Tipping the Velvet (40 page)

I might be Perseus, with a curved sword and a head of the Medusa, and sandals with straps that were buckled at the knee. I might be Cupid, with wings and a bow. I was once St Sebastian, tied to a stump - I remember what a job it was to fasten the arrows so they would not droop.

Then, another night I was an Amazon. I carried the Cupid's bow, but this time had one breast uncovered; Diana rouged the nipple. Next week - she said I had shown one, I might as well show both - I was the French Marianne, with a Phyrgian cap and a flag. The week after that I was Salome: I had the Medusa head again, but on a plate, and with a beard stuck on it; and while the ladies clapped I danced down to my drawers.

And the week after that - well, that week I was Hermaphroditus. I wore a crown of laurel, a layer of silver greasepaint - and nothing else save, strapped to my hips, Diana's
Monsieur Dildo.
The ladies gasped to see him.

That made him quiver.

And as the quiver did its usual work on me, I thought of Kitty. I wondered if she was still wearing suits and a topper, still singing songs like ‘Sweethearts and Wives'.

Then Diana came, and put a pink cigarette between my lips, and led me amongst the ladies and had them stroke the leather. I cannot say if it was Kitty I thought of then, or even Diana herself. I believe I thought I was a renter again, in Piccadilly - or, not a renter, but a renter's gent. For when I twitched and cried out there were smiles in the shadows; and when I shuddered, and wept, there was laughter.

 

I could help none of it. It was all Diana's doing. She was so bold, she was so passionate, she was so devilishly clever. She was like a queen, with her own queer court - I saw it, at those parties. Women sought her out, and watched her. They brought presents, ‘for your collection' - her collection was talked about, and envied! When she made a gesture, they raised their heads to catch it. When she spoke, they listened. It was her voice, I think, which snared them - those low, musical tones, which had once lured me from my random midnight wanderings into the heart of her own dark world. Again and again I heard arguments crumble at a cry or a murmur from Diana's throat; again and again the scattered conversations of a crowded room would falter and die, as one speaker after another surrendered the slender threads of some anecdote or fancy to catch at the more compelling cadences of hers.

Her boldness was contagious. Women came to her, and grew giddy. She was like a singer, shivering glasses. She was like a cancer, she was like a mould. She was like the hero of one of her own gross romances - you might set her in a chamber with a governess and a nun, and in an hour they would have torn out their own hair, to fashion a whip.

I sound weary of her. I was not weary of her then. How could I have been? We were a perfect kind of double act. She was lewd, she was daring - but who made that daring visible? Who could testify to the passion of her; to the sympathetic power of her; to the rare, enchanted atmosphere of her house in Felicity Place, where ordinary ways and rules seemed all suspended, and wanton riot reigned? Who, but I?

I was proof of all her pleasures. I was the stain left by her lust. She must keep me, or lose everything.

And I must keep her, or have nothing. I could not imagine a life beyond her shaping. She had awakened particular appetites in me; and where else, I thought, but with Diana, in the company of Sapphists - where else would those queer hungers be assuaged?

 

I have spoken of the peculiarly
timeless
quality of my new life, of my removal from the ordinary workings of the hours, the days and the weeks. Diana and I often made love until dawn, and ate breakfast at nightfall; or else, we woke at the regular time, but stayed abed with the drapes close-drawn, and took our lunch by candle-light. Once we rang for Blake, and she came in her night-gown: it was half-past three, we had woken her from her bed. Another time I was roused by bird-song: I squinted at the lines of light around the shutters, and realised I had not seen the sun for a week. In a house kept uniformly warm by the labour of servants, and with a carriage to collect us and deposit us where we wished, even the seasons lost their meanings or gained new ones. I knew winter had arrived only when Diana's walking-dresses changed from silk to corduroy, her cloaks from grenadine to sable; and when my own closet rail sagged with astrakhan, and camel's-hair, and tweed.

But there was one anniversary from the old order of things that, even in the enchanted atmosphere of Felicity Place, surrounded by so much narcotic luxury, I could not quite forget. One day, when I had been Diana's lover for a little less than a year, I was woken by the rustle of news-sheet. My mistress was beside me with the morning paper, and I opened my eyes upon a headline.
Home Rule Bill,
it said;
Irish
to
Demonstrate June 3rd.
I gave a cry. It was not the words which arrested me - they meant nothing to me. The date, however, was as familiar as my own name. June the third was my birthday; in a week I should be twenty-three.

‘Twenty-three!' said Diana when I told her, in a kind of delight. ‘What a really glorious age that is! With your youth still hot upon you, like a lover in a pant; and time with his face around the curtain, peeping on.' She could talk like this, even first thing in the morning; I only yawned. But then she said that we must celebrate - and at that, I looked livelier. ‘What shall we do,' she said, ‘that we haven't done before? Where shall I take you ... ?'

Where she hit upon, in the end, was the Opera.

The idea sounded a terrible one to me, though I did not like to show it - I had not yet grown sulky with her, as I was later to do. And I was still too much of a child to be anything other than enchanted with my own birthday, when it finally arrived; and of course, there were presents - and presents never lost their charm.

I was given them at breakfast, in two gold parcels. The first, was large, and held a cloak - a proper opera-going cloak, it was, and very grand; but then, I had expected that, and hardly considered it a gift at all. The second parcel, however, proved more marvellous. It was small and light: I knew at once it must be some piece of jewellery - perhaps, a pair of links; or a stud for my cravats; or a ring. Dickie wore a ring on the smallest finger of her left hand, and I had often admired it - yes, I was sure it must be a ring, like Dickie's.

But it was not a ring. It was a watch, of silver, on a slender strap of leather. It had two dark arms to show the minutes and the hours, and a faster, sweeping arm to count the seconds. Upon the face, there was glass: the arms were moved by the winder. I turned it in my hands, Diana smiling as I did so. ‘It's for your wrist,' she said at last.

I gazed at her in wonder - people never wore wrist-watches then, it was marvellously exotic and new - then tried to buckle the watch upon my arm. I could not manage it, of course: like so many of the things in Felicity Place, you really needed a maid to do it properly. In the end, Diana fastened it for me; and then we both sat gazing at the little face, the sweeping hand, and listened to the ticking.

I said, ‘Diana, it's the most wonderful thing I ever saw!', and she pinked, and looked pleased: she was a bitch, but she was human, too.

Later, when Maria came to call, I showed her the watch and she nodded and smiled at it, stroking my wrist beneath the leather of the strap. Then she laughed. ‘My dear, the time is wrong! You have it set at seven, and it's only a quarter-past four!'

I looked at the face again, and gave a frown of surprise. I had been wearing it as a kind of bracelet, only: it had not occurred to me to tell the time with it. Now I moved the arms to 4 and 3, for Maria's sake - but there was really no need, of course, for me ever to wind it at all.

The watch was my finest gift; but there was a present, too, from Maria herself: a walking-cane, of ebony, with a tassel at the top and a silver tip. It went very well with my new opera gear; indeed, we made a very striking couple that night, Diana and I, for her costume was of black and white and silver, to match my own. It came from Worth's: I thought we must look just as if we had stepped out from the pages of a fashion paper. I made sure, when walking, to hold my left arm very straight, so the watch would show.

We dined in a room at the Solferino. We dined with Dickie and Maria - Maria brought Satin, her whippet, and fed him dainties from a plate. The waiters had been told it was my birthday, and fussed around me, offering wine. ‘How old is the young gentleman today?' they asked Diana; and the way they asked it showed they thought me younger than I was. They might, I suppose, have taken Diana for my mother; for various reasons, the idea was not a nice one. Once, though, I had stopped at a shoe-black while Diana and her friends stood near to watch it, and the man - catching sight of Dickie and reading tommishness, as many regular people do, as a kind of family likeness - asked me if she, Dickie, were not my Auntie, taking me out for the day; and it had been worth being mistaken for a schoolboy, for the sake of her expression. She once or twice tried to compete with me, on the question of suits. The night of my birthday, for example, she wore a shirt with cuff-links and, above her skirt, a short gent's cloak. At her throat, however, she had a jabot - I should never have worn anything so effeminate. She did not know it - she would have been horrified to know it! - but she looked like nothing so much as a weary old mary-anne - one of the kind you see sometimes holding court, with younger boys, on Piccadilly: they have rented so long they're known as queens.

Our supper was a very fine one, and when it was over Diana sent a waiter for a cab. As I have said, I had thought her plan not much of a treat; but even I could not help being excited as our hansom joined the line of rocking carriages at the door of the Royal Opera, and we - Diana, Maria, Dickie and I - entered the crush of gentlemen and ladies in the lobby. I had never been here before; had never, in a year of fitful chaperoning, been part of such a rich and handsome crowd - the gents, like me, all in cloaks and silk hats and carrying glasses; the ladies in diamonds, and wearing gloves so high and slender they might all have just left off dipping their arms, to the armpit, in tubs of milk.

We stood jostling in the lobby for a moment or two, Diana exchanging nods with certain ladies that she recognised, Maria holding Satin at her bosom, out of the crush of heels and trains and sweeping cloaks. Dickie said she would fetch us a tray of drinks, and went off to do so. Diana said, ‘Take our coats, Neville, will you?' nodding to a counter where two men stood, in uniform, receiving cloaks. She turned to let me draw the coat from her, Maria did the same, and I picked my way across the lobby with them, then paused to unfasten my own cloak - thinking all the time, only, what a handsome gathering it was, and how well I looked in it! and making sure that the coats I carried weren't falling over my wrist and obscuring the watch. The counter had a queue at it, and as I waited I looked idly at the men whose job it was to collect the cloaks from the gents, and give them tickets. One of them was slim, with a sallow face - he might have been Italian. The other man was a black man. When I reached the desk at last and he tilted his face to the garments I gave him, I saw that he was Billy-Boy, my old smoking-partner from the Brit.

At first, I only stared; I think, actually, that I was considering how I might best make my escape before he saw me. But then, when he tugged at the coats and I failed to release them, he raised his eyes - and I knew that he didn't recognise me at all, only wondered why I hesitated; and the thought made me terribly sorry. I said, ‘Bill', and he looked harder. Then he said: ‘Sir?'

I swallowed. I said again, ‘Bill. Don't you remember me?' Then I leaned and lowered my voice. ‘It's Nan,' I said, ‘Nan King.' His face changed. He said, ‘My God!'

Behind me, the queue had grown longer; now there came a cry: ‘What's the delay there?' Bill took the coats from me at last, walked quickly to a hook with them, and gave me a ticket. Then he stepped a little to one side, leaving his friend to struggle with the cloaks, for a minute, on his own. I moved too, away from the jostling gents, and we stood facing each other across the desk, shaking our heads. His brow was shiny with sweat. His uniform was a white bum-shaver jacket and a cheap bow-tie, of scarlet.

He said, ‘Lord, Nan, but you gave me a fright! I thought you must be some gentleman I owed money to.' He looked at my trousers, my jacket, my hair. ‘What are you up to, wandering about like that,
here?'
He wiped his brow, then looked about him. ‘Are you here with an agent? You're not in the
show,
Nan - are you?'

I shook my head; and then I said, very quietly, ‘You mustn't say “Nan” now, Bill. The fact is -' The fact was, I hadn't thought what I would tell him. I hesitated; but it was impossible to lie to him: ‘Bill, I'm living as a boy just now.'

‘As a boy?' He said it loudly; then put a hand before his mouth. Even so, one or two of the grumbling gents in the queue turned their heads. I edged a little further away from them. I said again: ‘I'm living as a boy, with a lady who takes care of me ...' And at that, at last, he looked a little more knowing, and nodded.

Behind him, the Italian dropped a gentleman's hat, and the gentleman tutted. Bill said, ‘Can you wait?' and stepped to help his friend by taking another couple of cloaks. Then he moved towards me again. The Italian looked sour.

I glanced over to Diana and Maria. The lobby had emptied a bit; they stood waiting for me. Maria had placed Satin on the floor and he was scratching at her skirt. Diana turned to catch my eye. I looked at Bill.

‘How
are
you, then?' I asked him.

He looked rueful, and lifted his hand: there was a wedding-ring on it. He said, ‘Well, I am married now, for a start!'