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

quite left me. Persuaded at last that she liked me, I visited her again - and then again, and again. I went nowhere else that month but to the Palace; saw no one else - not Freddy, not my cousins, not even Alice, hardly - but her. Mother had begun to frown about it; but when I went home and said that I had gone back stage at Miss Butler’s invitation, and been treated by her like a friend, she was impressed. I worked harder than ever at my kitchen duties; I filleted fish, washed potatoes, chopped parsley, thrust crabs and lobsters into pans of steaming water - and all so briskly I barely had breath for a song to cover their shrieks with. Alice would say rather sullenly that my mania for a certain person at the Palace made me dull; but I didn’t speak to Alice much these days. Now every working day ended, for me, with a lightning change, and a hasty supper, and a run to the station for the Canterbury train; and every trip to Canterbury ended in Kitty Butler’s dressing-room. I spent more time in her company than I did watching her perform upon the stage, and saw her more often without her make-up, and her suit, and her footlight manner, than with them.
    For the friendlier we grew the freer she became, and the more confiding.
    â€˜You must call me “Kitty”,’ she said early on, ‘and I shall call you - what? Not “Nancy”, for that is what everyone calls you. What do they call you at home? “Nance”, is it? Or “Nan”?
    â€œâ€˜Nance”,’ I said.
    â€˜Then I shall call you “Nan” - if I might?’ If she might! I nodded and smiled like an idiot: for the thrill of being addressed by her I would gladly have lost all of my old name, and taken a new one, or gone nameless entirely.
    So presently it was ‘Well, Nan ... !’ this, and ‘Lord, Nan ... !’ that; and, increasingly, it was ‘Be a love, Nan, and fetch me my stockings ...’ She was still too shy to change her clothes before me, but one night when I arrived I found that she had had a little folding screen set up, and ever afterwards she used to step behind it while we talked, and hand me articles of her suit as she undressed, and have me pass her the pieces of her ladies’ costume from the hook that she had hung them on before the show. I adored being able to serve her like this. I would brush and fold her suit with trembling fingers, and secretly press its various materials - the starched linen of the shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and the stockings, the wool of the jacket and trousers - to my cheek. Each item came to me warm from her body, and with its own particular scent; each seemed charged with a strange kind of power, and tingled or glowed (or so I imagined) beneath my hand.
    Her petticoats and dresses were cold and did not tingle; but I still blushed to handle them, for I couldn’t help but think of all the soft and secret places they would soon enclose, or brush against, or warm and make moist, once she had donned them. Every time she stepped from behind the screen, clad as a girl, small and slim and shapely, a false plait smothering the lovely, ragged edges of her crop, I had the same sensation: a pang of disappointment and regret that turned instantly to pleasure and to aching love; a desire to touch, to embrace and caress, so strong I had to turn aside or fold my arms for fear that they would fly about her and press her close.
    At length I grew so handy with her costumes she suggested that I visit her before she went on stage, to help her ready herself for her act, like a proper dresser. She said it with a kind of studied carelessness, as if half-fearful that I might not wish to; she could not have known, I suppose, how dreary the hours were to me, that I must pass away from her ... Soon I never stepped into the auditorium at all, but headed, every night, back stage, a half-hour before she was due before the footlights, to help her re-don the shirt and