Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  For a full half-minute neither of us spoke; then she tilted back her head, and looked me over. She said, ‘You are, perhaps, on your way home from a costume ball?’ Her voice had a new, slightly arrogant drawl to it.

  ‘A ball?’ I answered. To my own surprise I sounded reedy, rather trembly.

  ‘I thought - the uniform ...’ She gestured towards my suit. It, too, seemed to have lost some of its bravado, seemed to be bleeding its crimson into the shadows of the coach. I felt I was letting her down. I said, with an effort at music-hall sauce, ‘Oh, the uniform is my disguise for the streets, not a party. I find that a girl in skirts, on her own in the city, gets looked at, rather, in a way not always nice.’

  She nodded. ‘I see. And you don’t care for that? - being looked at, I mean. I should never have guessed it.’

  ‘Well... It depends, of course, on who’s doing the looking.’

  I was getting back into my stride at last; and she, I could sense it, was also warming up. I felt for a second - what I had not felt, it seemed, for a hundred years - the thrill of performing with a partner at my side, someone who knew the songs, the steps, the patter, the pose ... The memory brought with it an old, dull ache of grief; but it was overlaid, in this new setting, with a keen, expectant pleasure. Here we were, this strange lady and I, on our way to I knew not what, playing whore and trick so well we might have been reciting a dialogue from some handbook of tartery! It made me giddy.

  Now she raised her hand to finger the braided collar of my coat. ‘What a little impostor you are!’ she said mildly. Then: ‘But you have a brother in the Guards, I think. A brother - or, perhaps, a beau ... ?’ Her fingers trembled slightly, and I felt the chillest of whispers of sapphire and gold upon my throat.

  I said, ‘I work in a laundry, and a soldier brought this in. I thought he wouldn’t notice if I borrowed it.’ I smoothed out the creases around my crotch, where the slippery cravat still rudely bulged. ‘I liked the cut,’ I added, ‘of the trousers.’

  After the briefest of pauses her hand - as I knew it must - moved to my knee, then crept to the top of my thigh, where she let it rest. Her palm felt extraordinarily hot. It was an age since anyone had touched me there; indeed, I had kept such a close guard over my own lap lately, I had to fight back the urge to brush her fingers away.

  Perhaps she felt me stiffen, for she removed the hand herself and said, ‘I’m rather afraid that you are something of a tease.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, recovering, ‘I can tease all right - if that’s what you care for ...’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And besides,’ I added pertly, ‘it’s you who’s the tease: I saw you in St James’s Square, watching me. Why didn’t you stop me then, if you wanted - company - so badly?’

  ‘And spoil the fun with hastening it? Why, the wait was half the pleasure!’ As she said it she raised the fingers of her other hand - her left hand - to my cheek. The gloves, I thought, were rather damp about the tips; and they were scented with a scent that made me draw back in confusion and surprise.

  She laughed. ‘But how prim you have turned! You are never so dainty, I’m sure, with the gentlemen of Soho.’

  There was a knowingness to the remark. I said, ‘You have watched me before - before tonight!’

  She answered: ‘Well, it is rather marvellous what one may catch, from one’s carriage, if one is quick and keen and patient. One may follow one’s quarry like a hound with a fox - and all the time the fox not know itself pursued - might think itself only about its little private business: lifting its tail, arching its eye, wiping its lips ... I might have had you, dear, a dozen times: but oh! as I said, why spoil the chase! Tonight - what was it, decided me at last? Perhaps it was the uniform; perhaps the moon ...’ And she turned her face to the carriage window, where the moon showed - higher and smaller than before, but still quite pink, as if ashamed to look upon the wicked world to which it was compelled to lend its light.

  I, too, flushed at the lady’s words. What she had said was strange, was shocking - and yet, I guessed, might easily be true. In the bustle and swarm of the streets on which I plied my shadowy trade, a stationary or a lingering carriage would be unremarkable - especially to me, who attended to the traffic of the pavements rather than the roads. It made me horribly uneasy to think she really had been observing me, all those times ... And yet, was it not just such an audience that I had longed for? Had I not lamented, again and again, precisely the fact that my new nocturnal performances must be staged in the dark, under cover, unguessed? I thought of all the parts I had handled, the gents I’d knelt to and the cocks I’d sucked. I had done it all, as cool as Christmas; now, the idea that she had watched me went direct to the fork of my drawers and made me wet.

  I said - I didn’t know what else to say - I said, ‘Am I then so - special?’

  ‘We shall see,’ she answered.

  After that, we spoke no more.

  She took me to her home, in St John’s Wood; and the house, as I guessed it must be, was grand - a high, pale villa in a well-swept square, with a wide front door and tall casement windows with many panes of glass. In one of these a single lamp sat gleaming; the neighbouring houses, however, presented only black, shuttered windows, and the clatter of our carriage sounded atrocious, to me, in the stillness - I was not then used to that total, unnatural hush which fills the streets and houses of the rich, when they are sleeping.

  She led me to her door, saying nothing. Her knock was answered by a grim-faced servant, who received her mistress’s cloak, looked once at me from beneath her lashes, but after that kept her eyes quite lowered. The lady paused to read the cards upon her table; and I, self-conscious, looked about me. We were in a spacious hall, at the bottom of a wide staircase winding up to darker, higher floors. There were doors - closed - to the left and the right of us. The floor was paved with marble, in squares of black and pink. The walls, to match it, were painted a deep, deep rose; and this darkened further, where the staircase curved and lifted, like the interior whorls of a shell.

  I heard my hostess say, ‘That will do, Mrs Hooper’, and the servant, with a bow, took her leave. The lady lifted the lamp from the table at my side and, still with no word for me, began to ascend the stairs. I followed. We climbed to one floor, and then another. At each step the house grew darker, until at last there was only the narrow pool of light from my chaperon’s hand to guide my uncertain footsteps through the gloom. She led me down a short passage to a closed door, then turned and stood before it, one hand raised upon the panels, the other with the lamp held at her thigh. Her dark eyes gleamed, with invitation or perhaps with challenge. She looked, to tell the truth, like nothing so much as the ‘Light of the World’ that hung above the umbrella-stand in Mrs Milne’s hallway; but her gesture was not lost on me. This was the third and most alarming threshold I had crossed for her tonight. I felt a prick, now, not of desire, but of fear: her face, lit from beneath by the smoking lamp, seemed all at once macabre, grotesque. I wondered at this lady’s tastes, and how they might have decked the room that lay behind this unspeaking door, in this silent house, with its curious, incurious servants. There might be ropes, there might be knives. There might be a heap of girls in suits - their pomaded heads neat, their necks all bloody.

  The lady smiled, and turned. The door swung open. She led me in.

  It was, after all, a kind of parlour; nothing more. A small fire had burned itself ashy in the grate, and a bowl of browning petals upon the mantel above it made the thick air thicker with a heady perfume. The window was tall, and close-drawn with velvet drapes; against the wall which faced it were two armless, ladder-backed chairs. A door beside the fireplace led into a further room; it was ajar, but I could not see beyond it.

  Between the chairs there was a bureau, and now the lady crossed to it. She poured a glass of wine, and took up a rose-tipped cigarette and lit it.

  I had seen already that she was older, less handsome, but more striking than I’d thought at first. Her fo
rehead was broad and pale - all the paler for being framed by the rippled blackness of her hair and her heavy dark brows. Her nose was very straight; her mouth was a full mouth that had once, I guessed, been fuller. Her eyes were a deep hazel and, in the dim light of the low-turned gas-jets, seemed all pupil. When she narrowed them - which she did now, the better to study me through the blue haze of tobacco smoke - one noticed the network of wrinkles, fine and not so fine, in which they were set.

  The room was terribly warm. I unfastened the button at my throat, then lifted my cap and raked my fingers through my hair - afterwards rubbing my palm against the wool of my thigh, to wipe the oil from it. And all the time she watched me. Then she said, ‘You must think me rather rude.’

  ‘Rude?’

  ‘To have brought you so far, without enquiring after your name.’

  I said, without hesitation, ‘It’s Miss Nancy King, and you might at least offer me a cigarette, I think.’

  She smiled, and came to me, and placed her own fag, half-smoked and damp at the end, between my lips. I caught the reek of it on her breath, together with the faint spice of the wine that she had swallowed.

  ‘If you were King of Pleasure,’ she said, ‘and I were Queen of Pain ...’ Then, in a different tone: ‘You’re very handsome, Miss King.’

  I took a long pull on the cigarette: it made me giddy as a glass of cham. I said: ‘I know.’ At that, she raised her hands to the front of my jacket - she was still wearing gloves, with the rings on top - and ran them over me, delicately and lingeringly, and sighing as she did so. Beneath the wool of my uniform my nipples sprang up stiff as little sergeants; my breasts - which had grown used to being as it were put aside with my corset and chemise - seemed at her touch to rise and swell and strain against their wrappings. I felt like a man being transformed into a woman at the hand of a sorceress. My cigarette smouldered at my lip, forgotten.

  Her hands moved lower, and stopped at my lap, which now, as before, began to pulse and heat. The silken cravat lay rolled there; and as she fingered it, I blushed. She said, ‘Now you are prim again!’ and began to unfasten my buttons. In a moment she had her hand through the slit of my drawers, had seized a corner of the cravat, and began to tug at it. The silk uncurled, and squirmed and susurrated its way out of my trousers, like an eel.

  She looked absurdly like a stage magician, producing a handkerchief or a string of flags from a fist, or an ear, or a lady’s purse - and, of course, she was too clever not to know it: one dark eyebrow lifted, and her lip gave its ironical curl, and she whispered ‘Presto!’ when the cravat was free. But then her look changed. She held the silk to her lips, and gazed at me above it. ‘All your promise has come to nothing, after all,’ she said. Then she laughed, and stepped away, and nodded to my trousers - now gaping whitely, of course, at the buttons. ‘Take them off.’ I did so at once, fumbling with my shoes and stockings in my haste. My fag showered me with ash, and I cast it into the grate. ‘And the underthings,’ she went on,‘ - but leave the jacket. That’s good.’

  Now I had a heap of discarded clothes at my feet. My jacket ended at my hips; beneath it, in the dim light, my legs looked very white, the triangle of hair between them very dark. The lady watched me all the while, making no move to touch me further. But when I was finished, she went to a drawer in the bureau; and when she turned back to me she held something in her hand. It was a key.

  ‘In my bedroom,’ she said, nodding towards the second door, ‘you’ll find a trunk, which this will open.’ She handed it to me. It felt very chill upon my overheated palm, and for a moment I merely gazed stupidly at it. Then she clapped her hands: ‘Presto!’ she said again; and this time, she did not smile, and her voice was rather thick.

  The room next door was smaller than the parlour, but quite as rich, and just as dim and hot. On one side there was a screen, with a commode behind it; on the other stood a japanned press, its surface hard and black and glossy, like a beetle’s back. At the bottom of the bed there was, as she had promised, a trunk: a handsome, antique chest made of some desiccated, perfumed wood - rosewood, I think - with four claw feet and corners of brass, and elaborate carvings on its sides and lid which the dull glow of the fire threw into exaggerated relief. I knelt before it, placed the key in the lock; and felt the shifting, as I turned it, of some deep interior spring.

  A movement in the corner of the room made me turn my head. There was a cheval-glass there, big as a door, and I saw myself reflected in it: pale and wide-eyed, breathless and curious, but for all that an unlikely Pandora, with my scarlet jacket and my saucy cap, my crop and my bare bare bum. In the room next door all was hushed and still. I turned to the trunk again, and lifted its lid. Inside was a jumble of bottles and scarves, of cords and packets and yellow-bound books. I didn’t pause to gaze upon these objects then, however; indeed, I hardly registered them at all. For on the top of the jumble, on a square of velvet, lay the queerest, lewdest thing I ever saw.

  It was a kind of harness, made of leather: belt-like, and yet not quite a belt, for though it had one wide strap with buckles on it, two narrower, shorter bands were fastened to this and they, too, were buckled. For one alarming moment I thought it might be a horse’s bridle; then I saw what the straps and the buckles supported. It was a cylinder of leather, rather longer than the length of my hand and about as fat, in width, as I could grip. One end was rounded and slightly enlarged, the other fixed firm to a flattened base; to this, by hoops of brass, the belt and the narrower bands were all also fastened.

  It was, in short, a dildo. I had never seen one before; I did not, at that time, know that such things existed and had names.

  For all I knew of it, this might be an original, that the lady had had fashioned to a pattern of her own.

  Perhaps Eve thought the same, when she saw her first apple. Even so, it didn’t stop her knowing what the apple was for...

  But in case I still wondered, the lady now spoke. ‘Put it on,’ she called - she must have caught the opening of the trunk - ‘put it on, and come to me.’

  I struggled for a moment or two over the placing of the straps, and the tightening of the buckles. The brass bit into the white flesh of my hips, but the leather was wonderfully supple and warm. I glanced again towards the looking-glass. The base of the phallus was a darker wedge upon my own triangular shield of hair, and its lowest tip nudged me in a most insinuating way. From this base the dildo itself obscenely sprang - not straight out, but at a cunning angle, so that when I looked down at it I saw first its bulbous head, gleaming in the red glow of the fire and split by a near-invisible seam of tiny, ivory stitches.

  When I took a step, the head gave a nod.

  ‘Come here,’ said the lady when she saw me in the doorway ; and as I walked to her, the dildo bobbed still harder. I lifted my hand to still it; and when she saw me do that she placed her own fingers over mine, and made them grasp the shaft and stroke it. Now the base’s insinuating nudges grew more insinuating still: it was not long before my legs began to tremble and she, sensing my rising pleasure, began to breathe more harshly. She took her hands away, and turned and lifted her hair from the nape of her neck, and gestured for me to undress her.

  I found the hooks of her gown, and then the laces of her corset: beneath this, I saw, she was mottled scarlet from the hundred tiny creases of her chemise. She stooped to remove her petticoats, but retained her drawers, her stockings and her boots and, still, her gloves. Very daring - for I had not touched her at all, yet - I slid a hand into the slit of her drawers; and with the other I caught hold of one of her nipples, and pressed it.

  At that, she put her mouth to mine. Our kisses were imperfect ones, as all new lovers’ kisses are, and tasted of tobacco; but - again, like all new lovers’ kisses - their very strangeness made them thrilling. The more I fingered her the harder she kissed me, and the hotter I grew between my legs, behind my sheath of leather. Finally she pulled away, and seized my wrists.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Not ye
t, not yet!’

  With my hands still clasped in hers she led me to one of the straight-backed chairs and sat me on it, the dildo all the while straining from my lap, rude and rigid as a skittle. I guessed her purpose. With her hands close-pressed about my head and her legs straddling mine, she gently lowered herself upon me; then proceeded to rise and sink, rise and sink, with an ever speedier motion. At first I held her hips, to guide them; then I returned a hand to her drawers, and let the fingers of the other creep round her thigh to her buttocks. My mouth I fastened now on one nipple, now on the other, sometimes finding the salt of her flesh, sometimes the dampening cotton of her chemise.

  Soon her breaths became moans, then cries; soon my own voice joined hers, for the dildo that serviced her also pleasured me - her motions bring it with an ever faster, ever harder pressure against just that part of me that cared for pressure best. I had one brief moment of self-consciousness, when I saw myself as from a distance, straddled by a stranger in an unknown house, buckled inside that monstrous instrument, panting with pleasure and sweating with lust. Then in another moment I could think nothing, only shudder; and the pleasure - mine and hers - found its aching, arching crisis, and was spent.

  After a second she eased herself from my lap, then straddled my thigh and rocked gently there, occasionally jerking, and at last growing still. Her hair, which had come loose, was hot against my jaw.

  At length she laughed, and moved again against my hip.

  ‘Oh, you exquisite little tart!’ she said.

  And thus we clasped one another, sated and spent, our legs inelegantly straddling that elegant, high-backed chair; and as the minutes passed I thought with something like dismay of how the night would now proceed. I thought, She’s had me fuck her; now she’ll send me home. If I’m in luck I might get a pound, for my trouble. It was the prospect of the sovereign, after all, which had lured me to her parlour in the first place. And yet, now, there was something inexpressibly dreary to me at the idea of quitting her company - of surrendering the toy to which I was strapped, and quieting the tommish urges it and its mistress had all unexpectedly revived.