Tipping the Velvet (55 page)

I swung the kettle over the fire, and Florence rose and stretched - then cocked her head.

‘Cyril,' she said. I listened too, and after a second caught his thin, irregular cry. She moved to the stairs. ‘I'll shush him, before he wakes Ralph.'

She was gone for a full five minutes or so, and when she returned it was with Cyril himself, his lashes gleaming in the lamplight and his hair damp and darkened with the sweat of fretful slumber.

‘He won't settle,' she said. ‘I'll let him stay with us a while.' She sat back in the armchair by the fire and the child lay heavily against her. I passed her her tea, and she took a sideways sip at it, and yawned. Then she gazed at me, and rubbed her eyes.

‘What a help you've been to me, Nance, these past few months!' she said.

‘I only help,' I answered truthfully, ‘to stop you wearing yourself out. You do too much.'

‘There's so much to do!'

‘I can't believe that all of it should fall to you, though. Do you never weary of it?'

‘I get tired,' she said, yawning again, ‘as you can see! But never of it.'

‘But Flo, if it's such an endless task, why labour at all?'

‘Why, because I must! Because how could I rest, when the world is so cruel and hard, and yet might be so sweet... The kind of work I do is its own kind of fulfilment, whether it's successful or not.' She drank her tea. ‘It's like love.'

Love! I sniffed. ‘You think love is its own reward, then?'

‘Don't you?'

I gazed into my cup. ‘I did once, I think,' I said. ‘But...' I had never told her about those days. Cyril wriggled, and she kissed his head and murmured in his ear, and for a moment all was very still - perhaps she thought me wondering about the gent I said I had lived with in St John's Wood. But then she spoke again, more briskly.

‘Besides, I don't believe it is an endless task. Things are changing. There are unions everywhere - and women's unions, as well as men's. Women do things today their mothers would have laughed to think of seeing their daughters doing, twenty years ago; soon they will even have the vote! If people like me don't work, it's because they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it - wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of people, new ways of being alive and in love ...' Love again. I put a finger to the scar upon my cheek, where Dickie's doctor's book had caught it. Florence bent her head to gaze at the baby, as he lay sighing upon her chest.

‘In another twenty years,' she went on quietly, ‘imagine how the world will be! It will be a new century. Cyril will be a young man - nearly, but not quite, as old as I am now. Imagine the things he'll see, the things he'll do ...' I looked at her, and then at him; and for a moment I felt almost able to see with her across the years to the queer new world that would have Cyril in it, as a man...

As I looked, she shifted in her seat, reached a hand out to the bookcase at her side, and drew a volume from the bulging shelves. It was
Leaves of Grass:
she turned its pages, and found a passage that she seemed to know.

‘Listen to this' she said. She began to read aloud. Her tone was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with passion - I had never heard such passion in her voice, before.

‘0 mater!
0
fils!'
she read.
‘0
brood
continental! 0 flowers of the prairies! 0 space boundless! 0 hum of mighty products! 0 you teeming cities! 0 so invincible, turbulent, proud! 0 race of the future! 0 women! O fathers! O you men of passion and storm! 0 beauty! 0 yourself! 0 you bearded roughs! 0 bards! 0 all those slumberers! 0 arouse! the dawn-bird's throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?'

She sat still for a moment, gazing down at the page; then she raised her eyes to mine, and I saw with surprise that they were gleaming with unspilled tears. She said, ‘Don't you think that marvellous, Nancy? Don't you think that a marvellous, marvellous poem?'

‘Frankly, no,' I said: the tears had unnerved me. ‘Frankly, I've seen better verses on some lavatory walls' — I really had. ‘If it's a poem, why doesn't it rhyme? What it needs is a few good rhymes and a nice, jaunty melody.' I reached to take the book from her, and studied the passage she had read - it had been underlined, at some earlier date, in pencil — then sang it out, to the approximate tune and rhythm of some music-hall song of the moment. Florence laughed, and, with one hand upon Cyril, tried to snatch the book from me.

‘You're a beast!' she cried. ‘You're a shocking philistine.'

‘I'm a purist,' I said primly. ‘I know a nice bit of verse when I see it, and this ain't it.' I flipped through the book, abandoning my attempt to try to force the staggering lines into some sort of melody, but reading all the ludicrous passages that I could find - there were many of them - and all in the silly American drawl of a stage Yankee. At last I found another underlined section, and started on that.
‘O my comrade!'
I began.
‘O you and me at last — and us two only; 0 power, liberty, eternity at last! 0 to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness! 0 the pensive aching to be together - you know not why, and I know not why...'

My voice trailed away; I had lost my Yankee drawl, and spoken the last few words in a self-conscious murmur. Florence had ceased her laughter, and begun to gaze, apparently quite gravely, into the fire: I saw the orange flames of the coals reflected in each of her hazel eyes. I closed the book, and returned it to the shelf. There was a silence, a rather long one.

At last she took a breath; and when she spoke she sounded quite unlike herself, and rather strange.

‘Nance,' she began, ‘do you remember that day in Green Street, when we talked? Do you remember how we said that we would meet, and how you didn't come... ?'

‘Of course,' I said, a little sheepishly. She smiled - a curiously vague and inward-seeming kind of smile.

‘I never said, did I,' she went on, ‘what I did that night?' I shook my head. I remembered very well what
I
had done that night - I had supped with Diana, and then fucked her in her handsome bedroom, and then been sent from it, chilled and chastened, to my own. But I had never stopped to think what Florence might have done; and she, indeed, had never told me.

‘What did you do?' I asked now. ‘Did you go to that - that lecture, on your own?'

‘I did,' she said. She took a breath. ‘I - met a girl there.'

‘A girl?'

‘Yes. Her name was Lilian. I saw her at once, and couldn't take my eyes from her. She was so very - interesting looking. You know how it is, with a girl, sometimes? - well, no, perhaps you don't...' But I did, I did! And now I gazed at her, and felt myself grow warm; and then rather chill. She coughed, and put a hand to her mouth. Then she said, still gazing at the coals: ‘When the lecture was finished Lilian asked a question - it was a very clever question, and the speaker was quite thrown by it. I looked at her then, and knew I must know her. I went over to her, and we began to talk. We talked - we talked, Nance, for an hour, quite without stopping! She had the most unusual views. She'd read, it seemed to me, everything, and had opinions on it all.'

The story went on. They had become friends; Lilian had come calling...

‘You loved her!' I said.

Florence blushed, and then nodded. ‘You couldn't have known her, and not loved her a little.'

‘But Flo, you loved her! You loved her — like a tom!'

She blinked, and put a finger to her lip, and blushed harder than ever. ‘I thought,' she said, ‘you might have guessed it ...'

‘Guessed it! I - I am not sure. I never thought you might have - well, I cannot say what I thought...'

She turned her head away. ‘She loved me, too,' she said, after a moment. ‘She loved me, like anything! But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn't mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn't do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!'

She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.

‘A few months after I first met her,' she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn't mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...'

She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.' She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn't matter that we weren't lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx' - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don't have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.' Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,' she said again, ‘I was hers...'

She grew silent. I looked at her, and at Cyril — at his flushed and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: ‘And then ... ?'

She blinked. ‘And then - well, then she died. She was too slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We couldn't even find a midwife who would see to her, because she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in from Islington, someone who didn't know us, and say that she was Ralph's wife. The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn't let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !”

‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she'd begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn't be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -'

Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.

‘I wish I'd known,' I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian's death. There had been Florence's strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother's gentle forbearance, her friends' concern. There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian's son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved...

I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.

‘How I have talked,' she said. ‘I don't know, I'm sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.'

‘I'm glad you did,' I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.' She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if
missing
was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away.

‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I've wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he'd got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don't even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn't know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I've never been gladder of anything, in all my life!'