by Sarah Waters
I didn’t change, of course, until after we had cleared the supper things; and when I did - banishing poor Ralph and Cyril to the kitchen while I washed and dressed before the parlour fire - it was with a kind of anxious thrill, an almost queasy gaiety. For all that it was skirts and stays and petticoats that I pulled on, I felt as I thought a young man must feel, when dressing for his sweetheart; and all the time I buttoned my costume, and fumbled blindly with my collar-stud and necktie, there came a creaking of the boards above my head, and a swishing of material, until at last I could hardly believe that it was not my sweetheart up there, dressing for me.
When she pushed at the parlour door and stepped into the room at last, I stood blinking at her for a moment, quite at a loss. She had changed out of her work-dress into a shirt-waist, and a waistcoat, and a skirt. The skirt was of some heavy winter stuff, but damson-coloured, and very warm upon the eye. The waistcoat was a lighter shade, the shirt-waist almost red; at her throat was pinned a brooch: a few chips of garnet, in a golden surround. It was the first time in a year that I had seen her out of her sober suits of black and brown, and she seemed quite transformed. The reds and damsons brought out the blush of her lip, the gold shine of her curling hair, the whiteness of her throat and hands, the pinkness and the pale half-moons at her thumb-nails.
‘You look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘very handsome.’ She flushed.
‘I have grown too stout,’ she said, ‘for all my newer clothes...’ Then she gazed at my own gear. ‘You look very smart. How well that neck-tie becomes you - doesn’t it? Except, you have tied it crooked. Here.’ She came towards me, and took hold of the knot to straighten it; the pulse at my throat began at once to knock against her fingers, and I started a fruitless fumbling at my hips for a pair of pockets in which to thrust my hands. ‘What a fidget you are,’ she said mildly, quite as if she were addressing Cyril; but her cheeks, I noticed, had not paled - nor was her voice, I thought, quite steady.
She finished at my throat at last, then stepped away again.
‘There is just my hair,’ I said. I took two brushes and dampened them in my water-jug, and combed the hair away from my face till it was flat and sleek; then I greased my palms with macassar - I had macassar, now - and ran them over my head until the hair felt heavy, and the little, overheated room was thick with scent. And all the time, Florence leaned against the frame of the parlour door and watched me; and when I had finished, she laughed.
‘My word, what a pair of beauties!’ This was Ralph, come that moment along the passageway, with Cyril at his feet. ‘We didn’t recognise them, did we, son?’ Cyril held up his arms to Florence, and she lifted him with a grunt. Ralph put his hand upon her shoulder and said, in an altogether softer tone, ‘How fair you look, Flo. I haven’t seen you look so fair, for a year and more.’ She tilted her head, graciously; they might for a moment have been a knight and his lady, in some medieval portrait. Then Ralph looked my way, and smiled; and I didn’t know who it was that I loved more, then - his sister, or him.
‘Now, you will manage with Cyril, won’t you?’ said Florence anxiously, when she had handed the baby back to Ralph and begun to button her coat.
‘I should think I will!’ said her brother.
‘We won’t be late.’
‘You must be as late as you like; we shall not wonder. Only mind you are careful. They are rather rough streets, that you must cross...’
The trip from Bethnal Green to Cable Street did indeed take us through some of the roughest, poorest, squalidest districts in the city, and could never, ordinarily, be very cheerful. I knew the route, for I had walked it often with Florence: I knew which courts were grimmest, which factories sweated their workers hardest, which tenements housed the saddest and most hopeless families. But we were out that night together - as Florence herself had admitted - for pleasure’s sake; and though it might seem strange to say it, our journey was indeed a pleasant one, and seemed to take us over a rather different landscape to the one we normally trod. We passed gin-palaces and penny-gaffs, coffee-shops and public-houses: they were not the grim and dreary places that they sometimes were, tonight, but luminous with warmth and light and colour, thick with laughter and shouts, and with the reeking odours of beer and soup and gravy. We saw spooning couples; and girls with cherries on their hats, and lips to match them; and children bent over hot, steaming packets of tripe, and trotters, and baked potatoes. Who knew to what sad homes they might be returning, in an hour or two? For now, however, there was a queer kind of glamour to them, and to the very streets - Diss Street, Sclater Street, Hare Street, Fashion Street, Plumbers Row, Coke Street, Pinckin Street, Little Pearl Street - in which they walked.
‘How gay the city seems tonight!’ said Florence wonderingly.
It is for you, I wanted to reply: for you and your new costume. But I only smiled at her and took her arm; then, ‘Look at that coat!’ I said, as we passed a boy in a yellow felt jacket that was bright, in the Brick Lane shadows, as a lantern. ‘I knew a girl once, oh! she would have loved that coat...’
It did not take us long, after that, to reach Cable Street. Here we turned left, then right; and at the end of this road I saw the public-house that was, I guessed, our destination: a squat, flat-roofed little building with a gas-jet in a plum-coloured shade above the door, and a garish sign - The Frigate - that reminded me how near our walk had brought us to the Thames.
‘It’s this way,’ said Florence self-consciously. She led me past the door and around the building to a smaller, darker entrance at the back. Here a set of rather steep and treacherous-looking steps took us downwards, to what must once have been a cellar; at the bottom there was a door of frosted glass, and behind this was the room - the Boy in the Boat, I remembered to call it - that we had come for.
It was not a large room, but it was very shady, and it took me a time to gauge its breadth and height, to see beyond its spots of brightness - its crackling fire, its gas-lamps, the gleam of brass and glass and mirror and pewter at its bar - into the pools of gloom that lay between them. There were, I guessed, about twenty persons in it: they were seated in a row of little stalls, or standing propped against the counter, or gathered in the furthest, brightest corner, about what seemed to be a billiard table. I didn’t like to gaze at them for long, for at our appearance they all, of course, looked up, and I felt strangely shy of them and their opinion.
Instead I kept my head down, and followed Florence to the bar. There was a square-chinned woman standing behind it, wiping at a beer-glass with a cloth; when she saw us coming she put both glass and towel down, and smiled.
‘Why, Florence! How grand to see you here again! And how bonny you are looking!’ She held out her hand and took Florence’s fingers in her own, and looked her over with pleasure. Then she turned to me.
‘This is my friend, Nancy Astley,’ said Flo, rather shyly. ‘This is Mrs Swindles, who keeps bar here.’ Mrs Swindles and I exchanged nods and smiles. I took off my coat and hat, and ran my fingers through my hair; and when she saw me do that her brow lifted a little and I hoped that she was thinking, as Annie Page had: Well, Florence has a fancy new uncle, all right!
‘What will you have, Nance?’ Florence asked me then. I said I would have whatever she cared for, and she hesitated, then asked for two rum hots. ‘Let’s take them to a stall.’ We stepped across the room - there was sand upon the floorboards, and our boots crunched upon it as we walked — to a table, set between two benches. We sat, across from one another, and stirred sugar into our glasses.
‘You were a regular here once, then?’ I asked Flo.
She nodded. ‘I haven’t been here for an age...’
‘No?’
‘Not since Lily died. It’s a bit of a monkey-parade, to tell the truth. I haven’t had the heart for it...’
I gazed into my rum. All at once there came a burst of laughter from the stall at my back that made me jump.
‘I said,’ came a girl’s voice, “‘I only does that sort o
f thing, sir, with my friends.” “Emily Pettinger,” he said, “said you let her flat fuck you for an hour and a half” — which is a lie, but anyway, “Flat fucking is one thing, sir,” I said, ‘and this quite another. If you want me to - her” ’ - here she must have made a gesture - “ ‘you shall have to pay me for it, rather dear.” ’
‘And did he, then?’ came another voice. The first speaker paused, perhaps to take a sip from her glass; then, ‘Swipe me!’ she said, ‘if the bastard didn’t put his hand in his pocket and pull out a sov, and lay it on the table-top, all cool as you like...’
I looked at Florence, and she smiled. ‘Gay girls,’ she said. ‘Half the girls who come in here are gay. Do you mind it?’ How could I mind it, when I had been a gay girl - well, a gay boy - once, myself? I shook my head.
‘Do you mind it?’ I asked her.
‘No. I’m only sorry that they must do it...’
I didn’t listen: I was too taken with the gay girl’s story. She was saying now: ‘We flat fucked for a half-an-hour; then tipped the velvet while the gent looked on. Then Susie took a pair of vampers, and -’
I looked again at Florence, and frowned. ‘Are they French, or what?’ I asked. ‘I can’t understand a thing they’re saying.’ And indeed, I could not; for I had never heard such words before, in all my time upon the streets. I said, ‘Tipped the velvet: what does that mean? It sounds like something you might do in a theatre...’
Florence blushed. ‘You might try it,’ she said; ‘but I think the chairman would chuck you out...’ Then, while I still frowned, she parted her lips and showed me the tip of her tongue; and glanced, very quickly, at my lap. I had never known her do such a thing before, and I found myself terribly startled by it, and terribly stirred. It might just as well have been her lips that she had dipped to me: I felt my drawers grow damp, and my cheeks flush scarlet; and had to look away from her own warm gaze, to hide my confusion.
I looked at Mrs Swindles at the bar, and at the pewter mugs that hung, in one long gleaming row, above her; and then I looked at the group of figures at the billiard table. And then, after a moment or two, I studied them a little harder. I said to Florence, ‘I thought you said it was to be all toms here? There are blokes over there.’
‘Blokes? Are you sure?’ She turned to where I pointed, and gazed with me at the billiard players. They were rather rowdy, and half of them were clad in trousers and waistcoats, and sported prison crops. But as Florence studied them, she laughed. ‘Blokes? she said again. ‘Those are not blokes! Nancy, how could you think it?’
I blinked, and looked again. I began to see... They were not men, but girls; they were girls - and they were rather like myself...
I swallowed. I said, ‘Do they live as men, those girls?’
Florence shrugged, not noticing the thickness in my voice. ‘Some do, I believe. Most dress as they please, and live as others care to find them.’ She caught my gaze. ‘I had rather thought, you know, that you must’ve done the same sort of thing, yourself...’
‘Would you think me very foolish,’ I answered, ‘if I said that I had thought I was the only one... ?’
Her gaze grew gentle, then. ‘How queer you are!’ she said mildly. ‘You have never tipped the velvet -’
‘I didn’t say that I had never done it, you know; only that I never called it that.’
‘Well. You use all sorts of peculiar phrases, then. You seem never to have seen a tom in a pair of trousers. Really, Nance, sometimes - sometimes I think you must’ve been born quite grown - like Venus in the sea-shell, in the painting ...’
She put a finger to the side of her glass, to catch a trickle of sugary rum; then put the finger to her lip. I felt my throat grow even thicker, and my heart give a strange kind of lurch. Then I sniffed, and gazed again at the trousered toms beside the billiard-table.
‘To think,’ I said after a second, ‘that I might have worn my moleskins, after all ...’ Florence laughed.
We sat sipping at our rums a little longer; more women arrived, and the room became hotter and noisier and thick with smoke. I went to the bar to have our glasses re-filled, and when I walked with them back to our stall I found Annie there, with Ruth and Nora and another girl, a fair-haired, pretty girl, who was introduced to me as Miss Raymond. ‘Miss Raymond works in a print-shop,’ said Annie, and I had to pretend surprise to hear it. When, after half-an-hour or so, she went off to find the lavatory, Annie made us rearrange our places so that she might sit next to her.
‘Quick, quick!’ she cried. ‘She’ll be back in a moment! Nancy, over there!’ I found myself placed between Florence and the wall; and for lovely long moments at a time I let the other women talk, and savoured the press of her damson thigh against my own more sober, more slender one. Every time she turned to me I felt her breath upon my cheek, hot and sugary and scented with rum.
The evening passed: I began to think that I had never spent a pleasanter one. I gazed at Ruth and Nora, and saw them lean together and laugh. I looked at Annie: she had her hand upon Miss Raymond’s shoulder, her eyes upon her face. I looked at Florence, and she smiled. ‘All right, Venus?’ she said. Her hair had sprung right out of its pins, and was curling about her collar.
Then Nora began one of those earnest stories — ‘This girl came into the office today, listen to this ...’ — and I yawned, and looked away from her, towards the billiard players; and was very surprised to find the knot of women there all turned away from their table, and gazing at me. They seemed to be debating me - one nodded, another shook her head, yet another squinted at me, and thumped her billiard cue upon the floor emphatically. I began to grow a little uncomfortable: perhaps - who knew? - I had breached some tommish etiquette, coming here in short hair and a skirt. I looked away; and when I looked again, one of the women had disentangled herself from her neighbours, and was stepping purposefully towards our stall. She was a large woman, and she had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. On her arm there was a rough tattoo, so green and smudged it might have been a bruise. She reached our booth, placed the tattooed arm across the back of it, and leaned to catch my eye.
‘Excuse me, sweetheart,’ she said, rather loudly. ‘But my pal Jenny will have it that you’re that Nan King gal, what used to work the halls with Kitty Butler. I’ve a shilling on it that you ain’t her. Now, will you settle it?’
I looked quickly around the table. Florence and Annie had looked up in mild surprise. Nora had broken off her story and now smiled and said, ‘I should make the most of this Nance. There might be a free drink in it.’ Miss Raymond laughed. No one believed that I really might be Nan King; and I, of course, had spent five years in hiding from that history, denying I had ever been her, myself.
But the rum, the warmth, my new, unspoken passion seemed to work in me like oil in a rusted lock. I turned back to the woman. ‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘that you must lose your bet. I am Nan King.’ It was the truth, and yet I felt like an impostor - as if I had just said, ‘I am Lord Rosebery’. I did not look at Florence — though out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fly open. I looked at the tattooed woman, and gave her a modest little shrug. She, for her part, had stepped back; now she slapped our stall until it shook, and called, laughing, to her friend.
‘Jenny, you have won your coin! The gal says she is Nan King, all right!’
At her words the group at the billiard-table let up a cry, and half the room fell silent. The gay girls in the neighbouring stall got up, to peer over at me; I heard ‘Nan King, it is Nan King there!’ whispered at every table. The tattooed tom’s friend - Jenny - came stepping over, and held her hand out to me.
‘Miss King,’ she said, ‘I knew it was you the moment you come in. What happy times I used to have, watching you and Miss Butler at the Paragon!’
‘You’re very kind,’ I said, taking her hand. As I did so, I caught Florence’s eye.
‘Nance,’ she asked, ‘what is all this? Did you really work the halls? Why did you never say?’
‘You don’t mean you didn’t know your friend was such a star?’ asked Jenny now, overhearing.
‘We didn’t know that she was any kind of star,’ said Annie.
‘Her and Kitty Butler - what a team! There never was a pair o’ mashers like ’em...’
‘Mashers!’ said Florence.
‘Why yes,’ continued Jenny. Then: ‘Why, just a minute - I believe there is the very thing to show it, here...’ She pushed her way through the crowd of gaping women to the bar, and here I saw her catch the barmaid’s eye, then gesture towards the wall behind the rows of upturned bottles. There was a faded piece of baize there, with a hundred old notes and picture-postcards fastened to it; I saw Mrs Swindles reach into the layers of curling paper for a second, then draw out something small and bent. This she handed to Jenny; in a moment it had been placed before me, and I found myself gazing at a photograph: Kitty and I, faint but unmistakable, in Oxford bags and boaters. I had my hand upon her shoulder, and a cigarette, unlit, between the fingers.
I looked and looked at the picture. I remembered very clearly the weight and scent of that suit, the feel of Kitty’s shoulder beneath my hand. Even so, it was like gazing into someone else’s past, and it made me shiver.
The postcard was seized from me, then, first by Florence - who bent her head to it and studied it almost as intently as I had - then by Ruth and Nora, and Annie and Miss Raymond, and finally by Jenny, who passed it on to her friends.
‘Fancy us still having that pinned up,’ she said. ‘I remember the gal what put it there: she was rather keen on you - indeed, you was always something of a favourite, at the Boy. She got it from a lady in the Burlington Arcade. Did you know there was a lady there, selling pictures such as yours, to interested gals?’ I shook my head - in wonder, to think of all the times that I had trolled up and down the Burlington Arcade for interested gents, and never noticed that particular lady.