Tipping the Velvet (13 page)

The hours we kept now, of course, were rather strange ones, for as long as Kitty continued to work two, three or four halls a night we would arrive back at Ginevra Road at half-past twelve or one, weary and aching but still giddy and hot from our moonlit criss-crossings of the city, our anxious waits in dressing-rooms and wings. Here we would find Sims and Percy, and Tootsie and her girl- and boy-friends, all fresh and flushed and gay as we, making tea and cocoa, Welsh rabbit and pancakes, in Mrs Dendy's kitchen. Then Mrs Dendy herself would appear - for she had kept theatrical lodgers for so long she had begun to keep theatrical hours, too - and suggest a game of cards, or a song or a dance. It could not long be kept secret, in that house, that I liked to sing and had a pretty voice, and so sometimes I might raise a chorus or two, along with Kitty. Now I never went to bed before three, and never woke in the morning before nine or ten o'clock - so swiftly and completely had I forgotten my old oyster-maidish habits.

I did not, of course, forget my family or my home. I sent them cards, as I have said; I sent them notices of Kitty's shows, and gossip from the theatre. They sent me letters in return, and little parcels - and, of course, barrels of oysters, which I passed on to my landlady to let her dish to us all at supper. And yet, somehow, my letters home grew more and more infrequent, my replies to their cards and presents increasingly tardy and brief. ‘When are you coming to see us?' they would write at the end of their letters. ‘When are you coming home to Whitstable?' And I would answer, ‘Soon, soon ...' or, ‘When Kitty can spare me ...'

But Kitty never could spare me. The weeks passed, the season changed; the nights grew longer and darker and cold. Whitstable became - not dimmer, in my mind, but overshadowed. It was not that I didn't think of Father and Mother, of Alice and Davy and my cousins - just that I thought of Kitty, and my new life, more...

For there was so very much to think about. I was Kitty's dresser, but I was also her friend, her adviser, her companion in all things. When she learned a song I held the sheet, to prompt her if she faltered. When tailors fitted her I watched and nodded, or shook my head if the cut was wrong. When she let herself be guided by the clever Mr Bliss - or ‘Walter' I should call him, for so, by now, he had become to us, just as we were ‘Kitty' and 'Nan' to him - when she let herself be guided by Walter, and spent hours as he had advised in shops and market squares and stations
studying the men,
I went with her; and we learned together the constable's amble, the coster's weary swagger, the smart clip of the off-duty soldier.

And as we did so we seemed to learn the ways and manners of the whole unruly city; and I grew as easy, at last, with London, as with Kitty herself - as easy, and as endlessly fascinated and charmed. We visited the parks - those great, handsome parks and gardens, that are so queer and verdant in the midst of so much dust, yet have a little of the pavements' quickness in them, too. We strolled the West End; we sat and gazed at all the marvellous sights - not just the grand, celebrated sights of London, the palaces and monuments and picture galleries, but also the smaller, swifter dramas: the overturning of a carriage; the escape of an eel from an eel-man's barrow; the picking of a pocket; the snatching of a purse.

We visited the river - stood on London Bridge, and Battersea Bridge, and all the bridges in between, just so that we might look, and marvel, at the great, stinking breadth of it. It was the Thames, I knew, which widened at its estuary to form the kind, clear, oyster-bearing sea I had grown up on. It gave me an odd little thrill, as I stood gazing at the pleasure-boats beneath Lambeth Bridge, to know that I had journeyed against the current - had made the trip from palpitating metropolis to mild, uncomplicated Whitstable in reverse. When I saw barges bringing fish from Kent I only smiled - it never made me homesick. And when the barge-men turned, to make the journey back along the river, I did not envy them at all.

 

And while we strolled and gazed and grew ever more sisterly and content, the year drew to a close; we continued to labour over the act, and Kitty herself became something of a success. Now, every contract that Walter found her was longer and more generous than the last; soon she was over-booked, and turning offers down. Now she had admirers - gentlemen, who sent her flowers and dinner invitations (which - to my secret relief - she only laughed over and put aside); boys, who asked for her picture; girls, who gathered at the stage door to tell her how handsome she was - girls I hardly knew whether to pity, patronise or fear, so closely did they resemble me, so easily might they have had my role, I theirs.

And yet, with all this, she did not become what she longed to be, what Walter had promised her she would be: a star. The halls she worked remained the suburban ones, and the better class of East End ones (and once or twice the not-so-nice ones - Foresters, and the Sebright, where the crowd threw boots and trotter-bones at the acts they didn't like). Her name never rose much or grew larger on the music-hall notices; her songs were never hummed or whistled about the streets. The problem, Walter said, lay not with Kitty herself but with the nature of her act. She had too many rivals; male impersonation - once as specialised as plate-spinning - had suddenly, inexplicably, become a cruelly overworked routine.

‘Why does every young lady who wants to do her bit of business on the stage these days want to do it in trousers?' he asked us, exasperated, when yet another male impersonator made her debut on the London circuit. ‘Why does every perfectly respectable comedienne and serio suddenly want to change her act - to pull a pair of bell-bottoms on, and dance the hornpipe? Kitty, you were born to play the boy, any fool can see it; were you an actress on the legitimate stage you would be Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia. But these tuppenyha' penny impersonators - Fannie Leslie, Fanny Robina, Bessie Bonehill, Millie Hylton - they look about as natural in their dinner-jackets as I would, clad in a crinoline or a bustle. It makes me rage' - he was seated in our little parlour as he spoke, and here he slapped the arm of his chair, so that the ancient seams gave a fart of dust and hair - ‘it makes me rage to see girls with a tenth of your talent getting all the bookings that should be yours - and worse! all the fame.' He stood, and placed his hands upon Kitty's shoulders. ‘You are on the very edge of stardom,' he said, giving her a little push so that she had to grasp his arms to stop herself from falling. ‘There must be something,
something
that we can do to just propel you over - something we can add to your act to set it apart from that of all those other prancing schoolgirls!'

But, however hard we worked, we could not find it; and meanwhile Kitty continued at the lesser theatres, in the humbler districts - Islington, Marylebone, Battersea, Peckham, Hackney - circling Leicester Square, crossing the West End on her nightly trips from hall to hall, but never entering those palaces of her and Walter's dreams: the Alhambra, and the Empire.

To be honest, I didn't much mind. I was sorry, for Kitty's sake, that her great new London career was not quite so great as she had hoped for; but I was also, privately, relieved. I knew how clever and charming and lovely she was, and while a part of me wanted, like Walter, to share the knowledge with the world, a greater part longed only to hug it to myself, to keep it secret and secure. For I was sure that, were she truly famous, I would lose her. I didn't like it when her fans sent flowers, or clamoured at the stage door for photographs and kisses; more fame would bring more flowers, more kisses - and I could not believe that she would go on laughing at the gentlemen's invitations, could not believe that one day, amongst all those admiring girls, there wouldn't be one she would like better then me ...

If she were famous, too, then she would also be richer. She might buy a house - we should have to leave Ginevra Road and all our new friends in it; we should have to leave our little sitting-room; we should have to leave our bed, and take separate chambers. I could not bear the thought of it. I had grown used, at last, to sleeping with Kitty at my side. I no longer trembled, or grew stiff and awkward, when she touched me, but had learned to lean into her embraces, to accept her kisses, chastely, nonchalantly - and even, sometimes, to return them. I had grown used to the sight of her slumbering or undressed. I did not hold my breath in wonder when I opened my eyes upon her face, still and shadowed in the thin grey light of dawn. I had seen her strip to wash or to change her gown. I was as familiar with her body, now, as with my own - more so, indeed, because her head, her neck, her wrists, her back, her limbs (which were as smooth and as rounded and as freckled as her cheek), her skin (which she wore with a marvellous, easy grace, as if it were another kind of handsome suit, perfectly tailored and pleasant to wear), were, I thought, so much lovelier and more fascinating than my own.

No, I didn't want a single thing to change - not even when I learned something about Walter that was rather disconcerting.

Inevitably, we had spent so many hours with Walter - working upon songs at Mrs Dendy's piano, or supping with him after shows - that we had begun to look upon him less as Kitty's agent and more as a friend, to both of us. In time it wasn't only working-days that we were spending with him, but Sundays, too; eventually, indeed, Sundays with Walter became the rule rather than the exception, and we began to listen out for the rumble of his carriage in Ginevra Road, the pounding of his boots upon our attic stairs, his rap upon our parlour door, his foolish, extravagant greetings. He would bring bits of news and gossip; we would drive into town, or out of it; we would stroll together - Kitty with her hand in the crook of one of his great arms, me with mine in the crook of the other, Walter himself like a blustering uncle, loud and lively and kind.

I thought nothing of it, except that it was pleasant, until one morning as I sat eating my breakfast beside Kitty and Sims and Percy and Tootsie. It was a Sunday, and Kitty and I were rather tardy; when Sims heard who it was that we were rushing for, he gave a cry: ‘My word, Kitty, but Walter must be expecting marvellous things of you! I've never known him spend so much time with an artiste before. Anyone would think he was your beau!' He seemed to say it guilelessly enough; but as he did so I saw Tootsie smile and give a sideways glance at Percy - and, worse! saw Kitty blush and turn her face away - and all at once I understood what they all knew, and cursed to think I had not guessed it sooner. A half-hour later, when Walter presented himself at the parlour door, offering a gleaming cheek to Kitty and crying ‘Kiss me, Kate!', I didn't smile, but only bit my lip, and wondered.

He was a little in love with her; perhaps, indeed, rather more than a little. I saw it now - saw the dampness of the looks he sometimes turned upon her, and the awkwardness of the glances which, more hastily, he turned away. I saw how he seized every foolish opportunity to kiss her hand, or pluck her sleeve, or place his arm, heavy and clumsy with desire, about her slender shoulders; I heard his voice catch, sometimes, or grow thick, when he addressed her. I saw and heard it all, now, because - it was the very reason that had kept me blind and deaf to it before! - because his passion was my own, which I had long grown used to thinking unremarkable, and right.

I almost pitied him; I almost loved him. I did not hate him - or if I did, it was only as one loathes the looking-glass, that shows one one's imperfect form in strict and fearful clarity. Nor did I now begin to resent his presence on those strolls and visits that I should otherwise have made with Kitty on my own. He was my rival, of sorts; but in some queer way it was almost easier to love her in his company, than out of it. His presence gave me a licence to be bold and gay and sentimental, as he was; to be able to pretend to worship her - which was almost as good as being able to worship her in earnest.

And if I still longed yet feared to hold her - well, as I have said, the fact that Walter felt the same showed that both my reticence and my love were only natural and proper. She was a star - my private star - and I would be content, I thought, like Walter, to fly about her on my stiff and distant orbit, unswervingly, for ever.

I could not know how soon we would collide, nor how dramatically.

 

By now it was December - a cold December to match the sweltering August, so cold that the little skylight above our staircase at Ma Dendy's was thick with ice for days at a time; so cold that when we woke in the mornings our breath showed grey as smoke, and we had to pull our petticoats into bed with us and dress beneath the sheets.

At home in Whitstable we hated the cold, because it made the trawler-men's job so much the harder. I remember my brother Davy sitting at our parlour fire on January evenings, and weeping, simply weeping with pain, as the life returned to his split and frozen hands, his chilblained feet. I remember the ache in my own fingers as I handled pail after frigid pail of winter oysters, and transferred fish, endlessly, from icy seawater to steaming soup.

At Mrs Dendy's, however, everybody loved the winter months; and the colder they were, they said, the better. Because frosts, and chill winds, fill theatres. For many Londoners a ticket to the music hall is cheaper than a scuttle of coal - or, if not cheaper, then more fun: why stay in your own miserable parlour stamping and clapping to keep the cold out when you can visit the Star or the Paragon, and stamp and clap along with your neighbours - and with Marie Lloyd as an accompaniment? On the very coldest nights the music halls are full of wailing infants: their mothers bring them to the shows rather than leave them to slumber - perhaps to death - in their damp and draughty cradles.

But we didn't worry much over the frozen babies at Mrs Dendy's house that winter; we were merely glad and careless, because ticket sales were high and we were all in work and a little richer than before. At the beginning of December Kitty got a spot on the bill at a hall in Marylebone, and played there twice a night, all month. It was pleasant to sit gossiping in the green room between shows, knowing that we had no frantic trips to make across London in the snow; and the other artistes - a juggling troupe, a conjuror, two or three comic singers and a dwarf husband-and-wife team, ‘The Teeny Weenies' - were all as complacent as we, and very jolly company.