Tipping the Velvet (14 page)

make way for funnier artistes; that he had sat through She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her Gully's latest routine, and all the gags were flat ones. The cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move bar-man said that when Gully heard this he went to the man to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure.

and shook him by the hand, and bought him a beer, then he When I said that we should go - since other people were bought beer for everyone. Then he went home and took a now leaving - she nodded. We returned to the change-room gun, and fired it at his own heart. . .

for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were We didn't know all of this that night at Marylebone, we white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their knew only that Gully had had a kind of fit, and taken his eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while life; but the news put an end to our party and left us all, like the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age.

Esther, nervous and grave. Kitty and I, on hearing the news, It was two o'clock or later before we started on our journey went up to the stage - she seizing my hand as we stumbled home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty up the steps, but in grief now, I thought, rather than repeating only, now and then: 'Poor Gully! What a thing to anything warmer. The manager had had all the house-lights do!', and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, lit, and the band had lain their instruments aside; some but still uncertain.

people were weeping, the cornet-player who had tickled me It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, had his arm about a trembling girl. Esther cried, 'Oh isn't it once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and awful, isn't it horrible!' -I suppose the wine made everybody still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so feel the shock of it the more.

often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn't caught the sound of the horse's slithering, uncertain step, think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and and the driver's gentle curses. Beside us the pavements with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long between us. She hadn't looked at me since then, and now stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only news of Gully's suicide. After a moment, however, I saw wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber.

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At length we reached Lambeth Bridge, where Kitty and I Kitty shivered, and shook her head. 'The ice would break,'

had stood only a few weeks before and gazed at the she said. 'We would sink and drown; or else be stranded pleasure-boats below. Now, with our faces pressed to the and die of the cold!'

carriage window, we saw it all transformed - saw the lights I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer.

of the Embankment, a belt of amber beads dissolving into I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past the night; and the great dark jagged bulk of the Houses of Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a Parliament looming over the river; and the Thames itself, pancake.

its boats all moored and silent, its water grey and sluggish The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the drive gave and thick, and rather strange.

a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving -

It was this last which made Kitty pull the window down, and both of us, finally, rather grave.

and call to the driver, in a high, excited voice, to stop. Then At last Kitty gave a whisper. 'Ain't it queer,' she said.

she pushed the carriage door open, pulled me to the iron I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water parapet of the bridge, and seized my hand.

swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the

'Look,' she said. Her grief seemed all forgotten. Below us, bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I in the water, there were great slivers of ice six feet across, moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in drifting and gently turning in the winding currents, like response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have basking seals.

moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the The Thames was freezing over.

carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen I looked from the river to Kitty, and from Kitty to the river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one bridge on which we stood. There was no one near us save another's bodies, now that we had found it.

our driver — and he had the collar of his cape about his I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling.

mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me.

warm them with my breath.

'How cold it must be!' I said softly. 'Imagine if the whole I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save Richmond. Would you walk across it?'

the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river.

Then, 'Nan,' she said, very low.

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I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my gave a kind of nervous laugh, and a whisper: 'You will kiss breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to the life out of me!'

mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the She moved into the carriage, and I clambered in behind her, water below.

trembling and giddy and half-blind, I think, with agitation I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then and desire. Then the door was closed; the driver called to moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, his pony, and the cab gave a jerk and a slither. The frozen my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a river was left behind us - dull, in comparison with this new whisper: 'You won't tell a soul, Nan - will you?'

miracle!

I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at We sat side by side. She put her hands to my face again, last! - that there was something to be told. And then I and I shivered, so that my jaws jumped beneath her fingers.

dipped my face to hers, and shut my eyes.

But she didn't kiss me again: rather, she leaned against me Her mouth was chill, at first, then very warm - the only with her face upon my neck, so that her mouth was out of warm thing, it seemed to me, in the whole of the frozen reach of mine, but hot against the skin below my ear. Her city; and when she took her lips away - as she did, after a hand, that was still bare of its glove and white with cold, moment, to give a quick, anxious glance towards our she slid into the gap at the front of my jacket; her knee she hunched and nodding driver - my own felt wet and sore and laid heavily against my own. When the brougham swayed I naked in the bitter January breezes, as if her kiss had flayed felt her lips, her fingers, her thigh come ever more heavy, them.

ever more hot, ever more close upon me, until I longed to She drew me into the shadow of the carriage, where We squirm beneath the pressing of her, and cry out. But she were hidden from sight. Here we stepped together, and gave me no word, no kiss or caress; and in my awe and my kissed again: I placed my arms about her shoulders, and felt innocence I only sat steady, as she seemed to wish. That her own hands shake upon my back. From lip to ankle, and cab-ride from the Thames to Brixton was, in consequence, through all the fussy layers of our coats and gowns, I felt the most wonderful and most terrible journey I have ever her body stiff against my own - felt the pounding, very made.

rapid, where we joined at the breast; and the pulse and the At last, however, we felt the carriage turn, then slow, and heat and the cleaving, where we pressed together at the finally stop, and heard the driver thump upon the roof with hips.

the butt of his whip to tell us we were home: we were so We stood like this for a minute, maybe longer; then the quiet, perhaps he thought we slumbered.

carriage gave a creak as the driver shifted in his seat, and I remember a little of our entry into Mrs Dendy's - the Kitty stepped quickly away. I could not take my hands from fumbling at the door with the latch-key, the mounting of the her, but she seized my wrists and kissed my fingers and darkened stairs, our passage through that still and sleeping 117

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house. I remember pausing on the landing beneath the again a nervous laugh, and tilted her face against her skylight, where the stars showed very small and bright, and pillow.

silently pressing my lips to Kitty's ear as she bent to unlock

'Oh Nan,' she said, 'I think I shall die if you don't!'

our chamber door; I remember how she leaned against it Tentatively, then, I raised my hand, and dipped my fingers when she had it shut fast behind us, and gave a sigh, and into her hair. I touched her face - her brow, that curved; her reached for me again, and pulled me to her. I remember that cheek, that was freckled; her lip, her chin, her throat, her she wouldn't let me raise a taper to the gas-jet - but made us collar-bone, her shoulder . . . Here, shy again, I let my hand stumble to the bedroom through the darkness.

linger - until, with her face still tilted from my own and her And I remember, very clearly, all that happened there.

eyes hard shut, she took my wrist and gently led my fingers The room was bitter cold - so cold it seemed an outrage to to her breasts. When I touched her here she sighed, and take our dresses off and bare our flesh; but an outrage, too, turned; and after a minute or two she seized my wrist again, to some more urgent instinct to keep them on. I had been and moved it lower.

clumsy in the change-room of the theatre, but I was not Here she was wet, and smooth as velvet. I had never, of clumsy now. I stripped quickly to my drawers and chemise, course, touched anyone like this before - except, then heard Kitty cursing over the buttons of her gown, and sometimes, myself; but it was as if I touched myself now, stepped to help her. For a moment - my fingers tugging at for the slippery hand which stroked her seemed to stroke hooks and ribbons, her own tearing at the pins which kept me: I felt my drawers grow damp and warm, my own hips her plait of hair in place -we might have been at the side of jerk as hers did. Soon I ceased my gentle strokings and a stage, making a lightning change between numbers.

began to rub her, rather hard. 'Oh!' she said very softly; At last she was naked, all except for the pearl and chain then, as I rubbed faster, she said 'Oh!' again. Then, 'Oh, oh, about her neck; she turned in my hands, stiff and pimpled oh!': a volley of 'Oh!'s, low and fast and breathy. She with cold, and I felt the brush of her nipples, and of the hair bucked, and the bed gave an answering creak; her own between her thighs. Then she moved away, and the bed-hands began to chafe distractedly at the flesh of my springs creaked; and at that, I didn't wait to pull the rest of shoulders. There seemed no motion, no rhythm, in all the my own clothes off but followed her to the bed and found world, but that which I had set up, between her legs, with her shivering there, beneath the sheets. Here we kissed one wet fingertip.

more leisurely, but also more fiercely, than we had before; At last she gasped, and stiffened, then plucked my hand at last the chill - though not the trembling - subsided.

away and fell back, heavy and slack. I pressed her to me, Once her naked limbs began to strain against my own, and for a moment we lay together quite still. I felt her heart however, I felt suddenly shy, suddenly awed. I leaned away beating wildly in her breast; and when it had calmed a little from her. 'May I really - touch you?' I whispered. She gave she stirred, and sighed, and put a hand to her cheek.

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'You've made me weep,' she murmured.

had simply been anxious, that I might only have been drunk I sat up. 'Not really, Kitty?'

.. . And then we gazed and gazed at one another; and for all

'Yes, really.' She gave a twitch that was half laughter, half a that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now sob, then rubbed at her eyes again, and when I took her that I was looking at her as if for the first time. We had fingers from her face I could feel the tears upon them. I lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; pressed her hand, suddenly uncertain: 'Did I hurt you? What but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries did I do that was bad? Did I hurt you, Kitty?'

and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She She shook her head, and sniffed, and laughed more freely.

looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly

'Hurt me? Oh no. It was only - so very sweet.' She smiled.

press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared,

'And you are - so very good. And I -' She sniffed again, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised.

then placed her face against my breast and hid her eyes But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and from me. 'And I - oh, Nan, I do so love you, so very, very watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and much!'

fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her I lay beside her, and put my arms about her. My own desire shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the I quite forgot, and she made no move to remind me of it. I match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the forgot, too, Gully Sutherland - who three hours before had flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, 'When I first put a gun to his own heart, because a man had sat through knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I his routine unsmiling. I only lay; and soon Kitty slept. And was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would I studied her face, where it showed creamy pale in the see ..." She smiled. I gave the match a shake. 'Didn't you darkness, and thought She loves me, She loves me - like a know,' I said then, 'didn't you know, that I loved you?'