Tipping the Velvet (59 page)

‘Excuse me, sweetheart,' she said, rather loudly. ‘But my pal Jenny will have it that you're that Nan King gal, what used to work the halls with Kitty Butler. I've a shilling on it that you ain't her. Now, will you settle it?'

I looked quickly around the table. Florence and Annie had looked up in mild surprise. Nora had broken off her story and now smiled and said, ‘I should make the most of this Nance. There might be a free drink in it.' Miss Raymond laughed. No one believed that I really might be Nan King; and I, of course, had spent five years in hiding from that history, denying I had ever been her, myself.

But the rum, the warmth, my new, unspoken passion seemed to work in me like oil in a rusted lock. I turned back to the woman. ‘I'm afraid,' I said, ‘that you must lose your bet. I
am
Nan King.' It was the truth, and yet I felt like an impostor - as if I had just said, ‘I
am
Lord Rosebery'. I did not look at Florence — though out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fly open. I looked at the tattooed woman, and gave her a modest little shrug. She, for her part, had stepped back; now she slapped our stall until it shook, and called, laughing, to her friend.

‘Jenny, you have won your coin! The gal says she is Nan King, all right!'

At her words the group at the billiard-table let up a cry, and half the room fell silent. The gay girls in the neighbouring stall got up, to peer over at me; I heard ‘Nan King, it is Nan King there!' whispered at every table. The tattooed tom's friend - Jenny - came stepping over, and held her hand out to me.

‘Miss King,' she said, ‘I knew it was you the moment you come in. What happy times I used to have, watching you and Miss Butler at the Paragon!'

‘You're very kind,' I said, taking her hand. As I did so, I caught Florence's eye.

‘Nance,' she asked, ‘what is all this? Did you really work the halls? Why did you never say?'

‘It was all rather long ago ...' She shook her head, and looked me over.

‘You don't mean you didn't know your friend was such a star?' asked Jenny now, overhearing.

‘We didn't know that she was any kind of star,' said Annie.

‘Her and Kitty Butler - what a team! There never was a pair o' mashers like 'em...'

‘Mashers!' said Florence.

‘Why yes,' continued Jenny. Then: ‘Why, just a minute - I believe there is the very thing to show it, here...' She pushed her way through the crowd of gaping women to the bar, and here I saw her catch the barmaid's eye, then gesture towards the wall behind the rows of upturned bottles. There was a faded piece of baize there, with a hundred old notes and picture-postcards fastened to it; I saw Mrs Swindles reach into the layers of curling paper for a second, then draw out something small and bent. This she handed to Jenny; in a moment it had been placed before me, and I found myself gazing at a photograph: Kitty and I, faint but unmistakable, in Oxford bags and boaters. I had my hand upon her shoulder, and a cigarette, unlit, between the fingers.

I looked and looked at the picture. I remembered very clearly the weight and scent of that suit, the feel of Kitty's shoulder beneath my hand. Even so, it was like gazing into someone else's past, and it made me shiver.

The postcard was seized from me, then, first by Florence - who bent her head to it and studied it almost as intently as I had - then by Ruth and Nora, and Annie and Miss Raymond, and finally by Jenny, who passed it on to her friends.

‘Fancy us still having that pinned up,' she said. ‘I remember the gal what put it there: she was rather keen on you - indeed, you was always something of a favourite, at the Boy. She got it from a lady in the Burlington Arcade. Did you know there was a lady there, selling pictures such as yours, to interested gals?' I shook my head - in wonder, to think of all the times that I had trolled up and down the Burlington Arcade for interested gents, and never noticed that particular lady.

‘What a treat, Miss King,' cried someone else then, ‘to find you
here...'
There was a general murmuring as the implications of this comment were digested; ‘I cannot say I never wondered,' I heard someone say. Then Jenny leaned near to me again, and cocked her head.

‘What about Miss Butler, if you don't mind my asking? I heard she was a bit of a tom, herself.'

‘That's right,' said another girl, ‘I heard that too.'

I hesitated. Then: ‘You heard wrong,' I said. ‘She wasn't.'

‘Not just a bit... ?'

‘Not at all.'

Jenny shrugged. ‘Well, that's too bad.'

I looked at my lap, suddenly upset; worse, however, was to follow, for at that moment one of the gay girls thrust her way between Ruth and Nora to call, ‘Oh, Miss King, won't you give us a song?' Her cry was taken up by a dozen throats - ‘Oh yes, Miss King, do!' - and, as in a terrible dream, a broken-down old piano was suddenly produced, it seemed, from nowhere, and wheeled over the gritty floorboards. At once, a woman sat down before it, cracked her knuckles, and played a staggering scale.

‘Really,' I said, ‘I can't!' I looked wildly at Florence - she was studying me as if she had never seen my face before. Jenny cried carelessly: ‘Oh, go on, Nan, be a sport, for the gals at the Boy. What was that one you used to sing - about winking at the pretty ladies, with your hand hanging on to your sovereign ... ?'

One voice, and then another and another, picked it up. Annie had taken a swig of her beer, and now almost choked on it. ‘Lord!' she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Did you sing that? I saw you once at the Holborn Empire! You threw a chocolate coin at me - it was half-melted from the heat of your pocket - I ate it, and thought I should die! Oh, Nancy!'

I gazed at her and bit my lip. The billiard players had all set down their cues and moved to stand about the piano; the pianist was picking out the chords of the song, and about twenty women were singing it. It was a silly song, but I remembered Kitty's voice lilting upwards at the chorus, and giving the tune a kind of sweet liquidity, as if the foolish phrases turned to honey on her tongue. It sounded very different here, in this rough cellar - and yet, it had a certain trueness, too, and a new sweetness all of its own. I listened to the boisterous girls, and found myself beginning to hum... In a moment I had knelt upon my seat and joined my voice with theirs; and afterwards they cheered and clapped me, and I found I had to put my head upon my arm, and bite my lip, to stop the tears from coming.

They started on another song, then - not one of mine and Kitty‘s, but a new one that I didn't know, and so could not join in with. I sat down, and let my head fall back against the panels of the stall. A girl arrived at the end of our table with a pork pie on a plate, sent over from Mrs Swindles and ‘on the house'. I picked at the pastry of this for a while, and grew a little calmer. Ruth and Nora now had their elbows on the table, their heads on their chins, and were gazing at me, their story forgotten. Annie, I could hear in the pauses of the new song, was explaining to an incredulous Miss Raymond: ‘No, I swear, we had no idea. Arrived on Florrie's doorstep with a black eye and a bunch of cresses, and has never left it.
Quite
a dark horse...'

Florence herself had her face turned my way, and her eyes in shadow.

‘You were really famous?' she asked me, as I found a cigarette and lit it. ‘And you really sang?'

‘Sang, and danced. And acted, once, in a pantomime at the Britannia.' I slapped my thigh. “‘My lords, where is the Prince, our master.”' She laughed, though I did not.

‘How I wish I'd seen you! When was all this?'

I thought for a moment; then, ‘Eighteen eighty-nine,' I said.

She stuck her lip out. ‘Ah. Strikes all that year: no time for the music hall. I think, one night, I might have stood outside the Britannia, collecting money for the dockers...' She smiled. ‘I should have liked a chocolate sovereign, though.'

‘Well, I should have made sure to throw you one...'

She lifted her glass to her lips, then thought of something else. ‘What happened,' she asked, ‘to make you leave the theatre? If you were doing so well, why did you stop? What did you do?'

I had admitted to some things; but I wasn't ready to admit to them all. I pushed my plate towards her. ‘Eat this pie for me,' I said. Then I leaned past her and called down the table. ‘I say, Annie. Give me a cigarette, will you? This one's a dud.'

‘Well, since you're a
celebrity...'

Florence ate the pie, helped out by Ruth. The singers at the piano grew weary and hoarse, and went back to their billiards. The gay girls in the stall next door got up, and pinned on their hats: they were off, I suppose, to start work, in the more ordinary publics of Wapping and Limehouse. Nora yawned and, seeing her, we all yawned, and Florence gave a sigh.

‘Shall we go?' she asked. ‘I think it must be very late.'

‘It is almost midnight,' said Miss Raymond. We stood, to button our coats on.

‘I must just have a word with Mrs Swindles,' I said, ‘to thank her for my pie'; and when I had done that - and been seized and saluted by half-a-dozen women on the way — I wandered over to the billiard corner, and nodded to Jenny.

‘Good-night to you,' I said. ‘I'm glad you won your shilling.'

She took my hand and shook it. ‘Good-night to you, Miss King! The shilling was nothing compared to the pleasure of having you here among us all.'

‘Shall we see you here again, Nan?' her friend with the tattoo called then. I nodded: ‘I hope so.'

‘But you must sing us a proper song next time, on your own, in all your gentleman's toggery.'

‘Oh yes, you must!'

I made no answer, only smiled, and took a step away from them; then I thought of something, and beckoned to Jenny again.

‘That picture,' I said quietly when she was close. ‘Do you think - would Mrs Swindles mind - do you think that I might have it, for myself?' She put her hand to her pocket at once, and drew out the creased and faded photograph, and passed it to me.

‘You take it,' she said; then she could not help but ask, a little wonderingly, ‘But have you none of your own? I should've thought...'

‘Between you and me,' I said, ‘I left the business rather fast. I lost a lot of stuff, and never cared to think of it till now. This, however — ' I gazed down at the photo. ‘Well, it won't hurt me, will it, to have this little reminder?'

‘I hope it won't, indeed,' she answered kindly. Then she looked past me, to Florence and the others. ‘Your girl is awaiting for you,' she said with a smile. I put the picture in the pocket of my coat.

‘So she is,' I said absently. ‘So she is.'

I joined my friends; we picked our way across the crowded room, and hauled ourselves up the treacherous staircase into the aching cold of the February night. Outside The Frigate the road was dark and quiet; from Cable Street, however, came a distant row. Like us, the customers of all the other publics and gin palaces of the East End were beginning to make their tipsy journeys home.

‘Is there never trouble,' I said as we started to walk, ‘between women at the Boy and local people, or roughs?'

Annie turned her collar up against the cold, then took Miss Raymond's arm. ‘Sometimes,' she said. ‘Sometimes. Once some boys dressed a pig in a bonnet, and tipped it down the cellar stairs...'

‘No!'

‘Yes,' said Nora. ‘And once a woman got her head broken, in a fight.'

‘But this was over a girl,' said Florence, yawning, ‘and it was the girl's husband who hit her...'

‘The truth is,' Annie went on, ‘there is such a mix round these parts, what with Jews and Lascars, Germans and Poles, socialists, anarchists, salvationists... The people are surprised at nothing.'

Even as she spoke, however, two fellows came out of a house at the end of the street and, seeing us - seeing Annie and Miss Raymond arm-in-arm, and Ruth with her hand in Nora's pocket, and Florence and I bumping shoulders - gave a mutter, and a sneer. One of them hawked as we passed by him, and spat; the other cupped his hand at the fork of his trousers, and shouted and laughed.

Annie looked round at me and gave a shrug. Miss Raymond, to make us all smile, said, ‘I wonder if any woman will ever get her head broken on my account...'

‘Only her heart, Miss Raymond,' I called gallantly; and had the satisfaction of seeing both Annie and Florence look my way and frown.

Our group got smaller as we journeyed, for at Whitechapel Ruth and Nora left us to pick up a cab to take them to their flat in the City, and at Shoreditch, where Miss Raymond lived, Annie looked at the toe of her boot and said, ‘Well, I think I shall just walk Miss Raymond to her door, since it's so late; but you be sure to go on without me, and I'll catch you up ...

So then it was only Florence and me. We walked quickly, because it was so cold, and Florence linked her hands around my arm and held me very close. When we reached the end of Quilter Street we stopped, as I had done on my first journey there, to gaze for a moment at the dark and eerie towers of Columbia Market, and to peer up at the starless, moonless, fog- and smoke-choked London sky.

‘I don't believe Annie will catch us up, after all,' murmured Florence, looking back towards Shoreditch.

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't believe she will ...'

The house, when we entered it, seemed hot and stuffy enough; we soon grew chilled, however, once we had taken our coats off and visited the privy. Ralph had left my truckle-bed made up for me, and fixed a note to the mantel to say there was a pot of tea for us inside the oven. There was: it was as thick and brown as gravy, but we drank it anyway - carrying our mugs back into the parlour, where the air was warmest, and holding our hands before the last few glowing coals in the ashy hearth.