Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The tent, now, was quiet: there was no speaker on the platform, and people had taken advantage of the break to drift outside into the sunlight and the bustle of the field. Miss Raymond said brightly, ‘Let us all sit down, shall we?’ As we moved to occupy a row of empty seats, however, a little girl came trotting up, and caught my eye. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ she said. ‘Are you the gal what give the lecture?’ I nodded. ‘There is a lady just outside the tent, then, says will you please step up and have a word?’ Annie laughed, and raised her eyebrows. ‘Another lecture tour offer, perhaps?’ she said. I looked at the girl, and hesitated. ‘A lady, you say?’ ‘Yes miss,’ she said firmly. ‘A lady. Dressed real smart, with her eyes all hid behind a hat with a veil on it.’ I gave a start, and looked quickly at Florence. A lady in a veil: there was only one person that could be. Diana must have seen me after all, and watched me give my speech, and now sought me out for- who knew what queer purpose? The idea made me tremble. When the girl stepped away I turned to gaze after her, and Florence shifted in her seat, and stared with me. In the corner of the tent there was a square of sunlight, where the canvas had been tied back to form a doorway - it was so bright I had to narrow my eyes to look at it, and blink. At one edge of the square of light stood a woman, her face concealed, as the girl had said, by a broad hat and a width of net. As I studied her, she lifted her arms to her veil, and raised it. And then I saw her face. ‘Why don’t you go to her?’ I heard Florence say coldly. ‘I daresay she has come to ask you back to St John’s Wood. You shall never have to think of socialism again, there ...’ I turned to her; and when she saw how pale my cheeks were, her expression changed. ‘It’s not Diana,’ I whispered. ‘Oh, Flo! It’s not Diana -’ It was Kitty. I stood for a moment quite dumbfounded. I had seen two old lovers already today; and here was the third of them - or, rather, the first of them: my original love; my one true love - my real love, my best love - the love who had so broken my heart, it seemed never to have fired quite properly again ... I went to her, without another glance at Florence, and stood before her and rubbed my eyes against the sun — so that, when I looked at her again, she seemed surrounded by a thousand dancing points of light. ‘Nan,’ she said, and she smiled, rather nervously. ‘You have not forgotten me, I hope?’ Her voice shook a little, as it had used to do, sometimes, in passion.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  After hours of top-lit tarmac my vision was in ruins. I couldn’t see anything at all, and I didn’t really want to, because of course the hawk was dead. And then, all at once, my God, the box was full of stars. A long time ago I’d seen a suitcase in an art gallery, a small brown leather suitcase lying on its side on a white table. It was the most mundane object imaginable, and faintly sad, as if someone had put it down on their way somewhere and forgotten to pick it up. The artist had cut a small round hole through the leather. Look inside, said a pasted label, and with the faint embarrassment of being required to participate in a work of art, I leaned and put my eye to the hole. Started in surprise. Looked again. And there I was, a king of infinite space, dizzy, exhilarated, looking into a deep starfield that stretched into infinity It was cleverly done; the artist had stuck two acid-spotted mirrors to the top and bottom of the case and lit them with a parade of tiny bulbs. The reflections of the spots and holes in the glass and the bright points of light turned the interior of that suitcase into a bright, cold universe that went on for ever. Crouched over the car’s back seat and lost in the memory of the suitcase I stared at a field of stars in darkness. Slowly it resolved into specks of feather- dust, little pieces of the crumbled keratin that protects growing feathers, loosed from the hawk’s young plumage and lit by a shaft of stray sunlight from a crack in the top of the box. Eyes and brain fell into place, and now I could see a dull shine of half-light on one lemon-yellow, taloned foot. Dim feathers, shivering with apprehension. The hawk knew she was being watched. I shivered too. ‘She’s OK?’ asked Christina, back and biting into a Solero. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Absolutely fine.’ Engine on. We pulled away. Hawks have been traded for centuries, I chided myself. Of course she was alive. Seven hours is nothing. Think of the seventeenth-century falcon traders who brought wild hawks to the French court from as far away as India. Think of the Fifth Earl of Bedford importing falcons from Nova Scotia and New England; rows of perched hawks in wooden ships, hooded and still, and the lowing of cattle that were carried as cargo on those ships to feed them.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For a whole summer after this, hidden like a wild animal, he remained buried in the woods, found by no one and forgetful of himself and of his kindred. Geoffrey’s poem is the Vita Merlini – the Life of Merlin – and the feral figure who in forgetting himself flew with the birds is Merlin Sylvestris, the Merlin of the Woods, the prophet and seer who in later tales would be recast as the greatest magician of all, and who as Merlyn in The Sword in the Stone would educate the King. It’s tempting to imagine an originary moment, one perfect opening scene. An autumn evening in 1937, when White takes down a book from the shelves that he does not want to read. It is a small blue book with a cloth cover; the first volume of Le Morte D’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century retelling of stories about the legendary king. White had written his dissertation on it at Cambridge, and he is disinclined to return to it now. But he’s finished all the other books in the house, so he sits in his armchair and begins to read. It is plodding, slow work, like wading through treacle. He nearly puts it down. But suddenly it catches on him, grips him like Gos had his shoulder with eight fierce talons, and he is stricken with amazement. This is a proper story. A proper tragedy, he thinks. The people in it are real. They had not been real before. Over two days he reads the whole thing ‘with the passion of an Edgar Wallace fiend then put it down and took up a pen’. It is easy to say – there. That is how The Sword in the Stone began. But I do not think that is the story at all. The book had been started months before, when a round thing that was something like a clothes-basket was set down before his door. White thought it a warm-hearted book, quite unlike his previous efforts. ‘It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children,’ he wrote to Potts. ‘It is a preface to Mallory.’ The boy in the book is called the Wart. He is a kindly soul, loyal and slightly stupid. He is an orphan and does not know he will become king. Sir Ector has raised him along with his natural son. The Wart will never become a knight because he is not a gentleman. But in the book he is given a magical teacher – Merlyn – and a magical education, too. Eschewing schooldesks and lessons learned by rote, Merlyn turns the Wart into animals and sends him off on quests. As a fish the boy learns about the dictator’s passion for power by meeting the pike in the castle moat.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The fact is -’ The fact was, I hadn’t thought what I would tell him. I hesitated; but it was impossible to lie to him: ‘Bill, I’m living as a boy just now.’ ‘As a boy?’ He said it loudly; then put a hand before his mouth. Even so, one or two of the grumbling gents in the queue turned their heads. I edged a little further away from them. I said again: ‘I’m living as a boy, with a lady who takes care of me ...’ And at that, at last, he looked a little more knowing, and nodded. Behind him, the Italian dropped a gentleman’s hat, and the gentleman tutted. Bill said, ‘Can you wait?’ and stepped to help his friend by taking another couple of cloaks. Then he moved towards me again. The Italian looked sour. I glanced over to Diana and Maria. The lobby had emptied a bit; they stood waiting for me. Maria had placed Satin on the floor and he was scratching at her skirt. Diana turned to catch my eye. I looked at Bill. ‘How are you, then?’ I asked him. He looked rueful, and lifted his hand: there was a wedding-ring on it. He said, ‘Well, I am married now, for a start!’ ‘Married! Oh, Bill, I am happy for you! Who’s the girl? It’s not Flora? Not Flora, our old dresser?’ He nodded, and said it was. ‘It is on account of Flora,’ he added, ‘that I am working here. She has a job on round the corner, a month at the Old Mo. She is still, you know’ - he looked suddenly rather awkward — ’s he is still, you know, dressing Kitty ...’ I stared at him. There came more mutters from the queue of gents, and more sour looks from the Italian, and he stepped back again to help with the cloaks and hats and tickets. I lifted a hand to my head, and put my fingers through my hair, and tried to understand what he had told me. He was married to Flora, and Flora was still with Kitty; and Kitty had a spot at the Middlesex Music Hall. And that was about three streets away from where I stood now. And Kitty, of course, was married to Walter. Are they happy? I wanted to call to Bill then. Does she talk of me, ever? Does she think of me? Does she miss me? But when he returned - looking even more flustered and damp about the brow - I said only, ‘How’s - how’s the act, Bill?’ ‘The act?’ He sniffed. ‘Not so good, I don’t think. Not so good as the old days ...’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is then that the knowledge of why my father watched planes drops into my head. When he and his friends had been small boys running feral across London bombsites, he’d told me, they collected things. Collected anything: shrapnel, cigarette packets, coins; mostly things that came in series. Things that could be matched and swapped; sets that could be completed. Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And my father’s aeroplanes were just as much of a set to collect: a series of beautiful, moving things with names and numbers, all deeply concerned with danger and survival. But there was more. Aeroplanes had wings. They took flight, and if you knew them, watched them, understood their movements, you could somehow take flight too; you could watch that Tupolev 104 take off and know it will cross borders you cannot cross except in your imagination. In a few hours it will be on a snowy Soviet airfield. Or any one of a thousand else. In watching the planes, you fly with them and escape. They enlarge your little world and spread it across the seas. The notebooks are full of a fierce attention to things I do not know. But now I know what they are for. These are records of ordered transcendence. A watcher’s diary. My father’s talk of patience had held within it all the magic that is waiting and looking up at the moving sky. I put the notebook back and as I do I see there’s a piece of brown cardboard between the next two notebooks on the shelves. Puzzled, I pull it out. It is a blank piece of thick card cut roughly along one edge. I turn it over. My heart misses a beat, because stuck to the other side is a silver doorkey under three inches of clear tape. And five words written in pencil. Key to flat. Love, Dad Dad had posted it to me last year so I could stay at his flat in London when he was away. I’d lost it, of course. ‘My daughter the absent-minded professor,’ he’d said, rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get another one cut.’ But he’d never got round to it, and I’d not thought of it since. I don’t know what it is doing here. I read the words again and think of his hand writing them. And I think of Dad holding my own tiny hand as I put the other one flat against the sarsens at Stonehenge, back when I was very small and there were no fences to stop you walking among the stones. I looked up at the thing that was like a door but had no walls behind it. ‘Is it a house, Daddy?’ I asked him. ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s very, very old.’

• From Educated (2018)

  going to Buck’s Peak. When he replied his tone was urgent and sharp, as if he was trying to cut through whatever fog I was living in. My dear Tara, he wrote. If Shawn stabs you, you won’t be taken to a hospital. You’ll be put in the basement and given some lavender for the wound. He begged me not to go, saying a hundred things I already knew and didn’t care about, and when that didn’t work, he said: You told me your story so I could stop you if you ever did something crazy. Well, Tara, this is it. This is crazy. I can still fix this, I chanted as the plane lifted off the tarmac. — IT WAS A BRIGHT WINTER morning when I arrived on Buck’s Peak. I remember the crisp smell of frozen earth as I approached the house and the feel of ice and gravel crunching beneath my boots. The sky was a shocking blue. I breathed in the welcome scent of pine. My gaze dropped below the mountain and my breath caught. When Grandma had been alive, she had, by nagging, shouting and threats, kept my father’s junkyard contained. Now refuse covered the farm and was creeping toward the mountain base. The rolling hills, once perfect lakes of snow, were dotted with mangled trucks and rusted septic tanks. Mother was ecstatic when I stepped through the door. I hadn’t told her I was coming, hoping that, if no one knew, I might avoid Shawn. She talked rapidly, nervously. “I’m going to make you biscuits and gravy!” she said, then flew to the kitchen. “I’ll help in a minute,” I said. “I just need to send an email.” The family computer was in the old part of the house, what had been the front room before the renovation. I sat down to write Drew, because I’d promised, as a kind of compromise between us, that while on the mountain I would write to him every two hours. I nudged the mouse and the screen flickered on. The browser was already open; someone had forgotten to sign out. I moved to open a different browser but stopped when I saw my name. It was in the message that was open on the screen, which Mother had sent only moments before. To Shawn’s ex-girlfriend Erin. The premise of the message was that Shawn had been reborn,

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Its shy master, who had watched while I had posed beneath a lamp-post and strolled the pavement with my fingers at my crotch, evidently fancied another look. My lace tied, I straightened up, but cautiously kept my place. The carriage slowed, then — its dark interior still hidden behind the heavy lace at its windows - it passed me by. Then, a little way on, it drew to a halt. I began, uncertainly, to walk towards it. The driver; as before, was impassive and still: I could see only the curve of his shoulders and the rise of his hat; indeed, as I approached the rear of the vehicle he disappeared from my view completely. In the darkness the brougham seemed quite black, but where the light from a guttering street-lamp spilled on it, it gleamed a deep crimson, touched here and there with gold. The gent inside, I thought, must be a very rich one. Well, he would be disappointed; he had followed me for nothing: I quickened my step, and made to move past, head down. But as I drew level with the rear wheel I heard the soft click of a latch undone: the door swung silently open, blocking my path. From the shadows beyond the doorframe drifted a thread of blue tobacco smoke; I heard a breath, a rustle. Now I must either retrace my steps and cross behind the vehicle, or squeeze between the swinging door and the wall on my left - and catch a glimpse, perhaps, of its enigmatic occupant. I confess, I was intrigued. Any gent who could bring such a sense of drama to the staging of an encounter which, in the ordinary course of things, might be settled so unspectacularly - by a word, or a nod, or the fluttering of one spit-blacked lash - was clearly someone special. I was also, frankly, flattered; and having been flattered, generous. Since he had had to make do so far with admiring my bottom from a distance, I felt it only fair to give him the chance of a closer look — though he must, of course, be content only to look. I advanced a little towards the open door. Within, all was dark; I saw only the vague outline of a shoulder, an arm, a knee, against the lighter square of the far window. Then briefly the end of a cigarette glowed bright in the blackness, and glimmered redly on a pale gloved hand, and a face. The hand was slender, and had rings upon it. The face was powdered: a woman’s face. I was too surprised even to laugh - too startled, for a moment, to do anything but stand at the rim of gloom that seemed to spill out from the carriage, and gape at her; and in that moment, she spoke. ‘Can I offer you a ride?’ Her voice was rich and rather haughty, and somehow arresting. It made me stammer.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever before seen brought together at an exclusively female ensemble. I did not notice all these details at once, of course; but the room was a large one and, since Diana took her time to lead me across it, I had leisure to gaze about me as she did so. We walked through a hush that was thick as bristling velvet - for, at our appearance at the door the lady members had turned their heads to stare, and then had goggled. Whether, like Miss Hawkins, they took me for a gentleman; or whether - like Diana - they had seen through my disguise at once, I cannot say. Either way, there was a cry - ‘Good gracious!’ - and then another exclamation, more lingering: ‘My word...’ I felt Diana stiffen at my side, with pure complacency. Then came another shout, as a lady at a table in the farthest corner rose to her feet. ‘Diana, you old roué! You have done it at last!’ She gave a clap. Beside her, two more ladies looked on, pink-faced. One of them had a monocle, and now she fixed it to her eye. Diana placed me before them all, and presented me - more graciously than she had introduced me to Miss Hawkins, but again as her ‘companion’; and the ladies laughed. The first of them, the one who had risen to greet us, now seized my hand. Her fingers held a stubby cigar. ‘This, Nancy dear,’ said my mistress, ‘is Mrs Jex. She is quite my oldest friend in London - and quite the most disreputable. Everything she tells you will be designed to corrupt.’ I bowed to her. I said, ‘I hope so, indeed.’ Mrs Jex gave a roar. ‘But it speaks!’ she cried. ‘All this’ - she gestured to my face, my costume - ‘and the creature even speaks!’ Diana smiled, and raised a brow. ‘After a fashion,’ she said. I blinked, but Mrs Jex still held my hand, and now she squeezed it. ‘Diana is brutal to you, Miss Nancy, but you must not mind it. Here at the Cavendish we have been positively panting to see you and make you our particular friend. You must call me “Maria”’ - she pronounced it the old-fashioned way - ‘and this is Evelyn, and Dickie. Dickie, you can see, likes to think of herself as the boy of the place.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In the corner of the tent there was a square of sunlight, where the canvas had been tied back to form a doorway - it was so bright I had to narrow my eyes to look at it, and blink. At one edge of the square of light stood a woman, her face concealed, as the girl had said, by a broad hat and a width of net. As I studied her, she lifted her arms to her veil, and raised it. And then I saw her face.‘Why don’t you go to her?’ I heard Florence say coldly. ‘I daresay she has come to ask you back to St John’s Wood. You shall never have to think of socialism again, there ...’I turned to her; and when she saw how pale my cheeks were, her expression changed.‘It’s not Diana,’ I whispered. ‘Oh, Flo! It’s not Diana -’It was Kitty.I stood for a moment quite dumbfounded. I had seen two old lovers already today; and here was the third of them - or, rather, the first of them: my original love; my one true love - my real love, my best love - the love who had so broken my heart, it seemed never to have fired quite properly again ...I went to her, without another glance at Florence, and stood before her and rubbed my eyes against the sun — so that, when I looked at her again, she seemed surrounded by a thousand dancing points of light.‘Nan,’ she said, and she smiled, rather nervously. ‘You have not forgotten me, I hope?’ Her voice shook a little, as it had used to do, sometimes, in passion. Her accent was rather purer, with slightly less colour to it, than I remembered.‘Forgotten you?’ I said then, finding my own voice at last. ‘No. I’m only so very surprised, to see you.’ I gazed at her, and swallowed. Her eyes were as brown as ever, her lashes as dark, her lip as pink ... But she had changed, I had seen it at once. There were one or two creases beside her mouth and at her brow, that told of the years that had passed since we were sweethearts; and she had let her hair grow, so that it curved above her ears in a great, glossy pompadour. With the creases and the hair she did not look, any more, like the prettiest of boys: she looked, as the girl she had sent to me had said, like a lady.As I studied her, so she gazed at me. At last she said, ‘You seem very different, to when I saw you last ...’I shrugged. ‘Of course. I was nineteen then. I’m twenty-five, now.’‘Twenty-five in two weeks’ time,’ she answered; and her lip trembled a little. ‘I remembered that, you see.’I felt myself blush, and could not answer her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Florence had ceased her laughter, and begun to gaze, apparently quite gravely, into the fire: I saw the orange flames of the coals reflected in each of her hazel eyes. I closed the book, and returned it to the shelf. There was a silence, a rather long one.At last she took a breath; and when she spoke she sounded quite unlike herself, and rather strange.‘Nance,’ she began, ‘do you remember that day in Green Street, when we talked? Do you remember how we said that we would meet, and how you didn’t come... ?’‘Of course,’ I said, a little sheepishly. She smiled - a curiously vague and inward-seeming kind of smile.‘I never said, did I,’ she went on, ‘what I did that night?’ I shook my head. I remembered very well what I had done that night - I had supped with Diana, and then fucked her in her handsome bedroom, and then been sent from it, chilled and chastened, to my own. But I had never stopped to think what Florence might have done; and she, indeed, had never told me.‘What did you do?’ I asked now. ‘Did you go to that - that lecture, on your own?’‘I did,’ she said. She took a breath. ‘I - met a girl there.’‘A girl?’‘Yes. Her name was Lilian. I saw her at once, and couldn’t take my eyes from her. She was so very - interesting looking. You know how it is, with a girl, sometimes? - well, no, perhaps you don’t...’ But I did, I did! And now I gazed at her, and felt myself grow warm; and then rather chill. She coughed, and put a hand to her mouth. Then she said, still gazing at the coals: ‘When the lecture was finished Lilian asked a question - it was a very clever question, and the speaker was quite thrown by it. I looked at her then, and knew I must know her. I went over to her, and we began to talk. We talked - we talked, Nance, for an hour, quite without stopping! She had the most unusual views. She’d read, it seemed to me, everything, and had opinions on it all.’The story went on. They had become friends; Lilian had come calling...‘You loved her!’ I said.Florence blushed, and then nodded. ‘You couldn’t have known her, and not loved her a little.’‘But Flo, you loved her! You loved her — like a tom!’She blinked, and put a finger to her lip, and blushed harder than ever. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you might have guessed it ...’‘Guessed it! I - I am not sure. I never thought you might have - well, I cannot say what I thought...’She turned her head away. ‘She loved me, too,’ she said, after a moment. ‘She loved me, like anything!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She left off leaning against the table, and asked, Did I mind if she smoked? I shook my head, and shook it again when she took up a packet of cigarettes from amongst the dirty cups and playing cards, and held it to me. Upon the wall there was a hissing gas-jet in a wire cage, and she put her face to it, to light the cigarette. With the fag at the side of her lip, her eyes screwed up against the flame, she looked like a boy again; when she took the cigarette away, however, the cork was smudged with crimson. Seeing that, she tutted: ‘Look at me, with all my paint still on! Will you sit with me while I clean my face? It’s not very polite, I know, but I must get ready rather quick; my room is needed later by another girl ...’ I did as she asked, and sat and watched her smear her cheeks with cream, then take a cloth to them. She worked quickly and carefully, but distractedly; and as she rubbed at her face she held my gaze in the glass. She looked at my new hat and said, ‘What a pretty bonnet!’ Then she asked how I knew Tony - was he my beau? I was shocked at that and said, ‘Oh, no! He is courting my sister’; and she laughed. Where did I live? she asked me then. What did I work at? ‘I work in an oyster-house,’ I said. ‘An oyster-house!’ The idea seemed to tickle her. Still rubbing at her cheeks, she began to hum, and then to sing very low beneath her breath. ‘As I was going down Bishopgate Street, An oyster-girl I happened to meet -’ A swipe at the crimson of her lip, the black of her lashes. ‘Into her basket I happened to peep, To see if she’d got any oysters ...’ She sang on; then opened one eye very wide, and leaned close to the glass to remove a stubborn crumb of spit-black - her mouth stretching wide, out of a kind of sympathy with her eyelids, and her breath misting the mirror. For a second she seemed quite to have forgotten me. I studied the skin of her face and her throat. It had emerged from its mask of powder and grease the colour of cream - the colour of the lace on her chemise; but it was darkened at the nose and cheeks - and even, I saw, at the edge of her lip - by freckles, brown as her hair. I had not suspected the existence of the freckles. I found them wonderfully and inexplicably moving. She wiped her breath from the glass, then, and gave me a wink, and asked me more about myself; 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.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I didn’t pause to gaze upon these objects then, however; indeed, I hardly registered them at all. For on the top of the jumble, on a square of velvet, lay the queerest, lewdest thing I ever saw. It was a kind of harness, made of leather: belt-like, and yet not quite a belt, for though it had one wide strap with buckles on it, two narrower, shorter bands were fastened to this and they, too, were buckled. For one alarming moment I thought it might be a horse’s bridle; then I saw what the straps and the buckles supported. It was a cylinder of leather, rather longer than the length of my hand and about as fat, in width, as I could grip. One end was rounded and slightly enlarged, the other fixed firm to a flattened base; to this, by hoops of brass, the belt and the narrower bands were all also fastened.It was, in short, a dildo. I had never seen one before; I did not, at that time, know that such things existed and had names.For all I knew of it, this might be an original, that the lady had had fashioned to a pattern of her own.Perhaps Eve thought the same, when she saw her first apple. Even so, it didn’t stop her knowing what the apple was for...But in case I still wondered, the lady now spoke. ‘Put it on,’ she called - she must have caught the opening of the trunk - ‘put it on, and come to me.’I struggled for a moment or two over the placing of the straps, and the tightening of the buckles. The brass bit into the white flesh of my hips, but the leather was wonderfully supple and warm. I glanced again towards the looking-glass. The base of the phallus was a darker wedge upon my own triangular shield of hair, and its lowest tip nudged me in a most insinuating way. From this base the dildo itself obscenely sprang - not straight out, but at a cunning angle, so that when I looked down at it I saw first its bulbous head, gleaming in the red glow of the fire and split by a near-invisible seam of tiny, ivory stitches.When I took a step, the head gave a nod.‘Come here,’ said the lady when she saw me in the doorway ; and as I walked to her, the dildo bobbed still harder.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Well, he would be disappointed; he had followed me for nothing: I quickened my step, and made to move past, head down. But as I drew level with the rear wheel I heard the soft click of a latch undone: the door swung silently open, blocking my path. From the shadows beyond the doorframe drifted a thread of blue tobacco smoke; I heard a breath, a rustle. Now I must either retrace my steps and cross behind the vehicle, or squeeze between the swinging door and the wall on my left - and catch a glimpse, perhaps, of its enigmatic occupant. I confess, I was intrigued. Any gent who could bring such a sense of drama to the staging of an encounter which, in the ordinary course of things, might be settled so unspectacularly - by a word, or a nod, or the fluttering of one spit-blacked lash - was clearly someone special. I was also, frankly, flattered; and having been flattered, generous. Since he had had to make do so far with admiring my bottom from a distance, I felt it only fair to give him the chance of a closer look — though he must, of course, be content only to look. I advanced a little towards the open door. Within, all was dark; I saw only the vague outline of a shoulder, an arm, a knee, against the lighter square of the far window. Then briefly the end of a cigarette glowed bright in the blackness, and glimmered redly on a pale gloved hand, and a face. The hand was slender, and had rings upon it. The face was powdered: a woman’s face. I was too surprised even to laugh - too startled, for a moment, to do anything but stand at the rim of gloom that seemed to spill out from the carriage, and gape at her; and in that moment, she spoke. ‘Can I offer you a ride?’ Her voice was rich and rather haughty, and somehow arresting. It made me stammer. I said: ‘That, that’s very kind of you, madam’ - I sounded like a mincing shop-boy refusing a tip - ‘but I’m not five minutes from home, and I shall get there all the quicker if you’ll let me say good-night, and pass on my way.’ I tilted my cap towards the dark place where the voice had come from, and, with a tight little smile, I made to move on. But the lady spoke again. ‘It’s rather late,’ she said, ‘to be out on one’s own, in streets like these.’ She drew on her cigarette, and the tip glowed bright again in the shadows. ‘Won’t you let me drop you somewhere ?

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I started to fret. The box was far too quiet. I pulled gloomily into the next motorway services. Christina ran off to buy ice-cream and I squinted into one of the airholes punched in the box’s cardboard sides. After hours of top-lit tarmac my vision was in ruins. I couldn’t see anything at all, and I didn’t really want to, because of course the hawk was dead. And then, all at once, my God, the box was full of stars. A long time ago I’d seen a suitcase in an art gallery, a small brown leather suitcase lying on its side on a white table. It was the most mundane object imaginable, and faintly sad, as if someone had put it down on their way somewhere and forgotten to pick it up. The artist had cut a small round hole through the leather. Look inside, said a pasted label, and with the faint embarrassment of being required to participate in a work of art, I leaned and put my eye to the hole. Started in surprise. Looked again. And there I was, a king of infinite space, dizzy, exhilarated, looking into a deep starfield that stretched into infinity It was cleverly done; the artist had stuck two acid-spotted mirrors to the top and bottom of the case and lit them with a parade of tiny bulbs. The reflections of the spots and holes in the glass and the bright points of light turned the interior of that suitcase into a bright, cold universe that went on for ever.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I stare at the hawk as she grips the dead pheasant, and her mad eyes stare right back at me. I’m amazed. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Bloodlust? Brutality? No. Nothing like that. There are thorn-scratches all over me from where I dived through the hedge, and an ache in my heart I can’t place. There’s a sheeny fog in the air. Dry. Like talc. I look at the hawk, the pheasant, the hawk. And everything changes. The hawk stops being a thing of violent death. She becomes a child. It shakes me to the core. She is a child. A baby hawk that’s just worked out who she is. What she’s for. I reach down and start, unconsciously as a mother helping a child with her dinner, plucking the pheasant with the hawk. For the hawk. And when she starts eating, I sit on my heels and watch, watch her eat. Feathers lift, blow down the hedge, and catch in spiders’ webs and thorn branches. The bright blood on her toes coagulates and dries. Time passes. Benison of sunlight. A wind shifts the thistle stalks and is gone. And I start crying, soundlessly. Tears roll down my face. For the pheasant, for the hawk, for Dad and for all his patience, for that little girl who stood by a fence and waited for the hawks to come. 20 Hiding

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was not impatient now. I did not need to be impatient. I merely sat and thought of her warm, slumbering body that I would soon embrace; I imagined her pleasure, her surprise, her rising love, at seeing me returned so soon.Our house, when I gazed up at it from the street, was, as I had hoped, quite dark and shuttered. I walked on tip-toe up the steps, and eased my key into the lock. The passageway was quiet: even our landlady and her husband seemed still abed. I laid down my bags, and took off my coat. There was a cloak already hanging from the hat-stand, and I squinted at it: it was Walter’s. How queer, I thought, he must have come here yesterday, and forgotten it! - and soon, creeping up the darkened staircase, I forgot it myself.I reached Kitty’s door, and put my ear to it. I had expected silence, but there was a sound from beyond it - a kind of lapping sound, as of a kitten at a saucer of milk. I thought, Damn! She must be awake already and taking her tea; then I caught the creak of the bedstead, and was sure of it. Disappointed, but gay with the expectation of seeing her, I caught hold of the door-handle and entered the room.She was indeed awake. She sat in bed, propped up against a pillow, with the blankets raised as far as her armpits and her naked arms upon the counterpane. There was a lamp lit, and turned high; the room was not at all dark. At a little wash-hand stand at the foot of the bed there was another figure. Walter. He was jacketless, and collarless; his shirt was tucked roughly into his trousers, but his braces dangled, almost to his knees. He was bending over the bowl of water, bathing his face - that had been the lapping sound that I had heard. His whiskers were dark and gleaming where he had wet them.It was his eye that I caught first. He gazed at me in sheer surprise, his hands lifted, the water running from them into his sleeves; then his face gave a kind of twitch, horrible to behold - and at the same time, from the corner of my eye, I saw Kitty twitch, too, beneath the bedclothes.Even then, I think, I didn’t quite understand.‘What’s this?’ I said, and laughed a little, nervously. I looked at Kitty, waiting for her to join in my laughter - to say, ‘Oh, Nan! How funny this must look to you! It isn’t how it seems, at all.’But she did not even smile.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked from her to the orchestra pit. There, the conductor had seen our confusion. The music had slowed and faded for a second - but now picked up, more briskly than before.But the melody affected neither Kitty nor the audience. At the side of the stalls, the door-men had reached the drunken man at last, and had hold of his collar. The crowd looked not at him, however, but at us. They looked at us, and saw - what? Two girls in suits, their hair close-clipped, their arms entwined. Toms! For all the efforts of the orchestra, the man’s cry still seemed to echo about the hall.Far off in the gallery someone called something that I could not catch, and there was an awkward answering laugh.If the shout cast a spell over the theatre, the laughter broke it. Kitty shifted, then seemed to see for the first time that our arms were joined. She gave a cry, and drew away from me as if in horror. Then she put her hand to her eyes and stepped, with her head bowed, into the wing.For a second I stood, dazed and confounded; then I hurried after her. The orchestra rattled on. There were shouts from the hall, at last, and cries of ‘Shame!’ The curtain, I think, was rung hurriedly down.Back stage, everything was in a state of the greatest confusion. Kitty had run to Walter: he had his arm about her shoulders and looked grave. Flora stood by with a shoe unlaced and ready, shocked and uncertain but desperately curious. A knot of stage-hands and fly-men looked on, whispering amongst themselves. I stepped up to Kitty and reached for her arm; she flinched as if I had raised my hand to strike her, and instantly I fell back. As I did so the manager appeared, more flustered than ever.‘I should like to know, Miss Butler, Miss King, what the blazes you mean by -’‘I should like to know,’ interrupted Walter harshly, ‘what the blazes you mean by sending my artistes on before that rabble you call your audience. I should like to know why a drunken fool is allowed to interfere with Miss Butler’s performance for ten minutes, while your men gather their scattered wits together, and make up their minds to remove him.’The manager stamped his foot: ‘How dare you, sir!’‘How dare you, sir -!’The debate went on. I didn’t listen to it, only looked at Kitty. Her eyes were dry, but she was white-faced and stiff. She hadn’t taken her head from Walter’s shoulder, and she had not glanced towards me, at all.Finally Walter gave a snort, and waved the blustering manager away. He turned to me. He said, ‘Nan, I am taking Kitty home, at once. There’s no question now of you going on for your final number; I’m afraid, too, that we must forfeit our supper. I shall hail us a hansom; will you follow with Flora and the gear, in the carriage?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Dickie said she would fetch us a tray of drinks, and went off to do so. Diana said, ‘Take our coats, Neville, will you?’ nodding to a counter where two men stood, in uniform, receiving cloaks. She turned to let me draw the coat from her, Maria did the same, and I picked my way across the lobby with them, then paused to unfasten my own cloak - thinking all the time, only, what a handsome gathering it was, and how well I looked in it! and making sure that the coats I carried weren’t falling over my wrist and obscuring the watch. The counter had a queue at it, and as I waited I looked idly at the men whose job it was to collect the cloaks from the gents, and give them tickets. One of them was slim, with a sallow face - he might have been Italian. The other man was a black man. When I reached the desk at last and he tilted his face to the garments I gave him, I saw that he was Billy-Boy, my old smoking-partner from the Brit.At first, I only stared; I think, actually, that I was considering how I might best make my escape before he saw me. But then, when he tugged at the coats and I failed to release them, he raised his eyes - and I knew that he didn’t recognise me at all, only wondered why I hesitated; and the thought made me terribly sorry. I said, ‘Bill’, and he looked harder. Then he said: ‘Sir?’I swallowed. I said again, ‘Bill. Don’t you remember me?’ Then I leaned and lowered my voice. ‘It’s Nan,’ I said, ‘Nan King.’ His face changed. He said, ‘My God!’Behind me, the queue had grown longer; now there came a cry: ‘What’s the delay there?’ Bill took the coats from me at last, walked quickly to a hook with them, and gave me a ticket. Then he stepped a little to one side, leaving his friend to struggle with the cloaks, for a minute, on his own. I moved too, away from the jostling gents, and we stood facing each other across the desk, shaking our heads. His brow was shiny with sweat. His uniform was a white bum-shaver jacket and a cheap bow-tie, of scarlet.He said, ‘Lord, Nan, but you gave me a fright! I thought you must be some gentleman I owed money to.’ He looked at my trousers, my jacket, my hair. ‘What are you up to, wandering about like that, here?’ He wiped his brow, then looked about him. ‘Are you here with an agent? You’re not in the show, Nan - are you?’I shook my head; and then I said, very quietly, ‘You mustn’t say “Nan” now, Bill.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He didn’t know if he should talk. He could explain that he was here, check Charlie’s face for a reaction. But with the sedative still in effect, and with Charlie blind, Yale had a cushion of anonymity right now—one it would feel safe to stay in, at least for today. Later, if Charlie was ever lucid, he could tell him everything he’d been wanting to. The good parts, at least. He could say, at least once, that he forgave him. And even if Charlie never fully woke up—well, he’d still say it. Maybe it would still count. He sat on the chair by the bed. The nurse came in, and she showed Yale a small pink sponge on the end of a stick, showed him how he could hold it to Charlie’s lips to give him water. He did it for a while, and he ran his thumb over Charlie’s wrist, listening to the thrumming of the walls. He fed him water, drop by drop. He could feel it, all around him: how down the corridor, and down other hallways of other hospitals around Chicago and the other godforsaken cities of the globe, a thousand other men did the same. I 2015 t made no sense. Or maybe it did. It had to. She was awake, and it was 2015, and here was a man, very much alive, whose eyes and gestures and voice were Julian’s. Fiona sat on the studio’s cement floor, the back of her head against a cupboard. Julian was explaining to the rest of them what Fiona had stammered in the hallway. “What’s the line about rumors of my death? Richard, should I be insulted that you never talk about me?” Serge found the whole thing hilarious, called Julian a zombie, laughed at the look on Fiona’s face. Cecily didn’t know Julian; she got Fiona a damp paper towel for her forehead. Richard said, “Fiona, I only found him myself two years ago. We knew you didn’t know where he was. That was the surprise. But if I’d thought for an instant that you’d believed he was—listen, I’d never have sprung that on you.” How much had she even talked to Richard in the past two years? Not at all, really. She’d emailed to ask if she could come. Before that . . . well, it felt like they’d talked, but that was just a product of seeing his name pop up so often in the world, and of their being such old friends. Julian stood above her, helpless, running his thumb across his chin. She stared at his face, the ways it had changed. Beyond the normal transformations of age, he had what she recognized as some facial wasting from AZT, and—she was certain—cheek implants to counter the fat loss. Not great ones either. A couple of her volunteers at the store had similar cheeks. And his face had broadened—the steroids, presumably—so that he looked blocky, carved.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Walter kept his distance, but clasped his hands together before his chest when we emerged, and shook them, in a gesture of triumph. He was pink-faced and smiling with relief.Our second number - a song called ‘Scarlet Fever’, for which we dressed in guardsmen’s uniforms (red jackets and caps, white belts, black trousers, very smart) - went down a treat; it was during the next routine that all turned sour. There was a man in the stalls: I had noticed him earlier, for he was large, and clearly very drunk; he slept noisily in his seat, with his knees spread wide, his mouth open and his chin glistening slightly in the glow from the stage. For all I know, he might have slept through all the rumpus with the clog-dancer; now, however, by some horrible mischance, he had woken up. It was a very small theatre and I could see him quite distinctly. He had stumbled over his neighbours’ legs to get to the end of his row, swearing all the way, and drawing answering curses from everyone he stepped on. He had reached the aisle at last - but there he had grown confused. Instead of heading for the bar, the privy, or wherever it was that he had made up his gin-or whisky- soaked mind to make for, he had wandered down to the side of the stage. Now he stood, peering up at us, with his hands over his eyes.‘What the devil - ?’ he said; he said it during a lull between verses, and it sounded very loud. A few people turned away from us to look at him, and to titter or tut-tut.I exchanged a glance with Kitty, but kept my voice and steps in time with hers, my eyes still bright, my smile still broad. After a second the man began to curse even louder. The crowd - who were still, I suppose, rather ready for a bit of sport - began to shout at him, to quieten him down.‘Throw the old josser out!’ called someone; and, ‘Don’t you pay no mind to him, Nan, dear!’ This was from a woman in the stalls. I caught her eye, and tipped my hat - it was a boater; we were wearing the Oxford bags and boaters, now - and saw her blush.All the shouting, however, only seemed to enrage and confuse the man still further. A boy stepped up to him, but was knocked away; I saw the fellows in the orchestra begin to gaze a little wildly over the tops of their instruments. At the back of the hall two door-men had been summoned and were squinting into the gloom.