Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  For on every visit I found some new trick to better my impersonation. I called at a barber’s shop, and had my old effeminate locks quite clipped away. I bought shoes and socks, singlets and drawers and combinations. I experimented with bandages in an effort to get the subtle curves of my bosom more subtle still; and at my groin I wore a handkerchief or a glove, neatly folded, to simulate the bulges of a modest little cock.

  I could not say that I was happy - you must not think that I was ever happy, now. I had spent too many miserable weeks at Mrs Best’s to be anything other than wretched in my room there: I was bleached of hope and colour, like the wallpaper. But London, for all my weeping, could never wash dim; and to walk freely about it at last - to walk as a boy, as a handsome boy in a well-sewn suit, whom the people stared after only to envy, never to mock - well, it had a brittle kind of glamour to it, that was all I knew, just then, of satisfaction.

  ‘Let Kitty see me now,’ I would think. ‘She would not have me when I was a girl - so let her only see me now!’ And I remembered a book that Mother had had once from the library, in which a woman, cast out, returned to her home to care for her children in the guise of a nurse. If only I could meet Kitty once again, I thought, and woo her as a man - and then reveal myself, to break her heart, as she had broken mine!

  But though I thought it, I made no attempt to contact her; and the possibility of accidentally meeting her - of seeing her with Walter — still made me shake. Even when June came, and then July, and she must surely have returned from her gay honeymoon, I never saw her name on any poster outside any hall or theatre; and I never bought a theatrical paper, to look for it there - so never learned how she fared, as Walter’s wife. The only glimpses I ever had of her were in my dreams. In those she was still sweet and lovely, still calling my name and offering me her mouth to kiss; but still, at the last, there would come Walter’s arm about her freckled shoulders, and she would turn her guilty eyes from me, to him.

  I did not wake weeping from such dreams now, however; I would only let them prick me back to Berwick Street. They seemed, I thought, to lend a brilliance to my disguise.

  How very fine it was, however, I did not realise until one night, in August, at the hot end of the summer, as I idled in the Burlington Arcade.

  It was about nine o‘clock. I had been walking, but now stood before the window of a tobacconist’s shop, and was gazing at the goods on show — at the cases and cigar-trimmers, the silver toothpicks and the tortoiseshell combs. The month had been a warm one. I was wearing not the blue serge suit, but the costume I had worn to sing the song called ‘Scarlet Fever’ - a guardsman’s uniform, with a neat little cap. I had unfastened the button at my throat, to let the air in.

  As I stood there I became aware at last of the presence of a fellow at my side. He had joined me at the window, and seemed slowly to have inched his way towards me; now he was really very close indeed - so close that I could feel the warmth of his arm against my own, and smell the soap on him. I didn’t turn to examine his face; I could see that his shoes, however, were highly polished and rather fine.

  After a minute or two of silence, he spoke: ‘A pleasant evening.’

  Still I didn’t look round, only agreed - all guilelessly - that it was. There was another silence.

  ‘You are admiring the display, perhaps?’ he went on then. I nodded - now I did turn to glance at him - and he looked pleased. ‘Then we are kindred spirits, I can tell!’ He had the voice of a gentleman, but kept his tone rather low. ‘Now, I’m not a smoker; and yet I find myself quite unable to resist the lure of a really good tobacconist’s. The cigars, the brushes, the nail-clippers ...’ He gestured with his hand. ‘There is something so very masculine about a tobacconist’s shop - don’t you think?’ His voice, at the last, had dipped to little more than a murmur. Now he said in the same tone but very fast: ‘Are you up for it, Private?’

  His words made me blink.

  ‘Pardon?’

  He looked about him with an eye that was quick, practised, smooth as a well-oiled castor; then he glanced back to me. ‘Are you up for a lark? Have you a room we might go to?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said - although, to be frank, I felt the stirrings of an idea.

  He, at least, must have thought that I was teasing. He smiled, and licked at his moustaches. ‘Don’t you, now. And I thought all you guardsmen fellows knew the game all right ...’

  ‘Not me,’ I said primly. ‘I only joined up last week.’

  He smiled again. ‘A raw recruit! And you’ve never done it with another lad, I suppose? A handsome fellow like you?’ I shook my head. ‘Well’ - he swallowed - ‘won’t you do it now, with me?’

  ‘Do what?’ I said. Again there was that swift, well-lubricated glance.

  ‘Put your pretty arse-hole at my service - or your pretty lips, perhaps. Or simply your pretty white hand, through the slit in my breeches. Whatever, soldier, you prefer; only cease your teasing, I beg you. I’m as hard as a broom-handle, and aching for a spend.’

  Through all this astonishing exchange our outward show of gazing into the tobacconist’s window had barely been disturbed. He had continued to murmur, and made all his lewd proposals in the same swift undertone, his moustaches hardly lifting to let the words out. Any stranger looking on, I thought, would think us two quite unconnected fellows, lost in our own worlds.

  The thought made me smile. In the same humouring tone as before, I said: ‘How much, then, will you give me for it?’

  At that, his face took on a cynical expression, as if he had expected no better of me; but behind the hardness, too, I caught a flash of heat - as if he wouldn’t really have wanted me any other way. He said, ‘A sovereign, for a suck or for a Robert’ - he meant, of course, a Robert Browning. ‘Half a guinea for a dubbing.’

  I made to shake my head - to tilt my cap to him and move away, with the joke quite finished. But in his impatience he half-turned, and I caught a gleam of something at his middle. It was a fat, gold watch-chain. The waistcoat it swung from was striped and rather flash. And when I looked again at the man’s face - there was light upon it, now, from the lamp at the window - I saw that his whiskers and his hair were gingerish and thick. His eyes were brown, his cheeks rather hollow; but for all that, he looked quite unmistakably like Walter. Like Walter, whom Kitty lay with and kissed.

  The idea had a peculiar effect on me. I spoke - but it was as if someone else were doing the speaking, not me. I said: ‘All right. I’ll do it. I’ll - touch you; for a sov.’

  He grew business-like. When I stepped away I felt him linger a moment at the window, then follow. I went not to my old knocking-shop - I had only the most confused sense of what I was about, but knew I oughtn’t to get stuck in a room with him, and risk having him opt for the Robert after all - but to a little court nearby, where there was a nook, above a grating, which the gay girls used as a lavatory. As I approached it, indeed, a woman emerged, pressing her skirts between her legs to dry herself: she gave me a wink. When she had gone, I stood waiting; and a moment later the man appeared. He had a newspaper shielding the fork of his trousers, and when he took the paper away I saw a bulge there the size of a bottle. I had a moment of panic; but then he came and stood before me, and looked expectant. When I began to pull at his buttons, he closed his eyes.

  I got his cock out, and studied it: I had never seen one before, so close, and - no disrespect to the gent concerned - it seemed quite monstrous. But there are always jokes about such things in the music hall: I had a pretty good idea of how they worked. Seizing hold of it, I began - very inexpertly, I am sure, though he didn’t seem to mind - to pump it.

  ‘How thick and long it is,’ I said then - I had heard that it was every man’s ambition to be spoken to thus, at such moments. The fellow gave a sigh, and opened his eyes.

  ‘Oh, I do wish you would kiss me there,’ he whispered. ‘Your mouth is such a perfect one - quite like a girl’s.’

  I slowed my rhythm
, and took another look at his straining cock; and again, when I knelt, it was as if it were someone else who was kneeling, not myself. I thought, This is how Walter tastes!

  Afterwards I spat his spendings out upon the cobbles, and he thanked me very graciously.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, buttoning himself up, ‘perhaps I shall see you again, in the same spot?’

  I could not answer him - the fact was, I felt almost ready to weep. He handed me my sovereign; then, after a moment’s hesitation, he stepped to me and kissed my cheek. The gesture made me flinch; and when he felt the shudder, he misunderstood, and looked wistful.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t like that, you soldier-boys, do you?’ His tone was strange; when I studied him, I saw that his eyes were gleaming.

  His excitement had stirred me to strangeness, before; his emotion, now, made me terribly thoughtful. When he turned and left the court, I remained there, trembling - not with sadness, but with a creeping kind of relish. The man had looked like Walter; I had pleasured him, in some queer way, for Kitty’s sake; and the act had made me sicken. But he was not like Walter, who might take his pleasure where he chose it. His pleasure had turned, at the last, to a kind of grief; and his love was a love so fierce and so secret it must be satisfied, with a stranger, in a reeking court like this. I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you.

  I had kept my heart-beats smothered; and had been betrayed, anyway.

  And now I had betrayed another, like myself.

  I put away the gentleman’s sovereign, and walked to Leicester Square.

  This was one place which, in all my careless West End wanderings, I had tended to avoid or pass through swiftly: I was always mindful of the first trip I had made there, with Kitty and Walter, and it was not a memory I cared, very often, to revisit. Tonight, however, I walked there rather purposefully. I went to the statute of Shakespeare, where we had stood that time, and I leaned before it, gazing at the view that we had looked on then. I remembered Walter saying that we were at the very heart of London, and did I know what it was that made that great heart beat? Variety! I had looked around me that afternoon and seen, astonished, what I thought was all the world’s variety, brought together in one extraordinary place. I had seen rich and poor, splendid and squalid, white man and black man, all bustling side by side. I had seen them make a vast harmonious whole, and been thrilled to think that I was about to find my own particular place in it, as Kitty’s friend.

  How had my sense of the world been changed, since then! I had learned that London life was even stranger and more various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret element, and claimed by it as a member.

  I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side. There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five hundred men there. How many of them were like the gentleman whose parts I had just fingered? Even as I wondered it I saw one fellow gaze my way, deliberately - and then another.

  Perhaps there had been many such looks since I had returned to the world as a boy; but I had never noticed them or grasped their import. Now, however, I grasped it very well - and I trembled again, as I did so, with satisfaction and spite. I had first donned trousers to avoid men’s eyes; to feel myself the object of these men’s gazes, however, these men who thought I was like them, like that — well, that was not to be pestered; it was to be, in some queer way, revenged.

  For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and to learn the ways and gestures of the world into which I had stumbled. Walking and watching, indeed, are that world’s keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there is a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, a purposeful stepping to an alley or a rooming-house ... At first, as I have said, I took no part in these exchanges, but only studied others at them, and received a thousand questing glances on my own account — some of which I held, rather teasingly, but most of which I turned aside, after a second, with a show of carelessness. But then, one afternoon, I was approached once again by a gentleman who, it seemed to me, bore some slight resemblance to Walter. He wanted my hand upon him, merely, and to have a string of lewd endearments whispered in his ears as I dubbed him off - it didn’t seem like much. If I hesitated, I don’t believe he saw. I named my terms - a sovereign, again - and led him to the nook where I had served his predecessor. His cock seemed rather small; again, however, I said how thick and fine it was.

  ‘You’re a beautiful boy,’ he whispered to me afterwards. There was no trouble over the coin.

  Thus easily - as easily, and fatefully, as I had first begun my music-hall career - thus easily did I refine my new impersonations, and become a renter.

  Chapter 9

  It might seem a curious kind of leap to make, from music-hall masher to renter. In fact, the world of actors and artistes, and the gay world in which I now found myself working, are not so very different. Both have London as their proper country, the West End as their capital. Both are a curious mix of magic and necessity, glamour and sweat. Both have their types - their ingénues and grandes dames, their rising stars, their falling stars, their bill-toppers, their hacks ...

  All this I learned, slowly but steadily, in the first few weeks of my apprenticeship, just as I had learned my music-hall trade at Kitty’s side. Luckily for me, I found a friend and adviser - a boy with whom I fell into conversation late one night, as we sheltered together from a sudden shower in the doorway of a building on the edge of Soho Square. He was a very girlish type - what they call a true mary-anne - and, like many of them, he gave himself a girl’s name: Alice.

  ‘That’s my sister’s name!’ I said, when he told me, and he smiled: it was his sister’s name, too - only his sister, he said, was dead. I said I didn’t know if mine was dead or not, and didn’t care; and this did not surprise him.

  This Alice was, I guessed, about my age. He was as pretty as a girl - prettier, indeed, than most girls (including me), for he had glossy black hair and a heart-shaped face, and eye-lashes impossibly long and dark and thick. He had rented, he said, since he was twelve; renting, now, was the only life he knew, but he liked it well enough. ‘It’s better, anyway,’ he said, ‘than working in an office or a shop. I believe that, if I had to work in the same little room all day, perched on the same little stool and staring at the same dull faces, I would go mad, just mad!’

  When he asked for my history, I told him that I had come up to London from Kent, that I had been treated rather badly by someone, and was now forced to find my living on the streets; all of which was true enough, in its way. I believe he felt sorry for me - or maybe it was just the coincidence of our sisters’ names that warmed him to me - anyway, he began to look out a little for me, and to give me tips and cautions. We would sometimes meet up at the coffee-stalls of Leicester Square, and have a little boast, or grumble, about our fortunes. And while we talked his eyes would be darting, darting, darting all about, looking for new customers, or old ones, or for sweethearts and friends.

  ‘Polly Shaw,’ he would say, inclining his head as some slight young man tripped by us, smiling. ‘A daisy, an absolute daisy, but never let her talk you into lending her a quid.’ Or, less kindly: ‘My eyes! but doesn’t that puss always land with her nose in the cream!’ as another boy drew up in a hansom, and disappeared into the Alhambra on the arm of a gentleman with a red silk lining to his cape.

  Finally, of course, his drifting gaze would settle and harden, and he would give a little nod, or wink, and hastily put down his cup. ‘Whoops!’ h
e would say, ‘I see a porter who wants to punch Sweet Alice’s ticket. Adieu, cherie. A thousand kisses on your marvellous eyes!’ He would touch his fingertip to his lips, then lightly press it to the sleeve of my jacket; then I would see him picking his careful way across the crowded square to the fellow who had gestured to him.

  When he asked me, early on, what my name was, I answered: Kitty.

  It was Sweet Alice who introduced me to the various renter types, and explained to me their costumes, and their habits, and their skills. Foremost amongst them, of course, were the mary-annes, the other boys like himself, who could be seen strolling up and down the Haymarket at any time of the day or night, with their lips rouged and their throats powdered, and clad in trousers as tight and revealing, almost, as a ballerina’s fleshings. These boys took their customers to lodging-houses and hotels; their aim was to be spotted by some manly young gentleman or lord and set up as his mistress in apartments of their own. More succeeded in this ambition than you might think.

  Then again, there were the more ordinary-looking fellows, the clerks and shop-boys: they rather despised the mary-annes, and went with gentlemen - or so they claimed - for the money rather than for the thrill of it; some of them, I believe, even kept wives and sweethearts. The aristocracy or leading men of this particular branch of the profession were the guardsmen: it had been as one of these that I had costumed myself, when I had donned that scarlet uniform - all innocently, of course, for I had known nothing of their reputation in this direction, then. These men, I was assured, were cock-handlers and -suckers, almost exclusively. They occasionally obliged a gentleman with a poke or two, when they were feeling friendly; but they never let their own parts be fondled or kissed. They were proud to the point of mania, Sweet Alice said, on that score.