Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

  Again, I couldn’t help it. I had persuaded myself that Florence was a kind of saint, with a saint’s dimmed, unguessable limbs and warmths and wantings; but now, in telling me the story of her own great love, it was as if she had suddenly shown herself to me, robeless. And I could not tear my eyes from what I saw.

  One night, for example - one dark night, quite late, when Ralph was out with his union friends and Cyril was quiet upstairs - she bathed and washed her hair, then sat in the parlour with her dressing-gown about her, and fell asleep. I had helped her tip her tub of soapy water down the privy, then gone to warm some milk for us to drink; and when I returned with the mugs, I found her slumbering there, before the fire. She was sitting, slightly twisted, and her head had fallen back, and her arms were slack and heavy, and her hands were loose and vaguely folded in her lap. Her breaths were deep, and almost snores.

  I stood before her, holding the steaming mugs. She had taken the towel from her head, and her hair was spread out over the bit of lace on the back of her chair, like the halo on a Flemish madonna. I did not think that I had ever seen her hair so full and loose before, and I studied it now for a long time. I remembered when I had thought it was a dreary auburn; but it was not auburn, there were a thousand tints of gold and brown and copper in it. It rose and curled, and grew ever more rich and lustrous, as it dried.

  I looked from her hair to her face - to her lashes, to her wide pink mouth, to the line of her jaw, and the subtle weight of flesh beneath it. I looked at her hands — I remembered seeing them at Green Street, beating the hot June air; I remembered taking her hand in mine, a little later — I remembered the exact pressure of her fingers, in their warm linen glove, against my own. Her hands were pink, tonight, and still a little puckered from her bath. Her nails - which she had used, I remembered now, to chew - were neat and quite unbitten.

  I looked at her throat. It was smooth, and very white; beneath it - just visible in the spreading V at the neck of her dressing-gown - was the hint of the beginnings of the swell of a breast.

  I looked - and looked - and felt a curious movement in my own breast, a kind of squirming or turning, or flexing, that I seemed not to have felt there for a thousand years. It was followed almost immediately by a similar sensation, rather lower down... The mugs of milk began to quiver, until I feared they would spill. I turned, and placed them carefully upon the supper-table; and then I crept, very quietly, from the room.

  With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls into a trunk. When I reached the kitchen I stood and leaned against a wall — I was still trembling, worse than ever. I did not return to the parlour until I heard Florence wake and exclaim, a half-hour later, over the mugs of milk that I had left upon the table to grow cool and scummy; and even then I was so flushed and shaken that she looked at me and said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’, and I had to answer, ‘Nothing, nothing...’ — all the time averting my gaze from that white V of curving flesh beneath her throat, because I knew that, if I looked at it again, I would be compelled to step to her and kiss it.

  I had come to Quilter Street to be ordinary; now I was more of a tom than ever. Indeed, once I had made my own confession on the matter and begun to look about me, I saw that I was quite surrounded by toms, and couldn’t believe I had not noticed them before. Two of Florence’s charity-worker friends, it seemed, were sweethearts: I suppose she must have tipped them off about me, for the next time they came calling, I thought they gazed at me in quite a different sort of way. As for Annie Page: when next I saw her she put her arm about my shoulder and said, ‘Nancy! Florrie tells me you’re a cousin! My dear, I never was less surprised by anything, nor more delighted...’

  And, for all that my bewildering new interest in Flo was such a troublesome one, it was rather marvellous to feel my lusts all on the rise again - to have my tommish parts all greased and purring, like an engine with a flame set to the coals. I dreamed one night that I was walking in Leicester Square in my old guardsman’s uniform, with my hair clipped military-style and a glove behind the buttons of my trousers (in fact, one of Florence’s gloves: I could never look at it again, without blushing). I had had such dreams before, at Quilter Street - minus the detail of the glove, of course; but this time, when I woke, there was a prickling at my scalp and a tickling at the inside of my thighs that remained insistent, and I fingered my drab little curls and my flowery frock in a kind of disgust. I went, that day, to the Whitechapel Market; and on the way home I found myself lingering at the window of a gentlemen’s outfitters, with my forehead and my fingertips pressing smears of sweat and longing against the glass ...

  And then I thought, Why not? I went in - perhaps the tailor thought me shopping for my brother - and bought a pair of moleskin trousers, and a set of drawers and a shirt, and a pair of braces and some lace-up boots; then, back at Quilter Street, I knocked on the door of a girl who was known for doing haircuts for a penny and said: ‘Cut it off, cut it all off, quick, before I change my mind!’ She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...

  Florence came home distracted that night, and hardly seemed to notice whether I had hair upon my head or not - though Ralph said, in a hopeful way, ‘Now, there’s a handsome hair-cut!’ She didn’t see me in my moleskins, either: for I had promised myself that, for the sake of the neighbours, I would only wear them to do the housework in; and by the time she came home from Stratford each night, I had changed back into my frock and put an apron on. But then, one day, she came home early. She came home the back way, through the yard behind the kitchen; and I was at the window, cleaning the glass. It was a large window, divided into panes: I had covered the panes with polish, and was wiping them clear, one by one. I was dressed in the moleskin bags and the shirt - I had left the collar off - my sleeves were rolled above my elbows, and my arms were dusty and my fingernails black. My throat was damp at the hollow, and my top lip wet - I paused to wipe it. My hair I had combed flat, but it had shaken itself loose: there was a long front lock which kept tumbling into my eyes, so that I had to push out my lip to blow it back, or swipe at it with my wrist. I had cleaned all the panes except the one before my face; and when I wiped at this I jumped, for Florence was standing on the other side of it, very still. She was clad in her coat and hat, and had her satchel over her arm; but she was gazing at me as if - well, I had had too many admiring glances come my way, in the years since I had first walked before Kitty Butler in a party-gown and not known why it was she flushed to look at me, not to know why it was that Florence, studying me in my moleskins and my crop, flushed now.

  But, like Kitty, her desire seemed almost as painful to her as it was pleasant. When she caught my eye, she lowered her head and walked into the house; and all that she would say was: ‘Why, what a shine you have put upon the glass!’ And while it was glorious to know that - at last, and all unwittingly! — I had made her look at me and want me; while I had felt, for the second that her gaze had met mine, the leaping of my own new passion, and an answering passion in her; and while that passion had left me giddy, and aching, and hot, it was as much with nervousness as with lust that I trembled and grew weak.

  Anyway, when I met her later her eyes were dim and she kept them turned from me; and I thought, again, Why would she ever care for me, while she still grieved for somebody like Lilian?

  And so we went on, and the year grew colder. When Christmas came I spent it not at Quilter Street, but at Freemantle House, where Florence had organised a dinner for her girls and needed extra hands to baste the goose and wash the dishes. At New Year we drank a toast to 1895, and. another to ‘absent friends’ - she meant Lilian, of course; I’d never told her about all the friends that I had los
t. In January there was Ralph’s birthday to celebrate. It fell, in the most uncanny fashion, on the same day as Diana’s; and as I smiled to see him opening his gifts, I remembered the bust of Antinous, and wondered if it was still casting its frigid glances over the warm transactions at Felicity Place, and whether Diana ever looked at it and remembered me.

  But by now I had grown so at home in Bethnal Green that I could barely believe I had ever lived anywhere else, or imagine a time when Quilter Street routines were not my own. I had become used to the neighbours’ racket, and to the clamour of the street. I bathed once a week, like Florence and Ralph, and the rest of the time was content to wash in a bowl: Diana’s bathroom had become a strange and distant memory to me - as of paradise, after the fall. I kept my hair short. I wore my trousers, as I had planned, to do the housework in - at least, for a month or so I did: after that, the neighbours had all caught glimpses of me in them, and since I had become known in the district as something of a trouser-wearer, it seemed rather a fuss to take the trousers off at night and put a frock on. No one appeared to mind it; in some houses in Bethnal Green, after all, it was a luxury to have any sort of clothes at all, and you regularly saw women in their husbands’ jackets, and sometimes a man in a shawl. Mrs Monks’ daughters, next door, would run squealing when they saw me. Ralph’s union colleagues tended to look me over, as they debated, and then lose the thread of their text. Ralph himself, however, would sometimes wander downstairs with a shirt or a flannel waistcoat in his hand, saying vaguely: ‘I found this, Nance, in the bottom of my cupboard, and wondered, would the thing be any use to you... ?’

  As for Florence - well, increasingly I seemed to catch her gazing at me as she had gazed at me that day through the glass of the window; but always — always — she would look away again, and her eyes would grow dark. I longed to keep them fixed upon me, but didn’t know how. I had made myself saucy, for Diana’s sake; I had flirted heartlessly with Zena; but with Florence I might as well have been eighteen again, sweating and anxious - afraid, of trespassing upon her fading sorrow. If only, I would think, we were mary-annes. If only I were a renter again, and she some nervous Soho gent, and I could simply lead her to some shabby shady place and there unbutton her...

  But we were not mary-annes; we were only a couple of blushing toms, hesitating between desire and the deed, while the winter slid by, and the year grew slowly older - and Eleanor Marx stayed fixed to the wall, grave and untidy and ageless.

  The change came in February, on quite an ordinary day. I went to Whitechapel, to the market - a very regular thing to do, I did it often. When I came home, I came through the yard; I found the back door slightly open, and so entered the house quite noiselessly. As I put my parcels down upon the kitchen floor I heard voices in the parlour - Florence‘s, and Annie’s. The doors between were all ajar, and I could hear them perfectly: ‘She works at a printer‘s,’ Annie was saying. ‘The handsomest woman you ever saw in your life.’

  ‘Oh Annie, you always say that.’

  ‘No, really. She was sitting at a desk at a page of text, and the sun was on her and making her shine. When she raised her eyes to me I held my hand out to her. I said, “Are you Sue Bridehead? My name’s Jude ... ”’

  Florence laughed: they had all just been reading the latest chapter of that novel, in a magazine; I daresay Annie would not have made the joke, had she known how the story would turn out. Now Florence said: ‘And what did she say to that? That she wasn’t sure, but thought Sue Bridehead might work at the other office... ?’

  ‘Not at all. What she said was: Allelujah! Then she took my hand and - oh, then I knew I was in love, for sure!’

  Flo laughed again - but in a thoughtful kind of way. After a second she murmured something that I did not catch, but which made her friend laugh. Then Annie said, still with a smile to her voice: ‘And how is that handsome uncle of yours?’

  Uncle? I thought, moving to warm my hands against the stove. What uncle is that? I didn’t feel like an eavesdropper. I heard Florence give a tut. ‘She’s not my uncle,’ she said - she said it very clearly. ‘She’s not my uncle, as you well know.’

  ‘Not your uncle?’ cried Annie then. ‘A girl like that - with hair like that - growling about in your parlour in a pair of chamois trousers like a regular little bricksetter ...’

  At that, I didn’t care if I were eavesdropping or not: I took a swift silent step into the passageway, and listened rather harder. Florence laughed again.

  ‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘she’s not my uncle.’

  ‘Why not? Why ever not? Florrie, I despair of you. It’s unnatural, what you’re doing. It’s like - like having a roast in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups of water.

  What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’

  ‘You ain’t having her!’

  ‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’

  ‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips.

  ‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy. You can meet my Miss Raymond...’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Florence. The words were followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was in a slightly different tone.

  ‘You cannot grieve for her for ever,’ she said. ‘She would never have wanted that...’

  Florence tutted. ‘Being in love, you know,’ she said, ‘it’s not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can’t just go out and get another to replace her.’

  ‘I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’

  ‘That’s what you do, Annie.’

  ‘But Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a little ... There is a new canary in your own front room, banging its handsome head against the bars.’

  ‘Suppose I let the new one in,’ said Flo then, ‘then find I don’t care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose - Oh!’ I heard a thump. ‘I can’t believe that you have got me here, comparing her to a budgie!’ I knew she meant Lilian, not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn’t listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly.

  ‘Do you think it’s true, though, what you said, about the new canary and the bars ... ?’

  My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a little thoughtfully.

  Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to her books. We said good-night in our usual way, but then we both lay wakeful. I could hear her creaking about in her bed upstairs, and once she went out to the privy. I thought she might have paused on her way, outside my door, to listen for my snores. I didn’t call out to her.

  Next morning I was too tired to study her terribly hard; but as I set the pan of bacon on the stove, she came to me. She came very close, and then she said, quite low - perhaps so that her brother, who was in the room across the passageway, might not hear: ‘Nance, will you come out with me tonight?’

  ‘Tonight?’ I said, yawning, and frowning at the bacon, which I had put too wet into a too-hot pan, so that it hissed and steamed. ‘Where to? Not collecting subscriptions again, surely?’

  ‘Not subscriptions, no. Not work at all, in fact, but — pleasure.’

  ‘Pleasure!’ I had never heard her say the word before, and it seemed, all
of a sudden, a terribly lewd one. Perhaps she thought the same, for now she blushed a little, and took up a spoon and began to fiddle with it.

  ‘There’s a public-house near Cable Street,’ she went on, ‘with a ladies’ room in it. The girls call it “The Boy in the Boat ...”’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  She looked once at me, and then away again. ‘Yes. Annie will be there, she says, with a new friend of hers; and perhaps Ruth and Nora.’

  ‘Ruth and Nora too!’ I said lightly: they were the two girl-friends who had turned out sweethearts. ‘Is it to be all toms, then?’

  To my surprise she nodded, quite seriously: ‘Yes.’

  All toms! The thought sent me into a fever. It was twelve months since I had last passed an evening in a room full of woman-lovers: I was not sure I still possessed the knack. What would I wear? What attitude would I strike? All toms! What would they make of me? And what would they make of Florence?

  ‘Will you still go,’ I asked, ‘if I don’t?’

  ‘I rather thought I might...’

  ‘Then I’ll certainly come,’ I said - and had to look quickly to the pan of smoking bacon, and so didn’t see whether she looked pleased, or satisfied, or indifferent.

  I passed a fretful day, picking through my few dull frocks and skirts in the hope of finding some forgotten tommish gem amongst them. Of course, there was nothing except my work-stained moleskins; and these - while they might have caused something of a sensation at the Cavendish Club - I thought must be rather too bold for an East End audience, so I cast them regretfully aside in favour of a skirt, and a gentleman’s shirt and collar, and a tie. The shirt and collar I cleaned and starched myself, and rinsed in washing-blue to make them shine; the neck-tie was of silk - a very fine silk, with only a slight imperfection to the weave, which Ralph had brought me from his workshop, and which I had had made up at a Jewish tailor’s. The silk was of blue, and showed off my eyes.