Tipping the Velvet (27 page)

Walter tastes!

This was one place which, in all my careless West End Afterwards I spat his spendings out upon the cobbles, and wanderings, I had tended to avoid or pass through swiftly: I he thanked me very graciously.

was always mindful of the first trip I had made there, with

'Perhaps,' he said, buttoning himself up, 'perhaps I shall see Kitty and Walter, and it was not a memory I cared, very you again, in the same spot?'

often, to revisit. Tonight, however, I walked there rather 225

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purposefully. I went to the statute of Shakespeare, where or grasped their import. Now, however, I grasped it very we had stood that time, and I leaned before it, gazing at the well — and I trembled again, as I did so, with satisfaction view that we had looked on then. I remembered Walter and spite. I had first donned trousers to avoid men's eyes; to saying that we were at the very heart of London, and did I feel myself the object of these men's gazes, however, these know what it was that made that great heart beat? Variety! I men who thought I was like them, like that — well, that had looked around me that afternoon and seen, astonished, was not to be pestered; it was to be, in some queer way, what I thought was all the world's variety, brought together revenged.

in one extraordinary place. I had seen rich and poor, For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and splendid and squalid, white man and black man, all bustling to learn the ways and gestures of the world into which I had side by side. I had seen them make a vast harmonious stumbled. Walking and watching, indeed, are that world's whole, and been thrilled to think that I was about to find my keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you own particular place in it, as Kitty's friend.

watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there How had my sense of the world been changed, since then! I is a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, a purposeful stepping had learned that London life was even stranger and more to an alley or a rooming-house ... At first, as I have said, I various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that took no part in these exchanges, but only studied others at not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that them, and received a thousand questing glances on my own not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or account — some of which I held, rather teasingly, but most graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one of which I turned aside, after a second, with a show of another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept carelessness. But then, one afternoon, I was approached themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those once again by a gentleman who, it seemed to me, bore some upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all slight resemblance to Walter. He wanted my hand upon unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret him, merely, and to have a string of lewd endearments element, and claimed by it as a member.

whispered in his ears as I dubbed him off — it didn't seem I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side.

like much. If I hesitated, I don't believe he saw. I named my There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five terms - a sovereign, again - and led him to the nook where I hundred men there. How many of them were like the had served his predecessor. His cock seemed rather small; gentleman whose parts I had just fingered? Even as I again, however, I said how thick and fine it was.

wondered it I saw one fellow gaze my way, deliberately -

'You're a beautiful boy,' he whispered to me afterwards.

and then another.

There was no trouble over the coin.

Perhaps there had been many such looks since I had returned to the world as a boy; but I had never noticed them 227

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Thus easily - as easily, and fatefully, as I had first begun only life he knew, but he liked it well enough. 'It's better, my music-hall career - thus easily did I refine my new anyway,' he said, 'than working in an office or a shop. I impersonations, and become a renter.

believe that, if I had to work in the same little room all day, perched on the same little stool and staring at the same dull
Chapter 9

faces, I would go mad, just mad!'

It might seem a curious kind of leap to make, from music-When he asked for my history, I told him that I had come hall masher to renter. In fact, the world of actors and up to London from Kent, that I had been treated rather artistes, and the gay world in which I now found myself badly by someone, and was now forced to find my living on working, are not so very different. Both have London as the streets; all of which was true enough, in its way. I their proper country, the West End as their capital. Both are believe he felt sorry for me - or maybe it was just the a curious mix pf magic and necessity, glamour and sweat.

coincidence of our sisters' names that warmed him to me -

Both have their types - their ingenues and grandes dames, anyway, he began to look out a little for me, and to give me their rising stars, their falling stars, their bill-toppers, their tips and cautions. We would sometimes meet up at the hacks . . .

coffee-stalls of Leicester Square, and have a little boast, or All this I learned, slowly but steadily, in the first few weeks grumble, about our fortunes. And while we talked his eyes of my apprenticeship, just as I had learned my music-hall would be darting, darting, darting all about, looking for new trade at Kitty's side. Luckily for me, I found a friend and customers, or old ones, or for sweethearts and friends.

adviser - a boy with whom I fell into conversation late one

'Polly Shaw,' he would say, inclining his head as some night, as we sheltered together from a sudden shower in the slight young man tripped by us, smiling. 'A daisy, an doorway of a building on the edge of Soho Square. He was absolute daisy, but never let her talk you into lending her a a very girlish type - what they call a true mary-anne - and, quid.' Or, less kindly: 'My eyes! but doesn't that puss like many of them, he gave himself a girl's name: Alice.

always land with her nose in the cream!' as another boy

'That's my sister's name!' I said, when he told me, and he drew up in a hansom, and disappeared into the Alhambra on smiled: it was his sister's name, too - only his sister, he said, the arm of a gentleman with a red silk lining to his cape.

was dead. I said I didn't know if mine was dead or not, and Finally, of course, his drifting gaze would settle and harden, didn't care; and this did not surprise him.

and he would give a little nod, or wink, and hastily put This Alice was, I guessed, about my age. He was as pretty down his cup. 'Whoops!' he would say, 'I see a porter who as a girl - prettier, indeed, than most girls (including me), wants to punch Sweet Alice's ticket. Adieu, cherie. A for he had glossy black hair and a heart-shaped face, and thousand kisses on your marvellous eyes!' He would touch eye-lashes impossibly long and dark and thick. He had his fingertip to his lips, then lightly press it to the sleeve of rented, he said, since he was twelve; renting, now, was the my jacket; then I would see him picking his careful way 229

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across the crowded square to the fellow who had gestured My own renter persona was, of necessity, a rather curious to him.

mixture of types. Never a very virile boy, I held no appeal When he asked me, early on, what my name was, I for the kind of gentleman who liked a rough hand through answered: Kitty.

the slit of his drawers, or a bit of a slap in the shadows; It was Sweet Alice who introduced me to the various renter equally, however, I could never afford to let myself be seen types, and explained to me their costumes, and their habits, as one of those lily-white lads whom the working-men go and their skills. Foremost amongst them, of course, were for, and make rather free with. Then again, I was choosy.

the mary-annes, the other boys like himself, who could be There were many fellows with curious appetites in the seen strolling up and down the Haymarket at any time of streets round Leicester Square; but not all of them were the the day or night, with their lips rouged and their throats sort I was after. Most men, to be frank, will step aside with powdered, and clad in trousers as tight and revealing, a renter as you or I might call into a public-house, on our almost, as a ballerina's fleshings. These boys took their way home from the market: they take their pleasure, give a customers to lodging-houses and hotels; their aim was to be belch, and think no more of it than that. But still there are spotted by some manly young gentleman or lord and set up always some - they are gentlemen, for the most part; I as his mistress in apartments of their own. More succeeded learned to spot them from afar - who are fretful, or wistful, in this ambition than you might think.

or romantic - who could, like the fellow from the Then again, there were the more ordinary-looking fellows, Burlington Arcade, be brought to kiss me, or thank me, or the clerks and shop-boys: they rather despised the mary-even weep over me, as I was handling them.

annes, and went with gentlemen - or so they claimed - for And, as they did so - as they strained and gasped, and the money rather than for the thrill of it; some of them, I whispered their desires to me in some alley or court or believe, even kept wives and sweethearts. The aristocracy dripping lavatory stall — I would have to turn my face or leading men of this particular branch of the profession away to hide my smiles. If they favoured Walter, then so were the guardsmen: it had been as one of these that I had much the better. If they did not — well, they were all gents costumed myself, when I had donned that scarlet uniform -

and (whatever their own opinion on the matter) with their all innocently, of course, for I had known nothing of their trousers unbuttoned they all looked the same.

reputation in this direction, then. These men, I was assured, I never felt my own lusts rise, raising theirs. I didn't even were cock-handlers and -suckers, almost exclusively. They need the coins they gave me. I was like a person who, occasionally obliged a gentleman with a poke or two, when having once been robbed of all he owns and loves, turns they were feeling friendly; but they never let their own thief himself- not to enjoy his neighbours' chattels, but to parts be fondled or kissed. They were proud to the point of spoil them. My one regret was that, though I was daily mania, Sweet Alice said, on that score.

giving such marvellous performances, they had no 231

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audience. I would gaze about me at the dim and dreary not see Nan King in me, I know it; and if I had an urge to place in which my gentleman and I leaned panting, and cross to her and reveal myself and ask for news of Kitty, it wish the cobbles were a stage, the bricks a curtain, the lasted for only a moment; and in that moment the driver scuttling rats a set of blazing footlights. I would long for shook his horses into life, and the carriage rumbled off.

just one eye - just one! - to be fixed upon our couplings: a No, my only contact with the theatre now was a renter. I bold and knowing eye that saw how well I played my part, discovered that the music halls of Leicester Square - the how gulled and humbled was my foolish, trustful partner.

very same halls which Kitty and I had gazed at, all Bat that - considering the circumstances - seemed quite hopefully, two years before - were rather famous in the impossible.

renter world as posing-grounds and pick-up spots. The All continued smoothly for, perhaps, six months or so: my Empire, in particular, was always thick with sods: they colourless life at Mrs Best's went on, and so did my trips to strolled side-by-side with the gay girls of the promenade, or the West End, and my renting. My little stash of money stood, in little knots, exchanging gossip, comparing dwindled, and finally disappeared; and now, since renting fortunes, greeting one another with flapping hands and was all I knew and cared for, I began to live entirely from high, extravagant voices. They never looked at the stage, what I earned upon the streets. I still had had no word of never cheered or applauded, only gazed at themselves in the Kitty - not a word! I concluded at last that she must have mirror-glass or at each other's powdered faces, or - more gone abroad, to try her luck with Walter - to America, covertly - at the gentlemen who, rapidly or rather perhaps, where we had planned to go. My months upon the lingeringly, passed them by.

music-hall stage seemed very distant to me now, and quite I loved to walk with them, and watch them, and be watched unreal. Once or twice on my trips around the city I saw by them in turn. I loved to stroll about the Empire - the someone I knew, from the old days - a fellow with whom handsomest hall in England, as Walter had described it, the we'd shared a bill at the Paragon, a wardrobe-mistress from hall to which Kitty had longed so ardently so uselessly! for the Bedford, Camden Town. One night I leaned against a an invitation - I loved to stroll about it with my back to its pillar in Great Windmill Street and watched as Dolly glorious golden stage, my costume bright beneath the Arnold -who had played Cinderella to Kitty's Prince, at the ungentle glare of its electric chandeliers, my hair gleaming, Britannia -made her exit from the door of the Pavilion and my trousers bulging, my lips pink, my figure and pose was helped into a carriage. She looked at me, and blinked -

reeking, as the gay boys say, of lavender, their import bold then looked away again. Perhaps she thought she knew my and unmistakable - but false. The singers and comedians I face; perhaps she thought I was a boy that she had worked never looked at once. I had finished with that world, with; perhaps she only thought I was a miserable ningle, entirely.

haunting the shadows in search of a gent. Anyway, she did 233

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All, as I have said, went smoothly; then, in the first few just as I was about to turn and begin my descent, however, I warm weeks of 1891 - that is, a year and more after my heard the creaking of a door and saw the bobbing glow of a flight from Kitty - there came a bothersome interruption to candle.

my little routine.

'Miss Astley -' It was my landlady's voice, sounding thin I returned to the knocking-shop after an evening of rather and querulous in the darkness. 'Miss Astley, is that you?'