Tipping the Velvet

She shook her head. ‘Oh, no! What happened was, Agnes lost her place, because the lady didn’t care for her. She went to a house in Dulwich — which, as you will know, is very far from Kentish Town, but not so far that we couldn’t meet on a Sunday, and send each other little notes and parcels through the post. But then - well, then another girl came. She was not so nice as Agnes, but she took to me like anything. I think she was a bit soft, miss, in the head. She would look through all my things - and, of course, she found my letters and all my bits. She would make me kiss her! And when at last I said that I wouldn’t, for Agnes’ sake - well, she went to the lady and told her that I had made her kiss me; and that I touched her, in a peculiar way. When all the time, it was her, only her — ! And when the lady wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her, she went and took her to my little box of letters, and showed her those.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘What a bitch!’

  She nodded. ‘A bitch is what she was, all right; only, I didn’t like to say it before.’

  ‘And it was the lady, then, who got you sent to the reformat ’ry?’

  ‘It was, on a charge of tampering and corrupting. And she made sure Agnes lost her place, too; and they would have sent her to prison along with me - except that she took up with another young man again, very sharp. And now she is married to him, and he I hear treats her shabbily.’

  She shook her head, and so did I. I said, ‘Well, it seems like you were roundly done over by women, all right!’

  ‘Wasn’t I, though!’

  I gave her a wink. ‘Come over here, and let’s have a fag.’

  She stepped over to the bed, and I found us two cigarettes; and for a little while we sat smoking together in silence, occasionally sighing and tutting and still shaking our heads.

  At last I saw her gazing at me rather thoughtfully. When I caught her eye, she blushed and looked away. I said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing, miss.’

  ‘No, there is something,’ I said, smiling. ‘What are you thinking?’

  She took another puff of her cigarette, smoking it as you see rough men on the street smoking, with her fingers cupped around the fag, the burning end of it nearly scorching her palm. Then she said: ‘Well, you will think me forwarder than I ought to be.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Yes. But I have been just about busting to know it, ever since I first got a proper look at you.’ She took a breath. ‘You used to work the halls, didn’t you? You used to work the halls, alonger Kitty Butler, and calling yourself plain Nan King. What a turn it give me, when I saw you here first! I never maided for no one famous before.’

  I studied the tip of my cigarette, and did not answer her. Her words had given me a kind of jolt: they were not what I had been anticipating at all. Then I said, with a show of laughter: ‘Well, you know, I am hardly famous now. They were all rather long ago, those days.’

  ‘Not so long,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing you at Camden Town, and another time at the Peckham Palace. That was with Agnes - how we laughed!’ Her voice sank a little. ‘It was just after that, that my troubles started ...’

  I remembered the Peckham Palace very well, for Kitty and I had only played there once. It had been in the December before we opened at the Brit, so rather near to the start of my own troubles. I said, ‘To think of you sitting there, with Agnes beside you; and me upon the stage, with Kitty Butler ...’

  She must have caught something in my tone, for she raised her eyes to mine and said: ‘And you don’t see Miss Butler at all, these days ... ?’ And when I shook my head, she looked knowing. ‘Well,’ she said then, ‘it’s something, ain’t it, to have been a star upon the stage!’

  I sighed. ‘I suppose it is. But -’ I had thought of something else. ‘You oughtn’t to let Mrs Lethaby hear you say it. She, well, she don’t quite care for the music hall.’

  She nodded. ‘I dare say.’ Then the clock upon the mantel struck the hour and, hearing it, she rose, and stubbed her fag out, and flapped her hand before her mouth to wave away the flavour of the smoke. ‘Lord, look at me!’ she cried. ‘I shall have Mrs Hooper after me.’ She reached for my empty coffee-cup, then picked up her tray and went to her scuttle of coal.

  Then she turned, and grew pink again. She said: ‘Will there be anything else, miss?’

  We gazed at one another for the space of a couple of heart-beats. She still had the smudge of coal-dust at her brow. I shifted beneath the sheets, and felt again that slippery spot between my thighs - only now, it was slipperier than ever. I had been fucking Diana every night, almost, for a year and a half. Fucking had come to seem to me like shaking hands - you might do it, as a kind of courtesy, with anyone. But would Zena have come and let me kiss her, if I had called her to the bed?

  I cannot say. I did not call her. I only said: ‘Thank you, Zena; there’s nothing else, just now.’ And she picked up the scuttle, and went.

  I had some squeamishness upon me about such matters, yet.

  And Diana, I knew, would have been furious.

  This, as I have said, was sometime in the autumn of that year. I remember that time, and the two or three months that followed it, very well, for they were busy ones: it was as if my stay with Diana were acquiring a kind of hectic intensity, as some sick people are said to do, as it hurtled towards its end. Maria, for example, gave a party at her house. Dickie threw a party on a boat - hired it to sail with us from Charing Cross to Richmond, and we danced, till four in the morning, to an all-girl band. Christmas we spent at Kettner’s, eating goose in a private room; New Year was celebrated at the Cavendish Club: our table grew so loud and ribald, Miss Bruce again approached us, to complain about our manners.

  And then, in January, came Diana’s fortieth birthday; and she was persuaded to celebrate it, at Felicity Place itself, with a fancy-dress ball.

  We called it a ball, but it was not really so grand as that. For music there was only a woman with a piano; and what dancing there was - in the dining-room with the carpet rolled back - was rather tame. No one, however, came for the sake of a waltz. They came for Diana’s reputation, and for mine. They came for the wine and the food and the rose-tipped cigarettes. They came for the scandal.

  They came, and marvelled.

  The house, for a start, we made wonderful. We hung velvet from the walls and, from the ceiling, spangles; and we shut off all the lamps, and lit the rooms entirely with candles. The drawing-room we cleared of furniture, leaving only the Turkey rug, on which we placed cushions. The marble floor of the hall we scattered with roses - we placed roses, too, to smoke upon the fires: by the end of the night you felt ill with it. There was champagne to drink, and brandies, and wine with spice in: Diana had this heated in a copper bowl above a spirit-lamp. All the food she had sent over from the Solferino. They did her a cold roast after the manner of the Romans, goose stuffed with turkey stuffed with chicken stuffed with quail - the quail, I think, having a truffle in it. There were also oysters, which sat upon the table in a barrel marked Whitstable; however, one lady, unused to the trick of the shells, tried to open one with a cigar-knife. The blade slipped, and cut her finger almost to the bone; and after she had bled into the ice, no one much cared for them. Diana had them taken away.

  Half of the Cavendish Club attended that party - and, besides them, more women, women from France and from Germany, and one, even, from Capri. It was as if Diana had sent a general invitation to all the wealthy circles of the world - but marked the card, of course, Sapphists Only. That was her prime requirement; her second demand, as I have said, was that they come in fancy dress.

  The result was rather mixed. Many ladies viewed the evening only as an opportunity at last to leave their riding-coats at home, and put on trousers. Dickie was one of these: she came clad in a morning suit, with a sprig of lilac at her lapel, and calling herself ‘Dorian Gray’. Other costumes, however, were more splendid. Maria Jex stained her face and put whiskers on it, and came robed as a Turkish pasha. Diana’s friend Evelyn arr
ived as Marie Antoinette - though, another Marie Antoinette came later and, after her, yet another. That, indeed, was one of the predicaments of the evening: I counted fully five separate Sapphos, all bearing lyres; and there were six Ladies from Llangollen - I had not even heard of the Ladies from Llangollen before I met Diana. On the other hand, the women who had been more daring in their choices risked going unrecognised by anyone at all. ‘I am Queen Anne!’ I heard one lady say, very cross, when Maria failed to identify her - yet, when Maria addressed another lady in a crown by the same title, she was even crosser. She turned out to be Queen Christina, of Sweden.

  Diana herself, that night, I never saw look more handsome. She came as her Greek namesake, in a robe, and with sandals showing her long second toe, and her hair piled high and with a crescent in it; and over her shoulder she wore a quiver full of arrows and a bow. She claimed the arrows were for shooting gentlemen, although later I heard her say they were for piercing young girls’ hearts.

  My own costume I kept secret, and would not show to anyone: it was my plan to reveal myself, when the guests were all arrived, and present a tribute to my mistress. It was not a very saucy costume; but I thought it a terribly clever one, because it had a connection with the gift I had bought Diana, for her birthday. For that event the year before I had begged the money from her to buy her a present, and had got her a brooch: I think she liked it well enough. This year, however, I felt I had surpassed myself. I had bought her, all by post and in secret, a marble bust of the Roman page Antinous. I had taken his story out of a paper at the Cavendish, and had smiled to read it, because - apart of course from the detail of Antinous being so miserable, and finally throwing himself in the River Nile - it seemed to resemble my own. I had given the bust to Diana at breakfast, and she had adored it at once, and had it set up on a pedestal in the drawing-room. ‘Who would have thought the boy had so much cleverness in him!’ she had said a little later. ‘Maria, you must have chosen it for him - didn’t you?’ Now, while the ladies all assembled at the party below, I stood in my bedroom, trembling before the glass, garbing myself as Antinous himself. I had a skimpy little toga that reached to my knee, with a Roman belt around it - what they called a zone. I had put powder on my cheeks to make them languorous, and spit-black on my eyes to make them dark. My hair I had covered entirely in a sable wig that curled to my shoulders. About my neck there was a garland of lotus flowers — and I can tell you, the lotus flowers had been harder to organise, in London, in January, than anything.

  I had another garland to hand to Diana: this I also placed about my neck. Then I went to the door and listened and, since the moment seemed right, I ran to Diana’s closet and took out a cloak of hers and wrapped it tight about me, and raised the hood. And then I went downstairs.

  There, in the hall, I found Maria.

  ‘Nancy, dear boy!’ she cried. Her lips looked very red and damp where they showed through the slit of her pasha’s whiskers. ‘Diana has sent me out to find you. The drawing-room is positively pullulating with women, all of them panting for a peek at your pose plastique!’

  I smiled - a pullulating audience was precisely what I wanted - then let her lead me into the room, still with the cloak about me, and hand me into the alcove behind the velvet curtain. Then, when I had bared my costume and struck my pose, I murmured to her and she pulled the tasselled cord, and the velvet twitched back and uncovered me. As I walked amongst them the guests all fell silent and looked knowing, and Diana - standing just where I could have wished her, beside the bust of Antinous on its little pedestal — raised a brow. Now, at the sight of me in my toga and belt, the ladies sighed and murmured.

  I gave them a moment, then stepped over to Diana, lifted the extra garland from around my neck, and wound it about hers. Then I knelt to her, took up her hand, and kissed it. She smiled; the ladies murmured again - and then began, in a delighted sort of way, to clap. Maria stepped up to me, and put a hand to the hem of my toga.

  ‘What a little jewel you look tonight, Nancy - doesn’t she, Diana? How my husband would admire you! You look like a picture from a buggers’ compendium!’

  Diana laughed and said that I did. Then she reached and put her fingers to my chin and kissed me - so hard, I felt her teeth upon the soft flesh of my lips.

  And then the music started up in the room across the hall. Maria brought me a glass of the warm spiced wine and, to go with it, a cigarette from Diana’s special case. One of the Marie Antoinettes weaved her way through the crowd to take my hand and kiss it. ‘Enchantée.’ she said - this one really was French. ‘What a spectacle you have provided for us! One would never see such a thing in the salons of Paris ...’

  The entire evening sounds charming; it might, indeed, have been the very high point of my triumph as Diana’s boy. And yet, for all my planning, for all the success of my costume and my tableau, I got no pleasure from it. Diana herself - it was her birthday, after all — seemed distant from me, and preoccupied with other things. Only a minute or two after I had placed the garland of lotus flowers about her neck, she took it off, saying it did not match her costume; she hung it from a corner of the pedestal, where it soon fell off - later I saw a lady with one of the flowers from it, at her own lapel. I cannot say why - heaven knows, I had suffered graver abuses at Diana’s hand, and only smiled to suffer them! - but her carelessness over the garland made me peevish. Then again, the room was terribly hot and terribly perfumed; and my wig made me hotter than anyone, and itched - yet, I could not remove it, for fear of spoiling my costume. After Marie Antoinette, more ladies sought me out to tell me how much they admired me; but each proved drunker and more ribald than the last, and I began to find them wearisome. I drank glass after glass of spiced wine and champagne, in an effort to make myself as careless as they; but the wine - or, more likely, the hashish I had smoked - seemed to make me cynical rather than gay. When one lady reached to stroke my thigh as she stepped past me, I pushed her roughly away. ‘What a little brute!’ she cried, delighted. In the end I stood half-hidden in the shadows, looking on, rubbing my temples. Mrs Hooper was at the table with the hot wine on it, ladling it out; I saw her glance my way, and give a kind of smile. Zena had been sent to move amongst the ladies, bearing dainties on a tray; but when she seemed to want to catch my eye, I looked away. Even from her I felt distant, that night.

  So I was almost glad when, at about eleven o’clock, the mood of the party was changed, by Dickie calling for more light to be brought, for the lady on the piano to cease her playing, and for all the women present to gather round and pay attention.

  ‘What’s this?’ cried one lady. ‘Why has it grown bright?’

  Evelyn said: ‘We are to hear Dickie Reynolds’ history, from a book written by a doctor.’

  ‘A doctor? Is she ill?’

  ‘It is her vie sexuelle!’

  ‘Her vie sexuelle!’

  ‘My dear, I know it already, it is terribly dreary ...’ This was from a woman who stood beside me in the shadows, garbed as a monk; as I turned to her she gave a yawn, then slipped quietly from the room in search of other sport. The rest of the guests, however, looked just as eager as Dickie could wish. She stood beside Diana; the book that Evelyn had referred to was in Diana’s hands - it was small and black and densely printed, with not a single illustration: it was not at all the kind of thing that people usually gave Diana, for her box. And yet, she was turning its pages in fascination. A lady dipped her head to read the title from the spine, then cried: ‘But the book’s in Latin! Dickie, whatever is the point of a filthy story, if the damn thing’s written in Latin?’

  Dickie now looked a little prim. ‘It is only the title that is Latin,’ she answered; ‘and, besides, it is not a filthy book, it is a very brave one. It has been written by a man, in an attempt to explain our sort so that the ordinary world will understand us.’

  A lady dressed as Sappho took the cigar from her mouth, and studied Dickie in a kind of disbelief. She said: ‘This book is to be passed
among the public; and your story is in it? The story of your life, as a lover of women? But Dick, have you gone mad! This man sounds like a pornographer of the most mischievous variety!’

  ‘She has taken a nom-de-guerre, of course,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Even so. Dickie, the folly of it!’

  ‘You misunderstand,’ said Dickie. ‘This is a new thing entirely. This book will assist us. It will advertise us.’

  A kind of collective shudder ran right around the drawing-room. The Sappho with the cigar shook her head. ‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ answered Dickie impressively, ‘you will hear more of it, believe me.’

  ‘Let us hear more of it now!’ cried Maria; and someone else called: ‘Yes, Diana, read it to us, do!’

  And so more candles were brought, and placed at Diana’s shoulder. The ladies settled themselves into comfortable poses, and the reading began.

  I cannot remember the words of it now. I know that, as Dickie had promised, they were not at all filthy; indeed, they were rather dry. And yet, her story was lent a kind of lewdness, too, by the very dullness of the prose in which it was told. All the time Diana read, the ladies called out ribald comments. When Dickie’s history was complete, they read another, which was rather lewder. Then they read a very saucy one from the gentlemen’s section. At last the air was thicker and warmer than ever; even I, in my sulkiness, began to feel myself stirred by the doctor’s prim descriptions. The book was passed from lady to lady, while Diana lit herself another cigarette. Then one lady said, ‘You must ask Bo about that: she was seven years amongst the Hindoos’; and Diana called, ‘What? What must she ask?’

  ‘We are reading the story,’ cried the woman in reply, ‘of a lady with a clitoris as big as a little boy’s prick! She claims she caught the malady from an Indian maid. I said, if only Bo Holliday were here, she might confirm it for us, for she was thick with the Hindoos in her years in Hindoostan.’