Tipping The Velvet

by Sarah Waters

in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish.

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice – a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

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

I had that sensation again, that there had grown a lantern or a beacon inside me. I was sure that when she stepped upon the stage it would be like putting a match to the wick, and I would flare up, golden and incandescent but somehow painfully and shamefully bright; and my family and my beau would shrink away from me, appalled.

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.

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.

had been ordinary before she came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left ringing with music or glowing with light.

she had a voice as damp and fruity as a piece of Christmas cake –

Her mouth was chill, at first, then very warm – the only warm thing, it seemed to me, in the whole of the frozen city; and when she took her lips away – as she did, after a moment, to give a quick, anxious glance towards our hunched and nodding driver – my own felt wet and sore and naked in the bitter December breezes, as if her kiss had flayed them.

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. I was eighteen, and knew nothing. I thought, at that moment, that I would die of love for her. We did not see Walter, and there was no more talk

But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.

and wished that I could be plain Nancy Astley again, whom Kitty Butler loved with an ordinary love she was not afraid to show to all the world.

Above the mantel there was one small looking-glass, as cloudy and as speckled as the back of an old man’s hand. The window faced the Market. It was all about as different

as one speaker after another surrendered the slender threads of some anecdote or fancy to catch at the more compelling cadences of hers. Her boldness was contagious. Women came to her, and grew giddy. She was like a singer, shivering glasses. She was like a cancer, she was like a mould. She was like the hero of one of her own gross romances – you might set her in a chamber with a governess and a nun, and in an hour they would have torn out their own hair, to fashion a whip.

As lovers’ vows go, this one was, I suppose, rather curious; but we were girls with curious histories – girls with pasts like boxes with ill-fitting lids.