Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online

confiding.
    Palace, and watched and applauded her as she sang, and
    'You must call me "Kitty",' she said early on, 'and I shall received those secret looks and tokens, it was a full week call you - what? Not "Nancy", for that is what everyone before I made my way again back stage, and presented calls you. What do they call you at home? "Nance", is it?
    myself, all pale, sweating and uncertain, at her dressing-Or "Nan"? '"Nance",' I said.
    room door.
    'Then I shall call you "Nan" - if I might?' If she might! I But when I did so, she received me with such kindness, and nodded and smiled like an idiot: for the thrill of being chided me so sincerely for having left her unvisited so long; addressed by her I would gladly have lost all of my old and we fell again to chatting so easily about her life in the name, and taken a new one, or gone nameless entirely.
    theatre, and mine as an oyster-girl in Whitstable, that all my So presently it was 'Well, Nan . . . !' this, and 'Lord, Nan . . .
    old qualms quite left me. Persuaded at last that she liked
    !' that; and, increasingly, it was 'Be a love, Nan, and fetch me, I visited her again - and then again, and again. I went me my stockings ..." She was still too shy to change her nowhere else that month but to the Palace; saw no one else clothes before me, but one night when I arrived I found that
    - not Freddy, not my cousins, not even Alice, hardly - but she had had a little folding screen set up, and ever her. Mother had begun to frown about it; but when I went afterwards she used to step behind it while we talked, and home and said that I had gone back stage at Miss Butler's hand me articles of her suit as she undressed, and have me 39

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    pass her the pieces of her ladies' costume from the hook that waistcoat and trousers that I had taken from her the night she had hung them on before the show. I adored being able before; to hold the powder-box while she dusted out her to serve her like this. I would brush and fold her suit with freckles, to dampen the brushes with which she smoothed trembling fingers, and secretly press its various materials -
    out the curl in her hair, to fasten the rose to her lapel.
    the starched linen of the shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and The first time I did all this I walked with her to the stage the stockings, the wool of the jacket and trousers - to my afterwards, and stood in the wing while she went through cheek. Each item came to me warm from her body, and her set, gazing in wonder at the limes-men who strode, with its own particular scent; each seemed charged with a nimble as acrobats, across the battens in the fly-gallery; strange kind of power, and tingled or glowed (or so I seeing nothing of the hall, nothing of the stage except a imagined) beneath my hand.
    stretch of dusty board with a boy at the other end of it, his Her petticoats and dresses were cold and did not tingle; but arm upon the handle that turned the rope that brought the I still blushed to handle them, for I couldn't help but think curtain down. She had been nervous, as all performers are, of all the soft and secret places they would soon enclose, or and her nervousness had infected me; but when she stepped brush against, or warm and make moist, once she had into the wing at the end of her final number, pursued by donned them. Every time she stepped from behind the stamping, by shouts and 'Hurrahs!', she was flushed and gay screen, clad as a girl, small and slim and shapely, a false and triumphant. To tell the truth, I did not quite like her plait smothering the lovely, ragged edges of her crop, I had then. She seized my arm, but didn't see me. She was like a the same sensation: a pang of disappointment and regret woman in the grip of a drug, or in the first flush of an that turned instantly to pleasure and to aching love; a desire embrace, and I felt a fool to be at her side, so still and to touch, to embrace and caress, so strong I had to turn sober, and jealous of the crowd