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

waistcoat and trousers that I had taken from her the night before; to hold the powder-box while she dusted out her freckles, to dampen the brushes with which she smoothed out the curl in her hair, to fasten the rose to her lapel.
    The first time I did all this I walked with her to the stage afterwards, and stood in the wing while she went through her set, gazing in wonder at the limes-men who strode, nimble as acrobats, across the battens in the fly-gallery; seeing nothing of the hall, nothing of the stage except a stretch of dusty board with a boy at the other end of it, his arm upon the handle that turned the rope that brought the curtain down. She had been nervous, as all performers are, and her nervousness had infected me; but when she stepped into the wing at the end of her final number, pursued by stamping, by shouts and ‘Hurrahs!’, she was flushed and gay and triumphant. To tell the truth, I did not quite like her then. She seized my arm, but didn’t see me. She was like a woman in the grip of a drug, or in the first flush of an embrace, and I felt a fool to be at her side, so still and sober, and jealous of the crowd that was her lover.
    After that, I passed the twenty minutes or so that she was gone each night alone, in her room, listening to the beat of her songs through the ceiling and walls, happier to hear the cheers of the audience from a distance. I would make tea for her - she liked it brewed in the pan with condensed milk, dark as a walnut and thick as syrup; I knew by the changing tempos of her set just when to set the kettle on the hearth, so the cup would be ready for her return. While the tea simmered I would wipe her little table, and empty her ashtrays, and dust down the glass; I would tidy the cracked and faded old cigar-box in which she kept her sticks of grease-paint. They were acts of love, these humble little ministrations, and of pleasure - even, perhaps, of a kind of self -pleasure, for it made me feel strange and hot and almost shameful to perform them. While she was being ravished by the admiration of the crowd, I would pace her dressing-room and gaze at her possessions, or caress them, or almost caress them - holding my fingers an inch away from them, as if they had an aura, as well as a surface, that might be stroked. I loved everything that she left behind her - her petticoats and her perfumes, and the pearls that she clipped to the lobes of her ears; but also the hairs on her combs, the eyelashes that clung to her sticks of spit-black, even the dent of her fingers and lips on her cigarette-ends. The world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since Kitty Butler had stepped into it. It had been ordinary before she came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left ringing with music or glowing with light.
    By the time she returned to her dressing-room I would have everything tidy and still. Her tea, as I have said, would be ready; sometimes, too, I would have a cigarette lit for her. She would have lost her fierce, distracted look, and be simply merry and kind. ‘What a crowd!’ she’d say. ‘They wouldn’t let me leave!’ Or, ‘A slow one tonight, Nan; I believe I was half-way through “Good Cheer, Boys, Good Cheer” before they realised I was a girl!’
    She would unclip her necktie and hang up her jacket and hat, then she would sip her tea and smoke her fag and - since performing made her garrulous - she would talk to me, and I would listen, hard. And so I learned a little of her history.
    She had been born, she said, in Rochester, to a family of entertainers. Her mother (she did not mention a father) had died while she was still quite a baby, and she had been raised by her grandmother; she had no brothers, no sisters, and no cousins that she could recall. She had taken her first bows before the footlights at the age of twelve, as ‘Kate Straw, the Little Singing Wonder’, and had known a bit of success in penny-gaffs and