Tipping the Velvet (41 page)

‘Married! Oh, Bill, I am happy for you! Who's the girl? It's not Flora? Not Flora, our old dresser?' He nodded, and said it was.

‘It is on account of Flora,' he added, ‘that I am working here. She has a job on round the corner, a month at the Old Mo. She is still, you know' - he looked suddenly rather awkward — 's he is still, you know, dressing Kitty ...'

I stared at him. There came more mutters from the queue of gents, and more sour looks from the Italian, and he stepped back again to help with the cloaks and hats and tickets. I lifted a hand to my head, and put my fingers through my hair, and tried to understand what he had told me. He was married to Flora, and Flora was still with Kitty; and Kitty had a spot at the Middlesex Music Hall. And that was about three streets away from where I stood now.

And Kitty, of course, was married to Walter.

Are they happy?
I wanted to call to Bill then.
Does she talk of me, ever? Does she think of me? Does she miss me?
But when he returned - looking even more flustered and damp about the brow - I said only, ‘How's - how's the act, Bill?'

‘The act?' He sniffed. ‘Not so good,
I
don't think. Not so good as the old days ...'

We gazed at one another. I looked harder at his face, and saw that he had gained a bit of weight beneath his chin, and that the flesh about his eyes was rather darker than I knew it. Then the Italian called, ‘Bill, will you come?' And Bill said that he must go.

I nodded, and held my hand out to him. As he shook it, he seemed to hesitate again. Then he said, very quickly, ‘You know, we was all really sorry, when you took off like that, from the Brit.' I shrugged. ‘And Kitty,' he went on, ‘well, Kitty was sorriest of all of us. She put notices, with Walter, in the
Era
and the
Ref,
week after week. Did you never see 'em, Nan, those notices?'

‘No, Bill, I never did.'

He shook his head. ‘And now, here you are, dressed up like a lord!' But he gave my suit a dubious glance, and added: ‘You're sure though, are you, that you're doing all right?'

I didn't answer him. I only looked over to Diana again. She was tilting her head to gaze after me; beside her stood Maria, and Satin, and Dickie. Dickie held our tray of drinks, and had placed her monocle at her eye. She said, ‘The wine will warm, Diana,' in a pettish sort of voice: the lobby was thinned of people, I could hear her very clearly.

Diana tilted her head again: ‘What is the boy doing?'

‘He is talking to the nigger,' answered Maria, ‘at the cloaks!'

I felt my cheeks flame red, and looked quickly back at Bill. His gaze had followed mine, but now had been caught by a gentleman offering a coat, and he was lifting the garment over the counter, and already turning with it to the row of hooks.

‘Good-bye, Bill,' I said, and he nodded over his shoulder, and gave me a sad little smile of farewell. I took a step away - but then, very quickly, I returned to the counter and put my hand upon his arm. I said: ‘What's Kitty's place, on the bill at the Mo?'

‘Her place?' He thought about it, folding another cloak. ‘I'm not sure. Second half, near the start, half-past nine or so ...'

Then Maria's voice came calling: ‘Is there trouble, Neville, over the tip?'

I knew then that if I lingered near him any longer some terrible sort of scene would ensue. I didn't look at him again but went back to Diana at once, and said it was nothing, I was sorry. But when she raised a hand to smooth back the hair I had unsettled, I flinched, feeling Bill's eyes upon me; and when she pulled my arm through hers, and Maria stepped around me to take my other arm, the flesh upon my back seemed to give a kind of shudder, as if there was a pistol pointed at it.

The hall itself, which was so grand and glorious, I only gazed at rather dully. We did not have a box - there had not been time to book a box - but our seats were very good ones, in the centre of one of the front rows of the stalls. I had made us late, however, and the stalls were almost full: we had to stumble over twenty pairs of legs to reach our seats. Dickie spilled her wine. Satin snapped at a lady with a fox-fur around her throat. Diana, when she sat at last, was thin-lipped and self-conscious: this was not the kind of entrance she had planned for us, at all.

And I sat, numb to her, numb to all of it. I could think only of Kitty. That she was still in the halls, in her act with Walter. That Bill saw her daily - would see her later, after the show, when he fetched Flora. That even now, while the actors in the opera we had come to see were putting on their grease-paint, she was sitting in a dressing-room three streets away, putting on hers.

As I thought all this, the conductor appeared, and was clapped; the lights went down, and the crowd grew silent. When the music started and the curtain went up at last, I gazed at the stage in a kind of stupor. And when the singing began, I flinched. The opera was
Figaro's Wedding.

I can remember hardly any of it. I thought only of Kitty. My seat seemed impossibly narrow and hard, and I shifted and turned in it, till Diana leaned to whisper that I must be still. I thought of all the times I had walked through the city, fearful of turning a corner and seeing Kitty there; I thought of the disguise I had adopted, to avoid her. Indeed, avoiding Kitty had become, in my renter days, a kind of second nature to me, so that there were whole areas of London through which I automatically never passed, streets at which I didn't have to pause, for thought, before I turned away to find another. I was like a man with a bruise or a broken limb, who learns to walk in a crowd so that the wound might not be jostled. Now, knowing that Kitty was so near, it was as if I was compelled to press the bruise, to twist the shrieking limb, myself. The music grew louder, and my head began to ache; my seat seemed narrower than ever. I looked at my watch, but the lights were too low for me to read it; I had to tilt it so that its face caught the glow from the stage, and in doing so, my elbow caught Diana and made her sigh with pique, and glare at me. The watch showed five to nine — how glad I was that I had wound it, now! The opera was just at that ridiculous point where the countess and the maid have forced the principal boy into a frock and locked him in a closet, and the singing and the rushing about is at its worst. I turned to Diana. I said, ‘Diana, I can't bear it. I shall have to wait for you in the lobby.' She put a hand out to grip my arm, but I shook her away, and rose and — saying ‘Pardon me, oh! pardon-me!' to every tutting lady and gent whose legs I stumbled over or feet I trampled — I made my halting way along the row, towards the usher and the door.

Outside, the lobby was wonderfully quiet after all the shrieking on the stage. At the coat-desk the Italian man sat with a paper. When I went over to him, he sniffed: ‘He ain't here,' he said, when I asked after Bill. ‘He don't stay once the show starts. Did you want your cloak?'

I said I didn't. I left the theatre, and headed for Drury Lane — very conscious of my suit, and the shine on my shoes, and the flower at my lapel. When I reached the Middlesex I found a group of boys outside it studying the programme and commenting on the acts. I went and peered over their shoulders, looking for the names I wanted, and a number.

Walter Waters and Kitty,
I saw at last: it gave me a shock to know that Kitty had lost her
Butler,
and was working under Walter's old stage-name. They were, as Bill had said, placed near the start of the second half — fourteenth on the list, after a singer and a Chinese conjuror.

In the booth inside sat a girl in a violet dress. I went to her window, then nodded to the hall. ‘Who's on stage?' I asked. ‘What number are they at?' She looked up; and when she saw my suit, she tittered.

‘You've lost your way, dearie,' she said. ‘You want the Opera, round the corner.' I bit my lip, and said nothing, and her smile faded. ‘All right, Lord Alfred,' she said then. ‘It's number twelve, Belle Baxter, Cockney Chanteuse.'

I bought a sixpenny ticket — she pulled a face at that, of course: ‘Thought we should have the red carpet brung up, at the least.' The truth was, I dared not venture too close to the stage. I imagined Billy-Boy having come to the theatre and told Kitty that he had met me, and how I was dressed. I remembered how near the crowd could seem, from a stage in a small hall, when you stepped out of the limes; and in my coat and my bow-tie, of course, I would be conspicuous. How terrible it would be, to have Kitty see me as I watched her — to have her fix her eyes on mine, as she sang to Walter!

So I went up to the gallery. The stairs were narrow: when I turned a corner and found a couple there, spooning, I had to step around them, very close. Like the girl in the booth, they gazed at my suit and, as she had done, they tittered. I could hear the thumping of the orchestra through the wall. As I climbed to the door at the top of the staircase and the thumps grew louder, my own heart seemed to beat against my breast, in time to them. When I passed into the hall at last — into the lurid half-light, and the heat and the smoke and the reek of the calling crowd — I almost staggered.

On the stage was a girl in a flame-coloured frock, twitching her skirts so her stockings showed. She finished one song while I stood there, clutching at a pillar to steady myself; and then she started on another. The crowd seemed to know it. There were claps, and whistles; and before these had quite died down, I made my way along the aisle to an empty seat. It turned out to be at the end of a line of boys - a bad choice, for, of course, when they saw me there in my opera suit and my flower, they nudged each other, and sniggered. One coughed into his hand - only the cough came out as
Toff!
I turned my face from them, and looked hard at the stage. Then, after a moment, I took out a cigarette and lit it. As I struck the match, my hand trembled.

The Cockney Chanteuse finished her set at last. There were cheers, then a brief delay, marked by shouts and shuffling and rustling, before the orchestra struck up with its introduction for the next act - a tinkling, Chinese melody, which made a boy in the line along from me stand up, and call out, ‘Ninkypoo!' Then the curtain rose on a magician and a girl, and a black japanned cabinet - a cabinet not unlike the one that sat in Diana's bedroom. When the magician snapped his fingers, there was a flash, and a crack, and a puff of purple smoke; and at that the boys put their fingers to their lips, and whistled.

I had seen - or felt as if I had seen - a thousand such acts; and I watched this one now, with my cigarette gripped hard between my lips, growing steadily more sick and more uncertain. I remembered sitting in my box at the Canterbury Palace, with my fluttering heart and my gloves with the bows: it seemed a time immeasurably distant and quaint. But, as I had used to do then, I clutched the sticky velvet of my seat, and gazed at where, with a hint of drooping rope and dusty floorboard, the stage gave way to the wings, and I thought of Kitty. She was there, somewhere, just beyond the edge of the curtain, perhaps straightening her costume - whatever that was; perhaps chatting with Walter or Flora; perhaps staring, as Billy-Boy told her of me - perhaps smiling, perhaps weeping, perhaps saying only, mildly, ‘Fancy that!' - and then forgetting me...

I thought all this, and the magician performed his final trick. There was another flash, and more smoke: the smoke drifted as far as the gallery, and left the entire crowd coughing, but cheering through their coughs. The curtain fell, there was another delay while the number was changed, and then a quiver of blue, white and amber, as the limes-man changed the filter across his beam. I had finished my cigarette, and now reached for another. This time, the boys in my row all saw me do it, so I held the case to them, and they each took a fag: ‘Very generous.' I thought of Diana. Suppose the opera had ended, and she was waiting for me, cursing, beating her programme against her thigh?

Suppose she went back to Felicity Place, without me?

But then there came music, and the creak of the curtain. I looked at the stage - and Walter was on it.

He seemed very large - much larger than I remembered. Perhaps he had grown fatter; perhaps his costume was a little padded. His whiskers he had teased with a comb, to make them stand out rather comically. He wore tartan peg-top trousers and a green velvet jacket; and on his head was a smoking-cap, in his pocket a pipe. Behind him, there was a cloth with a scene on it representing a parlour. Beside him was an armchair that he leaned on as he sang. He was quite alone. I had never seen him in costume and paint before. He was so unlike the figure I still saw, sometimes, in my dreams - the figure with the flapping shirt, the dampened beard, the hand on Kitty — that I looked at him, and frowned: my heart had barely twitched, to see him standing there.

His voice was a mild baritone, and not at all unpleasant; there had been a burst of applause at his first appearance, and there was another round of satisfied clapping now, and one or two cheers. His song, however, was a strange one: he sang of a son that he had lost, named ‘Little Jacky'. There were a number of verses, each of them ending on the same refrain - it might have been, ‘Where, oh where, is Little Jacky now?' I thought it queer he should be there, singing such a song, alone. Where was Kitty? I drew hard on my cigarette. I couldn't imagine how she would fit into this routine, in a silk hat, a bow-tie and a flower ...

Suddenly a horrible idea began to form itself in my mind. Walter had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and was dabbing at his eye with it. His voice rose on the predictable chorus, and was joined by not a few from the hall: ‘But where, oh
where,
is Little Jacky now?' I shifted in my seat. I thought, Let it not be that! Oh please, oh please, let the act not be that!