Tipping the Velvet (53 page)

When the house wasn't being shivered to its foundations by the thud of Janet's footsteps on the stairs, it was trembling to the arguments and the laughter of Florence's girl-friends, who came by regularly to bring books and pamphlets and bits of gossip, and to take tea. I thought them a very quaint breed, these girls. They all worked; but, like Annie Page, the sanitary inspector, not one of them had a dull, straightforward kind of job - making felt hats, or dressing feathers, or serving in a shop. Instead they all worked for charities or in homes: they all had lists of cripples, or immigrants, or orphaned girls, whom it was their continual ambition to set up in jobs, houses, and friendly societies. Every story they told began the same: ‘I had a girl come into the office today...'

‘I had a girl come into the office today, fresh from gaol, and her mother has taken her baby and disappeared with it ...'

‘I had a poor woman come into the office today: she was brought over from India as a maid, and now the family won't pay her passage back ...'

‘There was a woman come in today: she has been ruined by a gent, and the gent has given her such a thump she -' This particular story, however, never got finished: the girl who was telling it caught sight of me, perched on an armchair at Florence's elbow; then she flushed pink, and put her cup to her lips, and turned the subject. They had all had my history-my pretend history - from Florence herself. When they weren't blushing into their tea-cups over it, they were taking me aside to ask me, privately, Was I quite well now? and to recommend some man who would prove helpful if I thought to take my case to court, or else some vegetable treatment that would ease the bruising at my cheek ...

All of Ralph and Florence's circle, in fact, were quite sickeningly kind and earnest and conscientious over matters like this. As I could not help but find out very early on, the Banners were big in the local labour movement - they always had some desperate project on hand, some plan to get a parliamentary act passed or opposed; the parlour, as a consequence, was always full of people holding emergency meetings or dreary debates. Ralph was a cutter in a silk factory, and secretary of the silk workers' union. Florence - as well as working at the Stratford girls' home, Freemantle House - volunteered for a thing called the Women's Cooperative Guild: it was Guild work (not lists, as I had imagined, of friendless girls) which had kept her up so late on the night of my arrival at her home - and which, indeed, kept her up late on many subsequent nights, balancing budgets and writing letters. In those early days, I would occasionally glance at the pages she worked on; but whatever I saw, made me frown. ‘What does it mean,
cooperative
?' I asked her once. It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place.

And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana's drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence's house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!' a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.' I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle.

Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,' she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won't mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...' There was always something like this - always some neighbour in trouble, and needing money, or help, or a letter writing or a visit to the police; and it was always Ralph and Florence that they came to - I had not been with them a week before I saw Ralph leave his supper and run along the street in his shirt-sleeves, to give some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against. Now, hearing Florence's plans to visit the family that had the bailiffs coming, I grew sour. ‘You're a regular pair of saints, you two,' I said, filling a bowl with soapy water. ‘You never have a minute for yourselves. You have a pretty house - now that I am here to make it so - and not one moment to enjoy it. You earn a decent wage, between you, and yet you give it all away!'

‘If I wanted to close my doors to my neighbours and gaze all night at my pretty walls,' she replied, still passing a hand across her bleary features, ‘I would move to Hampstead! I have lived in this house all my life; there's not a family in this street who didn't help Mother out, at one time or another, when we were kids and things were rather hard. You're right: we do draw a fair wage between us, Ralph and me; but do you think I could enjoy my thirty shillings, knowing that Mrs Monks next door must live, with all her girls, on ten? That Mrs Kenny across the street, whose husband is sick, must make do with the three shillings she gets making paper flowers, sitting up all night and squinting at the wretched things until she is gone half-blind...'

‘All right,' I said. She made speeches like this often - sounding always, I thought, like a Daughter of the People in some sentimental novel of East End life: Maria Jex had liked to read such novels, and Diana had liked to laugh at her. I didn't say this to Florence, however. I didn't say anything at all. But when she and Ralph and their union friends had gone, I sat down in an armchair in the parlour, rather heavily. The truth was, I hated their charity; I hated their good works, their missions, their orphan protégés. I hated them, because I knew that I was one of them. I had thought that Florence had let me into her house through some extraordinary favour to myself; but what kind of a compliment was it, when she and her brother would regularly take in any old josser that happened to be staggering about the street, down on his luck, and give him supper? It was not that they were careless with me. Ralph, for example, I knew to be the gentlest man that I should ever meet: no one, not even the most hardened Sapphist in the city, could have lived with Ralph without loving him a little; and I - who liked to think of myself as no very soft tom - learned early on to love him a great deal. Florence, too, was pleasant enough to me, in her own tired, distracted sort of way. But though she ate the suppers I cooked; though she handed me Cyril to wash and dress and cradle; and though, when a month had passed, she had agreed that I might stay if I still cared to, and sent Ralph into the attic to bring me down a little truckle-bed, which she said would be cosier, in the parlour, than the two armchairs - though she did all these things, she never did them as if she really did them for me. She did them because the suppers and the baby-minding gave her more hours to devote to her other causes. She had given me work, as a lady might give work to a shiftless girl, come fresh from prison.

I should not have been myself, if her indifference had not rather piqued me. I had spent eighteen months at Felicity Place, shaping my behaviour to the desires of lustful ladies until I was as skilled and as subtle at it as a glove-maker: I could not throw those skills over now, just because I also learned the blacking of a grate. On Florence, however, the skills proved useless. ‘She really can't be a tom,' I would say to myself - for, if she never flirted with me, then there were plenty of other girls who passed through our parlour, and I never saw her flirt with a single one of them, not once. But then, I never saw her flirting with a fellow, either. At last, I supposed she was too good to fall in love with anyone.

And, after all, I had not come to Quilter Street to flirt; I had come to be ordinary. And knowing there was no one's eye to charm or set smarting only made me more ordinary still. My hair - which had lost its military sharpness after a week or two, anyway - I let grow; I even began to curl it at the ends. My pinching boots became less stiff, the more I walked in them; but I traded them in, at a second-hand clothes stall, for a pair of shoes with bows on. I did the same with my bonnet and my rusty frock - exchanged them, for a hat with a wired flower and a dress with ribbon at the neck. ‘Now, there's a pretty frock!' said Ralph to me, when I put it on for the first time; but Ralph would have told me I looked handsome wrapped in a piece of brown paper, if he thought it would make me smile. The truth was, I had looked awful ever since leaving St John's Wood; and now, in a flowery frock, I only looked extraordinarily awful. The clothes I had bought, they were the kind I'd used to wear in Whitstable and with Kitty; and I seemed to remember that I had been known then as a handsome enough girl. But it was as if wearing gentlemen's suits had magically unfitted me for girlishness, for ever - as if my jaw had grown firmer, my brows heavier, my hips slimmer and my hands extra large, to match the clothes Diana had put me in. The bruise at my eye faded quickly enough, but the brawl with Dickie's book had left me with a scar at my cheek - I have it there still; and this, combined with the new firmness at my shoulders and thighs, got from carrying buckets and whitening steps, gave me something of the air of a rough. When I washed in the mornings in a bowl in the kitchen, and caught sight of myself, from a certain angle, reflected in the darkened window, I looked like a youth in the back-room of some boys' club, rinsing himself down after a boxing match. How Diana would have admired me! At Quilter Street, however, as I have said, there was no one to gasp. By the time Ralph and Florence came down for their breakfasts, I would have my frock upon me and my hair in a curl; and then, more often than not, Florence would only gulp at her tea and say she had no time to eat, she was calling at the Guild on her way to work. Ralph would help himself to the red herrings left on her plate -‘My word, Cyril, but don't these look good!' - and she would leave, without a glance at me, wrapping a muffler about her throat like a woman of ninety.

However much I thought about her - and I spent many hours at it: for there is not much to occupy the brain in housework, and I might as well puzzle over her, as over anything - I could not figure her out, at all. The Florence I had met first, the Green Street Florence, had been gay; she had had hair that twisted from her head like bed-springs, she had worn skirts as bright as mustard, she had laughed and shown her teeth. Florence Banner of Bethnal Green, however, was only grave, and weary. Her hair was limp, and her dresses were dark, or the colour of rust or dust or ashes; and when she smiled, you found you were surprised by it, and flinched.

For her temper, I discovered, was fickle. She was kind as an angel to the undeserving poor of Bethnal Green; but at home she was sometimes depressed, and very often cross - I would see her brother and her friends tiptoeing about her chair, so as not to rouse her: I thought their patience quite astonishing. She might be gay as you like, for days at a time; but then she would come home from a walk, or wake one morning, as if from troubled dreams, dispirited. Strangest of all, to my mind, was her behaviour towards Cyril: for though I knew she loved him as her own, she would sometimes seem to turn her eyes from him, or push his grasping hands away, as if she hated him; then at other times she would seize him and cover him with kisses until he squealed. I had been at Quilter Street for several months when the talk, one evening, turned to birthdays; and I realised with a little start of surprise that Cyril's must have passed and gone uncelebrated. When I asked Ralph about it he answered that, just as I'd thought, it had passed in July, but they had not thought it worthwhile to mark it. I said, laughing, ‘Oh, do socialists not keep birthdays, then?' and he had smiled; Florence, however, had risen without a word, and left the room. I wondered again about what story there might be behind the baby; but Florence offered no clue to it, and I did not pry. I thought, if I did, that it might prompt her to ask me again about the gent who had supposedly kept me in luxury, then blacked my eye: she had never referred to him after that first night. I was glad she hadn't. She was so good and honest, after all- I should have hated to have had to lie to her.

Indeed, I should have hated to have had to abuse her, in any way. When she worked so hard and grew so weary, it made me pace about the room and wring my hands, and want to shake her. It was not her job at the girls' home that so exhausted her, it was the endless guild and union work - the piles of lists and ledgers she would place upon the supper-table, when the supper-things had been cleared off it, and squint at, all night long, until her eyes were red, and creased as currants. Sometimes, since I had nothing better to do, I would take a chair and sit beside her, and make her share the chores with me: she gave me envelopes to address, or other little harmless tasks I could not muddle. When, in spring, the Guild set up a local seamstresses' union, and Florence began visiting the home-workers of Bethnal Green - all the poor women who worked long hours, alone, in squalid rooms, for wretched pay - I went with her. The scenes we saw were very miserable, and the women were pleased to be visited, and the Guild was grateful; but it was for Florence's sake I really went. I couldn't bear for her to do the dreary task, and walk the East End streets, at night, alone.