish that Alice was Kitty. Then I began - I couldn’t help it! - to think of all that I would do with her, if she was. The sudden force of my desire unnerved me. I remembered all the times that I had lain here and pictured similar things, before Kitty and I had ever even kissed. I remembered when I had first slept beside her at Gin
evra Road, when I was used only to sharing with my sister. Now Alice’s body felt strange to me; it seemed queer and wrong, somehow, to lie so close to someone and not kiss and stroke them ...
I thought suddenly, Suppose I fall asleep, forget that she isn’t Kitty, and put a hand upon her, or a leg -?
I got up, put my coat over my shoulders, and smoked another cigarette. Alice did not stir.
I squinted at my watch: half-past eleven. I wondered, again, what Kitty was doing; and sent a mental message through the night, to Stamford Hill, to make her pause - whatever her business was just then - and remember to think of me, in Whitstable.
My visit, after that poor start, was not brilliant. I had arrived on a Sunday, and the following days, of course, were working ones. I didn’t fall asleep, that first night, until very late, but the next morning I woke when Alice woke, at half-past six, and forced myself to rise and eat my breakfast with the others, at the parlour-table. Then, however, I didn’t know whether to offer to take up my old duties in the kitchen, with the oyster-knife - I couldn’t tell whether they would like it or expect it, or even whether I could bear to try it. In the end I drifted down with them and found I wasn’t needed anyway; for they had a girl, now, to sever and beard the natives, and she was just as quick, it seemed, as I had been. I stood beside her - she was rather pretty - and made some half-hearted passes with my knife at a dozen or so shells ... But the water chilled and stung me, and soon I preferred to sit and watch - then I closed my eyes and placed my head upon my arms, and listened to the hum of gossip from the restaurant, and the bubble of the pans ...
In short, I fell asleep; and only woke when Father, hurrying by me, stumbled over my skirts and spilled a pot of liquor. Then it was suggested that I go upstairs - out of their way, they meant. And so I passed the afternoon alone, alternately nodding over the Illustrated Police News and pacing the parlour to keep myself awake - and wondering, frankly, why I had come home at all.
