Tipping the Velvet (60 page)

The chairs had been pushed back to make room for my bed, so now, rather shyly, we sat upon it, side by side: as we did so, it moved a little on its castors, and Florence laughed. There was a lamp turned low upon the table but, apart from that, the room was very dim. We sat, and sipped our tea, and gazed at the coals: now and then the ash would shift a little in the grate, and the coal give a pop. ‘How still it seems,' said Florence quietly, ‘after the Boy!'

I had drawn my knees to my chin - the bed was very low upon the rug - and now turned my cheek upon them, and smiled at her.

‘I'm glad you took me there,' I said. ‘I don't believe I've had such a pleasant night since - well, I cannot say.'

‘Can't you?'

‘I can't. For half my pleasure, you know, was seeing you so gay...'

She smiled, then yawned. ‘Didn't you think Miss Raymond very handsome?' she asked me.

‘Pretty handsome.' Not as handsome as you, I wanted to say, looking again at all the features I had once thought plain. Oh Flo, there's no one as handsome as you!

But I didn't say it. And meanwhile, she had smiled. ‘I remember another girl Annie courted once. We let them stay with us, because Annie was sharing with her sister then. They slept in here, and Lilian and I were upstairs; and they were so noisy, Mrs Monks came round to ask, “Was someone poorly?” We had to say that Lily had the toothache - when in fact, she had slept through it all, with me beside her...'

Her voice grew quiet. I put a hand to my necktie, to loosen it: the idea of Flo lying at Lilian's side, stirred to a useless passion, made me bitter; but, as usual, it also made me rather warm. I said, ‘Wasn't it hard, sharing a bed with someone you loved like that?'

‘It was terribly hard! But also rather marvellous.'

‘Did you never - never kiss her?'

‘I sometimes kissed her as she slept; I kissed her hair. Her hair was handsome...'

I had a very vivid memory, then, of lying beside Kitty, in the days before we had ever made love. I said, in a slightly different tone: ‘Did you watch her face, as she lay dreaming - and hope she dreamed of you?'

‘I used to light a candle, just to do it!'

‘Didn't you ache to touch her, as she lay at your side?'

‘I thought I
would
touch her! I was frightened half to death by it.'

‘But didn't you sometimes touch yourself - and wish the fingers were hers... ?'

‘Oh, and then blush to do it! One time, I moved against her in the bed and she said, still sleeping, “Jim!” - Jim was the name of her man-friend. And then she said it again:
“Jim!”
— and in a voice I'd never heard her use before. I didn't know whether to weep about it, or what; but what I really wanted - oh, Nance! what I really wanted was for her to sleep on, like a girl in a trance, so I could touch her and have her think me him, and call out again, in that voice, as I did it... !'

She drew in her breath. A coal in the hearth fell with a rattle, but she did not turn to it, and neither did I. We only stared: it was as if her words, that were so warm, had melted our gazes the one into the other, and we could not tear them free. I said, almost laughing: ‘Jim! Jim!' She blinked, and seemed to shiver; and then I shivered, too. And then I said, simply, ‘Oh, Flo...'

And then, as if through some occult power of its own, the space between our lips seemed to grow small, and then to vanish; and we were kissing. She lifted her hand to touch the corner of my mouth; and then her fingers came between our pressing lips - they tasted, still, of sugar. And then I began to shake so hard I had to clench my fists and say to myself, ‘Stop shaking, can't you? She'll think you've never been kissed before, at all!'

When I raised my hands to her, however, I found that she was shaking just as badly; and when, after a moment, I moved my fingers from her throat to the swell of her breasts, she twitched like a fish - then smiled, and leaned closer to me. ‘Press me harder!' she said.

We fell back together upon the bed, then - it shifted another inch across the carpet, on its wheels - and I undid the buttons of her shirt and pressed my face to her bosom, and sucked at one of her nipples, through the cotton of her chemise, till the nipple grew hard and she began to stiffen and pant. She put her hands to my head again, and lifted me to where she could kiss me; I lay and moved upon her, and felt her move beneath me, felt her breasts against my own, till I knew I should come, or faint - but then she turned me, and raised my skirt, and put her hand between my legs, and stroked so slowly, so lightly, so teasingly, I hoped I might never come at all...

At last, I felt her hand settle at the very wettest part of me, and she breathed against my ear. ‘Do you care for it,' she murmured then, ‘inside?' The question was such a gentle, such a gallant one, I almost wept. ‘Oh!' I said, and again she kissed me; and after a moment I felt her move within me, first with one finger, then with two, I guessed, then three... At last, after a second's pressure, she had her hand in me up to the wrist. I think I called out - I think I shivered and panted and called out, to feel the subtle twisting of her fist, the curling and uncurling of her sweet fingers, beneath my womb...

When I reached my crisis I felt a gush, and found that I had wet her arm, with my spendings, from fingertip to elbow - and that she had come, out of a kind of sympathy, and lay weak and heavy against me, with her own skirts damp. She drew her hand free - making me shiver anew - and I seized it and held it, and pulled her face to me and kissed her; and then we lay very quietly with our limbs pressed hard together until, like cooling engines, we ceased our pulsings and grew still.

When she rose at last, she cracked her head upon the supper-table: we had jerked the truckle-bed from one side of the parlour to the other, and not noticed. She laughed. We shuffled off our clothes, and she turned down the lamp, and we lay beneath the blankets in our damp petticoats. When she fell asleep I put my hands to her cheeks, and kissed her brow where she had bruised it.

 

I woke to find it still the night, but a little lighter. I didn't know what had disturbed me; when I looked about me, however, I saw that Florence had raised herself a little on the pillow, and was gazing at me, apparently quite wide awake. I reached for her hand again, and kissed it, and felt my insides give a kind of lurch. She smiled; but there was a darkness to the smile, that made me feel chill.

‘What's up?' I murmured. She stroked my hair.

‘I was only thinking...'

‘What?' She wouldn't answer. I propped myself up beside her, quite wide awake myself, now.
‘What,
Florence?'

‘I was looking at you in the darkness: I have never seen you sleep before. You looked like quite a stranger to me. And then I thought, you
are
a stranger to me ...'

‘A stranger? How can you say that? You have lived with me, for more than a year!'

‘And last night,' she answered, ‘for the first time, I discovered you were once a music-hall star! How can you keep a thing like that a secret? Why would you want to? What else have you done that I don't know about? You might have been in prison, for all I know. You might have been mad. You might have been gay!'

I bit my lip; but then, remembering how kind she had been about the gay girls at the Boy, I said quickly, ‘Flo, I did go on the streets one time. You won't hate me for it, will you?'

She took her hand away at once. ‘On the streets! My God! Of course I won't hate you, but - oh, Nance! To think of you as one of them sad girls...'

‘I wasn't sad,' I said, and looked away. ‘And to tell the truth I - well, I wasn't quite a girl, either.'

‘Not a girl?' she said. ‘What can you mean?'

I scraped at the silken edge of the blanket with my nail. Should I tell my story - the story I had kept so close, so long? I saw her hand upon the sheet and, as my stomach gave another slide, I remembered again her fingers, easing me open, and her fist inside me, slowly turning...

I took a breath. ‘Have you ever,' I said, ‘been to Whitstable ... ?'

Once I began it, I found I could not stop. I told her everything - about my life as an oyster-girl; about Kitty Butler, whom I had left my family for, and who had left me, in her turn, for Walter Bliss. I told her about my madness; my masquerade; my life with Mrs Milne and Grace, in Green Street, where she had seen me first. And finally I told her about Diana, and Felicity Place, and Zena.

When I stopped talking it was almost light; the parlour seemed chillier than ever. Through all my long narrative Florence had been silent; she had begun to frown when I had reached the part about the renting, and after that the frown had deepened. Now it was very deep indeed.

‘You wanted to know,' I said, ‘what secrets I had...'

She looked away. ‘I didn't think there would be quite so many.'

‘You said you wouldn't hate me, over the renting.'

‘It's so hard to think you did those things - for fun. And — oh, Nance, for such a cruel kind of fun!'

‘It was very long ago.'

‘To think of all the people you have known - and yet you have no friends.'

‘I left them all behind me.'

‘Your family. You said when you came here that your family had thrown you over. But it was you threw them over! How they must wonder over you! Do you never think of them?'

‘Sometimes, sometimes.'

‘And the lady who was so fond of you, in Green Street. Do you never think to call on her, and her daughter?'

‘They have moved away; and I tried to find them. And anyway, I was ashamed, because I had neglected them...'

‘Neglected them, for that - what was her name?'

‘Diana.'

‘Diana. Did you care for her, then, so very much?'

‘Care for her?' I propped myself upon my elbow. ‘I hated her! She was a kind of devil! I have told you — '

‘And yet, you stayed with her, so long...'

I felt suffocated, all at once, by my own story, and by the meanings she was teasing from it. ‘I can't explain,' I said. ‘She had a power over me. She was rich. She had - things.'

‘First you told me it was a gent that threw you out. Then you said it was a lady. I thought, that you had lost some girl... '

‘I had lost a girl; but it was Kitty, and it was years before.'

‘And Diana was rich; and blacked your eye and cut you, and you let her. And then she chucked you out because you - kissed her maid.' Her voice had grown steadily harder. ‘What happened to
her?'

‘I don't know. I don't know!'

We lay a while in silence, and the bed seemed suddenly terribly slim. Florence gazed at the lightening square of curtain at the window, and I watched her, miserably. When she put a finger to her mouth to chew at a nail I lifted my hand to stop her; but she pushed my arm away, and made to rise.

‘Where are you going?' I asked.

‘Upstairs. I want to sit a little while and think.'

‘No!' I cried; and as I cried it, Cyril, in his crib upstairs, woke up, and began to call out for his mother. I reached for Florence and seized her wrist and, all heedless of the baby's cries, pulled her back and pressed her to the bed. ‘I know what you mean to do,' I said. ‘You mean to go and think of Lilian!'

‘I cannot help but think of Lilian!' she answered, stricken. ‘I cannot help it. And you - you're just the same, only I never knew it. Don't say - don't say you weren't thinking of her, of Kitty, last night, as you kissed me!'

I took a breath - but then I hesitated. For it was true, I couldn't say it. It was Kitty I had kissed first and hardest; and it was as if I had had the shape or the colour or the taste of her kisses upon my lips, ever after. Not the spendings and the tears of all the weeping sods of Soho, nor the wine and the damp caresses of Felicity Place, had quite washed those kisses away. I had always known it - but it had never mattered with Diana, nor with Zena. Why should it matter with Florence?

What should it matter who she thought of, as she kissed me?

‘All I know is,' I said at last, ‘if we had not lain together last night, we would have died of it. And if you tell me now we shall never lie together again, after that, that was so marvellous -!'

I still held her to the bed, and Cyril still cried; but now, by some miracle, his cries began to die - and Florence, in her turn, grew slack in my arms, and turned her head against me.

‘I liked to think of you,' she said quietly, ‘as Venus in a sea-shell. I never thought of the sweethearts you had, before you came here...'

‘Why must you think of them now?'

‘Because you do! Suppose Kitty were to show up again, and ask you back to her?'

‘She won't. Kitty's gone, Flo. Like Lilian. Believe me, there's more chance of her coming back!' I began to smile. ‘And if she does, you can go to her, and I won't say a word. And if Kitty comes for me, you can do similar. And then, I suppose, we shall have our paradises - and will be able to wave to one another from our separate clouds. But till then - till then, Flo, can't we go on kissing, and just be glad?'

As lovers' vows go, this one was, I suppose, rather curious; but we were girls with curious histories - girls with pasts like boxes with ill-fitting lids. We must bear them, but bear them carefully. We should do very well, I thought, as Florence sighed and raised her hand to me at last; we should do very well, so long as the boxes stayed unspilled.