The Apple (7 page)

‘Very well, sir.’ Mrs Tremain gestures at Girl Number One, a complex mime with wrist and fingers. Girl Number One jumps up and hurries from the room, returning within moments holding a white nightshift.

‘Oh, but really …!’ Mr Bodley begins to protest, as the feminine garment is unfurled before him.

‘You won’t know the difference, sir, when you’re asleep. On a luxurious, soft pillow, sir, in a darkened room, in a house full of languorous women, and no dogs.’

Mr Bodley somewhat resembles a dog himself, gazing in hope at his mistress. Before his shame can overcome him, he reaches for the nightgown and gathers it to his chest.

‘Take Mr Bodley to bed, dear,’ says Mrs Tremain to Girl Number One.

Mr Bodley shambles towards the stairs, led by the girl whose name he still can’t recall, and whose nightgown he is about to wear. ‘Much obliged,’ he mumbles. ‘But I am sleeping unaccompanied, do we understand one another? The bed is for that purpose only. Yes?’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Girl Number One.

‘Fucky fuck bed-sleep, sir,’ says Lily.

‘Good morning, sir,’ says Mrs Tremain.

‘Good night, ladies,’ says Mr Bodley. ‘Sweet ladies, good night.’

The Apple

I
n Mrs Castaway’s brothel, at an hour of morning when decent folk are already awake and busy, Sugar is roused from a deep sleep by the sound of an urgent voice. It’s not in the room with her, thank God. It’s coming from down below, from the mews behind the house, where only horses, drunks and thieves usually go. The voice is singing, serenading her, right under her window.

To Hell with you
, Sugar thinks, and covers her head with a pillow.

The voice sings on. It is not the voice of the man who shared her bed last night. He’s lost in his own drunken slumber miles away from here, hidden inside his respectable, fragrant family home. No, this is a woman’s voice, fruity and righteous.

Dark and cheerless is the morn

Unaccompanied by Thee
…

Sugar groans. The morn is nowhere near as dark as she’d like it to be: sunlight streams through the windowpane, winkling her out of her sweet oblivion. The pillow over her head is no help at all, nor does the extra swaddling provided by her fleecy hair make any difference. Worse, the pillowcase stinks horribly of a man’s hair-oil, despite the fact that her last customer was dispatched sixteen hours ago; if she presses the pillow any harder against her face she’ll suffocate. And still the singing penetrates, only slightly muffled by the cotton and the feathers.

Oh happy house! supremely blest!

Where Christ is entertained

as its most dear-beloved guest

with selfless love unfeigned
.

Sugar tosses the pillow aside, blinking in the golden glare. An evangelist! A female evangelist! Here in Silver Street, Soho! Is this woman stupider than most, or cleverer? To sing about Christ being entertained with selfless love, right outside a bawdy-house – that must be an act of purest sarcasm, surely? Nobody could be so innocent.

Unsteady on her feet (for she had wine last night), Sugar shambles to the window and looks down into the alley from her top-floor vantage-point. Her tormentor is a fat matron in a black bonnet, accompanied by a miserable-looking child toting a basketful of pamphlets: two dark blots on the brightly-lit cobbles.

Set thy sights on Heaven’s gleaming
,

Look about thee for employ;

Linger not in idle dreaming;

Labour is the sweetest joy!

Sugar shivers where she stands. It’s spring, but not exactly warm. In fact, despite the brilliant sunshine, there’s a wintry nip in the air. She’s slept in her clothes all night, and her sweat is now cooling, making her feel as though she’s stepped out of a bath and wrapped herself in an unpleasantly damp towel. She hugs herself and rubs her thin arms vigorously with her palms.

The missionary in the street below, sensing movement above her head, glances upwards, but Sugar steps back at once. She’ll display every detail of her naked body to her customers, but she won’t allow passersby to ogle her outside of working hours. Let them pay if they want a look.

The do-gooder sings louder, sniffing an audience; her voice almost cracks with the force of her delivery, as she flings a new song at Mrs Castaway’s top storey.

Have I long in sin been sleeping
,

O, forgive and rescue me!

Lord! I crave Your showers of blessing

Let Your mercy fall on me!

Fall on me? Sugar momentarily considers pulling on a glove, fishing a turd out of her chamber-pot and throwing it down onto the head of this caterwauling ninny –
there’s
God’s mercy for you! But she’d probably miss, and ruin a glove for nothing. And there’s no guarantee the singing would stop, anyway; these Christian crusaders can be as tenacious as a dog in heat. Better to lose herself in an activity of her own.

She gets back into bed, still fully dressed, and wraps the bedsheet around her bony shoulders like a shawl. Yawns like a cat. For the duration of the yawn, the sound of the evangelist is suppressed, lost in the bloodstream commotion inside her ears. If she could only yawn for half an hour on end, the woman outside her window would surely hoarsen and go home.

Next to Sugar’s bed is a stack of books and periodicals. Trollope’s
He Knew He Was Right
, collected in book form, is topmost, but she won’t read any more of that: she can see where it’s heading. It wasn’t so bad at the start, but now he’s put a strong-minded woman into it, whom he clearly detests, so he’ll probably humiliate or kill her before the story’s finished. And she’s fed up with Trollope’s latest serial,
The Way
We Live Now
– she won’t buy any more instalments, it’s threatening to go on forever, and she’s wasted enough money on it already. Really, she doesn’t know why she persists with Trollope; he may be refreshingly unsentimental, but he always pretends he’s on the woman’s side, then lets the men win. They all do, these novelists, whether they’re male or female: the game is rigged. And the latest Mrs Riddell is worse than usual, and there hasn’t been a tolerable serial in
The London Journal
for months, only garbage about ghosts and forged wills. In every story she reads, the women are limp and spineless and insufferably virtuous. They harbour no hatred, they think only of marriage, they don’t exist below the neck, they eat but never shit. Where are the authentic, flesh-and-blood women in modern English fiction? There aren’t any!

She turns her face away from the stack of books and periodicals. She was foolish to buy them in the first place. (Well, granted, a few of them she stole.) What is the point of reading other people’s stories? She ought to be writing her own. Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours. Sugar suddenly wishes she could scrape her soul clean of all the fictional heroines she has ever cared about, claim back all the hours she has wasted worrying about star-crossed lovers and tragic misunderstandings. All of it is trickery, a Punch and Judy show for the gullible masses. Who will write the truth if she doesn’t write it herself? Nobody.

And will the portals open
, yammers the evangelist,

To me who roamed so long

Filthy, and vile and burdened

With this great weight of wrong
…

Sugar considers hurrying downstairs and opening the portals of Mrs Castaway’s brothel to this idiot. Why not drag her indoors? Introduce her to the smell of semen? Offer her a swig of gin? A generous dose of Christian hospitality.

She edges back up to the window, peers down at the evangelist, who has paused in her song and stands still, head bent, as if in prayer. In truth, she is bending down to listen to her child. Her child is saying something Sugar cannot hear. The mother hunches down lower, visibly annoyed that the child’s words make no sense to her. The child begins to whimper and sniffle, evidently fed up with standing in the glare and the chill, singing to nobody in an alleyway that smells of fermenting horse piss.

After several seconds of flustered communication, the mother rummages in her basket and, from under the religious pamphlets, extracts an apple. She offers it to the child, who begins to weep louder. The mother seizes the little girl’s hand and pushes the apple into it, but the child’s grip fumbles – accidentally? wilfully? – and the fruit falls to the ground. At once – as though the impact of the apple has released a tripwire attached to the mother’s arm – the mother slaps the child in the face. The child, poorly balanced, trips and falls.

Sugar is on the stairs before she has time to think. She’s barefoot, clad in a bodice and rumpled skirt but without bonnet or shawl: barely dressed, in other words. She leaps down the stairs two steps at a time, determined to assault the evangelist, smash her ugly nose, crush her windpipe, break her skull on the cobbles like an over-ripe melon.

She bursts out of Mrs Castaway’s and out onto the street. The evangelist and the child are gone.

Sugar makes a noise like a cornered cat. She lurches first in one direction, then another, then teeters around. They can’t have vanished so soon! She hurries from the deserted mews to Silver Street proper, and peers up and down the thoroughfare. There’s a fruit barrow with Fat Meg behind it, and Fat Meg’s dog, scratching himself in the sun. There’s an old man selling shirt collars on a stick. A street-sweeper waiting for horse-turds to fall. Tess, a prostitute from a rival house, struggling to open a stiff parasol. Two swells, striding purposefully towards a cab they’ve hailed. A group of hard-faced, grubby boys in cloth caps. A policeman, watchful for illegal behaviours that have not been rendered invisible by bribery. But no fat matron in a black bonnet, no little girl.

Sugar stands in the public street, aware all of a sudden that she is barefoot, that the soles of her naked feet are pressed against gritty, probably shit-soiled cobbles; aware that her unbrushed hair is being lifted by the breeze, and that her bodice is unhooked at the back, and that everyone can see. Her legs are trembling with rage and frustration, but they might as well be trembling because she’s just been fucked against a wall. Tess, the rival whore, snaps her parasol open at last and, raising it, notices Sugar at last. Their eyes meet across a distance of fifty yards or so. Sugar turns sharply – cutting her left heel on a jagged stone – and flees.

Back in her bedroom at Mrs Castaway’s bawdy-house, Sugar soaks her feet in a washtub. The injury is nothing to speak of. The dirt is floating free already. It was plain, nondescript dirt, street grime, not shit; for this she is grateful. Soon she will dry her feet and rub them with scented oil.

Her heart has stopped thumping now. It beats inside her breast, regular and only a little harder than usual. She is master – or is it mistress? – of herself again. How to account for her lapse? How could she have acted so foolishly, when she prides herself on her cool judgement? A man can insult her in the vilest conceivable manner, and she can continue her business with a calm face and an icy heart. It is a point of honour with her that none of her customers has ever had the faintest idea what she was truly feeling. Yet this morning she has chased after a stranger, helpless with fury. She stood dishevelled and confused in public, her distress evident to any passerby. This must never happen again.

Still soaking her feet in the tub, she reaches over to the stack of reading matter and seizes hold of the topmost thing. It’s an issue of
Purefoy’s Home &
Family Companion
, which she buys avidly despite having no real home, no family and no companion. She buys it because it includes a monthly summary of all the important things that have happened in the world, explained in simplified terms that ignorant young ladies and dim-witted matrons can understand. Sugar, who despises the pompous intrigues of politicians and the vainglorious exploits of businessmen, would be happy to remain perfectly ignorant of everything that goes on outside Soho, but she’s found that a rudimentary grasp of current affairs can be useful in her line of work: she can learn just enough to feign agreement with the views of her clients. And
Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion
has other things in it as well: pictures of pretty clothes, engravings of exotic animals from all over the Empire, advertisements, testimonials – and a serialised novel. It’s to this that Sugar turns as she soaks her feet.

Chapter 13: UNMASKED!

Oh, the predicament of poor Hornsby as he led
the innocent Fred into foul streets the like of which
the lad had plainly never seen before. On the one
hand, he had a solemn duty, as Fred’s best friend,
to pull him back from the precipitous decision to
which he, Fred, was, in his lamentable ignorance, so
unswervingly committed. On the other hand,
Hornsby knew that the grief his friend would, in
the minutes that were to follow, experience, would be
of such dreadful intensity that this noble young man
might never – not if he lived to be a hundred –
recover from it
.

‘
There must be some mistake,’ said Fred, noting
with growing alarm the shabby character of the
dwellings they were passing, and the brute depravity
on the faces of the inhabitants. ‘My lovely Violet
cannot possibly live here
.’

Hornsby made no reply, but pulled his friend ever
deeper into the cesspool of wickedness
.

‘This is the house,’ he said at last, as they came
to a halt in front of the shabbiest, meanest house of
them all; a house whose walls, were they not blackened
with grime, might have blushed in cognizance of
the depraved exploits transacted within them
.