Tipping the Velvet (5 page)

Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a monkey.

‘Hey, hey,' he said breathlessly when he reached my side, ‘someone's merry, and I know why! How come girls never look so gay as that, when I give them roses?' I blushed again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing. Tony smirked.

‘I've got a message for you,' he said then. ‘Someone to see you.' I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony's smirk broadened. ‘Miss Butler,' he said, ‘would like a word.'

My own grin faded at once. ‘A word?' I said. ‘Miss Butler? With me?'

‘That's right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told her. And now she wants to see you.'

‘What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell her?' I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard.

‘Nothing, except the truth -' I gave his arm a twist. The truth was terrible. I didn't want her to know about the shivering and the whispering, the flame and the streaming light. Tony prised my fingers from his sleeve, and held my hand. ‘Just that you like her,' he said simply. ‘Now will you come along, or what?'

I did not know what to say. So I said nothing, but let him lead me away from the great glass doors with the blue, cool, Canterbury night behind them, past the archway that led to the stalls, and the staircase to the gallery, towards an alcove in the far corner of the foyer, with a curtain across it, and a rope before it, and a sign swinging from the rope, marked
Private.

I
had been back stage at the Palace with Tony once or twice before, but only in the daytime, when the hall was dim and quite deserted. Now the corridors along which I walked with him were full of light and noise. We passed one doorway that led, I knew, to the stage itself: I caught a glimpse of ladders and ropes and trailing gas-pipes; of boys in caps and aprons, wheeling baskets, manœuvring lights. I had the sensation then - and I felt it again in the years that followed, every time I made a similar trip back stage - that I had stepped into the workings of a giant clock, stepped through the elegant casing to the dusty, greasy, restless machinery that lay, all hidden from the common eye, behind it.

Tony led me down a passageway that stopped at a metal staircase, and here he paused to let three men go by. They wore hats and carried overcoats and bags; they were sallow-faced and poor-looking, with a patina of flashness - I thought they might be salesmen carrying sample-cases. Only when they had moved on, and I heard them sharing a joke with the stage door-keeper, did I realise that they were the trio of tumblers taking their leave for the night, and that their bags contained their spangles. I had a sudden fear that Kitty Butler might after all be just like them: plain, unremarkable, almost unrecognisable as the handsome girl I had seen swaggering in the glow of the footlights. I very nearly called to Tony to take me back; but he had descended the staircase, and when I caught up with him in the passageway below he was at a door, and had already turned its handle.

The door was one of a row of others, indistinguishable from its neighbours but for a brass figure 7, very old and scratched, that was screwed at eye level upon its centre panel, and a hand-written card that had been tacked below. Miss Kitty Butler, it said.

I found her seated at a little table before a looking-glass; she had half-turned - to reply, I suppose, to Tony's knock - but at my approach she rose, and reached to shake my hand. She was a little shorter than me, even in her heels, and younger than I had imagined - perhaps my sister's age, of one- or two-and-twenty.

‘Aha,' she said, when Tony had left us - there was a hint, still, of her footlight manner in her voice - ‘my mystery admirer! I was sure it must be Gully you came to see; then someone said you never stay beyond the interval. Is it really me you stay for? I never had a fan before!' As she spoke she leaned quite comfortably against the table - it was cluttered, I now saw, with jars of cream and sticks of grease-paint, with playing cards and half-smoked cigarettes and filthy tea-cups - and crossed her legs at the ankle, and folded her arms. Her face was still thickly powdered, and very red at the lip; her lashes and eyelids were black with paint. She was dressed in the trousers and the shoes that she had worn for her act, but she had removed the jacket, the waistcoat, and, of course, the hat. Her starched shirt was held tight against the swell of her bosom by a pair of braces, but gaped at the throat where she had unclipped her bow-tie. Beyond the shirt I saw an edge of creamy lace.

I looked away. ‘I do like your act,' I said.

‘I should think you do, you come to it so often!'

I smiled. ‘Well, Tony lets me in, you see, for nothing ...' That made her laugh: her tongue looked very pink, her teeth extraordinarily white, against her painted lips. I felt myself blush. ‘What I mean is,' I said, ‘Tony lets me have the box. But I would pay if I had to, and sit in the gallery. For I do so like your act, Miss Butler, so very, very much.'

Now she did not laugh, but she tilted her head a little. ‘Do you?' she answered gently.

‘Oh, yes.'

‘Tell me what it is you like then, so much.'

I hesitated. ‘I like your costume,' I said at last. ‘I like your songs, and the way you sing them. I like the way you talk to Tricky. I like your ... hair.' Here I stumbled; and now she seemed to blush. There was a second's almost awkward silence - then, suddenly, as if from somewhere very near at hand, there came the sound of music - the blast of a horn and the pulse of a drum - and a cheer, like the roaring of the wind in some vast sea-shell. I gave a jump, and looked about me; and she laughed. ‘The second half,' she said. After a moment the cheering stopped; the music, however, went on pulsing and thumping like a great heart-beat.

She left off leaning against the table, and asked, Did I mind if she smoked? I shook my head, and shook it again when she took up a packet of cigarettes from amongst the dirty cups and playing cards, and held it to me. Upon the wall there was a hissing gas-jet in a wire cage, and she put her face to it, to light the cigarette. With the fag at the side of her lip, her eyes screwed up against the flame, she looked like a boy again; when she took the cigarette away, however, the cork was smudged with crimson. Seeing that, she tutted: ‘Look at me, with all my paint still on! Will you sit with me while I clean my face? It's not very polite, I know, but I must get ready rather quick; my room is needed later by another girl ...'

I did as she asked, and sat and watched her smear her cheeks with cream, then take a cloth to them. She worked quickly and carefully, but distractedly; and as she rubbed at her face she held my gaze in the glass. She looked at my new hat and said, ‘What a pretty bonnet!' Then she asked how I knew Tony - was he my beau? I was shocked at that and said, ‘Oh, no! He is courting my sister'; and she laughed. Where did I live? she asked me then. What did I work at?

‘I work in an oyster-house,' I said.

‘An oyster-house!' The idea seemed to tickle her. Still rubbing at her cheeks, she began to hum, and then to sing very low beneath her breath.

A swipe at the crimson of her lip, the black of her lashes.

She sang on; then opened one eye very wide, and leaned close to the glass to remove a stubborn crumb of spit-black - her mouth stretching wide, out of a kind of sympathy with her eyelids, and her breath misting the mirror. For a second she seemed quite to have forgotten me. I studied the skin of her face and her throat. It had emerged from its mask of powder and grease the colour of cream - the colour of the lace on her chemise; but it was darkened at the nose and cheeks - and even, I saw, at the edge of her lip - by freckles, brown as her hair. I had not suspected the existence of the freckles. I found them wonderfully and inexplicably moving.

She wiped her breath from the glass, then, and gave me a wink, and asked me more about myself; and because it was somehow easier to talk to her reflection than to her face, I began at last to chat with her quite freely. At first she answered as I thought an actress should - comfortably, rather teasingly, laughing when I blushed or said a foolish thing. Gradually, however - as if she was stripping the paint from her voice, as well as from her face - her tone grew milder, less pert and pressing. At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl's: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl's voice, like my own.

Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary:
I am in love with you.

Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,' she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door.

‘Thank you, Miss Astley,' she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.' She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips.

I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler's nose! I felt ready to die of shame.

I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret.

‘You smell,' she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -'

‘Like a herring!' I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.

‘Not at all like a herring,' she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...' And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.

I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against the cloth. ‘Will you come and see me again, Miss Mermaid?' she asked. Her tone was light; incredibly, however, she seemed to mean it. I said, Oh yes, I should like that very much, and she nodded with something like satisfaction. Then she made me another little bow, and we said good-night; and she closed the door and was gone.

I stood quite still, facing the little 7, the hand-written card,
Miss Kitty Butler.
I found myself unable to move from in front of it - quite as unable as if I really were a mermaid and had no legs to walk on, but a tail. I blinked. I had been sweating, and the sweat, and the smoke of her cigarette, had worked upon the castor oil on my lashes to make my eye-lids very sore. I put my hand to them - the hand that she had kissed; then I held my fingers to my nose and smelled through the linen what she had smelled, and blushed again.

In the dressing-room all was silent. Then at last, very low, came the sound of her voice. She was singing again the song about the oyster-girl and the basket. But the song came rather fitfully now, and I realised of course that as she was singing she was stooping to unlace her boots, and straightening to shrug her braces off, and perhaps kicking free her trousers ...

All this; and there was only the thickness of one slender door between her body and my own smarting eyes!

It was that thought which made me find my legs at last, and leave her.

 

Watching Miss Butler perform upon the stage after having spoken to her, and been smiled at by her, and had her lips upon my hand, was a strange experience, at once more and less thrilling than it had been before. Her lovely voice, her elegance, her swagger: I felt I had been given a kind of secret share in them, and pinked complacently every time the crowd roared their welcome or called her back on to the stage for an encore. She threw me no more roses; these all went, as before, to the pretty girls in the stalls. But I know she saw me in my box, for I felt her eyes upon me, sometimes, as she sang; and always, when she left the stage, there was that sweep of her hat for the hall, and a nod, or a wink, or the ghost of a smile, just for me.