Tipping the Velvet (32 page)

As before, she started. Then she glanced up at the balcony above my head. And then she pinked. ‘Oh! It was you then - was it?'

I smiled again, and gave a little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong, being gallant in a skirt, and I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur, but for a fool. But when I raised my eyes to hers again her flush was fading, and her face showed neither contempt, nor discomfiture, but a kind of amusement. She tilted her head.

A van passed between us, followed by a cart. In lifting my hat to her this time I had thought only, and vaguely, to correct the earlier misunderstanding; perhaps, to make her smile. But when the street was once again clear and she still stood there it seemed a kind of invitation. I crossed, and stood before her. I said, ‘I'm sorry if I frightened you the other night.' She seemed embarassed at the memory, but laughed.

‘You didn't
frighten
me,' she said, as if she were never frightened. ‘You just gave me a bit of a start. If I'd known you were a woman — well!' She blushed again - or it may have been the same blush as before, I couldn't tell. Then she glanced away; and we fell silent.

‘Where's your friend the musician?' I said at last. I held an imaginary mandolin to my waist and gave it a couple of strums.

‘Miss Derby,' she said with a smile. ‘She is back at our office. I do a bit of work with a charity, finding houses for poor families that've lost their homes.' She had a plain East End accent, more or less; but her voice was deep and slightly breathy. ‘We have been trying for ages to get our hands on some of the flats in this block here, and that night you saw me we had moved our first family in - a bit of a success for us, we are only a small affair - and Miss Derby thought we should make a party of it.'

‘Oh yes? Well, she plays very nicely. You should tell her to come and busk round here more often.'

‘You live there then, do you?' she asked, nodding towards Mrs Milne's.

‘I do. I like to sit out on the balcony ...

She raised her hand to tuck away a lock of hair beneath her bonnet. ‘And always in trousers?' she asked me then, so that I blinked.

‘Only sometimes in trousers.'

‘But always, to gaze at the women and give them a start?'

Now I blinked two or three times. ‘I never thought to do it,' I answered, ‘before I saw you.' It was the plain truth; but she laughed at it, as if to say,
Oh yes.
The laugh, and the exchange which had provoked it, was unsettling. I studied her more closely. As I had seen on that first night, she was not what you might term a beauty. She was thick at the waist and almost stout, and her face was broad, her chin a firm one. Her teeth were even, but not perfectly white; her eyes were hazel, but the lashes not long; her hands, however, seemed graceful. Her hair was the kind of hair we had all been thankful, as girls, that we did not have - for though she had bound it into a bun at her neck, the curls kept springing from it and twisting about her face. With the lamp behind it, too, it had seemed auburn; but it would really be more truthful to say that it was brown.

I believe I liked it better that she was not more handsome. And though there was something wonderfully intriguing about her tranquillity at my strange behaviour - as if women donned gents' trousers all the time; as if they made love to girls on balconies so often that she was used to it, and thought it merely naughty - I did not think I saw that
trick
in her, that furtive something, that I had recognised in other girls. Certainly nobody, gazing at her, would ever think to sneer and call out
Tom!
Again, though, I was glad of it. I had quit the business of hearts and kisses; I was in quite another trade altogether, these days!

And yet would it hurt me after all this time to have a - friend ?

I said, ‘Look here, will you come to the park with me? I was just on my way there when I saw you.'

She smiled, but shook her head: ‘I'm working, I couldn't.'

‘It's too hot for working.'

‘The work must still be done, you know. I have a visit to make at Old Street - a lady Miss Derby knows might have some rooms for us. I should be there now, really.' And she frowned down at a little watch that hung from a ribbon at her breast like a medal.

‘Can't you send to Miss Derby and make her go? It seems awfully hard on you. I bet she's sitting in the office with her feet upon her desk, playing a tune on the mandolin; and here are you out in the sun doing all the tramping about. You need a bit of ice-cream, at the least; there's an Italian lady in Kensington Gardens who sells the best ices in London, and she lets me have them at half-price...'

She smiled again. ‘I cannot. Else, what would happen to all our poor families?'

I didn't care a button about the families; but I did care, suddenly at the thought that I might lose her. I said, ‘Well, then I shall have to see you when you come again to Green Street. When will that be?'

‘Ah well, you see,' she said, ‘it won't. I shall be leaving this post in a couple of days, and I am to help with the running of a hostel, at Stratford. It is better for me, since it's nearer where I live, and I know the local people; but it means I shall be spending most of my days down East...'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘And shall you never be coming into town, at all, after that?'

She hesitated; then: ‘Well, I do sometimes come in, in the evenings. I go to the theatre, or to the lectures at the Athenaeum Hall. You might come with me, to one of those places ...'

I only went to the theatre, now, as a renter; I wouldn't sit in a velvet seat before a stage again, even for her. I said, ‘The Athenaeum Hall? I know that place. But lectures - what do you mean? Church stuff?'

‘Political stuff. You know, the Class Question, the Irish Question...'

I felt my heart sink. ‘The Woman Question.'

‘Exactly. They have speakers, and readings, and afterwards debates. Look here.' She reached into her satchel and drew forth a slim blue pamphlet.
The Athenaeum Hall Society Lecture Series,
it said;
Women and Labour: An Address by Mr-
and it gave a name I now forget, followed by a little piece of explanatory text, and a date that was for four or five days ahead.

I said, ‘Lord!' in an ambiguous sort of way. She lifted her head, took the pamphlet back from me, and said: ‘Well, perhaps, after all, you would prefer the ice-cream cart in Kensington Gardens ...' There was a hint of rustiness about the words, that I found I could not bear to hear. I said at once, ‘Good heavens, no: this looks a treat!' But I added, that if they really didn't sell ices in the hall, then I thought we ought to take some refreshment first. There was, I had heard, a little public-house at the King's Cross corner of Judd Street with a ladies' room at the back of it, where they did a very nice, very inexpensive supper. The lecture began at seven - would she meet me there beforehand? At, say, six o'clock? I said - because I thought it would please her - that I might need some instruction, in the ins and outs of the Woman Question.

At that she snorted, and gave me another knowing look; though what it was she thought she knew, I wasn't sure. She did, however, agree to meet me - with a warning that I must not let her down. I said there was not a chance of it, held out my hand; and for a second felt her fingers, very firm and warm in their grey linen glove, clasp my own.

It was only after we had parted that I realised we had not exchanged names; but by then she had turned the corner of Green Street, and was gone. But I had, as a piece of secret knowledge from our earlier, darker encounter, her own romantic christian name, at least. And besides, I knew I should be seeing her again within the week.

T
he days that week grew ever warmer, until at last even I began to tire of the heat. All London longed for a break in the weather; and on Thursday evening, when it finally came, crowds took to the streets of the city in sheer relief.

I was amongst them. For two days almost I had kept indoors in a kind of hot stupor, drinking endless cups of lemonade with Mrs Milne and Gracie in their darkened parlour, or dozing naked on my bed with the windows thrown open and the curtains pulled. Now the promise of a night of chilly liberty on the swarming, gaudy streets of the West End drew me like a magnet. My purse, too, was almost empty - and I was mindful of the supper I would have to take care of, with Florence, the following night. So I needed, I thought, to cut something of a dash. I washed, and combed my hair flat and brilliant with macassar; and when I dressed I put on my favourite costume - the guardsman's uniform, with its brass buttons and its piping, its scarlet jacket and its neat little cap.

I hardly ever wore this outfit. The military pips and buckles meant nothing to me, but I had a vague terror that some real soldier might one day recognise them, and claim me for his regiment; or else that some emergency might occur - the Queen be assaulted while I was strolling by Buckingham Palace, for instance - and I would be called upon to play some impossible role in its resolution. But the suit was a lucky one, too. It had brought me the bold gentleman of the Burlington Arcade, whose kiss had proved such a fateful one; and it had tipped the wavering balance at my first interview at Mrs Milne's. Tonight, I thought, I should be content enough if it would only net me a sovereign.

And there was a curious quality to the city that night, that seemed all of a piece with the costume I had chosen. The air was cool and unnaturally clear, so that colours - the red of a painted lip, the blue of a sandwich-man's boards, the violet and the green and the yellow of a flower-girl's tray - seemed to leap out of the gloom. It was just as if the city were a monstrous carpet to which a giant hand had applied the beater, to make all glow again. Infected by the mood I had sensed even in my Green Street chamber, people had, like me, put on their finest. Girls in gay dresses walked the pavements in long, intimidating lines, or spooned with their bowler-hatted beaux on steps and benches. Boys stood drinking at the doors of public-houses, their pomaded heads gleaming, in the gas-light, like silk. The moon hung low above the roofs of Soho, pink and bright and swollen as a Chinese lantern. One or two stars winked viciously alongside it.

And through it all sauntered I, in my suit of scarlet; and yet by eleven o'clock, when the streets were thinning, I had had no luck at all. A couple of gents had seemed to like the look of me, and one rough-looking man had set himself to follow me, right the way from Piccadilly to Seven Dials and back again. But the gents, at the last, had been lured by other renters; and the rough man was not the type I cared for. I had given him the slip in a lavatory with two exits.

And then there had been yet another almost-encounter, later, while I was idling beside a lamp-post in St James's Square. A brougham had driven slowly by, then stopped; and then, like me, it had lingered. No one had got out of it, no one had got in. The driver had had a high collar shadowing his face, and had never moved his gaze from his horse - but there had been a certain twitching of the lace at the dark carriage windows, that let me know that I was being observed, carefully, from within.

I had strolled about a bit, and lit a cigarette. I didn't, for obvious reasons, do carriage jobs. Gents on wheels, I knew from my friends at Leicester Square, were demanding. They paid well, but expected correspondingly large favours: bumwork, bed-work - nights, sometimes, in hotels. Even so, it never hurt to show off a bit: the gent inside might remember me on another, more pedestrian, occasion. I had ambled up and down the edges of the Square for a good ten minutes, occasionally reaching down to give a twitch to my groin - for, in the rather flamboyant spirit in which I had dressed that night, I had padded my drawers with a rolled silk cravat, instead of my usual kerchief or glove, and the material was slippery, and kept edging along my thigh. Still, I thought, such a gesture might not prove unpleasing to the distant eye of an interested gent ...

The carriage, however, with its taciturn driver and bashful occupant, had at last jerked into life and pulled away.

Since then my admirers had all, apparently, been as cautious as that last one; I had sensed a few interested glances slither my way, but had managed to hook none of them with my own more frankly searching one. By now it had grown very dark, and almost chill. It was time, I thought, to pick my slow way home. I felt disappointed. Not with my own performance, but with the evening itself, which had opened with such promise and had finished such a flop. I had not earned so much as a threepenny-bit: I should now have to borrow a little cash from Mrs Milne, and spend longer, more resolute, less choosy hours on the streets over the following week, until my luck turned. The thought did not cheer me: renting, which had seemed such a holiday at first, had come to seem, of late, a little tiresome.