Tipping The Velvet
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Read between March 3 - March 7, 2023
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I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father’s kitchen for occupation, or for love.
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It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause.
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we would carry the tunes away with us.
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The hush of fatigue became a silence of expectation.
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It was the hair, I think, which drew me most. If I had ever seen women with hair as short as hers, it was because they had spent time in hospital or prison; or because they were mad. They could never have looked like Kitty Butler. Her hair fitted her head like a little cap that had been sewn, just for her, by some nimble-fingered milliner. I would say it was brown; brown, however, is too dull a word for it. It was, rather, the kind of brown you might hear sung about – a nut-brown, or a russet.
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though it was peculiarly thrilling to have them sung to us, not by a gent, but by a girl, in neck-tie and trousers.
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I could not think of anything more wonderful, at that moment, than to receive a rose from Kitty Butler’s hand.
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‘When I see her,’ I said, ‘it’s like – I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like I never saw anything at all before. It’s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it’s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing – they’re like dust. Then she walks on the stage and – she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet … She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here.’ I placed a hand upon my chest, upon the breast-bone. ‘I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her …’ My voice became a ...more
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Oh! and when she stepped on stage at last, there would be that rush of gladness so swift and sharp I would catch my breath to feel it, and grow faint.
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You would be marvellous, if I were here or not. You would be marvellous, without my admiration.
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Kitty Butler had looked for me – had raised her head and looked for me; and I was lost and sitting with strangers.
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she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed.
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I had the sensation then – and I felt it again in the years that followed, every time I made a similar trip back stage – that I had stepped into the workings of a giant clock, stepped through the elegant casing to the dusty, greasy, restless machinery that lay, all hidden from the common eye, behind it.
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and because it was somehow easier to talk to her reflection than to her face, I began at last to chat with her quite freely.
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Gradually, however – as if she was stripping the paint from her voice, as well as from her face – her tone grew milder, less pert and pressing.
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Like the freckles, it made her – not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! – and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you.
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But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again – yet also feared to.
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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.
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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.
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and I felt a fool to be at her side, so still and sober, and jealous of the crowd that was her lover.
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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.
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But she saw me, of course, as I lay in my bed; and, as anyone will tell you who has been secretly in love, it is in bed that you do your dreaming – in bed, in the darkness, where you cannot see your own cheeks pink, that you ease back the mantle of restraint that keeps your passion dimmed throughout the day, and let it glow a little.
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And how nice to see where you live and work; and to catch your train; and to meet the people that love you, and have you with them all day …’
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She was more to me than all the world;
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I felt a little pang of disappointment. This swiftly turned, however – as always – to desire, and then to pride, for she looked terribly smart and handsome on that dusty Whitstable platform.
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‘In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow – and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.’
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It wasn’t like my anxious dreams at all: she gave a great wave when she saw us, and a smile.
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For to be Kitty’s sister was better than to be Kitty’s nothing, Kitty’s no one. And if my head and my heart – and the hot, squirming centre of me – cried out at the shame of it, then I must stifle them. I must learn to love Kitty as Kitty loved me; or never be able to love her at all. And that, I knew, would be terrible.
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But Kitty could have worn anything – a string of bottle-tops about her neck – and still, I thought, look like a queen.
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And at that, Kitty herself turned to me – and showed me such a look of wonder and confusion that it was as if, just for a second, she had never seen me before; and I do not know whose cheeks at that moment were the pinker – mine, or hers.
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I think I sighed then: sighed to know – to know for sure, at last! – that there was something to be told. And then I dipped my face to hers, and shut my eyes.
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The piece of sport with the jacket and the boater had been a novel one, born of the gaiety of that marvellous morning; until then Kitty’s suits had seemed too handsome, too special – above all, too peculiarly hers, too fundamental to her own particular magic and swank – for me to fool with.
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I felt as though I had never had legs before – or, rather, that I had never known, quite, what it really felt like to have two legs, joined at the top.
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As I did so, I put a hand to my breast. There was a dull movement there, a kind of pulling or folding, or melting, exactly as if my chest were the hot, soft wall of a candle, falling in upon a burning wick. I gave a sigh. Kitty heard, and saw my stricken face, and came to me; then she moved my hand away and placed her lips, very softly, over my heart.
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The truth was this: that whatever successes I might achieve as a girl, they would be nothing compared to the triumphs I should enjoy clad, however girlishly, as a boy.
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That, in itself, impressed me; what astonished and thrilled me now was the thought that girls might look at me at all – the thought that in every darkened hall there might be one or two female hearts that beat exclusively for me, one or two pairs of eyes that lingered, perhaps immodestly, over my face and figure and suit.
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‘I know that this ain’t wrong, what we do. Only that the world says it is.’
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‘I shall think about you every minute.’ ‘And I shall think of you …’
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then she put her arms about my waist and held me to her rather fiercely – quite as if she loved me more than anything.
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beneath the pain of it, rather, I crossed my arms over my ribs, and embraced my dark and thickened heart like a lover.
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I think she was never quite sure if I were a girl come to her house to pull on a pair of trousers, or a boy arrived to change out of his frock. Sometimes, I was not sure myself.
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It seemed my fate to be dressed and fashioned and admired by others.
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that the moon was reeling through the clouds like a drunken woman looking for lovers.
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I have heard him myself – of how he plans to rename the estate New Lesbos.’ ‘New Lesbos!’ Diana said mildly. Then she yawned. ‘With that tired old lesbian Susan Dacre in it, it might just as well be the original …’
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even when we ventured into the public world, the ordinary world beyond the circle of Cavendish Sapphists,
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she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling.
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Dickie wore a ring on the smallest finger of her left hand, and I had often admired it – yes, I was sure it must be a ring, like Dickie’s.
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We gazed at one another for the space of a couple of heartbeats.
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– but marked the card, of course, Sapphists Only. That was her prime requirement; her second demand, as I have said, was that they come in fancy dress.
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Dickie was one of these: she came clad in a morning suit, with a sprig of lilac at her lapel, and calling herself ‘Dorian Gray’.
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