Tipping the Velvet

  We lost money on that deal, too. In the end I marvelled at Walter’s patience.

  For that was another change. I have spoken of the curious dimming of Walter’s brightness, of the subtle new distance that had grown between us, since Kitty and I had become sweethearts. Now the dimming and the distance increased. He remained kind, but his kindness was tempered by a surprising kind of stiffness; in Kitty’s presence, in particular, he grew easily flustered and self-conscious - and then jolly, with a horrible, forced kind of jolliness, as if ashamed of himself for being so awkward. His visits to Ginevra Road grew rarer. At last we saw him only to rehearse new songs, or in the company of the other artistes we sometimes took supper or drinks with.

  I missed him, and wondered at his change of heart - but didn’t wonder very hard, I must confess, because I thought I knew what had caused it. That night at Islington he had learned the truth at last - had heard that drunken man’s shout, seen Kitty’s terrible, terrified response, and understood. He had driven her home - I did not know what had passed between them then, for neither of them seemed at all inclined to discuss any part of that dreadful evening - he had driven her home, but that tender gesture of his, to place his cloak about her trembling shoulders and see her safely to her door, had been his last. Now he could not be easy with her - perhaps because he knew for sure that he had lost her; more probably, because the idea of our love he found distasteful. And so he stayed away.

  Had we remained very long at Mrs Dendy’s house, I think our friends there would have noticed Walter’s absence, and quizzed us over it; but at the end of September came the biggest change of all. We said good-bye to our landlady and Ginevra Road, and moved.

  We had talked vaguely of moving since the start of our fame; but we had always put the crucial moment off - it seemed foolish to leave a place in which we had been, and were still, so happy. Mrs Dendy’s had become our home. It was the house in which we had first kissed, first declared our love; it was, I thought, our honeymoon house - and for all that it was so cramped and plain, for all that our costumes now took up more space in the bedroom than our bed, I was terribly loath to leave it.

  But Kitty said it looked queer, us still sharing a room, and a bed, when we had the money to live somewhere ten times the size; and she had a house agent look about for rooms for us, somewhere more seemly.

  It was to Stamford Hill that we moved, in the end - Stamford Hill, far across the river, in a bit of London I hardly knew (and thought, privately, a little dull). We had a farewell supper at Ginevra Road, with everyone saying how sorry they were to see us go - Mrs Dendy herself even wept a little, and said her house would never be the same. For Tootsie was also leaving - leaving for France, for a part in a Parisian revue; and her room was being taken by a comedian who whistled. The Professor had developed the beginnings of a palsy - there was talk that he might end up in a home for old artistes. Sims and Percy were doing well, and planned to take our rooms when we had left them; but Percy had found a sweetheart, too, and the girl made quarrels between them - I learned later that they split the act, and found spots as minstrels in rival troupes. It’s the way of theatrical houses, I suppose, to break up and re-fashion themselves; but I was almost sadder, on my last day at Ginevra Road, than I had been on leaving Whitstable. I sat in the parlour - my portrait was upon the wall, now, along with all the others - and thought how much had changed since I had sat there first, a little less than thirteen months before; and for a moment I wondered if all the changes had been good ones, and wished that I could be plain Nancy Astley again, whom Kitty Butler loved with an ordinary love she was not afraid to show to all the world.

  The street to which we moved was very new, and very quiet. Our neighbours, I think, were city men; their wives stayed at home all day, and their children had nurses, who wheeled them, puffing, up and down the garden steps in great iron perambulators. We had the top two floors of a house close to the station; our landlady and her husband lived beneath us, but they were not connected to the business, and we rarely saw them. Our rooms were smart, we were the first to rent them: the furniture was all of polished wood, and velvet and brocade, and was far finer than anything either of us was used to - so that we sat upon the chairs and sofas rather gingerly. There were three bedrooms, and one of them was mine - which meant only, of course, that I kept my dresses in its closet, my brushes and combs upon its wash-hand stand, and my nightgown beneath the pillow of its bed: this was for the sake of the girl who came to clean for us, three days a week. My nights were really spent in Kitty’s chamber, the great front bedroom with its great high bed that the house-builders had meant for a husband and wife. It made me smile to lie in it. ‘We are married,’ I would say to Kitty. ‘Why, we don’t have to lie here at all, if we don’t wish to! I could carry you down to the parlour carpet, and kiss you there!’ But I never did. For though we were at liberty at last to be as saucy and as clamorous as we chose, we found we couldn’t break ourselves of our old habits: we still whispered our love, and kissed beneath the counterpane, noiselessly, like mice.

  That, of course, was when we had time for kisses. We were working six nights a week now, and there was no Sims and Percy and Tootsie to keep us lively after shows; often we would arrive back at Stamford Hill so weary we would simply fall into the bed and snore. By November we were both so tired Walter said we must take a holiday. There was talk of a trip to the Continent - even, to America, where there were also halls at which we might build up a quiet reputation, and where Walter had friends who would lodge us. But then, before the trip could be fixed, there came an invitation to play in pantomime, at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton. The pantomime was Cinderella, and Kitty and I were wanted for the First and Second Boy roles; and the offer was too flattering to resist.

  My music-hall career, though brief enough, had been a happy one; but I do not think that I was ever so content as I was that winter, playing Dandini to Kitty’s Prince, at the Britannia. Any artiste will tell you that it is their ambition to work in pantomime; it is not until you play in one yourself, however, at a theatre as grand and as famous as the Brit, that you understand why. For the three coldest months of the year you are settled. There is no dashing about from hall to hall, no worrying about contracts. You mix with actors and ballet-girls, and make friends with them. Your dressing-room is large and private and warm - for you are really expected to change and make-up in it, not arrive, breathless, at the stage door, having buttoned on your costume in your brougham. You are handed lines to speak, and you speak them, steps to take, and you take them, costumes to wear - the most wonderful costumes you ever saw in your life, costumes of fur and satin and velvet - and you wear them, then pass them back to the wardrobe-mistress and let her worry about mending them and keeping them neat. The crowds you have to play before are the kindest, gayest crowds there ever were: you will hurl all manner of nonsense at them and they will shriek with laughter, merely because it is Christmas and they are determined to be jolly. It is like a holiday from real life - except that you are paid twenty pounds a week, if you are as lucky as we were then, to enjoy it.

  The Cinderella in which we played that year was a particularly splendid one. The title role was taken by Dolly Arnold - a lovely girl with a voice like a linnet’s, and a waist so slim her trademark was to wear a necklace as a belt. It was rather odd to see Kitty spooning with her upon the stage, kissing her while the clock showed a minute-to-midnight - though it was odder still, perhaps, to think that no one in the audience called out Toms! now, or even appeared to think it: they only cheered when the Prince and Cinderella were united at the end, and drawn on stage, by half-a-dozen pygmy horses, in their wedding-car.

  Aside from Dolly Arnold, there were other stars - artistes whose turns I had once paid to watch and clap at, at the Canterbury Palace of Varieties. It made me feel very green, to have to work with them and talk to them as equals. I had only ever sung and danced, before, at Kitty’s side; now, of course, I had to act - to walk on stage with a hunting retin
ue and say, ‘My lords, where is Prince Casimir, our master?’; to slap my thigh and make terrible puns; to kneel before Cinderella with a velvet cushion, and place the slipper of glass upon her tiny foot - then lead the crowd in three rousing cheers when it was found to fit it. If you have ever seen a panto at the Brit, you will know how marvellous they are. For the transformation scene of Cinderella they dressed one hundred girls in suits of gauze and bullion fringe, then harnessed them to moving wires and had them swoop above the stalls. On the stage they set up fountains, which they lit, each with a different coloured lime. Dolly, as Cinderella in her wedding-gown, wore a frock of gold, with glitter on the bodice. Kitty had golden pantaloons, a shining waistcoat, and a three-cornered hat, and I wore breeches and a vest of velvet, and square-toed shoes with silver buckles. Standing at Kitty’s side while the fountains played, the fairies swooped, and the pigmy horses pranced and trotted, I was never sure I had not died on my way to the theatre and woken up in paradise. There is a particular scent that ponies give off, when they are set too long beneath a too-hot lamp. I smelled it every night at the Brit, mingled with that familiar music-hall reek of dust and grease-paint, tobacco and beer. Even now, if you were to ask me, quickly, ‘What is heaven like?’ I should have to say that it must smell of over-heated horsehair, and be filled with angels in spangles and gauze, and decorated with fountains of scarlet and blue ...

  But not, perhaps, have Kitty in it.

  I did not think this then, of course. I was only extraordinarily glad to have a place in such a business, and with my true love at my side; and everything that Kitty said or did only seemed to show that she felt just the same. I believe we spent more hours at the Brit that winter than at our new home in Stamford Hill - more time in velvet suits and powdered wigs than out of them. We made friends with all the theatre people - with the ballerinas and the wardrobe-girls, the gas-men, the property-men, the carpenters and the call-boys. Flora, our dresser, even found herself a beau amongst them. He was a black fellow, who had run away from a sailing family in Wapping to join a minstrel troupe; not having the voice for it, however, he had become a stage-hand instead. His name, I believe, was Albert - but he paid about as much heed to that as anybody in the business, and was known, universally, as ‘Billy-Boy’. He loved the theatre more than any of us, and spent all his hours there, playing cards with the door-men and the carpenters, hanging about in the flies, twitching ropes, turning handles. He was good-looking, and Flora was very keen on him; he spent a deal of time, in consequence, at our dressing-room door, waiting to take her home after the show - and so we came to know him very well. I liked him because he came from the river, and had left his family for the theatre’s sake, as I had. Sometimes, in the afternoons or late at night, he and I would leave Kitty and Flora fussing over the costumes and take a stroll through the dim and silent theatre, just for the pleasure of it. He had, somehow, acquired copies of all the keys to all the Britannia’s dusty, secret places - the cellars and the attics and the ancient property-rooms - and he would show me hampers full of costumes from the shows of the ‘fifties, papier-mâché crowns and sceptres, armour made of foil. Once or twice he led me up the great high ladders at the side of the stage, into the flies: here we would stand with our chins upon the rails, sharing a cigarette, gazing at the ash as it fluttered through the web of ropes and platforms to the boards, sixty feet below us.

  It was quite like being at Mrs Dendy’s again, with all our friends around us - except, of course, that Walter wasn’t one of them. He came only occasionally to the Brit, and hardly at all to Stamford Hill; when he did, I couldn’t bear to see him so ill at ease, and so found business of my own to keep me occupied elsewhere, and left Kitty to deal with him. She, I noticed, was as awkward and self-conscious as he when he came calling, and seemed to prefer his letters to his person - for he sent his news to her by post, these days, so drastically had our old friendship dwindled. But she said she did not mind, and I understood she didn’t wish to talk of something that was painful to her. I knew it must be very hard for her, to think that Walter had guessed her secret, and hated it.

  Chapter 7

  We had opened at the Brit on Boxing Day, and rehearsed all through the weeks before it. Christmas, therefore, had been rather swallowed up; and when Mother had written - as she had the year before - to ask me home for it, I had had to send another apologetic note, to say I was again too busy. It was now almost a year and a half since I had left them; a year and a half since I had seen the sea and had a decent fresh oyster-supper. It was a long time - and no matter how gloomy and spiteful Alice’s letter had made me, I could not help but miss them all and wonder how they fared. One day in January I came across my old tin trunk with its yellow enamel inscription. I lifted the lid - and found Davy’s map of Kent pasted on the underside, with Whitstable marked with a faded arrow, ‘To show me where home was, in case I forgot.’ He had meant it as a joke; they had none of them thought I really would forget them. Now, however, it must seem to them that I had.

  I closed the trunk with a bang; I had felt my eyes begin to smart. When Kitty came running to see what the noise was, I was weeping.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, and put her arm about me. ‘What’s this? Not tears?’

  ‘I thought of home,’ I said, between my sobs, ‘and wanted to go there, suddenly.’

  She touched my cheek, then put her fingers to her lips and licked them. ‘Pure brine,’ she said. ‘That’s why you miss it. I’m amazed you have managed to survive this long away from the sea, without shrivelling up like a bit of old seaweed. I should never have taken you away from Whitstable Bay. Miss Mermaid ...’

  I smiled, at last, to hear her use a name I thought she had forgotten; then I sighed. ‘I would like to go back,’ I said, ‘for a day or two ...’

  ‘A day or two! I shall die without you!’ She laughed, and looked away; and I guessed that she was only partly joking, for in all the months that we had spent together, we had not been separated for so much as a night. I felt that old queer tightness in my breast, and quickly kissed her. She raised her hands to hold my face; but again she turned her gaze away.

  ‘You must go,’ she said, ‘if it makes you sad like this. I shall manage.’

  ‘I shall hate it too,’ I said. My tears had dried; it was I, now, who was doing the consoling. ‘And anyway, I shan’t be able to go until we close at Hoxton - and that is weeks away.’ She nodded, and looked thoughtful.

  It was weeks away, for Cinderella was not due to finish until Easter; in the middle of February, however, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly at liberty. There was a fire at the Britannia. There were always fires in theatres in those days - halls were regularly being burned to the ground, then built up again, better than before, and no one thought anything of it; and the fire at the Brit had been small enough, and no one got injured. But the theatre had had to be evacuated, and there had been problems with the exits; afterwards an inspector came, looked at the building, and said a new escape door must be added. He closed the theatre while the work was done: tickets were returned, apologies pasted up; and for a whole half-week we found ourselves on holiday.

  Urged on by Kitty - for she had grown suddenly gallant about letting me go - I took my chance. I wrote to Mother and told her that, if I was still welcome, I should be home the following day - that was Sunday - and would stay till Wednesday night. Then I went shopping, to buy presents for the family: there was something thrilling after all, I found, about the idea of returning to Whitstable after so long, with a parcel of gifts from London ...

  Even so, it was hard to part from Kitty.

  ‘You will be all right?’ I said to her. ‘You won’t be lonely here?’

  ‘I shall be horribly lonely. I expect you will come back and find me dead from loneliness!’

  ‘Why don’t you come with me? We might catch a later train -’

  ‘No, Nan; you should see your family without me.’

  ‘I shall think about you every minute.’


  ‘And I shall think of you ...’

  ‘Oh, Kitty ...’

  She had been tapping at her tooth with the pearl of her necklace; when I put my mouth upon hers I felt it, cold and smooth and hard, between our lips. She let me kiss her, then moved her head so that our cheeks touched; then she put her arms about my waist and held me to her rather fiercely - quite as if she loved me more than anything.

  Whitstable, when I drew into it later that morning, seemed very changed - very small and grey, and with a sea that was wider, and a sky that was lower and less blue, than I remembered. I leaned from the carriage window to gaze at it all, and so saw Father and Davy, at the station, a moment or two before they saw me. Even they looked different - I felt a rush of aching love and strange regret, to think it - Father a little older, a little shrunken, somehow; Davy slightly stouter, and redder in the face.

  When they saw me, stepping from the train on to the platform, they came running.

  ‘Nance! My dearest girl ... !’ This was Father. We embraced - awkwardly, for I had all my parcels with me, and a hat upon my head with a veil around it. One of the parcels fell to the ground and he bent to retrieve it, then hurried to help me with the others. Davy, meanwhile, took my hand, then kissed my cheek through the mesh of my veil.

  ‘Just look at you,’ he said. ‘All dressed up to the ninety-nines ! Quite the lady, ain’t she, Pa?’ His cheek grew redder than ever.

  Father straightened, and looked me over, then gave a wide smile that seemed to pull, somewhat, at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Very smart,’ he said. ‘Your mother won’t know you, hardly.’

  I did indeed, I suppose, look a little dressy, but I had not thought about it until that moment. All my clothes were good ones, these days, for I had long ago got rid of those girlish hand-me-downs with which I’d first left home. I had only wanted, that morning, to look nice. Now I felt self-conscious.