Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  Where she hit upon, in the end, was the Opera.

  The idea sounded a terrible one to me, though I did not like to show it - I had not yet grown sulky with her, as I was later to do. And I was still too much of a child to be anything other than enchanted with my own birthday, when it finally arrived; and of course, there were presents - and presents never lost their charm.

  I was given them at breakfast, in two gold parcels. The first, was large, and held a cloak - a proper opera-going cloak, it was, and very grand; but then, I had expected that, and hardly considered it a gift at all. The second parcel, however, proved more marvellous. It was small and light: I knew at once it must be some piece of jewellery - perhaps, a pair of links; or a stud for my cravats; or a ring. Dickie wore a ring on the smallest finger of her left hand, and I had often admired it - yes, I was sure it must be a ring, like Dickie’s.

  But it was not a ring. It was a watch, of silver, on a slender strap of leather. It had two dark arms to show the minutes and the hours, and a faster, sweeping arm to count the seconds. Upon the face, there was glass: the arms were moved by the winder. I turned it in my hands, Diana smiling as I did so. ‘It’s for your wrist,’ she said at last.

  I gazed at her in wonder - people never wore wrist-watches then, it was marvellously exotic and new - then tried to buckle the watch upon my arm. I could not manage it, of course: like so many of the things in Felicity Place, you really needed a maid to do it properly. In the end, Diana fastened it for me; and then we both sat gazing at the little face, the sweeping hand, and listened to the ticking.

  I said, ‘Diana, it’s the most wonderful thing I ever saw!’, and she pinked, and looked pleased: she was a bitch, but she was human, too.

  Later, when Maria came to call, I showed her the watch and she nodded and smiled at it, stroking my wrist beneath the leather of the strap. Then she laughed. ‘My dear, the time is wrong! You have it set at seven, and it’s only a quarter-past four!’

  I looked at the face again, and gave a frown of surprise. I had been wearing it as a kind of bracelet, only: it had not occurred to me to tell the time with it. Now I moved the arms to 4 and 3, for Maria’s sake - but there was really no need, of course, for me ever to wind it at all.

  The watch was my finest gift; but there was a present, too, from Maria herself: a walking-cane, of ebony, with a tassel at the top and a silver tip. It went very well with my new opera gear; indeed, we made a very striking couple that night, Diana and I, for her costume was of black and white and silver, to match my own. It came from Worth’s: I thought we must look just as if we had stepped out from the pages of a fashion paper. I made sure, when walking, to hold my left arm very straight, so the watch would show.

  We dined in a room at the Solferino. We dined with Dickie and Maria - Maria brought Satin, her whippet, and fed him dainties from a plate. The waiters had been told it was my birthday, and fussed around me, offering wine. ‘How old is the young gentleman today?’ they asked Diana; and the way they asked it showed they thought me younger than I was. They might, I suppose, have taken Diana for my mother; for various reasons, the idea was not a nice one. Once, though, I had stopped at a shoe-black while Diana and her friends stood near to watch it, and the man - catching sight of Dickie and reading tommishness, as many regular people do, as a kind of family likeness - asked me if she, Dickie, were not my Auntie, taking me out for the day; and it had been worth being mistaken for a schoolboy, for the sake of her expression. She once or twice tried to compete with me, on the question of suits. The night of my birthday, for example, she wore a shirt with cuff-links and, above her skirt, a short gent’s cloak. At her throat, however, she had a jabot - I should never have worn anything so effeminate. She did not know it - she would have been horrified to know it! - but she looked like nothing so much as a weary old mary-anne - one of the kind you see sometimes holding court, with younger boys, on Piccadilly: they have rented so long they’re known as queens.

  Our supper was a very fine one, and when it was over Diana sent a waiter for a cab. As I have said, I had thought her plan not much of a treat; but even I could not help being excited as our hansom joined the line of rocking carriages at the door of the Royal Opera, and we - Diana, Maria, Dickie and I - entered the crush of gentlemen and ladies in the lobby. I had never been here before; had never, in a year of fitful chaperoning, been part of such a rich and handsome crowd - the gents, like me, all in cloaks and silk hats and carrying glasses; the ladies in diamonds, and wearing gloves so high and slender they might all have just left off dipping their arms, to the armpit, in tubs of milk.

  We stood jostling in the lobby for a moment or two, Diana exchanging nods with certain ladies that she recognised, Maria holding Satin at her bosom, out of the crush of heels and trains and sweeping cloaks. Dickie said she would fetch us a tray of drinks, and went off to do so. Diana said, ‘Take our coats, Neville, will you?’ nodding to a counter where two men stood, in uniform, receiving cloaks. She turned to let me draw the coat from her, Maria did the same, and I picked my way across the lobby with them, then paused to unfasten my own cloak - thinking all the time, only, what a handsome gathering it was, and how well I looked in it! and making sure that the coats I carried weren’t falling over my wrist and obscuring the watch. The counter had a queue at it, and as I waited I looked idly at the men whose job it was to collect the cloaks from the gents, and give them tickets. One of them was slim, with a sallow face - he might have been Italian. The other man was a black man. When I reached the desk at last and he tilted his face to the garments I gave him, I saw that he was Billy-Boy, my old smoking-partner from the Brit.

  At first, I only stared; I think, actually, that I was considering how I might best make my escape before he saw me. But then, when he tugged at the coats and I failed to release them, he raised his eyes - and I knew that he didn’t recognise me at all, only wondered why I hesitated; and the thought made me terribly sorry. I said, ‘Bill’, and he looked harder. Then he said: ‘Sir?’

  I swallowed. I said again, ‘Bill. Don’t you remember me?’ Then I leaned and lowered my voice. ‘It’s Nan,’ I said, ‘Nan King.’ His face changed. He said, ‘My God!’

  Behind me, the queue had grown longer; now there came a cry: ‘What’s the delay there?’ Bill took the coats from me at last, walked quickly to a hook with them, and gave me a ticket. Then he stepped a little to one side, leaving his friend to struggle with the cloaks, for a minute, on his own. I moved too, away from the jostling gents, and we stood facing each other across the desk, shaking our heads. His brow was shiny with sweat. His uniform was a white bum-shaver jacket and a cheap bow-tie, of scarlet.

  He said, ‘Lord, Nan, but you gave me a fright! I thought you must be some gentleman I owed money to.’ He looked at my trousers, my jacket, my hair. ‘What are you up to, wandering about like that, here?’ He wiped his brow, then looked about him. ‘Are you here with an agent? You’re not in the show, Nan - are you?’

  I shook my head; and then I said, very quietly, ‘You mustn’t say “Nan” now, Bill. The fact is -’ The fact was, I hadn’t thought what I would tell him. I hesitated; but it was impossible to lie to him: ‘Bill, I’m living as a boy just now.’

  ‘As a boy?’ He said it loudly; then put a hand before his mouth. Even so, one or two of the grumbling gents in the queue turned their heads. I edged a little further away from them. I said again: ‘I’m living as a boy, with a lady who takes care of me ...’ And at that, at last, he looked a little more knowing, and nodded.

  Behind him, the Italian dropped a gentleman’s hat, and the gentleman tutted. Bill said, ‘Can you wait?’ and stepped to help his friend by taking another couple of cloaks. Then he moved towards me again. The Italian looked sour.

  I glanced over to Diana and Maria. The lobby had emptied a bit; they stood waiting for me. Maria had placed Satin on the floor and he was scratching at her skirt. Diana turned to catch my eye. I looked at Bill.

  ‘How are you, then?’ I asked him.


  He looked rueful, and lifted his hand: there was a wedding-ring on it. He said, ‘Well, I am married now, for a start!’

  ‘Married! Oh, Bill, I am happy for you! Who’s the girl? It’s not Flora? Not Flora, our old dresser?’ He nodded, and said it was.

  ‘It is on account of Flora,’ he added, ‘that I am working here. She has a job on round the corner, a month at the Old Mo. She is still, you know’ - he looked suddenly rather awkward — ’s he is still, you know, dressing Kitty ...’

  I stared at him. There came more mutters from the queue of gents, and more sour looks from the Italian, and he stepped back again to help with the cloaks and hats and tickets. I lifted a hand to my head, and put my fingers through my hair, and tried to understand what he had told me. He was married to Flora, and Flora was still with Kitty; and Kitty had a spot at the Middlesex Music Hall. And that was about three streets away from where I stood now.

  And Kitty, of course, was married to Walter.

  Are they happy? I wanted to call to Bill then. Does she talk of me, ever? Does she think of me? Does she miss me? But when he returned - looking even more flustered and damp about the brow - I said only, ‘How’s - how’s the act, Bill?’

  ‘The act?’ He sniffed. ‘Not so good, I don’t think. Not so good as the old days ...’

  We gazed at one another. I looked harder at his face, and saw that he had gained a bit of weight beneath his chin, and that the flesh about his eyes was rather darker than I knew it. Then the Italian called, ‘Bill, will you come?’ And Bill said that he must go.

  I nodded, and held my hand out to him. As he shook it, he seemed to hesitate again. Then he said, very quickly, ‘You know, we was all really sorry, when you took off like that, from the Brit.’ I shrugged. ‘And Kitty,’ he went on, ‘well, Kitty was sorriest of all of us. She put notices, with Walter, in the Era and the Ref, week after week. Did you never see ’em, Nan, those notices?’

  ‘No, Bill, I never did.’

  He shook his head. ‘And now, here you are, dressed up like a lord!’ But he gave my suit a dubious glance, and added: ‘You’re sure though, are you, that you’re doing all right?’

  I didn’t answer him. I only looked over to Diana again. She was tilting her head to gaze after me; beside her stood Maria, and Satin, and Dickie. Dickie held our tray of drinks, and had placed her monocle at her eye. She said, ‘The wine will warm, Diana,’ in a pettish sort of voice: the lobby was thinned of people, I could hear her very clearly.

  Diana tilted her head again: ‘What is the boy doing?’

  ‘He is talking to the nigger,’ answered Maria, ‘at the cloaks!’

  I felt my cheeks flame red, and looked quickly back at Bill. His gaze had followed mine, but now had been caught by a gentleman offering a coat, and he was lifting the garment over the counter, and already turning with it to the row of hooks.

  ‘Good-bye, Bill,’ I said, and he nodded over his shoulder, and gave me a sad little smile of farewell. I took a step away - but then, very quickly, I returned to the counter and put my hand upon his arm. I said: ‘What’s Kitty’s place, on the bill at the Mo?’

  ‘Her place?’ He thought about it, folding another cloak. ‘I’m not sure. Second half, near the start, half-past nine or so ...’

  Then Maria’s voice came calling: ‘Is there trouble, Neville, over the tip?’

  I knew then that if I lingered near him any longer some terrible sort of scene would ensue. I didn’t look at him again but went back to Diana at once, and said it was nothing, I was sorry. But when she raised a hand to smooth back the hair I had unsettled, I flinched, feeling Bill’s eyes upon me; and when she pulled my arm through hers, and Maria stepped around me to take my other arm, the flesh upon my back seemed to give a kind of shudder, as if there was a pistol pointed at it.

  The hall itself, which was so grand and glorious, I only gazed at rather dully. We did not have a box - there had not been time to book a box - but our seats were very good ones, in the centre of one of the front rows of the stalls. I had made us late, however, and the stalls were almost full: we had to stumble over twenty pairs of legs to reach our seats. Dickie spilled her wine. Satin snapped at a lady with a fox-fur around her throat. Diana, when she sat at last, was thin-lipped and self-conscious: this was not the kind of entrance she had planned for us, at all.

  And I sat, numb to her, numb to all of it. I could think only of Kitty. That she was still in the halls, in her act with Walter. That Bill saw her daily - would see her later, after the show, when he fetched Flora. That even now, while the actors in the opera we had come to see were putting on their grease-paint, she was sitting in a dressing-room three streets away, putting on hers.

  As I thought all this, the conductor appeared, and was clapped; the lights went down, and the crowd grew silent. When the music started and the curtain went up at last, I gazed at the stage in a kind of stupor. And when the singing began, I flinched. The opera was Figaro’s Wedding.

  I can remember hardly any of it. I thought only of Kitty. My seat seemed impossibly narrow and hard, and I shifted and turned in it, till Diana leaned to whisper that I must be still. I thought of all the times I had walked through the city, fearful of turning a corner and seeing Kitty there; I thought of the disguise I had adopted, to avoid her. Indeed, avoiding Kitty had become, in my renter days, a kind of second nature to me, so that there were whole areas of London through which I automatically never passed, streets at which I didn’t have to pause, for thought, before I turned away to find another. I was like a man with a bruise or a broken limb, who learns to walk in a crowd so that the wound might not be jostled. Now, knowing that Kitty was so near, it was as if I was compelled to press the bruise, to twist the shrieking limb, myself. The music grew louder, and my head began to ache; my seat seemed narrower than ever. I looked at my watch, but the lights were too low for me to read it; I had to tilt it so that its face caught the glow from the stage, and in doing so, my elbow caught Diana and made her sigh with pique, and glare at me. The watch showed five to nine — how glad I was that I had wound it, now! The opera was just at that ridiculous point where the countess and the maid have forced the principal boy into a frock and locked him in a closet, and the singing and the rushing about is at its worst. I turned to Diana. I said, ‘Diana, I can’t bear it. I shall have to wait for you in the lobby.’ She put a hand out to grip my arm, but I shook her away, and rose and — saying ‘Pardon me, oh! pardon-me!’ to every tutting lady and gent whose legs I stumbled over or feet I trampled — I made my halting way along the row, towards the usher and the door.

  Outside, the lobby was wonderfully quiet after all the shrieking on the stage. At the coat-desk the Italian man sat with a paper. When I went over to him, he sniffed: ‘He ain’t here,’ he said, when I asked after Bill. ‘He don’t stay once the show starts. Did you want your cloak?’

  I said I didn’t. I left the theatre, and headed for Drury Lane — very conscious of my suit, and the shine on my shoes, and the flower at my lapel. When I reached the Middlesex I found a group of boys outside it studying the programme and commenting on the acts. I went and peered over their shoulders, looking for the names I wanted, and a number.

  Walter Waters and Kitty, I saw at last: it gave me a shock to know that Kitty had lost her Butler, and was working under Walter’s old stage-name. They were, as Bill had said, placed near the start of the second half — fourteenth on the list, after a singer and a Chinese conjuror.

  In the booth inside sat a girl in a violet dress. I went to her window, then nodded to the hall. ‘Who’s on stage?’ I asked. ‘What number are they at?’ She looked up; and when she saw my suit, she tittered.

  ‘You’ve lost your way, dearie,’ she said. ‘You want the Opera, round the corner.’ I bit my lip, and said nothing, and her smile faded. ‘All right, Lord Alfred,’ she said then. ‘It’s number twelve, Belle Baxter, Cockney Chanteuse.’

  I bought a sixpenny ticket — she pulled a face at that, of course: �
�Thought we should have the red carpet brung up, at the least.’ The truth was, I dared not venture too close to the stage. I imagined Billy-Boy having come to the theatre and told Kitty that he had met me, and how I was dressed. I remembered how near the crowd could seem, from a stage in a small hall, when you stepped out of the limes; and in my coat and my bow-tie, of course, I would be conspicuous. How terrible it would be, to have Kitty see me as I watched her — to have her fix her eyes on mine, as she sang to Walter!

  So I went up to the gallery. The stairs were narrow: when I turned a corner and found a couple there, spooning, I had to step around them, very close. Like the girl in the booth, they gazed at my suit and, as she had done, they tittered. I could hear the thumping of the orchestra through the wall. As I climbed to the door at the top of the staircase and the thumps grew louder, my own heart seemed to beat against my breast, in time to them. When I passed into the hall at last — into the lurid half-light, and the heat and the smoke and the reek of the calling crowd — I almost staggered.

  On the stage was a girl in a flame-coloured frock, twitching her skirts so her stockings showed. She finished one song while I stood there, clutching at a pillar to steady myself; and then she started on another. The crowd seemed to know it. There were claps, and whistles; and before these had quite died down, I made my way along the aisle to an empty seat. It turned out to be at the end of a line of boys - a bad choice, for, of course, when they saw me there in my opera suit and my flower, they nudged each other, and sniggered. One coughed into his hand - only the cough came out as Toff! I turned my face from them, and looked hard at the stage. Then, after a moment, I took out a cigarette and lit it. As I struck the match, my hand trembled.