Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  ‘She can borrow all my suits, all at once, so far as I care,’ I said; and when Grace looked up I gave her a wink, and her pale cheeks pinked a little, and her head went down.

  Mrs Milne gave a mild tut-tut, and folded her arms complacently. ‘I do believe that, after all, Miss Astley, you will suit us very well.’

  I moved in at once. That first afternoon I passed in unpacking my few little things, with Gracie beside me exclaiming over them all, and Mrs Milne bringing tea, and then more tea, and cake. By supper-time I had become ‘Nancy’ to them both; and supper itself - which was a pie and peas and gravy, and afterwards, blancmange in a mould - was the first that I had eaten, at a family table, since my last dinner at Whitstable just over a year before.

  The next day, Gracie tried my suits, in every combination, and her mother clapped. There were sausages for supper, and later cake. The cake being eaten, I changed for Soho; and when Mrs Milne saw me in my serge-and-velvet, she clapped again. She had had a key cut for me, so that when I came home late I should not wake them ...

  It was like rooming with angels. I could keep the hours I liked, wear the costumes I chose, and Mrs Milne said nothing. I could come home in a jacket crusted, at the collar, with a man’s rash spendings - and she would only pluck it from my nervous hands, and wash it at the tap: ‘I never saw a girl so careless with her soup!’ I could wake wretched, plagued with memories, and she would pile my breakfast plate the higher, asking nothing. She was as simple, in her way, as her own simple daughter; she was good to me for Gracie’s sake, because I liked her, and was kind to her.

  I was patient, for example, over the issue of Grace’s interest in the colourful. You could not have spent three minutes in that house without noticing it; but after three days there I began to sense a kind of system to her mania which, if I had had routines of my own, like an ordinary girl, might have proved rather maddening. When, on my first Wednesday there, I went down to breakfast in a yellow waistcoat, Mrs Milne flinched: ‘Gracie don’t quite like to see yellow in the house,’ she said, ‘on a Wednesday.’ Three days later, however, we had a custard for tea: food on a Saturday, it seemed, must be yellow, or nothing ...

  Mrs Milne had grown so used to the fads, she had almost ceased to notice them; and in time, as I have said, I grew used to them, too - calling, ‘What colour today, Grace?’ as I dressed in the mornings. ‘May I wear my blue serge suit, or must it be the Oxfords?’ ‘Shall we have gooseberries for supper, or a Battenburg cake?’ I didn’t mind, it came to seem a kind of game; and Gracie’s way was quite as valid a philosophy, I thought, as many others. And her basic passion, for the vivid and the bright, I understood very well. For there were so many lovely colours in the city; and in a sense she tutored me to look at them anew. As I strolled about I would keep a watch for pictures and dresses that I knew that she would like, then bring them home for her. She had a number of huge albums, into which she pasted cuttings and scraps: I would find her magazines and little books, to worry at with her scissors; I would buy her flowers from the flower-girls’ stalls: violets, carnations, lavender statice and blue forget-me-nots. When I presented them to her - producing them with a flourish, from under my coat, like a conjuror - she would flush with pleasure, and perhaps dip me a playful little curtsey. Mrs Milne would look on, pleased as anything, but shaking her head and pretending to chide.

  ‘Tut!’ she would say to me. ‘You will turn that girl’s head right round, one of these days, I swear it!’ And I would think for a second how queer it was that she - who had been so careful to keep her daughter from the covetous glances of fresh young men - should encourage Grace and me to play at sweethearts, so blithely, and with such seeming unconcern.

  But it was impossible to think very hard about anything in that household, where life was so even and idle and sweet.

  And because, since losing Kitty, thinking was the occupation I cared for least, this suited me best of all.

  So the months slid by. My birthday arrived: I had not marked its passing at all the year before; but now there were gifts, and a cake with green candles. Christmas came, bringing more presents, and a dinner. I remembered with some small, insistent portion of my brain the two gay Christmases that I had spent with Kitty; and then I thought of my family. Davy, I supposed, would be married by now, and possibly a father - that made me an aunt. Alice would be twenty-five. They would all be celebrating the turning of the year, today, without me - wondering, perhaps, where I was, and how I did; and Kitty and Walter might be doing the same. I thought: Let them wonder. When Mrs Milne raised her glass at the dinner-table, and wished the three of us all the luck of the Season and the New Year, I gave her a smile, and then a kiss upon the cheek.

  ‘What a Christmas!’ she said. ‘Here I am, with my two best girls beside me. What a lucky day it was for me and Grace, Nance, the day you knocked upon our door!’ Her eyes glistened a little; she had said this sort of thing before, but never so feelingly. I knew what she was thinking. I knew she had begun to look upon me as a kind of daughter — as a sister, anyway, to her real daughter: a kindly older sister who might be relied upon, perhaps, to care for Gracie when she herself was dead and gone ...

  The idea, at that moment, made me shiver - and yet I had no other plans; no other family, now; no sister of my own; and certainly no sweetheart. So, ‘What a lucky day it was for me,’ I answered. ‘If only everything might stay just as it is, for ever!’ Mrs Milne blinked her tears away and took my soft white hand in her old, hardened one. Gracie gazed at us, pleased, but distracted by the splendours of the day, her hair shining in the candle-light like gold.

  That night I went as usual to Leicester Square. There are gents there, looking for renters, even at Christmas.

  The trade is poor, though, in the winter months. The fogs and the early darkness are kind to the furtive; but no one likes unbuttoning himself when there are icicles upon the wall — nor did I much care for kneeling on slippery cobbles, or wandering around the West End in a short jacket merely for the sake of showing off my lovely bum and the roll of the hankie at the fork of my trousers. I was glad to have a home that was cosy: gay people go down like skittles in January, with fevers and influenza, or worse; Sweet Alice coughed all through that winter - said he was afraid he should do it while he knelt to a gent, a bite his cock off.

  As spring came again, however, the evenings warmed and my curious gaslit career grew easier; but I, if anything, grew lazier. Now, more often than I ventured out into the streets, I kept at home in my room - not sleeping, only lying, open-eyed, half-clothed; or smoking, while the night grew thicker and still, and a candle burned low, and trembled, and died. I took to throwing wide my windows to let the voices of the city in: the clatter of cabs and vans from the Gray’s Inn Road; the hoots and the rattles and hisses of steam, from King’s Cross; snatches of quarrels and confidences and greetings, from passers-by -‘Well now, Jenny!’; ‘Till Tuesday, till Tuesday ...’ When the stifling heat of June arrived I got into the habit of placing a chair on my little balcony high above Green Street, and sitting there long into the cooling night.

  I passed about fifty nights like this that summer, and daresay I could not distinguish so many as five of them from all of their fellows. But one of those nights, I remember very well.

  I had set my chair as usual upon my balcony, but had turned its back to the street and sat lazily straddling it, with my arms across each other and my chin upon my arms. I was wearing, I remember, plain linen trousers and a shirt left open at the neck, and a little straw sailor-hat I had put on against the strong late-afternoon sun, and forgotten to remove. The room behind me I had let darken; I guessed that, apart from the occasional dancing glow of my cigarette tip, I must be quite invisible against its shadows. My eyes were closed, I was thinking of nothing, when all at once I heard music. Someone had begun to strum some kind of sweet, twangy instrument - not a banjo, not a guitar - and a lilting gypsy melody was playing upon the bare evening breezes. Soon a woman’s voice, high and qu
avering, had risen to accompany it.

  I opened my eyes to find the source of the sound; it came not, as I had expected, from the street below, but from the building opposite - the old tenement that had used to be so grim and empty, and such a contrast to the pleasant little terrace in which my landlady had her house. Labourers had been at work upon it for a month and more, and I had been dimly aware of them as they hammered and whistled and leaned from ladders; now the building was spruce and mended. In all my time at Green Street the windows opposite mine had been dark. Tonight, however, they were thrown open, and the curtains behind them were drawn quite wide. It was from here that the gay little melody was issuing: the parted drapes gave me a perfect view of the curious scene that was being enacted within.

  The player of the instrument - it was, I now saw, a mandolin - was a handsome young woman in a well-tailored jacket, a white blouse, a neck-tie, and spectacles; I put her down at once for a lady clerk or a college girl. As she sang, she smiled; and when her voice fell short of the higher notes, she laughed. She had tied a bunch of ribbons to the neck of her mandolin, and these shook and shimmered as she strummed it.

  The little group of people to whom she sang, however, were not quite so gay. A man, in a suit that was rather rough, sat beside her, nodding with a fixed and hopeful smile; on his knee he held a sweet little girl in a patched frock and apron, whose hands he made to clap in approximate time to the melody. At his shoulder leaned a boy, his hair shaved to a stubble around his narrow neck and his large, flushed ears. Behind him stood a tired-looking hard-faced woman - the man’s wife, I guessed - and she held another infant listlessly at her breast. The final member of the party, a stocky girl in a smartish jacket, was only partly visible beyond the edge of the curtain. Her face was hidden, but I could see her hands - which were slender and rather pale - with peculiar clarity: they held a card or a pamphlet, which they flapped in the still, warm air like a fan.

  All of these figures were gathered around a table, upon which stood a jar of flaccid little daisies and the remains of an economical supper: tea and cocoa, cold meat and pickle, and a cake. Despite the long faces and forced smiles, there was something celebratory about the scene. It was, I supposed, a sort of house-warming party - though I could not fathom the relationship between the lady mandolinist and the poor, drab little family to whom she played. Nor was I sure about the other girl, with the pale hands; she, I thought, could have belonged in either camp.

  The tune changed, and I could sense the family growing restless. I lit a cigarette and studied the scene: it was as good a thing to watch, I thought, as any. At length the girl behind the curtain ceased her intermittent fanning and rose. Stepping carefully around the group, she approached the window: it, like my own, opened on to a little balcony, upon which she now stepped, and from which she surveyed, with a mild glance and a yawn, the quiet street beneath.

  There were not more than twelve yards between us, and we were almost level; but, as I had guessed , I was only another shadow against my own shadowy chamber, and she hadn’t noticed me. 1, for my part, had still not seen her face. The window and curtains framed her beautifully, but the light was all from behind. It streamed through her hair, which seemed curly as a corkscrew, and lent her a kind of flaming nimbus, such as a saint might have in the window of a church; her face, however, was left in darkness. I watched her. When the music stopped, and there was a self-conscious smattering of applause and then a bit of desultory chatter, still she kept her place on the balcony and didn’t look round.

  At last my cigarette burned down, almost to my fingers, and I cast it into the street below. She caught the gesture: gave a start, then squinted at me, then grew stiff. Her confusion - despite the darkness, I could see from the tips of her ears that she flushed - disconcerted me, till I recollected my gentleman’s costume. She took me for some insolent voyeur! The thought gave me an odd mixture of shame and embarrassment and also, I must confess, pleasure. I took hold of my boater and raised it, politely.

  ‘G’night, sweetheart,’ I said in a low, lazy tone. It was the kind of thing rough fellows of the street - costers and roadmenders - said to passing ladies all the time. I don’t know why, just then, I thought to copy them.

  The girl gave another twitch, then opened her mouth as if to make me some rusty reply; at that moment, however, her friend approached the window. She had a hat fixed to her head, and was pulling on her gloves. She said, ‘We must go, Florence’ - the name sounded very romantic, in the half-light. ‘It is time for the children to be put to bed. Mr Mason says he will walk with us as far as King’s Cross.’

  The girl gave not a glance more my way then, but turned quickly into the room. Here she kissed the children, shook the mother’s hand, and politely took her leave; from my place on the balcony I saw her, and her friend, and their rough chaperon Mr Mason, quit the building and make their way up towards the Gray’s Inn Road. I thought she might turn to see if I still watched but she did not; and why should I mind it? With the lamplight at last turned upon her face I had seen that she was not at all handsome.

  I might have forgotten all about her, indeed, except that a fortnight or so after I had watched her in the darkness, I saw her again - but this time in daylight.

  It was another warm day, and I had woken rather early. Mrs Milne and Grace were out on a visit, and I had in consequence nothing at all in the world to do, and no one to please but myself. Before my money had all run out I had bought myself a couple of decent frocks; and it was one of those that I had put on, today. I had my old plait of false hair, too: it looked wonderfully natural under the shadow of the stiff brim of a black straw hat. I had a mind to make my way to one of the parks - Hyde Park, I thought, then on perhaps to Kensington Gardens. I knew men would pester me along the way; but parks, I have found, are full of women - full of nursemaids wheeling bassinets, and governesses airing babies, and shop-girls taking their lunches on the grass. Any of these, I knew, might be led into a little conversation by a girl with a smile and a handsome dress; and I had a fancy - a rather curious fancy - for women’s company that day.

  It was in this mood, and with these plans, and in that costume, that I saw Florence.

  I recognised her at once, for all that I had seen so little of her before. I had just let myself out of the house, and lingered for a moment on the lowest step, yawning and rubbing my eyes. She was emerging into the sunlight from a passageway on the other side of Green Street, a little way down on my left, and she was dressed in a jacket and skirt the colour of mustard - it was this, struck by the sun and set glowing, that had caught my eye. Like me, she had paused: she had a sheet of paper in her hand, and seemed to be consulting it. The passageway led to the tenement flats, and I guessed she had been visiting the family that had held the party. I wondered idly which way she would go. If she moved towards King’s Cross again, I should miss her.

  At last she stowed the paper in a satchel that was slung, crosswise, over her chest, and turned - to her left, towards me. I kept to my step and, as I had before, I watched her; slowly she drew level with me until, once again, there was no more than the width of the road between us. I saw her eyes flick once towards mine, then away, and then, as she felt the persistence of my gaze, to mine again. I smiled; she slowed her step and, with a show of uncertainty, smiled back: but I could see that she had not the least idea who I might be. I couldn’t let the moment pass. While my eyes still held her questioning, amiable gaze, I lifted my hand to my head and raised my hat, and said in the same low tone that I had used on her before: ‘G’mornin’.’

  As before, she started. Then she glanced up at the balcony above my head. And then she pinked. ‘Oh! It was you then - was it?’

  I smiled again, and gave a little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong, being gallant in a skirt, and I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur, but for a fool. But when I raised my eyes to hers again her flush was fading, and her face showed neither contempt, nor discomfiture, but
a kind of amusement. She tilted her head.

  A van passed between us, followed by a cart. In lifting my hat to her this time I had thought only, and vaguely, to correct the earlier misunderstanding; perhaps, to make her smile. But when the street was once again clear and she still stood there it seemed a kind of invitation. I crossed, and stood before her. I said, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you the other night.’ She seemed embarassed at the memory, but laughed.

  ‘You didn’t frighten me,’ she said, as if she were never frightened. ‘You just gave me a bit of a start. If I’d known you were a woman — well!’ She blushed again - or it may have been the same blush as before, I couldn’t tell. Then she glanced away; and we fell silent.

  ‘Where’s your friend the musician?’ I said at last. I held an imaginary mandolin to my waist and gave it a couple of strums.

  ‘Miss Derby,’ she said with a smile. ‘She is back at our office. I do a bit of work with a charity, finding houses for poor families that’ve lost their homes.’ She had a plain East End accent, more or less; but her voice was deep and slightly breathy. ‘We have been trying for ages to get our hands on some of the flats in this block here, and that night you saw me we had moved our first family in - a bit of a success for us, we are only a small affair - and Miss Derby thought we should make a party of it.’

  ‘Oh yes? Well, she plays very nicely. You should tell her to come and busk round here more often.’

  ‘You live there then, do you?’ she asked, nodding towards Mrs Milne’s.

  ‘I do. I like to sit out on the balcony ...

  She raised her hand to tuck away a lock of hair beneath her bonnet. ‘And always in trousers?’ she asked me then, so that I blinked.

  ‘Only sometimes in trousers.’