Tipping the Velvet (27 page)

Perhaps I was a little feverish; yet my head felt clearer than it had in a month and a half. I gazed at the photograph, and then at myself. I saw that I was wasted and grey, that my eyes were swollen and purpled with shadows. My hair, which I had loved before to keep so trim and sleek, was long and filthy; my lips were bitten almost to the blood; my frock was stained and rancid at the armpits. They, I thought - the smiling couple in the photograph - they had done this to me!

But for the first time in all those long, miserable weeks, I thought, too, what a fool I had been, to let them.

I turned my head away then and stepped to the door, and gave a shout for Mary. When she came running, breathless and a little nervous, I told her I wanted a bath, and soap, and towels. She looked at me rather strangely - I had never called for such a thing before - then she ran to the basement, and soon there came the thump of the tub upon the stairs as she hauled it up behind her, and the clatter of pans and kettles in the kitchen. Soon, too, Mrs Best emerged from her parlour, disturbed once again by the noise. When I explained my sudden longing to bathe she said, ‘Oh Miss Astley, now is that really wise?', and looked pale and shaken. I believe she thought I intended to drown myself, or cut my wrists into the water.

I did, of course, neither. Instead I sat for an hour in the steaming tub, gazing into the fireplace or at Kitty's picture, gently massaging the life back into my aching limbs and joints with a piece of soap and flannel. I washed my hair and cleaned the muck from my eyes; the flesh beneath my ears and behind my knees, in the crooks of my arms and between my legs, I rubbed till it was red and stinging.

At last I think I dozed; and as I did so I had a strange, unsettling vision.

I remembered a woman from Whitstable - an old neighbour of ours - of whom I had not thought in years. She had died while I was still a child, quite unexpectedly, and of a peculiar condition. Her heart, the doctors said, had hardened. The outer skin of it had grown leathery and tough; its valves had turned sluggish, then had begun to falter in their pumping, then ceased entirely. Save a little tiredness and breathlessness there had been no warning; the heart had worked away on its private, fatal, project, at its own secret pace - then stopped.

This story had thrilled and terrified my sister and me, when we first heard it. We were young and well cared for; the idea that one of our organs - our most vital organ, at that - might baulk at its natural role, might conspire with itself to choke, rather than to nurture, us, seemed an appalling one. For a week after the woman's death we talked of nothing else. At night, in bed, we would lie trembling; we would rub and worry at our ribs with sweating fingers, conscious of the unemphatic pulse beneath, terrified that the flimsy rhythm would falter or slow, certain that - like hers, our poor, dead, unsuspecting neighbour's - our hearts were stealthily hardening, hardening, in the tender red cavities of our breasts.

Now, waking to the reality of the cooling tub, the colourless room, the photograph upon the wall, I found my fingers once again upon my breast-bone, probing and chafing, searching for the thickening organ behind it. This time, however, it seemed to me that I found it. There was a darkness, a heaviness, a stillness at the very centre of me, that I had not known was growing there, but which gave me, now, a kind of comfort. My breast felt tight and sore - but I didn't writhe, or sweat, beneath the pain of it, rather, I crossed my arms over my ribs, and embraced my dark and thickened heart like a lover.

Perhaps, even as I did it, Walter and Kitty were walking together, on a street in France or Italy; perhaps he leaned to touch her, as I touched myself; perhaps they kissed; perhaps they lay in a bed ... I had thought such things a thousand times, and wept and bitten my lips to think them; but now I gazed at the photograph and felt my misery stiffen, as my heart had stiffened, with rage and frustration. They walked together, and the world smiled to see it! They embraced on the street, and strangers were glad! While all the time I lived pale as a worm, cast out from pleasure, from comfort and ease.

I rose from the bath, all heedless of the spilling water, and took up the photograph again; but this time I crushed it. I gave a cry, I paced the floor: but it was not with wretchedness that I paced, it was as if to try out new limbs, to feel my whole self shift and snap and tingle with life. I hauled open the window of my room, and leaned out into the dark - into the never-quite-dark of the London night, with its sounds and its scents that, for so long, I had been shut from. I thought, I will go out into the world again; I will go back into the city - they have kept me from it long enough!

But oh! how terrible it was, making my way into the streets next morning - how busy I found them, how dirty and crowded and dazzling and loud! I had lived for a year and a half in London, and called it my own. But when I walked in it before, it was with Kitty or Walter; often, indeed, we had not walked at all, but taken carriages and cabs. Now, for all that I had borrowed a hat and a jacket of Mary's to make me seemly, I felt as though I might as well be stumbling through Clerkenwell in no clothes at all. Part of it was my nervous fear that I would turn a corner and see a face I knew, a face to remind me of my old life, or - worst of all - Kitty's face, tilted and smiling as she walked on Walter's arm. This fear made me falter and flinch, and so I was jostled worse than ever, and had curses thrown at me. The curses seemed as sharp as nettle-stings, and set me trembling.

Then again, I was stared at and called after - and twice or thrice seized and stroked and pinched - by men. This, too, had not happened in my old life; perhaps, indeed, if I had had a baby or a bundle on me now, and was walking purposefully or with my gaze fixed low, they might have let me pass untroubled. But, as I have said, I walked fitfully, blinking at the traffic about me; and such a girl, I suppose, is a kind of invitation to sport and dalliance ...

The stares and the strokings affected me like the curses: they made me shake. I returned to Mrs Best's and turned the key in my door; then I lay upon my rancid mattress and shivered and wept. I had thought myself brilliant with new life and promise, but the streets that I thought would welcome me had only cast me back into my former misery. Worse, they had frightened me.
How,
I thought,
will I bear it? How will I live?
Kitty had Walter now; Kitty was married! But I was poor and alone and uncared for. I was a solitary girl, in a city that favoured sweethearts and gentlemen; a girl in a city where girls walked only to be gazed at.

I had discovered it, that morning. I might have learned it sooner, from all the songs I'd sung at Kitty's side.

I thought then what a cruel joke it was that I, who had swaggered so many times in a gentleman's suit across the stages of London, should now be afraid to walk upon its streets, because of my own girlishness! If only I were a boy, I thought wretchedly. If only I were really a boy ...

Then I gave a start, and sat up. I remembered what Kitty had said, that day in Stamford Hill - that I was
too much like a boy.
I remembered Mrs Dendy's reaction, when I had posed for her in trousers: She's too
real.
The very suit that I had worn then - the blue serge suit that Walter had given me on New Year's Eve - was here, beneath my bed, still crumpled in the sailor's bag with all the other costumes that I'd taken from the Brit. I slid from the mattress and drew the bag free, and in a moment I had all the suits upon the floor. They lay about me, impossible handsome and vivid in that colourless room: all the shades and textures of my former life, with all the scents and songs of the music hall, and my old passion, in their seams and creases.

For a second I sat trembling: I feared the memories would overcome me, and set me weeping again. I almost returned the costumes to the bag - but then I took a breath, and willed my hands to steady and my dampening eyes to dry. I placed my hand upon my breast - upon the heaviness, and the darkness, that had so strengthened me.

I picked up the blue serge suit and shook it. It was horribly creased, but apart from that not damaged at all by its confinement to the bag. I tried it on, with a shirt and a neck-tie. I had become so thin that the trousers sagged about my waist; my hips were narrower, my breasts even shallower, than before. All that spoilt the illusion of my being a boy was the foolish, tapered jacket - but its seams had not been cut, I saw, only tucked and sewn. There was a knife on the mantel that I used to slice my bread; I seized it, and applied it to the stitches. Soon the jacket was its old, masculine self again. With my hair trimmed, I thought, and a pair of proper boy's shoes upon my feet, anyone - even Kitty herself! - might meet me on the streets of London, and never know me for a girl, at all.

 

There were one or two obstacles to be overcome, of course, before I could begin to put my daring plan into practice. Firstly, I must properly reacquaint myself with the city: it took another week of wandering every day about the streets of Farringdon and St Paul's, before I could accept the jostling and the roars, and the stares of the men, without smarting.

Then there was the problem of where - if I really was to stroll about in costume - I should change. I did not want to live as a boy full-time; nor did I want, just yet, to give up my room at Mrs Best's. I could imagine that lady's face, however, if I presented myself before her one day in a pair of trousers. She would think that I had lost my mind, entirely; she might call for a doctor or a policeman. She would certainly throw me out - and then I would be homeless again. I didn't want that, at all.

I needed somewhere, away from Smithfield; I needed, in fact, a dressing-room. But so far as I knew, there were no such places for hire. The gay girls of the Haymarket, I believe, transformed themselves in the public lavatories of Piccadilly - put their make-up on at the wash-hand basins, and changed into their gaudy frocks while the latch on the door said
Occupied.
This seemed to me a sensible scheme - but hardly one that I could copy, since it would blue my project, rather, to be seen emerging from a ladies' lavatory in a suit of serge and velvet and a boater.

It was indeed amidst the gay life of the West End, however, that I at last found the answer to the problem. I had begun to walk, each day, as far as Soho; and I had noticed there the tremendous number of houses bearing signs that advertised
Beds Let By The Hour.
In my naivety I wondered at first, who would want to sleep there, for an hour? Then, of course, I realised that no one would: the rooms were for the girls to bring their customers to; to lie abed in, certainly - but not to sleep. I stood one day at a coffee-stall in the mouth of an alley off Berwick Street, and watched the entrance to one of these houses. There was, I saw, a constant flow of men and women over its threshold, and no one paid the slightest heed to any of them save the leering old woman who sat in a chair at the door, taking their coins - and her alertness lasted only until she had palmed her pennies and handed her customers their key. I believe a pantomime horse could have sashayed over that step with a harlot's hand upon its bridle and - so long as the horse had its coin at the ready - no one would have stopped their business to turn and look ...

A few days later, therefore, I put my costume in a bag, presented myself at the house, and asked for a room. The old woman looked me over and grinned, quite mirthlessly; then, when I gave her my shilling, she thrust a key at me, and nodded me into the darkened passageway behind her. The key was sticky; the handle of my chamber was sticky; indeed, the house was entirely horrible - damp and stinking, and with walls as thin as paper, so that, unpacking my bag and straightening my costume, I heard all the business from the rooms above, below, and on either side of it - all the grunts and slaps and giggles, and pounding mattresses.

I changed very quickly, growing all the time, with every grunt and titter, less certain and less brave. But when I gazed at myself - there was a looking-glass, with a crack across it, and blood in the crack - when I gazed at myself at last, I smiled, and knew my plan was a good one. I had borrowed a flat-iron from my landlady's kitchen, and pressed the suit free of all its creases; I had given my hair a trim with a pair of sewing-shears - now I smoothed it flat with spittle. I left my dress and purse upon a chair, went out upon the landing, and locked the door behind me - my new dark heart, all the time, beating fast as a clock. As I had expected, the old bawd on the step barely raised her eyes as I went past her; and so, a little hesitantly, I began the walk down Berwick Street. With every glance that came my way, I flinched; at any moment I expected the cry to be let up: ‘A girl! There is a girl, here, in boy's clothing!' But the glances did not settle on me: they only slithered past me, to the girls behind. There was no cry; and I began to walk a little straighter. At St Luke's Church, on the corner, a man brushed by me with a barrow, calling, ‘All right, squire!' Then a woman with a frizzed fringe put her hand upon my arm, and tilted her head and said: ‘Well now, pretty boy, you look like a lively one. Fancy payin' a visit, to a nice little place I know ... ?'