Tipping the Velvet (65 page)

Florence had not smiled at me since I had stepped from the stage; and she did not smile now. When she spoke at last, her expression was sad and grave and almost bewildered - as if astonished at her own bitterness.

‘I should like it very much,' she said, ‘if I thought that Nancy really meant her speeches, and wasn't just repeating them like a - like a dam' parrot!'

Annie looked uneasily at Miss Raymond, then said, ‘Oh Florrie, for shame ...' I did not say anything, but gazed hard at Florence for a second, then looked away - my pleasure at the speech, at the shouts of the crowd, all dimmed, and my heart all heavy.

The tent, now, was quiet: there was no speaker on the platform, and people had taken advantage of the break to drift outside into the sunlight and the bustle of the field. Miss Raymond said brightly, ‘Let us all sit down, shall we?' As we moved to occupy a row of empty seats, however, a little girl came trotting up, and caught my eye.

‘Excuse me, miss,' she said. ‘Are you the gal what give the lecture?' I nodded. ‘There is a lady just outside the tent, then, says will you please step up and have a word?'

Annie laughed, and raised her eyebrows. ‘Another lecture tour offer, perhaps?' she said.

I looked at the girl, and hesitated.

‘A lady, you say?'

‘Yes miss,' she said firmly. ‘A lady. Dressed real smart, with her eyes all hid behind a hat with a veil on it.'

I gave a start, and looked quickly at Florence. A lady in a veil: there was only one person that could be. Diana must have seen me after all, and watched me give my speech, and now sought me out for- who knew what queer purpose? The idea made me tremble. When the girl stepped away I turned to gaze after her, and Florence shifted in her seat, and stared with me. In the corner of the tent there was a square of sunlight, where the canvas had been tied back to form a doorway - it was so bright I had to narrow my eyes to look at it, and blink. At one edge of the square of light stood a woman, her face concealed, as the girl had said, by a broad hat and a width of net. As I studied her, she lifted her arms to her veil, and raised it. And then I saw her face.

‘Why don't you go to her?' I heard Florence say coldly. ‘I daresay she has come to ask you back to St John's Wood. You shall never have to think of socialism again, there ...'

I turned to her; and when she saw how pale my cheeks were, her expression changed.

‘It's not Diana,' I whispered. ‘Oh, Flo! It's not Diana -'

It was Kitty.

I stood for a moment quite dumbfounded. I had seen two old lovers already today; and here was the third of them - or, rather, the first of them: my original love; my one true love - my real love, my best love - the love who had so broken my heart, it seemed never to have fired quite properly again ...

I went to her, without another glance at Florence, and stood before her and rubbed my eyes against the sun — so that, when I looked at her again, she seemed surrounded by a thousand dancing points of light.

‘Nan,' she said, and she smiled, rather nervously. ‘You have not forgotten me, I hope?' Her voice shook a little, as it had used to do, sometimes, in passion. Her accent was rather purer, with slightly less colour to it, than I remembered.

‘Forgotten you?' I said then, finding my own voice at last. ‘No. I'm only so very surprised, to see you.' I gazed at her, and swallowed. Her eyes were as brown as ever, her lashes as dark, her lip as pink ... But she had changed, I had seen it at once. There were one or two creases beside her mouth and at her brow, that told of the years that had passed since we were sweethearts; and she had let her hair grow, so that it curved above her ears in a great, glossy pompadour. With the creases and the hair she did not look, any more, like the prettiest of boys: she looked, as the girl she had sent to me had said, like a lady.

As I studied her, so she gazed at me. At last she said, ‘You seem very different, to when I saw you last ...'

I shrugged. ‘Of course. I was nineteen then. I'm twenty-five, now.'

‘Twenty-five in two weeks' time,' she answered; and her lip trembled a little. ‘I remembered that, you see.'

I felt myself blush, and could not answer her. She gazed past me, into the tent. ‘You can imagine my surprise,' she said then, ‘when I looked in there just now, and saw you lecturing from the stage. I never thought you'd end up on a platform in a tent, speaking on workers' rights!'

‘Neither did I,' I said. Then I smiled, and so did she. ‘Why are you here, at all?' I asked her then.

‘I'm in rooms at Bow. Everyone has been saying all week, that I must come to the park on Sunday, since there was to be such a marvellous thing in it.'

‘Have they?'

‘Oh, yes!'

‘And - are you here quite alone, then?'

She glanced quickly away. ‘Yes. Walter's in Liverpool just now. He has gone back to managing: he has shares in a hall up there, and has rented a house for us. I'm to join him when the house is ready.'

‘And you're still working the halls?'

‘Not so much. We ... we had an act together -'

‘I know,' I said. ‘I saw you. At the Middlesex.'

Her eyes widened. ‘The time that you met Billy-Boy? Oh, Nan, if I had only known that you were watching! When Bill came back and said he'd seen you -'

‘I couldn't look at you for long,' I said.

‘Were we so bad as that, then?' She smiled, but I shook my head: ‘It wasn't that ...' Her smile grew fainter.

I said, after a moment: ‘So you don't work so much? How's that?'

‘Well, Walter is kept busy with the managing now. And then - well, we kept it quiet, but I was rather ill.' She hesitated. ‘I was to have a child ...'

The thought was horrible to me, in every way. ‘I'm sorry,' I said.

She shrugged. ‘Walter was disappointed. We have quite forgotten it now, however. It only means that I am not quite so strong as I once was ...'

We fell silent. I looked for a second into the crowd, then back at Kitty. She had coloured. Now she said: ‘Nan, Bill told me, when he met you that time, that you were dressed - well, as a boy.'

‘That's right. I was. Quite as a boy.' She laughed and frowned at once, not understanding.

‘He said, too, that you were living with a - with a -'

‘With a lady. I was.'

She blushed still harder. ‘And - are you with her still?'

‘No, I - I live with a girl now, in Bethnal Green.'

‘Oh!'

I hesitated - but then I did what I had done with Zena, two hours before. I moved slightly into the shadow of the tent, and Kitty followed. ‘That's her over there,' I said, nodding towards the seats before the platform. ‘The girl with the little boy.'

Annie and Miss Raymond had moved away, and Florence sat alone now. As I gestured to her she looked over at me, then gazed gravely at Kitty. Kitty herself gave another little ‘Oh,' and then a nervous smile. ‘It's Flo,' I said, ‘who's the socialist, and who has got me into all this ...' As I spoke, Florence took off her hat: immediately, Cyril began pulling at the pins that fixed her hair, and twisting the curls about his fingers. His tugs made her redden. I watched her for a little longer, then saw her look again at Kitty; and when I turned to Kitty herself I found that her eyes were upon me and her expression was rather strange.

‘I cannot stop myself from gazing at you,' she said, with an uncertain smile. ‘When you ran off, I was sure, at first, that you'd be back. Where did you go? What did you do? We tried so hard to find you. And then, when there was no word of you, I was sure that I would never see you again. I thought - oh Nan, I thought that you had harmed yourself.'

I swallowed.
‘You
harmed me, Kitty. It was
you
that harmed me.'

‘I know it, now. Do you think I don't know it? I feel ashamed to even talk to you. I am so sorry, for what happened.'

‘You needn't be sorry now,' I said awkwardly. But she went on as if she had not heard me: that she was so very sorry; that what she had done had been so very wrong. That she was sorry, so sorry ...

At last, I shook my head. ‘Oh!' I said. ‘What does all that matter now? It matters nothing!'

‘Doesn't it?' she said. I felt my heart begin to hammer. When I did not answer, only continued to stare at her, she took a step towards me and began to talk, very fast and low. ‘Oh Nan, so many times I thought about finding you, and planned what I would say when I did. I cannot leave you now without saying it!'

‘I don't want to hear it,' I said in sudden terror; I believe I even put my hands to my ears, to try to block out the sound of her murmurs. But she caught at my arm and talked on, into my face.

‘You must hear it! You must know. You mustn't think that I did what I did easily, or thoughtlessly. You mustn't think it did not - break my heart.'

‘Why did you do it, then?'

‘Because I was a fool! Because I thought my life upon the stage was dearer to me than anything. Because I thought that I would be a star. Because, of course, I did not ever think that I would really, really lose you ...' She hesitated. Outside the tent the bustle of the day went on: children ran shrieking; stall-holders called and argued; flags and pamphlets fluttered in the May breezes. She took a breath. She said: ‘Nan, come back to me.'

Come back to me ...
One part of me reached out to her at once, leapt to her like a pin to a magnet; I believe the very same part of me would leap to her again - would go on leaping to her, if she went on asking me, for ever.

Then another part of me remembered, and remembers still.

‘Come back to you?' I said. ‘With you, still Walter's wife?'

‘All that means nothing,' she said quickly. ‘There's nothing - like that - between him and me now. If we were only a little careful ...'

‘Careful!' I said: the word had made me flinch. ‘Careful! Careful! That's all I ever had from you. We were so careful, we might as well have been dead!' I shook myself free of her. ‘I have a new girl now, who's not ashamed to be my sweetheart.'

But Kitty came close, and seized my arm again. ‘That girl with the baby?' she said, nodding back into the tent. ‘You don't love her, I can see it in your face. Not as you loved me. Don't you remember how it was? You were mine, before anyone's; you belong with me. You don't belong with her and her sort, talking all this foolish political stuff. Look at your clothes, how plain and cheap they are! Look at these people all about us: you left Whitstable to get away from people such as this!'

I gazed at her for a second in a kind of stupor; then I did as she urged me, and glanced about the tent - at Annie and Miss Raymond; at Ralph, who was still blinking and blushing into Mrs Costello's face; at Nora and Ruth, who stood beside the platform with some other girls I recognised from the Boy in the Boat. In a chair at the far side of the tent - I had not noticed her before - sat Zena, her arm looped through that of her broad-shouldered sweetheart; close to them stood a couple of Ralph's union friends — they nodded when they saw me looking, and raised a glass. And in the midst of them all, sat Florence. Her head was still bent to where Cyril clutched at it: he had tugged her hair down to her shoulder, and she had raised her hands to pull his fingers free. She was flushed and smiling; but even as she smiled, she lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw tears in them - perhaps, only from Cyril's grasping - and, behind the tears, a kind of bleakness, that I did not think I'd ever seen in them before.

I could not meet her smile with one of my own. But when I turned again to Kitty, my gaze was level; and my voice, when I spoke, was perfectly steady.

‘You're wrong,' I said. ‘I belong here, now: these are my people. And as for Florence, my sweetheart, I love her more than I can say; and I never realised it, until this moment.'

She let go of my arm and stepped away as if she had been struck. ‘You are saying these things to spite me,' she said breathlessly, ‘because you are still hurt -'

I shook my head. ‘I'm saying these things because they're true. Good-bye, Kitty.'

‘Nan!' she cried, as I made to move away from her. I turned back.

‘Don't call me that,' I said pettishly. ‘No one calls me that now. It ain't my name, and never was.'

She swallowed, then stepped towards me again and said in a lower, chastened tone: ‘Nancy, then. Listen to me: I still have all your things. All the things you left at Stamford Hill.'

‘I don't want them,' I said at once. ‘Keep them, or throw 'em away: I don't care.'

‘There are letters, from your family! Your father came to London, looking for you. Even now, they send me letters, asking if I have heard ...'

My father! I had had a vision, on seeing Diana, of myself upon a silken bed. Now, more vividly, I saw my father, in the apron that fell to his boots; I saw my mother, and my brother, and Alice. I saw the sea. My eyes began to smart, as if there was salt in them.

‘You can send me the letters,' I said thickly: I thought, I'll write, and tell them of Florence. And if they don't care for it - well, at least they'll know that I'm safe, and happy ...

Now Kitty came nearer, and lowered her voice still further. ‘There's the money, too,' she said. ‘We have kept it all. Nan, there's almost seven hundred pounds of yours!'

I shook my head: I had forgotten about the money. ‘I have nothing to spend it on,' I said simply. But even as I said it, I remembered Zena, whom I had robbed; and I thought again of Florence - I imagined her dropping seven hundred pounds into the charity boxes of East London, coin by coin.