‘What a treat, Miss King,’ cried someone else then, ‘to find you here...’ There was a general murmuring as the implications of this comment were digested; ‘I cannot say I never wondered,’ I heard someone say. Then Jenny leaned near to me again, and cocked her head.
‘What about Miss Butler, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard she was a bit of a tom, herself.’
‘That’s right,’ said another girl, ‘I heard that too.’
I hesitated. Then: ‘You heard wrong,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t.’
‘Not just a bit... ?’
‘Not at all.’
Jenny shrugged. ‘Well, that’s too bad.’
I looked at my lap, suddenly upset; worse, however, was to follow, for at that moment one of the gay girls thrust her way between Ruth and Nora to call, ‘Oh, Miss King, won’t you give us a song?’ Her cry was taken up by a dozen throats - ‘Oh yes, Miss King, do!’ - and, as in a terrible dream, a broken-down old piano was suddenly produced, it seemed, from nowhere, and wheeled over the gritty floorboards. At once, a woman sat down before it, cracked her knuckles, and played a staggering scale.
‘Really,’ I said, ‘I can’t!’ I looked wildly at Florence - she was studying me as if she had never seen my face before. Jenny cried carelessly: ‘Oh, go on, Nan, be a sport, for the gals at the Boy. What was that one you used to sing - about winking at the pretty ladies, with your hand hanging on to your sovereign ... ?’
One voice, and then another and another, picked it up. Annie had taken a swig of her beer, and now almost choked on it. ‘Lord!’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Did you sing that? I saw you once at the Holborn Empire! You threw a chocolate coin at me - it was half-melted from the heat of your pocket - I ate it, and thought I should die! Oh, Nancy!’
I gazed at her and bit my lip. The billiard players had all set down their cues and moved to stand about the piano; the pianist was picking out the chords of the song, and about twenty women were singing it. It was a silly song, but I remembered Kitty’s voice lilting upwards at the chorus, and giving the tune a kind of sweet liquidity, as if the foolish phrases turned to honey on her tongue. It sounded very different here, in this rough cellar - and yet, it had a certain trueness, too, and a new sweetness all of its own. I listened to the boisterous girls, and found myself beginning to hum... In a moment I had knelt upon my seat and joined my voice with theirs; and afterwards they cheered and clapped me, and I found I had to put my head upon my arm, and bite my lip, to stop the tears from coming.
They started on another song, then - not one of mine and Kitty‘s, but a new one that I didn’t know, and so could not join in with. I sat down, and let my head fall back against the panels of the stall. A girl arrived at the end of our table with a pork pie on a plate, sent over from Mrs Swindles and ‘on the house’. I picked at the pastry of this for a while, and grew a little calmer. Ruth and Nora now had their elbows on the table, their heads on their chins, and were gazing at me, their story forgotten. Annie, I could hear in the pauses of the new song, was explaining to an incredulous Miss Raymond: ‘No, I swear, we had no idea. Arrived on Florrie’s doorstep with a black eye and a bunch of cresses, and has never left it. Quite a dark horse...’
Florence herself had her face turned my way, and her eyes in shadow.
‘You were really famous?’ she asked me, as I found a cigarette and lit it. ‘And you really sang?’
‘Sang, and danced. And acted, once, in a pantomime at the Britannia.’ I slapped my thigh. “‘My lords, where is the Prince, our master.”’ She laughed, though I did not.
‘How I wish I’d seen you! When was all this?’
I thought for a moment; then, ‘Eighteen eighty-nine,’ I said.
She stuck her lip out. ‘Ah. Strikes all that year: no time for the music hall. I think, one night, I might have stood outside the Britannia, collecting money for the dockers...’ She smiled. ‘I should have liked a chocolate sovereign, though.’
‘Well, I should have made sure to throw you one...’
She lifted her glass to her lips, then thought of something else. ‘What happened,’ she asked, ‘to make you leave the theatre? If you were doing so well, why did you stop? What did you do?’
I had admitted to some things; but I wasn’t ready to admit to them all. I pushed my plate towards her. ‘Eat this pie for me,’ I said. Then I leaned past her and called down the table. ‘I say, Annie. Give me a cigarette, will you? This one’s a dud.’
‘Well, since you’re a celebrity...’
Florence ate the pie, helped out by Ruth. The singers at the piano grew weary and hoarse, and went back to their billiards. The gay girls in the stall next door got up, and pinned on their hats: they were off, I suppose, to start work, in the more ordinary publics of Wapping and Limehouse. Nora yawned and, seeing her, we all yawned, and Florence gave a sigh.
‘Shall we go?’ she asked. ‘I think it must be very late.’
‘It is almost midnight,’ said Miss Raymond. We stood, to button our coats on.
‘I must just have a word with Mrs Swindles,’ I said, ‘to thank her for my pie’; and when I had done that - and been seized and saluted by half-a-dozen women on the way — I wandered over to the billiard corner, and nodded to Jenny.
‘Good-night to you,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you won your shilling.’
She took my hand and shook it. ‘Good-night to you, Miss King! The shilling was nothing compared to the pleasure of having you here among us all.’
‘Shall we see you here again, Nan?’ her friend with the tattoo called then. I nodded: ‘I hope so.’
‘But you must sing us a proper song next time, on your own, in all your gentleman’s toggery.’
‘Oh yes, you must!’
I made no answer, only smiled, and took a step away from them; then I thought of something, and beckoned to Jenny again.
‘That picture,’ I said quietly when she was close. ‘Do you think - would Mrs Swindles mind - do you think that I might have it, for myself?’ She put her hand to her pocket at once, and drew out the creased and faded photograph, and passed it to me.
‘You take it,’ she said; then she could not help but ask, a little wonderingly, ‘But have you none of your own? I should’ve thought...’
‘Between you and me,’ I said, ‘I left the business rather fast. I lost a lot of stuff, and never cared to think of it till now. This, however — ’ I gazed down at the photo. ‘Well, it won’t hurt me, will it, to have this little reminder?’
‘I hope it won’t, indeed,’ she answered kindly. Then she looked past me, to Florence and the others. ‘Your girl is awaiting for you,’ she said with a smile. I put the picture in the pocket of my coat.
‘So she is,’ I said absently. ‘So she is.’
I joined my friends; we picked our way across the crowded room, and hauled ourselves up the treacherous staircase into the aching cold of the February night. Outside The Frigate the road was dark and quiet; from Cable Street, however, came a distant row. Like us, the customers of all the other publics and gin palaces of the East End were beginning to make their tipsy journeys home.
‘Is there never trouble,’ I said as we started to walk, ‘between women at the Boy and local people, or roughs?’
Annie turned her collar up against the cold, then took Miss Raymond’s arm. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. Once some boys dressed a pig in a bonnet, and tipped it down the cellar stairs...’
‘No!’
‘Yes,’ said Nora. ‘And once a woman got her head broken, in a fight.’
‘But this was over a girl,’ said Florence, yawning, ‘and it was the girl’s husband who hit her...’
‘The truth is,’ Annie went on, ‘there is such a mix round these parts, what with Jews and Lascars, Germans and Poles, socialists, anarchists, salvationists... The people are surprised at nothing.’
Even as she spoke, however, two fellows came out of a house at the end of the street and, seeing us - seeing Annie and Miss Raym
ond arm-in-arm, and Ruth with her hand in Nora’s pocket, and Florence and I bumping shoulders - gave a mutter, and a sneer. One of them hawked as we passed by him, and spat; the other cupped his hand at the fork of his trousers, and shouted and laughed.
Annie looked round at me and gave a shrug. Miss Raymond, to make us all smile, said, ‘I wonder if any woman will ever get her head broken on my account...’
‘Only her heart, Miss Raymond,’ I called gallantly; and had the satisfaction of seeing both Annie and Florence look my way and frown.
Our group got smaller as we journeyed, for at Whitechapel Ruth and Nora left us to pick up a cab to take them to their flat in the City, and at Shoreditch, where Miss Raymond lived, Annie looked at the toe of her boot and said, ‘Well, I think I shall just walk Miss Raymond to her door, since it’s so late; but you be sure to go on without me, and I’ll catch you up ...
So then it was only Florence and me. We walked quickly, because it was so cold, and Florence linked her hands around my arm and held me very close. When we reached the end of Quilter Street we stopped, as I had done on my first journey there, to gaze for a moment at the dark and eerie towers of Columbia Market, and to peer up at the starless, moonless, fog- and smoke-choked London sky.
‘I don’t believe Annie will catch us up, after all,’ murmured Florence, looking back towards Shoreditch.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe she will ...’
The house, when we entered it, seemed hot and stuffy enough; we soon grew chilled, however, once we had taken our coats off and visited the privy. Ralph had left my truckle-bed made up for me, and fixed a note to the mantel to say there was a pot of tea for us inside the oven. There was: it was as thick and brown as gravy, but we drank it anyway - carrying our mugs back into the parlour, where the air was warmest, and holding our hands before the last few glowing coals in the ashy hearth.
The chairs had been pushed back to make room for my bed, so now, rather shyly, we sat upon it, side by side: as we did so, it moved a little on its castors, and Florence laughed. There was a lamp turned low upon the table but, apart from that, the room was very dim. We sat, and sipped our tea, and gazed at the coals: now and then the ash would shift a little in the grate, and the coal give a pop. ‘How still it seems,’ said Florence quietly, ‘after the Boy!’
I had drawn my knees to my chin - the bed was very low upon the rug - and now turned my cheek upon them, and smiled at her.
‘I’m glad you took me there,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had such a pleasant night since - well, I cannot say.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘I can’t. For half my pleasure, you know, was seeing you so gay...’
She smiled, then yawned. ‘Didn’t you think Miss Raymond very handsome?’ she asked me.
‘Pretty handsome.’ Not as handsome as you, I wanted to say, looking again at all the features I had once thought plain. Oh Flo, there’s no one as handsome as you!
But I didn’t say it. And meanwhile, she had smiled. ‘I remember another girl Annie courted once. We let them stay with us, because Annie was sharing with her sister then. They slept in here, and Lilian and I were upstairs; and they were so noisy, Mrs Monks came round to ask, “Was someone poorly?” We had to say that Lily had the toothache - when in fact, she had slept through it all, with me beside her...’
Her voice grew quiet. I put a hand to my necktie, to loosen it: the idea of Flo lying at Lilian’s side, stirred to a useless passion, made me bitter; but, as usual, it also made me rather warm. I said, ‘Wasn’t it hard, sharing a bed with someone you loved like that?’
‘It was terribly hard! But also rather marvellous.’
‘Did you never - never kiss her?’
‘I sometimes kissed her as she slept; I kissed her hair. Her hair was handsome...’
I had a very vivid memory, then, of lying beside Kitty, in the days before we had ever made love. I said, in a slightly different tone: ‘Did you watch her face, as she lay dreaming - and hope she dreamed of you?’
‘I used to light a candle, just to do it!’
‘Didn’t you ache to touch her, as she lay at your side?’
‘I thought I would touch her! I was frightened half to death by it.’
‘But didn’t you sometimes touch yourself - and wish the fingers were hers... ?’
‘Oh, and then blush to do it! One time, I moved against her in the bed and she said, still sleeping, “Jim!” - Jim was the name of her man-friend. And then she said it again: “Jim!” — and in a voice I’d never heard her use before. I didn’t know whether to weep about it, or what; but what I really wanted - oh, Nance! what I really wanted was for her to sleep on, like a girl in a trance, so I could touch her and have her think me him, and call out again, in that voice, as I did it... !’
She drew in her breath. A coal in the hearth fell with a rattle, but she did not turn to it, and neither did I. We only stared: it was as if her words, that were so warm, had melted our gazes the one into the other, and we could not tear them free. I said, almost laughing: ‘Jim! Jim!’ She blinked, and seemed to shiver; and then I shivered, too. And then I said, simply, ‘Oh, Flo...’
And then, as if through some occult power of its own, the space between our lips seemed to grow small, and then to vanish; and we were kissing. She lifted her hand to touch the corner of my mouth; and then her fingers came between our pressing lips - they tasted, still, of sugar. And then I began to shake so hard I had to clench my fists and say to myself, ‘Stop shaking, can’t you? She’ll think you’ve never been kissed before, at all!’
When I raised my hands to her, however, I found that she was shaking just as badly; and when, after a moment, I moved my fingers from her throat to the swell of her breasts, she twitched like a fish - then smiled, and leaned closer to me. ‘Press me harder!’ she said.
We fell back together upon the bed, then - it shifted another inch across the carpet, on its wheels - and I undid the buttons of her shirt and pressed my face to her bosom, and sucked at one of her nipples, through the cotton of her chemise, till the nipple grew hard and she began to stiffen and pant. She put her hands to my head again, and lifted me to where she could kiss me; I lay and moved upon her, and felt her move beneath me, felt her breasts against my own, till I knew I should come, or faint - but then she turned me, and raised my skirt, and put her hand between my legs, and stroked so slowly, so lightly, so teasingly, I hoped I might never come at all...
At last, I felt her hand settle at the very wettest part of me, and she breathed against my ear. ‘Do you care for it,’ she murmured then, ‘inside?’ The question was such a gentle, such a gallant one, I almost wept. ‘Oh!’ I said, and again she kissed me; and after a moment I felt her move within me, first with one finger, then with two, I guessed, then three... At last, after a second’s pressure, she had her hand in me up to the wrist. I think I called out - I think I shivered and panted and called out, to feel the subtle twisting of her fist, the curling and uncurling of her sweet fingers, beneath my womb...
When I reached my crisis I felt a gush, and found that I had wet her arm, with my spendings, from fingertip to elbow - and that she had come, out of a kind of sympathy, and lay weak and heavy against me, with her own skirts damp. She drew her hand free - making me shiver anew - and I seized it and held it, and pulled her face to me and kissed her; and then we lay very quietly with our limbs pressed hard together until, like cooling engines, we ceased our pulsings and grew still.
When she rose at last, she cracked her head upon the supper-table: we had jerked the truckle-bed from one side of the parlour to the other, and not noticed. She laughed. We shuffled off our clothes, and she turned down the lamp, and we lay beneath the blankets in our damp petticoats. When she fell asleep I put my hands to her cheeks, and kissed her brow where she had bruised it.
I woke to find it still the night, but a little lighter. I didn’t know what had disturbed me; when I looked about me, however, I saw that Florence had raised hers
elf a little on the pillow, and was gazing at me, apparently quite wide awake. I reached for her hand again, and kissed it, and felt my insides give a kind of lurch. She smiled; but there was a darkness to the smile, that made me feel chill.
‘What’s up?’ I murmured. She stroked my hair.
‘I was only thinking...’
‘What?’ She wouldn’t answer. I propped myself up beside her, quite wide awake myself, now. ‘What, Florence?’
‘I was looking at you in the darkness: I have never seen you sleep before. You looked like quite a stranger to me. And then I thought, you are a stranger to me ...’
‘A stranger? How can you say that? You have lived with me, for more than a year!’
‘And last night,’ she answered, ‘for the first time, I discovered you were once a music-hall star! How can you keep a thing like that a secret? Why would you want to? What else have you done that I don’t know about? You might have been in prison, for all I know. You might have been mad. You might have been gay!’
I bit my lip; but then, remembering how kind she had been about the gay girls at the Boy, I said quickly, ‘Flo, I did go on the streets one time. You won’t hate me for it, will you?’
She took her hand away at once. ‘On the streets! My God! Of course I won’t hate you, but - oh, Nance! To think of you as one of them sad girls...’
‘I wasn’t sad,’ I said, and looked away. ‘And to tell the truth I - well, I wasn’t quite a girl, either.’
‘Not a girl?’ she said. ‘What can you mean?’
I scraped at the silken edge of the blanket with my nail. Should I tell my story - the story I had kept so close, so long? I saw her hand upon the sheet and, as my stomach gave another slide, I remembered again her fingers, easing me open, and her fist inside me, slowly turning...
I took a breath. ‘Have you ever,’ I said, ‘been to Whitstable ... ?’
Once I began it, I found I could not stop. I told her everything - about my life as an oyster-girl; about Kitty Butler, whom I had left my family for, and who had left me, in her turn, for Walter Bliss. I told her about my madness; my masquerade; my life with Mrs Milne and Grace, in Green Street, where she had seen me first. And finally I told her about Diana, and Felicity Place, and Zena.