Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters Page A

...’ Then she led us from the parlour, and up the stairs. We climbed for three flights, the stairwell growing dimmer as we ascended, then lightening: the last set of steps were slim and uncarpeted, and had a little skylight above them, a quartered pane streaked with soot and pigeon-droppings, through which the blue of the September sky showed unexpectedly vivid and clear - as if the sky itself were a ceiling, and, climbing, we had come nearer to it.
    At the top of these steps there was a door, and behind this a very small room - not a bed-sitting room as I had expected, but a tiny parlour with a pair of ancient, sagging armchairs set before a hearth, and a shallow, old-fashioned dresser. Beside the dresser was another door, leading to a second chamber which a sloping roof made even smaller than the first. Kitty and I stepped to its threshold and stood, side by side, gazing at what lay beyond: a wash-hand stand; a lyre-backed chair; an alcove with a curtain before it; and a bed - a bed with a high, thick mattress and an iron bedstead, and beneath it a chamber-pot - a bed rather narrower than the one I was used to sharing with my sister at home.
    â€˜You won’t mind doubling up, of course,’ said Mrs Dendy, who had followed us to the bedroom. ‘You’ll be quite on top of each other in here I’m afraid - though not so tight as my boys downstairs, who only have the one room. But Mr Bliss did insist on a decent bit of space for the two of you.’ She smiled at me, and I looked away. Kitty, however, said very brightly: ‘It’s perfect, Mrs Dendy. Miss Astley and I will be as cosy here as two peg-dolls in a dolls’ house - won’t we, Nan?’
    Her cheeks, I saw, had grown a little pink - but that might have been from the climb up from the parlour. I said, ‘We will’, and lowered my gaze again; then moved to take a box from Mr Bliss.
    Mr Bliss himself did not stay long after that - as if he thought it indelicate to linger in a lady’s chamber, even one he was paying for himself. He exchanged a few words with Kitty regarding her appointment on the morrow at the Bermondsey Star - for she had to meet the manager, and rehearse with the orchestra, in the morning, in preparation for her first appearance in the evening - then he shook her hand, and mine, and bade us farewell. I felt as anxious, suddenly, at the thought of him leaving us, as I had done a few hours before at the prospect of meeting him at all.
    But when he had gone - and when Mrs Dendy, too, had closed the door on us and wheezed and coughed her way downstairs behind him - I lowered myself into one of the armchairs and closed my eyes, and felt myself ache with pleasure and relief simply to be alone at last with someone who was more to me than a stranger. I heard Kitty step across the luggage, and when I opened my eyes she was at my side and had raised a hand to tug at a lock of hair which had come loose from my plait and was falling over my brow. Her touch made me stiffen again: I was still not used to the easy caresses, the hand-holdings and cheek-strokings, of our friendship, and every one of them made me flinch slightly, and colour faintly, with desire and confusion.
    She smiled, then bent to tug at the straps of the basket at her feet; and after a moment of idling in the armchair, watching her busy herself with dresses and books and bonnets, I rose to help her.
    It took us an hour to unpack. My own few poor frocks and shoes and underclothes took up little enough space, and were stowed away in a moment; but Kitty, of course, had not only her everyday dresses and boots to unpack and brush and straighten, but also her suits and toppers. When she started on these, I moved to take them from her. I said, ‘You must let me take charge of your costumes now, you know. Look at these collars! They all need whitening. Look at these stockings! We must keep a drawer for the ones that have been cleaned, and another for the