Tipping the Velvet (55 page)

'We won't be late.'

began at once to knock against her fingers, and I started a

'You must be as late as you like; we shall not wonder. Only fruitless fumbling at my hips for a pair of pockets in which mind you are careful. They are rather rough streets, that you to thrust my hands. 'What a fidget you are,' she said mildly, must cross ..."

quite as if she were addressing Cyril; but her cheeks, I The trip from Bethnal Green to Cable Street did indeed take noticed, had not paled - nor was her voice, I thought, quite us through some of the roughest, poorest, squalidest steady.

districts in the city, and could never, ordinarily, be very She finished at my throat at last, then stepped away again.

cheerful. I knew the route, for I had walked it often with

'There is just my hair,' I said. I took two brushes and Florence: I knew which courts were grimmest, which dampened them in my water-jug, and combed the hair away factories sweated their workers hardest, which tenements from my face till it was flat and sleek; then I greased my housed the saddest and most hopeless families. But we palms with macassar — I had macassar, now — and ran were out that night together -as Florence herself had 469

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admitted - for pleasure's sake; and though it might seem Frigate - that reminded me how near our walk had brought strange to say it, our journey was indeed a pleasant one, and us to the Thames.

seemed to take us over a rather different landscape to the

'It's this way,' said Florence self-consciously. She led me one we normally trod. We passed gin-palaces and penny-past the door and around the building to a smaller, darker gaffs, coffee-shops and public-houses: they were not the entrance at the back. Here a set of rather steep and grim and dreary places that they sometimes were, tonight, treacherous-looking steps took us downwards, to what must but luminous with warmth and light and colour, thick with once have been a cellar; at the bottom there was a door of laughter and shouts, and with the reeking odours of beer frosted glass, and behind this was the room - the Boy in the and soup and gravy. We saw spooning couples; and girls Boat, I remembered to call it - that we had come for.

with cherries on their hats, and lips to match them; and It was not a large room, but it was very shady, and it took children bent over hot, steaming packets of tripe, and me a time to gauge its breadth and height, to see beyond its trotters, and baked potatoes. Who knew to what sad homes spots of brightness - its crackling fire, its gas-lamps, the they might be returning, in

however, there was a queer kind of glamour to them, and to into the pools of gloom that lay between them. There were, the very streets - Diss Street, Sclater Street, Hare Street, I guessed, about twenty persons in it: they were seated in a Fashion Street, Plumbers Row, Coke Street, Pinckin Street, row of little stalls, or standing propped against the counter, Little Pearl Street - in which they walked.

or gathered in the furthest, brightest corner, about what

'How gay the city seems tonight!' said Florence seemed to be a billiard table. I didn't like to gaze at them for wonderingly.

long, for at our appearance they all, of course, looked up, It is for you, I wanted to reply: for you and your new and I felt strangely shy of them and their opinion.

costume. But I only smiled at her and took her arm; then, Instead I kept my head down, and followed Florence to the

'Look at that coat!' I said, as we passed a boy in a yellow bar. There was a square-chinned woman standing behind it, felt jacket that was bright, in the Brick Lane shadows, as a wiping at a beer-glass with a cloth; when she saw us lantern. 'I knew a girl once, oh! she would have loved that coming she put both glass and towel down, and smiled.

coat. ..'

'Why, Florence! How grand to see you here again! And It did not take us long, after that, to reach Cable Street.

how bonny you are looking!' She held out her hand and Here we turned left, then right; and at the end of this road I took Florence's fingers in her own, and looked her over saw the public-house that was, I guessed, our destination: a with pleasure. Then she turned to me.

squat, flat-roofed little building with a gas-jet in a plum-This is my friend, Nancy Astley,' said Flo, rather shyly.

coloured shade above the door, and a garish sign - The

'This is Mrs Swindles, who keeps bar here.' Mrs Swindles and I exchanged nods and smiles. I took off my coat and 471

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hat, and ran my fingers through my hair; and when she saw I looked at Florence, and she smiled. 'Gay girls,' she said.

me do that her brow lifted a little and I hoped that she was

'Half the girls who come in here are gay. Do you mind it?'

thinking, as Annie Page had: Well, Florence has a fancy How could I mind it, when I had been a gay girl - well, a new uncle, all right!

gay boy - once, myself? I shook my head.

'What will you have, Nance?' Florence asked me then. I

'Do you mind it?' I asked her.

said I would have whatever she cared for, and she hesitated,

'No. I'm only sorry that they must do it..."

then asked for two rum hots. 'Let's take them to a stall.' We I didn't listen: I was too taken with the gay girl's story. She stepped across the room - there was sand upon the was saying now: 'We flat fucked for a half-an-hour; then floorboards, and our boots crunched upon it as we walked -

tipped the velvet while the gent looked on. Then Susie took to a table, set between two benches. We sat, across from a pair of vampers, and -'

one another, and stirred sugar into our glasses.

I looked again at Florence, and frowned. 'Are they French,

'You were a regular here once, then?' I asked Flo.

or what?' I asked. 'I can't understand a thing they're saying.'

She nodded. 'I haven't been here for an age ..."

And indeed, I could not; for I had never heard such words

'No?'

before, in all my time upon the streets. I said, 'Tipped the

'Not since Lily died. It's a bit of a monkey-parade, to tell the velvet: what does that mean? It sounds like something you truth. I haven't had the heart for it, . .'

might do in a theatre ..."

I gazed into my rum. All at once there came a burst of Florence blushed. 'You might try it,' she said; 'but I think laughter from the stall at my back that made me jump.

the chairman would chuck you out ..." Then, while I still

'I said,' came a girl's voice, '"I only does that sort of thing, frowned, she parted her lips and showed me the tip of her sir, with my friends." "Emily Pettinger," he said, "said you tongue; and glanced, very quickly, at my lap. I had never let her flat fuck you for an hour and a half" - which is a lie, known her do such a thing before, and I found myself but anyway, "Flat fucking is one thing, sir," I said, 'and this terribly startled by it, and terribly stirred. It might just as quite another. If you want me to —her'" - here she must well have been her lips that she had dipped to me: I felt my have made a gesture - '"you shall have to pay me for it, drawers grow damp, and my cheeks flush scarlet; and had rather dear.'"

to look away from her own warm gaze, to hide my

'And did he, then?' came another voice. The first speaker confusion.

paused, perhaps to take a sip from her glass; then, 'Swipe I looked at Mrs Swindles at the bar, and at the pewter mugs me!' she said, 'if the bastard didn't put his hand in his pocket that hung, in one long gleaming row, above her; and then I and pull out a sov, and lay it on the table-top, all cool as looked at the group of figures at the billiard table. And then, you like . . .'

after a moment or two, I studied them a little harder. I said 473

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to Florence, 'I thought you said it was to be all toms here?

lurch. Then I sniffed, and gazed again at the trousered toms There are blokes over there.'

beside the billiard-table.

'Blokes? Are you sure?' She turned to where I pointed, and

'To think,' I said after a second, 'that I might have worn my gazed with me at the billiard players. They were rather moleskins, after all . . .' Florence laughed.

rowdy, and half of them were clad in trousers and We sat sipping at our rums a little longer; more women waistcoats, and sported prison crops. But as Florence arrived, and the room became hotter and noisier and thick studied them, she laughed. 'Blokes? she said again. 'Those with smoke. I went to the bar to have our glasses re-filled, are not blokes! Nancy, how could you think it?'

and when I walked with them back to our stall I found I blinked, and looked again. I began to see ... They were not Annie there, with Ruth and Nora and another girl, a fair-men, but girls; they were girls - and they were rather like haired, pretty girl, who was introduced to me as Miss myself. . .

Raymond. 'Miss Raymond works in a print-shop,' said I swallowed. I said, 'Do they live as men, those girls?'

Annie, and I had to pretend surprise to hear it. When, after Florence shrugged, not noticing the thickness in my voice.

half-an-hour or so, she went off to find the lavatory, Annie

'Some do, I believe. Most dress as they please, and live as made us rearrange our places so that she might sit next to others care to find them.' She caught my gaze. 'I had rather her.

thought, you know, that you must've done the same sort of

'Quick, quick!' she cried. 'She'll be back in a moment!

thing, yourself..."

Nancy, over there!' I found myself placed between Florence

'Would you think me very foolish,' I answered, 'if I said that and the wall; and for lovely long moments at a time I let the I had thought I was the only one . . . ?'

other women talk, and savoured the press of her damson Her gaze grew gentle, then. 'How queer you are!' she said thigh against my own more sober, more slender one. Every mildly. 'You have never tipped the velvet -'

time she turned to me I felt her breath upon my cheek, hot

'I didn't say that I had never done it, you know; only that I and sugary and scented with rum.

never called it that.'

The evening passed: I began to think that I had never spent

'Well. You use all sorts of peculiar phrases, then. You seem a pleasanter one. I gazed at Ruth and Nora, and saw them never to have seen a torn in a pair of trousers. Really, lean together and laugh. I looked at Annie: she had her Nance, sometimes - sometimes I think you must've been hand upon Miss Raymond's shoulder, her eyes upon her born quite grown - like Venus in the sea-shell, in the face. I looked at Florence, and she smiled. 'All right, painting

Venus?' she said. Her hair had sprung right out of its pins, She put a finger to the side of her glass, to catch a trickle of and was curling about her collar.

sugary rum; then put the finger to her lip. I felt my throat Then Nora began one of those earnest stories - This girl grow even thicker, and my heart give a strange kind of came into the office today, listen to this ..." - and I yawned, 475

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and looked away from her, towards the billiard players; and impostor - as if I had just said, 'I am Lord Rosebery'. I did was very surprised to find the knot of women there all not look at Florence -though out of the corner of my eye I turned away from their table, and gazing at me. They saw her mouth fly open. I looked at the tattooed woman, seemed to be debating me - one nodded, another shook her and gave her a modest little shrug. She, for her part, had head, yet another squinted at me, and thumped her billiard stepped back; now she slapped our stall until it shook, and cue upon the floor emphatically. I began to grow a little called, laughing, to her friend.

uncomfortable: perhaps — who knew? -I had breached

'Jenny, you have won your coin! The gal says she is Nan some tommish etiquette, coming here in short hair and a King, all right!'

skirt. I looked away; and when I looked again, one of the At her words the group at the billiard-table let up a cry, and women had disentangled herself from her neighbours, and half the room fell silent. The gay girls in the neighbouring was stepping purposefully towards our stall. She was a stall got up, to peer over at me; I heard 'Nan King, it is Nan large woman, and she had her sleeves rolled up to her King there!' whispered at every table. The tattooed tom's elbows. On her arm there was a rough tattoo, so green and friend -Jenny - came stepping over, and held her hand out smudged it might have been a bruise. She reached out to me.

booth, placed the tattooed arm across the back of it, and

'Miss King,' she said, 'I knew it was you the moment you leaned to catch my eye.

come in. What happy times I used to have, watching you

'Excuse me, sweetheart,' she said, rather loudly. 'But my pal and Miss Butler at the Paragon!'

Jenny will have it that you're that Nan King gal, what used

'You're very kind,' I said, taking her hand. As I did so, I to work the halls with Kitty Butler. I've a shilling on it that caught Florence's eye.

you ain't her. Now, will you settle it?'

'Nance,' she asked, 'what is all this? Did you really work the I looked quickly around the table. Florence and Annie had halls? Why did you never say?'

looked up in mild surprise. Nora had broken off her story

'It was all rather long ago . . .' She shook her head, and and now smiled and said, 'I should make the most of this looked me over.

Nance. There might be a free drink in it.' Miss Raymond

'You don't mean you didn't know your friend was such a laughed. No one believed that I really might be Nan King; star?' asked Jenny now, overhearing.

and I, of course, had spent five years in hiding from that

'We didn't know that she was any kind of star,' said Annie.

history, denying I had ever been her, myself.

'Her and Kitty Butler - what a team! There never was a pair But the rum, the warmth, my new, unspoken passion o' mashers like "em . . .'

seemed to work in me like oil in a rusted lock. I turned back