Tipping the Velvet

  Then I had a rather wonderful idea. I ran back into the parlour and looked at the clock. Less than an hour had passed since Florence’s departure, and neither she nor Ralph, I guessed, would be home much before five. That gave me about eight whole hours - slightly less, I supposed, if I wanted to be sure of finding myself a room in some lodging-house or hostel while it was still light. How much cleaning could you do in eight hours? I had no idea: it was generally Alice who had helped Mother out at home; I had hardly cleaned a thing before in my life; lately I had had servants to do my cleaning for me. But I felt inspired, now, to tidy this house - this house where I had been, albeit briefly, so content. It would be a kind of parting gift, I thought, for Ralph and Florence. I would be like a girl in a fairy story, sweeping out the dwarves’ cottage, or the robbers’ cave, while the dwarves or the robbers were at work.

  I believe I laboured, that day, harder than I had ever laboured over anything before; and I have wondered since, thinking back to the industry of those hours, whether the thing that I was really washing was not my own tarnished soul. I began by lighting a bigger fire in the range, to heat more water with. Then I found that I had used up all the water in the house: I had to limp up and down Quilter Street with two great buckets, looking for a stand-pipe; and when I found one I also found a line of women at it, and had to wait amongst them for half-an-hour, until the tap - which ran no faster than a trickle, and sometimes only spluttered and choked - was free. The women looked me up and down, rather - they looked at my eye, and more especially at my head, for I had placed a cap of Ralph’s upon it in lieu of my damp hat, and they could see where the hair was shorn and razored beneath. But they were not at all unfriendly. One or two, who had seen me leave the house, asked me, ‘Was I lodging with the Banners?’ and I answered that I was only passing through. They seemed happy enough with that, as if people passed through, in this district, very frequently.

  When I had staggered home with the water, set it warming on the stove, and wrapped myself in a great, crusty apron I found hanging on the back of the pantry door, I began on the parlour. First I wiped down all the dim and sooty things with a wet cloth; then I washed the window, and then the skirting-boards. The rugs I carried out into the yard: here I hung them over the wash-line, and beat them until my arm ached. As I did so, the back door of the neighbouring house was pulled open and a woman, her sleeves rolled up like mine and her own cheeks flushed, emerged to stand upon the step. When she saw me she nodded, and I nodded back.

  ‘A fine job you’ve taken on,’ she said, ‘cleaning the Banners’ place.’ I smiled, glad of the rest, and wiped the sweat from my brow and lip.

  ‘Are they known for their dirt, then?’

  ‘They are,’ she said, ‘in this street. They do too much in other folks’ houses, and not enough in their own. That’s the trouble.’ She spoke good-humouredly, however: she didn’t seem to mean that Ralph and Florence were busy-bodies. I rubbed my aching shoulder. ‘You’ll be the new lodger, I suppose?’ she asked me then. I shook my head, and repeated what I had told the other neighbours - that I was only passing through. She seemed as unimpressed by that as they had been. She watched me for a minute or two while I resumed my beating; then she went indoors, without another word.

  When the rugs were beaten I swept the fireplace in the parlour; then I found some blacklead in the pantry, and began to dab at it with that. I had not leaded a grate since I left home - though I had seen Zena blacking Diana’s fireplaces a hundred times, and remembered it as rather easy labour. In fact, of course, it was tricky, filthy work, and kept me busy for an hour, and left me feeling not a half so blithe as I had been at first. Still, however, I didn’t stop to rest. I swept the floors, and then I scrubbed them; then I washed the kitchen tiles, and then the range, and then the kitchen window. I did not like to venture upstairs, but the parlour and the kitchen, and even the privy and the yard, I worked upon until they fairly gleamed; until every surface that was meant to shine, shone; until every colour was vivid, rather than dulled and paled by dust.

  My final triumph was the front doorstep: this I swept and washed, and finally scrubbed with a piece of hearthstone until it was as white as any doorstep in the street - and my arms, which had been black with lead, were streaked with chalk from my fingernails to my elbows. I knelt for a few moments when I had finished it, admiring the effect and stretching my aching back, too warmed with work to be bothered by the January breezes. Then I saw a figure emerge from the house next door, and looked up to see a little girl in a tattered frock and a pair of over-large boots pigeon-stepping her way towards me with a spilling mug of tea.

  ‘Mother says you must be fairly fagged, and to give you this,’ she said. Then she ducked her head. ‘But I’m to stay with you while you drink it, to make sure we get the cup back.’

  The tea had been made murky with a bit of skim-milk, and was terribly sweet. I drank it quickly, while the girl shivered and stamped her feet. ‘No school for you today?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not today. It’s wash-day, and Mother needs me at home to keep the babies out from under her heels.’ All the while she talked to me she kept her eyes fixed on my shorn head. Her own hair was fair, and - much as mine had used to - dribbled down between her jutting shoulder-blades in a long, untidy plait.

  It was now about half-past three, and when I returned to Florence’s kitchen to wash my filthy hands and arms I found the house had grown quite dark. I removed my apron, and lit a lamp; then I took a few minutes to wander between the rooms, gazing at the transformation I had effected. I thought, like a child, How pleased they will be! How pleased... I was not quite so gay, however, as I had been six hours before. Like the darkening day beyond the parlour window, there was a gloomy knowledge pressing at the edges of my own pleasure-the knowledge that I must go, and find some shelter of my own. I picked up the list that Florence had made for me. Her handwriting was very neat but the ink had stained her fingers, and there was a smudge where she had lain her tired hand upon the sheet.

  I could not bear the idea of going just yet - of working my way through the list of hostels, of being shown to a bed in another chamber like the one I had slept in with Zena. I would go in an hour; for now, I thought again, determinedly, of how enchanted Ralph and Florence would be, to come home to a tidy house - and then, with more enthusiasm, I thought: And how much more pleased would they be, to come home to their tidy house, and find their supper bubbling on the stove! There was not much food in the cupboards, so far as I could see; but there was, of course, the half-crown that they had left for me ... I didn’t stop to think that I should keep it for my own needs. I picked the coin up - it was just where Florence had placed it, for I had lifted it only to wipe beneath it with a cloth, then put it back again - and hobbled off down Quilter Street, towards the stalls and barrows of the Hackney Road.

  A half-hour later I was back. I had bought bread, meat and vegetables and - purely on the grounds that it had looked so handsome on the fruit-man’s barrow - a pineapple. For a year and a half I had eaten nothing but cutlets and salmis, pates and crystallised fruits; but there was a dish that Mrs Milne had used to make, consisting of mashed potato, mashed cabbage, corned beef and onions - Gracie and I had used to smack our lips at the sight of it placed before us on the table. I thought it couldn’t be very hard to make; and I set about cooking it now, for Ralph and Florence.

  I had set the potatoes and the cabbage on to boil, and got as far as browning the onions, when I heard a knock at the door. This made me jump, then grow a little flustered. I had made myself so comfortable that I felt, instinctively, that I should answer it; but should I, really? Was there not a point at which helpfulness, if persevered with, became impertinence? I looked down at the pan of onions, my rolled-up sleeves. Had I perhaps crossed over that point, already?’

  While I wondered, the knock came again; and this time I didn’t hesitate, but went straight to the door and opened it. Beyond it was a girl - a rather handsome girl, with dark hair sho
wing beneath a velvet tam-o‘-shanter. When she saw me she said, ‘Oh! Is Florrie not at home, then?’ and looked quickly at my arms, my dress, my eye, and then my hair.

  I said, ‘Miss Banner isn’t here, no. I’m on my own.’ I sniffed, and thought I caught the smell of burning onions. ‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘I’m doing a bit of frying. Do you mind... ?’ I ran back to the kitchen to rescue my dish. To my surprise I heard the thud of the front door, and found that the girl had followed me. When I looked round she was unbuttoning her coat, and gazing about her in wonder.

  ‘My God,’ she said - her voice had a bit of breeding to it, but she was not at all proud. ‘I called because I saw the step, and thought Florrie must have had some sort of fit. Now I see she’s either lost her head entirely, or had the fairies in.’

  I said, ‘I was me that did it all ...’

  She laughed, showing her teeth. ‘Then you, I suppose, must be the fairy king himself. Or is it, the fairy queen? I cannot tell if your hair is at odds with your costume, or the other way around. If that’ - she laughed again - ‘means anything.’

  I didn’t know what it might mean. I said only, rather primly, that I was waiting for my hair to grow; and she answered, ‘Ah’, and her smile grew a little smaller. Then she said, in a puzzled sort of way: ‘And you’re staying with Florrie and Ralph, are you?’

  ‘They let me sleep last night in the parlour, as a favour; but today I have to move on. In fact - what time have you?’ She showed me her watch: a quarter to five, and much later than I had expected. ‘I really must go very soon.’ I took the pan off the stove - the onions had burned a little browner than I wanted - and began to look about me for a bowl.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, waving her hand at my haste, ‘have a cup of tea with me, at least.’ She put some water on to boil, and I began jabbing at the potatoes with a fork. The dish, as I assembled it, did not look quite like the meal that Mrs Milne had used to make; and when I tasted it, it was not so savoury. I set it on the side, and frowned at it. The girl handed me a cup. Then she leaned against a cupboard, quite at her ease, and sipped at her own tea, and then yawned.

  ‘What a day I have had!’ she said. ‘Do I stink like a rat? I’ve been all afternoon down a drain-pipe.’

  ‘Down a drain-pipe?’

  ‘Down a drain-pipe. I’m an assistant at a sanitary inspector’s. You may not pull such a face; it was quite a triumph, I tell you, my getting the position at all. They think women too delicate for that sort of work.’

  ‘I think I would rather be delicate,’ I said, ‘than do it.’

  ‘Oh, but it’s marvellous work! It’s only now and then I have to peer into sewers, as I did today. Mostly I measure, and talk to workers, and see if they are too hot or too cold, have enough air to breathe, enough lavatories. I have a government order, and do you know what that means? It means I can demand to see an office or a workshop, and if it’s not right, I can demand that it be put right. I can have buildings closed, buildings improved ...’ She waved her hands. ‘Foremen hate me. Greedy masters from Bow to Richmond absolutely loathe the sight of me. I wouldn’t swap my work for anything!’ I smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice; she might be a sanitary inspector, but she was also, I could tell, something of an actress. Now she took another mouthful of tea. ‘So,’ she said, when she had swallowed it, ‘how long have you been a friend of Florrie’s?’

  ‘Well, friend isn’t quite the word for it, really...’

  ‘You don’t know her terribly well?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘She’s not been herself, these past few months. Not been herself at all...’ She would have gone on, I think, if there had not, at that moment, come the sound of the front door opening, and then of feet upon the parlour floor.

  ‘Oh hell!’ I said. I put my cup down, gazed wildly about me for a second, then ran past the girl to the pantry door. I didn’t stop to think; I didn’t say a word to her or even look at her. I simply hopped inside the little cupboard, and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I put my ear to it, and listened.

  ‘Is there someone out there?’ It was Florence’s voice. I heard her stepping, cautiously, into the kitchen. Then she must have seen her friend. ‘Annie, oh, it’s you! Thank goodness. For a moment I thought - what’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Why do you look so queer? What’s going on? What has happened to the step at the front of the house? And what’s this mess on the stove?’

  ‘Florrie -’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I might as well tell you; indeed, I really think I’m quite obliged to tell you...’

  ‘What? You’re frightening me.’

  ‘There’s a girl in your pantry.’

  There was a silence then, during which I swiftly surveyed my options. They were, I found, very few; so I decided on the noblest. I took hold of the handle of the pantry door, and slowly pushed it open. Florence saw me, and twitched.

  ‘I was just about to leave,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’ I looked at the girl called Annie, who nodded.

  ‘She was,’ she said. ‘She was.’

  Florence gazed at me. I stepped out of the pantry and edged past her, into the parlour. She frowned.

  ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ she asked, as I searched for my hat. ‘Why does everything look so strange?’ She picked up a box of matches, and lit the two oil-lamps and then a couple of candles. The light was taken up by a thousand polished surfaces, and she started. ‘You have cleaned the house!’

  ‘Only the downstairs rooms. And the yard. And the front step,’ I said, in increasing tones of wretchedness. ‘And I made you supper.’

  She gaped at me. ‘Why!’

  ‘Your house was dirty. The woman next door said you were famous for it ...’

  ‘You met the woman next door?’

  ‘She gave me some tea.’

  ‘I leave you in my home for one day and you quite transform it. You get yourself in with my neighbours. You’re thick, I suppose, with my best friend. And what has she been telling you?’

  ‘I haven’t told her anything, I’m sure!’ called Annie from the kitchen.

  I pulled at a thread that had come loose at my cuff. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said quietly, ‘to have a tidy house. I thought -’ I had thought that it would make her like me. In Diana’s world, it would have. It, or something similar.

  ‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’

  She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’

  ‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’

  Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’

  ‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’

  Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that’s possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.’ As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other.

  ‘My word,’ he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.’ He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?’ - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all th
is! I haven’t come into the wrong parlour, have I?’

  Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry. I went to her, and - with terrible boldness, for the last baby I had held had been my cousin’s child, four years before: and he had screamed in my face - I said, ‘Give him to me, babies love me.’ She handed him over and, through some extraordinary miracle - perhaps I was holding him so inexpertly, the grip quite stunned him - he fell against my shoulder, and sighed, and grew calm.

  I might have thought, if I had had more experience in the matter, that the sight of her foster-son content and still in another girl’s arms would be the last thing to convince a mother to allow that girl to stay in her own house; and yet, when I looked at Florence again I saw that her eyes were upon me, and her expression - as it had been once, last night - was strange and almost sad, but also desperately tender. One curl had worked its way out of her knot of hair, and hung, rather limply, over her brow. When she raised a hand to brush it from her eye, it seemed to me that the finger came away a little damp at the tip.

  I thought: Blimey, I was wasted in male impersonation, I should have been in melodrama. I bit my lip, and gave a gulp. ‘Good-bye, Cyril,’ I said, in a voice that shook a little. ‘I must put on my damp bonnet now, and head off into the darkening night, and find some bench to sleep on...’

  But this, after all, proved too much. Florence sniffed, and her face grew stern again.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You may stay - for a week. And if the week works out, we shall try it for a month: you may have a share of the family salary, I suppose, for the sake of watching Cyril and keeping house. But if it does not work, then you must promise me, Miss Astley, that you will go.’

  I promised it. Then I hitched the baby a little higher at my shoulder, and Florence turned away. I didn’t look to see what her expression was, now. I only smiled; and then I put my lips to Cyril’s head - he smelt rather sour - and kissed him.