Tipping the Velvet (56 page)

She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.

But before she could reach it, I called her name.

I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you'd let me stay. I'm - I' m a tom, like you.'

‘You
are!'
She gaped at me. ‘Annie said it all along; but I never thought much about it, after that first night.' She began to frown. ‘And so, if there never was a man, your story wasn't like Lilian's, at all...' I shook my head. ‘And you were never in trouble...'

‘Not
that
kind of trouble.'

‘And all this time, you have been here, and I've been thinking you one thing, and...' She looked at me, then, with a strange expression - I didn't know if she felt angry, or sad, or bewildered, or betrayed, or what.

I said, ‘I'm sorry.' But she only shook her head, and put a hand across her eyes for a second; and when she took the hand away, her gaze seemed perfectly clear, and almost amused.

‘Annie always said it,' she said again. ‘Won't she be pleased, now! Will you mind it, if I tell her?'

‘No, Flo,' I said. ‘You may tell who you like.'

Then she went, still shaking her head; and I sat, and listened to her climb the stairs and creak about in the room above my head. Then I took some tobacco and a paper, and rolled myself a cigarette from a tin upon the mantel, and lit it; then I ground it upon the hearth, and threw it into the fire, and put my head against my arm, and groaned.

What a fool I'd been! I had blundered into Florence's life, too full of my own petty bitternesses to notice her great grief. I had thrust myself upon her and her brother, and thought myself so sly and charming; I had thought that I was putting my mark upon their house, and making it mine. I had believed myself playing in one kind of story, when all the time, the plot had been a different one - when all the time, I was only clumsily rehearsing what the fascinating Lilian had done so well and cleverly before me! I gazed about the room - at the washed blue walls, the hideous rug, the portraits: I saw them suddenly for what they were - details in a shrine to Lilian's memory, that I, all unwittingly, had been tending. I caught hold of the little picture of Eleanor Marx - except it was not Eleanor Marx I saw, of course; it was her, with Eleanor Marx's features. I turned it in my hands, and read the back of it: F.B.,
my comrade,
it said, in large, looped letters,
my comrade for ever. L.V.

I groaned still louder. I wanted to chuck the damn picture into the grate along with my half-smoked fag - I had to return it quickly to its frame in case I did so. I was jealous, of Lilian! I was more jealous than I had ever been, of anyone! Not because of the house; not because of Cyril, or even Ralph - who had been kind to me, but who had wept for her, and wrung his hands in grief when she lay dying; but because of Florence. Because it was Florence, above all, whom Lilian's story seemed both to have given me, and to have robbed me of for ever. I thought of my labours of the past few months. I had not made Florence fat and happy, as I had supposed: it had only been time, making her grief less keen, her memories duller.
Do you remember how we said that we would meet, she
had asked me tonight,
and how you didn't come...
? Her eyes had shone as she had asked it, for I had done her some sort of wonderful favour by not turning up that night, two years before.

I had done her a wonderful favour - and done myself, it seemed to me now, the worst kind of disservice. I thought again of how I had spent that night, and the nights following it; I thought of all the lickerish pleasures of Felicity Place - all the suits, the dinners, the wine, the poses
plastiques.
I would have traded them all in, at that moment, for the chance to have been in Lilian's place at that dull lecture, and had Florence's hazel eyes upon me, fascinated!

I
n the days and weeks following Florence's sad disclosure I became aware that things at Quilter Street were rather changed. Florence herself seemed gayer, lighter - as if, in telling me her history, she had rid herself of some huge burden, and was now flexing limbs that had been cramped and numbed, straightening a back that had been bowed. She was still gloomy, sometimes, and she still went off for walks, alone, and came back wistful. But she did not try to hide her melancholy now, or to disguise its cause - letting me know, for example, that her trips were (as I might have guessed) to Lilian's grave. In time she even began to speak of her dead friend, quite routinely. ‘How Lilian would have laughed to hear of that!' she would say; or, ‘Now, if Lily were only here, we might ask her, and she'd be sure to know.'

Her new, sweeter mood had an effect upon us all. The atmosphere of our little house - which I had always thought easy enough, before, but which I now saw to have been quite choked with the memory of Lilian, and with Ralph and Florence's sorrow - seemed to clear and brighten: it was as if we were passing not into the fogs and frosts of winter, but into springtime, with all its mildnesses and balms. I would see Ralph gazing at his sister as she smiled or hummed or caught at Cyril and tickled him, and his gaze would be soft, and he would sometimes lean to kiss her cheek, in pleasure. Even Cyril himself seemed to feel the change, and to grow bonnier and more content.

And I, in contrast, became ever more pinched and secretive and fretful.

I could not help it. It was as if, in casting off her own old load, Florence had burdened me with a new one; my feelings - which had been stirred, on the night of her confession, into such a curious mixture - only seemed to grow queerer and more contradictory as the weeks went by. I had been sorry for her, and was as glad as her brother to see her rather lighter-hearted now; I was also pleased and touched that she had confided in me at last, and told me all. But oh, how I wished her story had been different! I could never learn to like the tragic Lilian, and had to bite back my crossness when she was spoken of so reverently. Perhaps I pictured her as Kitty - it was certainly Walter's face I saw, whenever I thought of her cowardly man-friend; but it made me hot and giddy to think of her, commanding Florence's passion, sleeping beside her night after night - and never so much as turning he face to her friend, to kiss her mouth. Why had Florence cared for her so much? I would gaze at the photograph of Eleanor Marx - I could never shake off the confused conviction that it was really Lilian's features printed there - until the face began to swim before my eyes. She was so different from me - hadn't Florence herself told me that? She said she had never been gladder of anything, than that I was so different from Lilian! She meant, I suppose, that Lilian was clever, and good; that she knew the meaning of words like
cooperative,
and so never had to ask. But I - what was I? I was only tidy, and clean.

Well, I think I was never quite so tidy, after that night. I certainly never beat the dirt from Lilian's gaudy rug again - but smiled when people stepped on it, and took a dreadful pleasure in watching its colours grow dim.

But then I would imagine Lilian in paradise, weaving more carpets so that Florence might one day come and sit on them and rest her head against her knee. I imagined her stocking up the bookshelves with essays and poems, so that she and Florence might walk, side by side, reading together. I saw her preparing a stove in some small back kitchen in heaven, so that I should have somewhere to stew the oysters while she and Flo held hands.

I began to look at Florence's hands — I had never done such a thing before - and imagine all the occupations I would have set them to, had I been in Lilian's place...

Again, I couldn't help it. I had persuaded myself that Florence was a kind of saint, with a saint's dimmed, unguessable limbs and warmths and wantings; but now, in telling me the story of her own great love, it was as if she had suddenly shown herself to me, robeless. And I could not tear my eyes from what I saw.

One night, for example - one dark night, quite late, when Ralph was out with his union friends and Cyril was quiet upstairs - she bathed and washed her hair, then sat in the parlour with her dressing-gown about her, and fell asleep. I had helped her tip her tub of soapy water down the privy, then gone to warm some milk for us to drink; and when I returned with the mugs, I found her slumbering there, before the fire. She was sitting, slightly twisted, and her head had fallen back, and her arms were slack and heavy, and her hands were loose and vaguely folded in her lap. Her breaths were deep, and almost snores.

I stood before her, holding the steaming mugs. She had taken the towel from her head, and her hair was spread out over the bit of lace on the back of her chair, like the halo on a Flemish madonna. I did not think that I had ever seen her hair so full and loose before, and I studied it now for a long time. I remembered when I had thought it was a dreary auburn; but it was not auburn, there were a thousand tints of gold and brown and copper in it. It rose and curled, and grew ever more rich and lustrous, as it dried.

I looked from her hair to her face - to her lashes, to her wide pink mouth, to the line of her jaw, and the subtle weight of flesh beneath it. I looked at her hands — I remembered seeing them at Green Street, beating the hot June air; I remembered taking her hand in mine, a little later — I remembered the exact pressure of her fingers, in their warm linen glove, against my own. Her hands were pink, tonight, and still a little puckered from her bath. Her nails - which she had used, I remembered now, to chew - were neat and quite unbitten.

I looked at her throat. It was smooth, and very white; beneath it - just visible in the spreading V at the neck of her dressing-gown - was the hint of the beginnings of the swell of a breast.

I looked - and looked - and felt a curious movement in my own breast, a kind of squirming or turning, or flexing, that I seemed not to have felt there for a thousand years. It was followed almost immediately by a similar sensation, rather lower down... The mugs of milk began to quiver, until I feared they would spill. I turned, and placed them carefully upon the supper-table; and then I crept, very quietly, from the room.

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls into a trunk. When I reached the kitchen I stood and leaned against a wall — I was still trembling, worse than ever. I did not return to the parlour until I heard Florence wake and exclaim, a half-hour later, over the mugs of milk that I had left upon the table to grow cool and scummy; and even then I was so flushed and shaken that she looked at me and said, ‘What's wrong with you?', and I had to answer, ‘Nothing, nothing...' — all the time averting my gaze from that white V of curving flesh beneath her throat, because I knew that, if I looked at it again, I would be compelled to step to her and kiss it.

 

I had come to Quilter Street to be ordinary; now I was more of a tom than ever. Indeed, once I had made my own confession on the matter and begun to look about me, I saw that I was quite surrounded by toms, and couldn't believe I had not noticed them before. Two of Florence's charity-worker friends, it seemed, were sweethearts: I suppose she must have tipped them off about me, for the next time they came calling, I thought they gazed at me in quite a different sort of way. As for Annie Page: when next I saw her she put her arm about my shoulder and said, ‘Nancy! Florrie tells me you're a cousin! My dear, I never was less surprised by anything, nor more delighted...'

And, for all that my bewildering new interest in Flo was such a troublesome one, it
was
rather marvellous to feel my lusts all on the rise again - to have my tommish parts all greased and purring, like an engine with a flame set to the coals. I dreamed one night that I was walking in Leicester Square in my old guardsman's uniform, with my hair clipped military-style and a glove behind the buttons of my trousers (in fact, one of Florence's gloves: I could never look at it again, without blushing). I had had such dreams before, at Quilter Street - minus the detail of the glove, of course; but this time, when I woke, there was a prickling at my scalp and a tickling at the inside of my thighs that remained insistent, and I fingered my drab little curls and my flowery frock in a kind of disgust. I went, that day, to the Whitechapel Market; and on the way home I found myself lingering at the window of a gentlemen's outfitters, with my forehead and my fingertips pressing smears of sweat and longing against the glass ...