Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

that was her lover.
    aside or fold my arms for fear that they would fly about her After that, I passed the twenty minutes or so that she was and press her close.
    gone each night alone, in her room, listening to the beat of At length I grew so handy with her costumes she suggested her songs through the ceiling and walls, happier to hear the that I visit her before she went on stage, to help her ready cheers of the audience from a distance. I would make tea herself for her act, like a proper dresser. She said it with a for her - she liked it brewed in the pan with condensed kind of studied carelessness, as if half-fearful that I might milk, dark as a walnut and thick as syrup; I knew by the not wish to; she could not have known, I suppose, how changing tempos of her set just when to set the kettle on the dreary the hours were to me, that I must pass away from her hearth, so the cup would be ready for her return. While the
    . . . Soon I never stepped into the auditorium at all, but tea simmered I would wipe her little table, and empty her headed, every night, back stage, a half-hour before she was ashtrays, and dust down the glass; I would tidy the cracked due before the footlights, to help her re-don the shirt and and faded old cigar-box in which she kept her sticks of 41

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    grease-paint. They were acts of love, these humble little She had been born, she said, in Rochester, to a family of ministrations, and of pleasure - even, perhaps, of a kind of entertainers. Her mother (she did not mention a father) had self-pleasure, for it made me feel strange and hot and died while she was still quite a baby, and she had been almost shameful to perform them. While she was being raised by her grandmother; she had no brothers, no sisters, ravished by the admiration of the crowd, I would pace her and no cousins that she could recall. She had taken her first dressing-room and gaze at her possessions, or caress them, bows before the footlights at the age of twelve, as 'Kate or almost caress them - holding my fingers an inch away Straw, the Little Singing Wonder', and had known a bit of from them, as if they had an aura, as well as a surface, that success in penny-gaffs and public-houses, and the smaller might be stroked. I loved everything that she left behind her kinds of halls and theatres. But it was a miserable sort of
    - her petticoats and her perfumes, and the pearls that she life, she said - 'and soon I wasn't even little any more. Every clipped to the lobes of her ears; but also the hairs on her time a place came up there was a crush of girls queuing for combs, the eyelashes that clung to her sticks of spit-black, it at the stage door, all just the same as me, or prettier, or even the dent of her fingers and lips on her cigarette-ends.
    perter - or hungrier, and so more willing to kiss the The world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since Kitty chairman for the promise of a season's work, or a week's, or Butler had stepped into it. It had been ordinary before she even a night's.' Her grandmother had died; she had joined a came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left dancing troupe and toured the seaside towns of Kent and ringing with music or glowing with light.
    the South Coast, doing end-of-pier shows three times a By the time she returned to her dressing-room I would have night. She frowned when she spoke about these times, and everything tidy and still. Her tea, as I have said, would be her voice was bitter, or weary; she would place a hand ready; sometimes, too, I would have a cigarette lit for her.
    beneath her chin, and rest her head upon it, and close her She would have lost her fierce, distracted look, and be eyes.
    simply merry and kind. 'What a crowd!' she'd say. 'They
    'Oh, it was hard,' she'd say, 'so hard . . . And you never wouldn't let me leave!' Or, 'A slow one tonight, Nan; I made a friend, because you were never in one place long believe I was half-way through "Good Cheer, Boys, Good enough.