Tipping the Velvet

  ‘It was,’ I said at last, ‘if Diana said it was.’

  And at that, Maria gave a startling laugh, low and loud and rapid as the rattle of a road-drill; and Diana took my arm and made a space for me upon the sofa, and called for a waitress to bring us drinks.

  At the rest of the tables the ladies still looked on - some of them, I could not help but notice, rather fastidiously. There had come some murmurs, and some whispers; also a titter or two and a gasp. No one in our party paid the slightest heed to any of it. Maria kept her eyes fixed upon myself, and when our drinks arrived, she leered at me over her glass: ‘To both ends of the busk!’ she said, and gave me a wink. Diana had her face turned, to catch a story from the lady named Evelyn. She was saying, ‘Such a scandal, Diana, you never heard! She has vowed herself to seven women, and sees them all on different days; one of them is her sister-in-law! She has put together an album - my dear, I nearly died at the sight of it! - full of bits and pieces of stuff that she has cut off them or pulled out of them: eyelashes, and toe-nail clippings - old sanitary wrappings, from what I could see of it; and she has hair -’

  ‘Hair, Diana,’ broke in Dickie meaningfully.

  ‘- hair, which she has had made up into rings and aigrettes. Lord Myers saw a brooch, and asked her where she bought it, and Susan told him it was from the tail of a fox, and said she would have one made for him, for his wife! Can you imagine? Now Lady Myers is to be found at all the fashionable parties with a sprig of Susan Dacre’s sister-in-law’s quim-hair at her bosom!’

  Diana smiled. ‘And Susan’s husband knows it all, and does not mind it?’

  ‘Mind it? It is he who pays her jewellers’ bills! You may hear him boasting - I have heard him myself - of how he plans to rename the estate New Lesbos.’

  ‘New Lesbos!’ Diana said mildly. Then she yawned. ‘With that tired old lesbian Susan Dacre in it, it might just as well be the original ...’ She turned to me, and her voice dropped a tone. ‘Light me a cigarette, would you, child?’

  I took two fags from the tortoise-shell case in my breast pocket, lit them both at my own lip, then passed one over. The ladies watched me - indeed, even while they laughed and chattered, they studied all my movements, all my parts. When I leaned to knock the ash from my cigarette, they blinked. When I ran a hand over the stubble at my hairline, they coloured. When I parted my trouser-clad legs and showed the bulge there, Maria and Evelyn, as one, gave a shift in their chairs; and Dickie reached for her brandy glass and disposed of its contents with one savage swig.

  After a moment, Maria came close again. She said, ‘Now, Miss Nancy, we are still waiting for your history. We want to know all about you, and so far you have done nothing but tease.’

  I said, ‘There’s nothing to know. You must ask Diana.’

  ‘Diana speaks for the sake of cleverness, not truth. Tell me now’ - she had grown confiding - ‘where were you born? Was it some hard place? Was it some rookery, where you must sleep ten to a bed with your sisters?’

  ‘A rookery?’ I thought very suddenly, and more vividly than I had in months, of our old front parlour at home - of the cloth with the fringe that dangled, fluttering, above the hearth. I said, ‘I was born in Kent, in Whitstable.’ Maria only stared. I said again, ‘Whitstable - where the oysters come from.’

  At that, she threw back her head. ‘Why my dear, you’re a mermaid! Diana, did you know it? A Whitstable mermaid ! - though thankfully,’ and here she placed her free hand upon my knee, and patted it, ‘thankfully, without the tail. That would never do, now would it?’

  I could not answer. Hot into my head after the image of our parlour had come the memory of Kitty, at her dressing-room door. Miss Mermaid, she had called me; and she had said it again that time in Stamford Hill, when she had heard me weeping, come, and kissed my tears ...

  I gave a gulp, and put my cigarette to my lips. It was smoked right down and almost burned me; and as I fumbled with it, it fell. It struck the sofa, bounced, then rolled between my legs. I reached for it - that made the ladies stare again, and twitch - but it was caught, still smouldering, between my buttock and the chair. I leapt up, found the fag at last, then pulled at the linen that covered my bum. I said, ‘Hell, if I haven’t scorched a hole through these dam’ trousers!’

  The words came out louder than I meant them to; and as they did, there was an answering cry from the room at my back: ‘Really, Mrs Lethaby, this is intolerable!’ A lady had risen, and was approaching our table.

  ‘I must protest, Mrs Lethaby,’ she said when she arrived at it, ‘I really must protest, on behalf of all the ladies present, and absent, at the very great damage you are inflicting upon our club!’

  Diana raised languid eyes to her. ‘Damage, Miss Bruce? Are you referring to the presence of my companion, Miss King?’

  ‘I am, ma’am.’

  ‘You don’t care for her?’

  ‘I don’t care for her language, ma’am, or for her clothes!’ She herself wore a silk shirt with a cummerbund and a cravat; in the cravat there was a pin, cast in silver, of the head of a horse. Now she stood expectantly at Diana’s side; and after a moment, Diana sighed.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I see we must bow to the members’ pleasure.’ She rose, then drew me up beside her and leaned rather ostentatiously upon my arm. ‘Nancy, dear, you costume has proved too bold for the Cavendish after all. It seems that I must take you home and rid you of it. Now, who will ride with us to Felicity Place, to catch the sport ...’

  There was a ripple around the room. Maria rose at once, and reached for her walking-cane. ‘Tantivy, tantivy!’ she cried. Then: ‘Ho, Satin!’ I heard a yelp, and from beneath her chair there came - what I had not seen before, as it lay dozing behind the curtain of her skirts - a handsome little whippet, on a pig-skin leash.

  Dickie and Evelyn rose too, then. Diana inclined her head to Miss Bruce, and I made her a deeper bow. All eyes had been upon us as we made our entrance; all eyes were on us still, as we headed for the exit. I heard Miss Bruce return to her seat, and someone call, ‘Quite right, Vanessa!’ But another lady held my gaze as I passed her, and winked; and from a table near the door a woman rose to say to Diana that she hoped that Miss King’s trousers had not been too desperately singed...

  The trousers were rather spoiled; back at Felicity Place, Diana had me walk and bend before Maria and Evelyn and Dickie, in order to decide it. She said she would order me another pair, just the same.

  ‘What a find, Diana!’ said Maria, as Evelyn patted the cloth. She said it as she might say it about a statue or a clock that Diana had picked up for a song in some grim market. She didn’t care whether I overheard or not. Why should it matter that I did? She meant it, she meant it! There was admiration in her eyes. And being admired, by tasteful ladies - well, I knew it wasn’t being loved. But it was something. And I was good at it.

  Who would ever have thought I should be so good at it!

  ‘Take off your shirt, Nancy,’ said Diana then, ‘and let the ladies see your linen.’

  I did so, and Maria cried again, ‘What a find!’

  Chapter 13

  Diana’s wider circle of friends, I believe, thought our union a fantastic one. I would sometimes see them look between us, then overhear their murmurs - ‘Diana’s caprice,’ they called me, as if I were an enthusiasm for a wonderful food, that a sensitive palate would tire of. Diana herself, however, once having found me, seemed only increasingly disinclined to let me go. With that one brief visit to the Cavendish Club she had launched me on my new career as her permanent companion. Now came more excursions, more visits, more trips; and more suits for me to make them in. I grew complacent. I had once sat drooping on her parlour chair, expecting her to send me home with a sovereign. Now, when the ladies whispered of ‘this freak of Diana Lethaby’s’, I brushed the lint from the sleeve of my coat, drew my monogrammed hankie from my pocket, and smiled. When the autumn of 1892 became the winter, and then the spring of ’93, and still I kept my favo
ured place at Diana’s side, the ladies’ whispers faded. I became at last not Diana’s caprice; but simply, her boy.

  ‘Come to supper, Diana.’

  ‘Come for breakfast, Diana.’

  ‘Come at nine, Diana; and bring the boy.’

  For it was always as a boy that I travelled with her now, even when we ventured into the public world, the ordinary world beyond the circle of Cavendish Sapphists, the world of shops and supper-rooms and drives in the park. To anyone who asked after me, she would boldly introduce me as ‘My ward, Neville King’; she had several requests for introductions, I believe, from ladies with eligible daughters. These she turned aside: ‘He’s an Anglo-Catholic, ma’am,’ she’d whisper, ‘and destined for the Church. This is his final Season, before taking Holy Orders ...’

  It was with Diana that I returned to the theatre again - flinching to find her lead me to a box beside the foot-lights, flinching again as the chandeliers were dimmed. But they were terribly grand, the theatres she preferred. They were lit with electricity rather than gas; and the crowd sat hushed. I could not see the pleasure in it. The plays I liked well enough; but I would more often turn my gaze to the audience - and there was always plenty of eyes and glasses, of course, that were lifted from the stage and fastened on me. I saw several faces that I knew from my old renter days. One time I stood washing my hands in the lavatory of a theatre and felt a gent look me over - he didn’t know that he had had my lips on him already, in an alley off Jermyn Street; later I saw him in the audience, with his wife. One time, too, I saw Sweet Alice, the mary-anne who had been so kind to me in Leicester Square. He also sat in a box; and when he recognised me, he blew a kiss. He was with two gents: I raised my brows, he rolled his eyes. Then he saw who it was I sat with - It was Diana and Maria - and he stared. I gave a shrug, he looked thoughtful - then rolled his eyes again, as much as to say, What a business!

  To all these places, as I have said, I went clad as a boy — indeed, the only time I ever dressed as a girl, now, was for our visits to the Cavendish. This was the single spot in the city at which Diana might have put me in trousers and not cared who knew it; but after Miss Bruce’s complaint they introduced a new rule, and ever after I was taken there in skirts - Diana having something made up for me, I forget the cut and colour of it now. At the club I would sit and drink and smoke, and be flirted with by Maria, and eyed by other ladies, while Diana met friends or wrote letters. She did this very often, for she was known - I suppose I might have guessed it, in a way - as a philanthropist, and ladies courted her for schemes. She gave money to certain charities. She sent books to girls in prisons. She was involved in the producing of a magazine for the Suffrage, named Shafts. She attended to all this, with me at her side. If I leaned to pick up a paper or a list and idly read it, she would take the sheet away, as if gazing too hard at too many words might tire me. In the end, I would settle on the cartoons in Punch.

  These, then, were my public appearances. There were not too many of them - I am describing here a period that lasted about a year. Diana kept me close, for the most part, and displayed me at home. She liked to limit the numbers who gazed at me, she said; she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling.

  When I say display, of course, I mean it: it was part of Diana’s mystery, to make real the words that other people said in metaphor or jest. I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. Once she dressed me as a footman, in breeches and a powdered wig. It was the costume I had worn for Cinderella, more or less - though my breeches at the Brit had not been so snug, nor so large at the groin.

  The freak with the breeches inspired her further. She grew tired of gentlemen’s suits; she took to displaying me in masquerade - had me set up, behind a little velvet curtain in the drawing-room. This would happen about once a week. Ladies would come for dinner and I would eat with them, in trousers; but while they lingered over their coffee and the trimming of their fags I would leave them, and slip up to my room to change my gear. By the time they made their way into the drawing-room I would be behind the curtain, striking some pose; and when she was ready, Diana would pull a tasselled cord and uncover me.

  I might be Perseus, with a curved sword and a head of the Medusa, and sandals with straps that were buckled at the knee. I might be Cupid, with wings and a bow. I was once St Sebastian, tied to a stump - I remember what a job it was to fasten the arrows so they would not droop.

  Then, another night I was an Amazon. I carried the Cupid’s bow, but this time had one breast uncovered; Diana rouged the nipple. Next week - she said I had shown one, I might as well show both - I was the French Marianne, with a Phyrgian cap and a flag. The week after that I was Salome: I had the Medusa head again, but on a plate, and with a beard stuck on it; and while the ladies clapped I danced down to my drawers.

  And the week after that - well, that week I was Hermaphroditus. I wore a crown of laurel, a layer of silver greasepaint - and nothing else save, strapped to my hips, Diana’s Monsieur Dildo. The ladies gasped to see him.

  That made him quiver.

  And as the quiver did its usual work on me, I thought of Kitty. I wondered if she was still wearing suits and a topper, still singing songs like ‘Sweethearts and Wives’.

  Then Diana came, and put a pink cigarette between my lips, and led me amongst the ladies and had them stroke the leather. I cannot say if it was Kitty I thought of then, or even Diana herself. I believe I thought I was a renter again, in Piccadilly - or, not a renter, but a renter’s gent. For when I twitched and cried out there were smiles in the shadows; and when I shuddered, and wept, there was laughter.

  I could help none of it. It was all Diana’s doing. She was so bold, she was so passionate, she was so devilishly clever. She was like a queen, with her own queer court - I saw it, at those parties. Women sought her out, and watched her. They brought presents, ‘for your collection’ - her collection was talked about, and envied! When she made a gesture, they raised their heads to catch it. When she spoke, they listened. It was her voice, I think, which snared them - those low, musical tones, which had once lured me from my random midnight wanderings into the heart of her own dark world. Again and again I heard arguments crumble at a cry or a murmur from Diana’s throat; again and again the scattered conversations of a crowded room would falter and die, as one speaker after another surrendered the slender threads of some anecdote or fancy to catch at the more compelling cadences of hers.

  Her boldness was contagious. Women came to her, and grew giddy. She was like a singer, shivering glasses. She was like a cancer, she was like a mould. She was like the hero of one of her own gross romances - you might set her in a chamber with a governess and a nun, and in an hour they would have torn out their own hair, to fashion a whip.

  I sound weary of her. I was not weary of her then. How could I have been? We were a perfect kind of double act. She was lewd, she was daring - but who made that daring visible? Who could testify to the passion of her; to the sympathetic power of her; to the rare, enchanted atmosphere of her house in Felicity Place, where ordinary ways and rules seemed all suspended, and wanton riot reigned? Who, but I?

  I was proof of all her pleasures. I was the stain left by her lust. She must keep me, or lose everything.

  And I must keep her, or have nothing. I could not imagine a life beyond her shaping. She had awakened particular appetites in me; and where else, I thought, but with Diana, in the company of Sapphists - where else would those queer hungers be assuaged?

  I have spoken of the peculiarly timeless quality of my new life, of my removal from the ordinary workings of the hours, the days and the weeks. Diana and I often made love until dawn, and ate breakfast at night
fall; or else, we woke at the regular time, but stayed abed with the drapes close-drawn, and took our lunch by candle-light. Once we rang for Blake, and she came in her night-gown: it was half-past three, we had woken her from her bed. Another time I was roused by bird-song: I squinted at the lines of light around the shutters, and realised I had not seen the sun for a week. In a house kept uniformly warm by the labour of servants, and with a carriage to collect us and deposit us where we wished, even the seasons lost their meanings or gained new ones. I knew winter had arrived only when Diana’s walking-dresses changed from silk to corduroy, her cloaks from grenadine to sable; and when my own closet rail sagged with astrakhan, and camel’s-hair, and tweed.

  But there was one anniversary from the old order of things that, even in the enchanted atmosphere of Felicity Place, surrounded by so much narcotic luxury, I could not quite forget. One day, when I had been Diana’s lover for a little less than a year, I was woken by the rustle of news-sheet. My mistress was beside me with the morning paper, and I opened my eyes upon a headline. Home Rule Bill, it said; Irish to Demonstrate June 3rd. I gave a cry. It was not the words which arrested me - they meant nothing to me. The date, however, was as familiar as my own name. June the third was my birthday; in a week I should be twenty-three.

  ‘Twenty-three!’ said Diana when I told her, in a kind of delight. ‘What a really glorious age that is! With your youth still hot upon you, like a lover in a pant; and time with his face around the curtain, peeping on.’ She could talk like this, even first thing in the morning; I only yawned. But then she said that we must celebrate - and at that, I looked livelier. ‘What shall we do,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t done before? Where shall I take you ... ?’