Tipping the Velvet (36 page)

 

My visit to Green Street was every bit as dreary as I knew it must be. I could not bear, somehow, for the brougham to draw up at Mrs Milne's front door, so I asked Mr Shilling - Diana's taciturn driver - to drop me at Percy Circus and wait for me there. When I let myself in with my house-key, therefore, it was as if I had just returned from a shopping expedition or a stroll, as I did most days; there was nothing but the length of my absence from them to hint to Mrs Milne and Gracie of my awful change of fortune. I closed the door very softly; still, Grace's sharp ears must have caught the sound, for I heard her - she was in the parlour - give a cry of ‘Nance!', and the next moment she had come lolloping down the stairs and had me in a fierce, neck-breaking embrace. Her mother soon followed her to the landing.

‘My dear!' she called, ‘you're home, and thank goodness! We've been wondering ourselves silly - haven't we, love ? - about where you might've got to. Gracie was fretted near half to death, poor soul, but I said to her: “Don't you worry about Nancy, girl; Nancy will've found some friend to take her in, or missed the last bus home, and passed the night in some rooming-house. Nancy will be back all right, tomorrow, you wait and see.”' As she spoke she came slowly down the stairs, until at last we were quite level. She gazed at me with real affection; but there was a hint of reproach, I thought, in her words. I felt even more guilty about what I must tell her - but also slightly resentful. I was not her daughter, nor was I Gracie's sweetheart. I owed them nothing - I told myself - but my rent.

Now I drew carefully away from Grace, and nodded to her mother. I said, ‘You're right, I did meet a friend. A very old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. What a surprise it was, to meet her! She has rooms over in Kilburn. It was too far to come back so late.' The story sounded hollow to me, but Mrs Milne seemed pleased enough with it.

‘There now, Gracie,' she said, ‘what did I tell you? Now, just you run downstairs and put the kettle on. Nancy'll be wanting a bit of tea, I don't doubt.' She smiled at me again, while Gracie dutifully lumbered off; then she headed back up the stairs, and I followed.

‘The thing is, Mrs Milne,' I began, ‘this friend of mine, she's in a bit of a state. You see her room-mate up and moved out last week' - Mrs Milne checked slightly, then stepped steadily on - ‘and she can't replace her; and she can't afford all the rent herself, she has only a little part-time work in a milliner‘s, poor thing ...' We had reached the parlour. Mrs Milne turned to face me, and her eyes were troubled.

‘That is a shame,' she said feelingly. ‘A good roomer is hard to find, these days, that I do know. That's why - and I've told you so before, you know I have - that's why me and Gracie've been so glad to have you with us. Why, if you was ever to leave us, Nance -' This seemed the worst possible way for me to tell her, yet I had to speak.

‘Oh, don't say that, Mrs M!' I said lightly. ‘For you see, I'm sorry to say I
shall
be leaving you. This friend of mine has asked me and, well, I said I would take the other girl's place - just to help her out, you know ...' My voice grew thin. Mrs Milne looked grey. She sank into a chair and put a hand to her throat.

‘Oh, Nance ...'

‘Now don't,' I said, with an attempt at jollity, ‘don't be like that; now just don‘t! I'm not so special a boarder, heaven knows; and you'll soon find another nice girl to take my place.'

‘But it ain't me I'm thinking of so much,' she said, ‘as Gracie. You have been so good with her, Nance; there's not many as would understand her like you do; not many who would take the trouble over her little ways, the way you have.'

‘But I shall come back and visit,' I said reasonably. ‘And Grace -' I swallowed as I said it, for I knew there would never be a welcome for Gracie in the stillness and richness and elegance of Diana's villa - ‘Grace can come and visit me. It won't be so bad.'

‘Is it the money, Nance?' she said then. ‘I know you ain't got much -'

‘No, of course it ain't the money,' I said. ‘Indeed -' I had remembered the coin in my pocket: a pound, placed there by Diana's own fingers. It more than covered the rent I owed, and the fortnight's warning I should have given. I held it out to her; but when she only gazed bleakly at it and made no move to take it, I stepped awkwardly to the mantelpiece and laid it softly there.

There was a silence, broken only by Mrs Milne's sighs. I coughed. ‘Well,' I said, ‘I had better go and get my things together ...'

‘What! You ain't leaving us
today?
Not so soon?'

‘I did promise my friend I would,' I said, trying to suggest by my tone that my friend might have all the blame for it.

‘But you'll stay for a bit of tea, at least?'

The thought of the dreary tea-party we would make, with Mrs Milne so ashen and disappointed, and Gracie in all probability in tears, or worse, filled me with dismay. I bit my lip.

‘I'd better not,' I said.

Mrs Milne straightened, and her mouth grew small. She shook her head slowly. ‘This will break my poor girl's heart.'

There was a flintiness to her tone that was more frightening, more shaming, than her sadness had been; but I found myself, again, vaguely piqued. I had opened my mouth to utter some dreadful pleasantry when there came a scuffling at the door, and Grace herself appeared. ‘Tea's hot!' she sang out, all unsuspecting. I could not bear it. I gave her a smile, nodded blindly towards her mother, then made my escape. Her voice - ‘Oh, Ma, what's up?' - pursued me up the stairwell, followed by Mrs Milne's murmurs. In a moment I was in my own room again, with the door closed hard behind me.

 

The little bits and pieces I owned, of course, could be bundled together in a second, in my sailor's bag, and a carpet-bag that Mrs Milne had once given me. My bedclothes I folded and placed neatly at the end of the mattress, and the rug I shook out at the open window; the few little pictures I had pinned to the wall I took down, and burned in the grate. My toilet articles - a cake of cracked yellow soap, a half-used jar of tooth-powder, a tub of face-cream scented with violet - I scooped into the bin. I kept only my toothbrush, and my hair-oil; these, together with an unopened tin of cigarettes and a slab of chocolate, I added to the carpet-bag - though, after a second's hesitation, I took the chocolate out again, and left it on the mantel, where I hoped Grace would find it. In half an hour the room looked quite as it had when I had first moved in. There was nothing at all to mark my stay there save the cluster of pinholes in the wallpaper where my pictures had been tacked, and a scorch-mark on the bedside cabinet where once, slumbering over a magazine, I had let a candle fall. The thought seemed a miserable one; but I would not grow sad. I didn't go to the window, for a last sentimental look at the view from it. I didn't check the drawers, or go poking under the bed, or pull the cushions from the chair. If I had left anything behind I knew that Diana would replace it with something better.

Downstairs all seemed ominously still, and when I arrived at the parlour it was to find its door shut fast against me. I gave a knock, and turned the handle, my heart beating. Mrs Milne was seated before the table, where I had left her. She was less ashen than before, but still looked grim. The teapot stood cooling on its tray, its contents unpoured; the cups lay huddled on their nest of saucers beside it. Gracie sat stiff and straight on the sofa, her face turned effortfully away, her gaze fixed unswervingly - but also, I thought, unseeingly - on the view beyond the window. I had expected her to weep at my news; instead, it seemed to have enraged her. Her lips were clenched and quite drained of colour.

Mrs Milne, at least, appeared to have reconciled herself a little to my departure, for she addressed me now with something like a smile. ‘I'm afraid Gracie is not quite herself,' she said. ‘Your tidings've quite upset her. I told her you'll be coming to see us, but - well - she's that stubborn.'

‘Stubborn?' I said, as if amazed. ‘Not our Gracie?' I took a step towards her and reached out a hand. With something like a yelp she thrust me away, and shuffled to the furthest end of the sofa, her head all the time kept at its stiff, unnatural angle. She had never shown me such displeasure before; when I spoke to her next it was with real feeling.

‘Ah, now don't be like that, Gracie, please. Won't you give me a word, or a kiss, before I go? Won't you shake hands with me, even? I shall miss you, so; and I should hate us to part on bad terms, after all our fun together.' And I went on in this fashion, half entreating, half reproachful, until Mrs Milne rose and touched my shoulder, and said quietly, ‘Best leave her, Nance, and be on your way. You come back and see her another day; she'll've come round by then, I don't doubt it.'

So I had to leave, in the end, without Grace's good-bye kiss. Her mother accompanied me to the front door, where we stood awkwardly before the
Light of the World
and the blue effeminate idol, she with her arms folded over her bosom, me hung with bags, and still clad in my scarlet duds.

‘I'm sorry, Mrs M, that this has been so sudden,' I tried; but she hushed me.

‘Never mind, dear. You must go your own way.' She was too kind to be stern for long. I said that I had left my room in order; that I would send her my address (I never did, I never did!); and lastly that she was the best landlady in the city, and that if her next girl did not appreciate her I would make it my business to find out why.

She smiled in earnest then, and we hugged. Yet, as we drew apart, I could sense that something was troubling her; and as I stood on the step for my final farewell, she spoke.

‘Nance,' she said, ‘don't mind me asking, but - this friend: it is a girl, ain't it?'

I snorted. ‘Oh, Mrs Milne! Did you really think - ? Did you really think that I would - ?' That I would set up house with a man, was what she meant: me, with my trousers and my barbered hair! She blushed.

‘I just thought,' she said. ‘A girl can get herself hooked up by a feller, these days, quicker'n that. And what with you moving out so sudden, I was half convinced you'd let some gentleman or other make you a pile of promises. I should've known better.'

My laughter rang a little hollowly then, as I thought of how near her thoughts ran to the truth, while yet remaining so far from it.

I took a firmer grip of my bags. I had told her I was heading for the cab rank on the King's Cross Road, since that was the direction in which I must walk in order to rejoin Diana's driver. Her eyes, which had stayed dry through all her first shock at my news, now began to glisten. She kept her place on the doorstep as I made my slow, awkward way down Green Street. ‘Don't forget us, love!' she called out, and I turned to wave. At the parlour window a figure had appeared. Grace! She had unbent enough, then, to watch me leave. I widened the arc of my wave, then caught up my cap and flapped that at her. Two boys turning somersaults on a broken railing stopped their game to give me a playful salute: they took me for a soldier, I suppose, whose leave had all run out, and Mrs Milne for my tearful, white-haired old mother, and Gracie no doubt for my sister or my wife. But for all that I waved and blew kisses, she made me no sign, simply stood with her head and her hands upon the window-pane, which pressed a whiter circle to the centre of her pale brow, and to the end of each blunt finger. At last I let my arm slow, and fall.

‘She
don't love yer much,' said one of the boys; and when I had looked from him back to the house, Mrs Milne had gone. Gracie, however, still stood and watched. Her gaze - cold and hard as alabaster, piercing as a pin - pursued me to the corner of the King's Cross Road. Even up the steep climb to Percy Circus, where the windows of Green Street are quite hidden from view, it seemed to prick and worry at the flesh upon my back. Only when I had seated myself in the shadowy interior of Diana's carriage, and made fast the latch of the door, did I feel quite free of it, and secure once again on the path of my new life.

But even then there was another reminder of my unpaid debts to the old one. For on our drive along the Euston Road we neared the corner of Judd Street, and all at once I remembered the appointment I had made, to meet my new friend Florence. It was for Friday: that, I realised, was today. I had said that I would see her at the entrance to the public house at six o'clock, and it must, I thought, be past six now ... Even as I thought it, the carriage slowed in the traffic and I saw her standing there, a little way along the street, waiting for me. The brougham crawled still slower; from behind the lace of its windows I could see her perfectly, frowning to her left and right, then bending her head to look at the watch at her bosom, then raising a hand to tuck a curl in place. Her face, I thought, was so very plain and kind. I had a sudden urge to tug at the latch of the door, and race down the street to her side; I could at least, I thought, call to the driver to stop his horse, so that I might shout some apology to her ...

But while I sat, anxious and undecided, the traffic grew swift, the carriage gave a jerk, and in a moment Judd Street and plain, kind Florence were far behind me. I could not bear the thought, then, of asking the forbidding Mr Shilling to turn the horse around, for all that I was his mistress for the afternoon. And besides, what would I say to her? I would never, I supposed, be free to meet with her again; and I could hardly expect to have her visit me at Diana's. She would be surprised, I thought, and cross, when I didn't turn up: the third woman to be disappointed by me that day. I was sorry, too - but, on reflection, not terribly sorry. Not terribly sorry at all.