Tipping the Velvet (47 page)

‘A guinea!' I said.

‘A guinea is as fair a price as you will get, tonight.' He sniffed again. ‘I daresay they are hot enough.'

‘They ain't hot at all,' said Zena. ‘But the guinea will do; and if you'll chuck in a couple of ladies' niceties and a pair of hats with bows on, call it a pound.'

The drawers and stockings he gave us were yellowed with age; the hats were terrible; and we were both, of course, still in need of stays. But Zena, at least, seemed satisfied with the deal. She pocketed the money, then led me to a baked-potato stall, and we had a potato each, and a cup of tea between us. The potatoes tasted of mud. The tea was really tinted water. But at the stall there was a brazier, and this warmed us.

Zena, as I have said, seemed very changed since our expulsion from the house. She did not tremble - it was I who trembled now - and she had an air of wisdom and authority about her, a way of passing through the streets, as if she were quite at her ease upon them. I had been at ease upon them once; now, I think that, if she had let me hold her hand, I would have done it - as it was, I could only stumble at her heels, saying wretchedly, ‘What shall we do next, Zena?' and ‘Oh, Zena, how cold it is!' and even ‘What do you suppose they are doing now, Zena, at Felicity Place? Oh, can you believe that she has really cast me from her!'

‘Miss,' she said to me at last, ‘don't take it the wrong way; but if you don't shut up, I really shall be obliged to hit you, after all.'

I said: ‘I'm sorry, Zena.'

In the end she fell into conversation with a gay girl who had also come to stand beside the brazier; and from her she got the details of a lodging-house nearby, that was said to take people in, all through the night. It turned out to be a dreadful place, with one chamber for the women and another for the men; and everyone who slept there had a cough. Zena and I lay two in a bed - she keeping her dress on, for the sake of the warmth, but me still fretting over the creases in mine, and so placing it beneath the foot of the mattress in the hope that it would press flat overnight.

We lay together very straight and stiff, our heads upon the same prickling bolster, but hers turned from mine and her eyes shut fast. The coughing of the other lodgers, the soreness at my cheek, my general wretchedness and panic, kept me wakeful. When Zena gave a shiver, I put my hand upon her; and when she didn't take the hand away, I moved a little closer to her. I said, very low: ‘Oh Zena, I cannot sleep, for thinking of it all!'

‘I daresay.'

I trembled. ‘Do you hate me, Zena?' She wouldn't answer. ‘I shan't blame you, if you do. But oh! do you know how sorry I am?' A woman in the bed beside us gave a shriek — I think she was a drunkard - and that made both of us jump, and brought our faces even closer. Her eyes were still hard shut, but I could tell that she listened. I thought of how differently we had lain together, only a few hours before. My wretchedness since then had knocked the fire right out of me; but because it hadn't been said by either of us, and I thought it ought to be, I whispered now: ‘Oh, if only Diana hadn't come when she did! It was fun - wasn't it? - before Diana came and stopped it ...'

She opened her eyes. ‘It was fun,' she said sadly. ‘It is always fun before they catch you.' Then she gazed at me, and swallowed.

I said: ‘It won't be so bad, Zena - will it? You're the only tom I know in London, now; and since you're all alone, I thought - we might make a go of it, mightn't we? We might find a room, in a rooming-house. You could get work, as a sempstress or a char. I shall buy another suit; and when my face is all healed up - well, I know a trick or two, for making money. We shall have your seven pounds back in a month. We shall have twenty pounds in no time. And then, you can make your trip out to the colonies; and I' — I gave a gulp — ‘I might go with you. You said they always need landladies there; surely, they'll always need gentlemen's tarts, too - even in Australia ... ?'

She gazed at me as I murmured, saying nothing. Then she bent her head and kissed me once, very lightly, upon the lips. Then she turned away again, and at last I slept.

When I woke, it was daylight. I could hear the sounds of women coughing and spitting, and discussing, in low, peevish voices, the nights that they had passed, and the days they must now move on to. I lay with my eyes shut and my hands before my face: I didn't want to look at them, or at any part of the squalid world I was now obliged to share with them. I thought of Zena, and the plan that I had put to her - I thought: It will be hard, it will be terribly hard; but Zena will keep me from the worst of the hardness. Without Zena, it would be hard indeed ...

Then I took my hands from my face at last, and turned to gaze at the bed beside me; and it was empty. Zena was gone. The money was gone. She had risen at dawn, with her servant's habits; and she had left me, slumbering, with nothing.

 

Understanding it at last left me curiously blank: I think, I was too giddy already to be dazed any further, too wretched to descend to greater depths. I rose, and drew my frock from beneath the mattress - it was creased worse than ever - and buttoned it on. The drunkard in the neighbouring bed had spent a ha'penny on a bowl of tepid water, and she let me use it, after she had stood in it and washed herself down, to wipe the last remaining flakes of blood from my cheeks, and to flatten my hair. My face, when I gazed at it in the sliver of mirror that was glued to the wall, looked like a face of wax, that had been set too near a spirit-lamp. My feet, when I stepped on them, seemed to shriek: the shoes were ones I had used to wear as a renter, but either my feet had grown since then, or I had become too used to gentle leather; I had gained blisters in the walk to the Kilburn Road, and now the blisters began to rub raw and wet, and the stockings to fray.

We were not allowed to linger past the morning in the bedroom of the lodging-house: at eleven o'clock a woman came, and chivvied us out with a broom. I walked a little way with the drunkard. When we parted, at the top of Maida Vale, she took out the smallest screw of tobacco, rolled two thread-like cigarettes, and gave me one. Tobacco, she said, was the best cure for a bruise. I sat on a bench, and smoked till my fingers scorched; and then I considered my plight.

My situation, after all, was a ridiculously familiar one: I had been as cold and as ill and as wretched as this four years before, after my flight from Stamford Hill. Then, however, I had at least had money, and handsome clothes; I had had food, and cigarettes - had all I required to keep me, not happy, but certainly quick. Now, I had nothing. I was nauseous with hunger and with the after-effects of wine; and to get so much as a penny for a cone of eels, I should have to beg for it - or do what Zena recommended, and try my luck as a tart, up against some dripping wall. The idea of begging was hateful to me - I could not bear the thought of trying to extract pity and coins from the kind of gentlemen who, a fortnight before, had admired the cut of my suit or the flash of my cuff-links as I passed amongst them at Diana's side. The thought of being fucked by one of them, as a girl, was even worse.

I got up: it was too cold to sit upon the bench all day. I remembered what Zena had said the night before - that I must go to my folks, that my folks would take me. I had said that I had no one; but now I thought that there might, after all, be one place I could try. I did not think of my real family, in Whitstable: I had finished with them, it seemed to me then, for ever. I thought instead of a lady who had been like a mother to me, once; and of her daughter, who had been a kind of sister. I thought of Mrs Milne, and Gracie. I had had no contact with them in a year and a half. I had promised to visit them, but had never been at liberty to do so. I had promised to send them my address: I had never sent them so much as a note to say I missed them, or a card on Gracie's birthday. The truth was that, after my first few, strange days at Felicity Place, I had not missed them at all. But now I remembered their kindness, and wanted to weep. Diana and Zena between them had made an outcast of me; but Mrs Milne - I was sure of it! - was bound to take me in.

And so I walked, from Maida Vale to Green Street - walked creepingly, in my misery and my shame and my pinching boots, as if every step were taken barefoot on open swords. The house, when I reached it at last, seemed shabby - but then, I knew what it was, to leave a place for something grand, and come back to find it humbler than you knew. There was no flower before the door, and no three-legged cat - but then again, it was winter, and the street very cold and bleak. I could think only of my own sorry plight; and when I rang the bell and no one came, I thought: Well, I will sit upon the step, Mrs Milne is never out for long; and if I grow numb from the cold, it will serve me right...

But then I pressed my face to the glass beside the door and peered into the hall beyond, and I saw that the walls - that used to have Gracie's pictures on them, the
Light of the World
and the Hindoo idol, and the others - I saw that they were bare; that there were only marks upon them, where the pictures had been fastened. And at that, I trembled. I caught hold of the door-knocker and banged it, in a kind of panic; and I called into the letter-box: ‘Mrs Milne! Mrs Milne!' and ‘Gracie! Grace Milne!' But my voice sounded hollow, and the hall stayed dark.

Then there came a shout, from the tenement behind.

‘Are you looking for the old lady and her daughter? They have gone, dear - gone a month ago!'

I turned, and looked up. From a balcony above the street a man was calling to me, and nodding to the house. I went out, and gazed miserably up at him, and said, Where had they gone to?

He shrugged. ‘Gone to her sister's, is what I heard. The lady was took very bad, in the autumn; and the girl being a simpleton - you knew that, did you? - they didn't think it clever to leave the pair of them alone. They have took all the furniture; I daresay that the house will come up for sale ...' He looked at my cheek. ‘That's a lovely black eye you have,' he said, as if I might not have noticed. ‘Just like in the song - ain't it? Except you only have one of ‘em!'

I stared at him, and shivered while he laughed. A little fair-haired girl had appeared on the balcony beside him, and now gripped the rail and put her feet upon the bars. I said, ‘Where does the lady live - the sister they've gone to?' and he pulled at his ear and looked thoughtful.

‘Now, I did know, but have forgotten it ... I believe it was Bristol; or it may have been Bath...'

‘Not London, then?'

‘Oh no, certainly not London. Now, was it Brighton ... ?'

I turned away from him, to gaze back up at Mrs Milne's house - at the window of my old room, and at the balcony where I had liked, in summer-time, to sit. When I looked at the man again, he had his little girl in his arms, and the wind had caught her golden hair and made it flap about his cheeks: and I remembered them both, then, as the father and daughter that I had seen clapping their hands to the sound of a mandolin, on that balmy June evening, in the week I met Diana. They had lost their home and been given a new one. They had been visited by that charity-visitor with the romantic-sounding name.

Florence! I did not know that I had remembered her. I had not thought of her at all, for a year and more.

If only I might meet her, now! She found houses for the poor; she might find a house for me. She had been kind to me once - wouldn't she be kind, if I appealed to her, a second time? I thought of her comely face, and her curling hair. I had lost Diana, I had lost Zena; and now I had lost Mrs Milne and Grace. In all of London she was the closest thing I had, at that moment, to a friend - and it was a friend just then that, above all else, I longed for.

On the balcony above me, the man had turned away. Now I called him back: ‘Hey, mister!' I walked closer to the wall of the tenement, and gazed up at him: he and his daughter leaned from the balcony rail - she looked like an angel on the ceiling of a church. I said, ‘You won't know me; but I lived here once, with Mrs Milne. I am looking for a girl, who called on you when you moved in. She worked for the people that found you your flat.'

He frowned. ‘A girl, you say?'

‘A girl with curly hair. A plain-faced girl called Florence. Don't you know who I mean? Don't you have the name of the charity she worked for? It was run by a lady - a very clever-looking lady. The lady played the mandolin.'

He had continued to frown, and to scratch at his head; but at this last detail he brightened. ‘That one,' he said; ‘yes, I remember her. And that gal what helped her, that was your chum, was it?'

I said it was. Then: ‘And the charity? Do you remember them, and where their rooms are?'

‘Where their rooms are, let me see ... I did go there wunst; but I don't know as I can quite recall the partic'lar number. I do know as it was a place rather close to the Angel, Islington.'

‘Near Sam Collins's?' I asked.

‘Past
Sam Collins's, on Upper Street. Not so far as the post office. A little doorway on the left-hand side, somewhere between a public-house and a tailor's ...'

This was all he could recall; I thought it might be enough. I thanked him, and he smiled. ‘What a lovely black eye,' he said again, but to his daughter this time. ‘Just like the song - ain't it, Betty?'

 

By now I felt as if I had been on my feet for a month. I suspected that my boots had worn their way right through my stockings, and had started on the bare flesh of my toes and heels and ankles. But I did not stop at another bench, and untie my laces, in order to find out. The wind had picked up a little and, though it was only two o'clock or so, the sky was grey as lead. I wasn't sure what time the charity offices might close; I wasn't sure how long it would take me to find them; I didn't know if Florence would even be there, when I did. So I walked rather quickly up Pentonville Hill, and let my feet be rubbed to puddings, and tried to plan what I would say to her when I found her. This, however, proved difficult. After all, she was a girl I hardly knew; worse - I could not help but recall this, now - I had once arranged to meet her, then let her down. Would she, even, remember me at all? In that gloomy Green Street passageway I had been certain that she would. But with every burning step, I grew less sure of it.