The Apple (8 page)

‘It cannot be,’ weakly remonstrated the ghastly-pale lad
.

‘
If, by cutting off my right arm at the shoulder,
I could unmake the truth of it, I beg you to believe
I would do so, my friend,’ said Hornsby. ‘But this
wretched abode, it pains me infinitely to say, is the
home of that false creature to whom you are engaged
.’

The unhappy lad, profoundly offended by this
slur upon the virtue of the person he loved more than
any other, turned exceedingly red in the cheeks, and
gathered his soft white hands into fists, poised to
strike at his friend. But at that instant, the door of
the sordid house in front of which they stood flew
open, and there, in its dark, dismal, worm-eaten
doorway, tainted by unwholesome shadows, stood
Violet, aghast. Aghast for a moment only! – before
she imposed upon her countenance a look of delighted
surprise
.

‘Beloved!’ she cried. ‘You never told me you were
in the habit of performing charitable works! And what
an extraordinary coincidence that our ministering purposes
should cross in this most pitiful of places! I have
just finished delivering to the wretched folk here a
parcel of clean clothing, some soap and a pamphlet of
Bible verses
.

What the mortified Fred said in response to this unlikely declaration, Sugar doesn’t wait to find out. In a blind fury, she rips
Purefoy’s Home & Family
Companion
into shreds, flinging it piecemeal all over her bedroom.

Once again, she’s out of breath, panting like a dog. Once again, her heart is beating far too loud against her rib-cage. Once again, damn it, she has allowed herself to lose her grip. She’ll never get out of Silver Street if she carries on like this. Only the steeliest resolve and the chilliest heart will rescue her from a life of subjection. A moment will come, on a day unheralded by any forewarning, when she will be presented with an opportunity to escape her fate, and she must be ready for that moment. A powerful man will stray into her life, with the intention of using her once and then disappearing back to his exalted sphere. But in the heat of the moment, he will let slip a confession, or mention a name he’d intended to keep secret, or perhaps he will simply get a look in his eye that she can match with her own, and there he’ll be: caught. It could happen in any of a hundred ways, ways she can’t even imagine on this humdrum morning in her hatefully familiar room with its faded wallpaper and rotten skirting-boards and rumpled old bedclothes. The only certain thing is that this golden opportunity will come once only, and her mind will need to be unclouded, her emotions strapped down.

She notices a pain in her right fist. Uncurling her fingers, she winces as a hair-thin slit opens up in the tender flesh between her palm and her middle finger. A paper cut. She has injured herself on
Purefoy’s Home
& Family Companion
. Another lesson in restraint.

Sugar removes her feet from the tub and dries them on the hem of her petticoats. The skin on her soles has gone pale and wrinkled; tiny pellets of flesh rub off. The scratch on her heel is bloodless now. It has stopped hurting, although the paper cut on her hand is exquisitely bothersome.

It’s high time she got properly dressed and groomed. She walks over to the window, combing her hair. She looks down into the mews, at the cobbles. There’s nobody there now. But, balanced on her windowsill, ready, is the apple, shiny and firm. Sugar snatched it up from the ground as she stumbled back

to the house, loath to let it be scavenged by dogs, and now here it sits, scarcely bruised. Maybe the evangelist will return this afternoon, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; the apple will keep for a while. And, if the evangelist should return, Sugar will take the apple in hand, aim with the utmost care, and throw – straight and true.

Medicine

W
illiam Rackham sits at his desk and examines the label of the medicine he is about to take. He hopes there’s no morphine or cocaine in these little yellow pills, because the swig of Rennick’s Restorative Syrup he swallowed just an hour ago was generously laced with narcotics, and he still feels rather peculiar. Each passing year makes him less tolerant of intoxicants; he would gladly do without them altogether, were he not so prone to all sorts of complaints.

‘
Persons of A FULL HABIT, who are subject to
Headache, Depression of Spirits, Dullness of Sight, Nervous
Affections, Singing in the Ears, Spasms, and all Disorders
of the Stomach and Bowels, should never be without
Frampton’s Pills of Health
’, says the label on the bottle. The ingredients aren’t specified, however, except for the routine assurance that they are entirely natural, pure and unadulterated. William Rackham shakes one pill into his wrinkled palm and lifts it close to his nose. His long experience as a perfumer would certainly allow him to identify the smell of opium if any were perceptible. There is none.

He lays his hand down on the desktop, fingers folded loosely over the pill, delaying the moment. There is always the hope that he will draw a deep breath, exhale slowly, and feel the illness drain out of his body in an unexpected, delirious thrill. He draws the breath, exhales, waits. A gust of wind rattles his study window, and the lamplight dims momentarily, making him feel as though the walls of his room are contracting. He knows every inch of these walls, every calcifying spine of every long-unread book in the bookcases, every glint on the burnished wood of the clock, every yellowish blemish on the clockface, every faded print in every outmoded frame, every hairline crack in the ceiling cornices, every tiny air-bubble trapped behind the wallpaper. It seems like months since he set foot outside this gloomy sanctum.

It’s high time he paid a visit to his lavender fields. The journey to Surrey would be a tonic in itself; just to get away from London and its air of suffocating competition, its pervading sense of a million human creatures jostling and gasping for their own lungful of life. How sweet it would be to walk in the fresh air, with the sun overhead and damp soil underfoot, and the smell of acres of lovingly-tended lavender in his nose.

A cold chill runs down his back, as though a prankster is trickling ice-water under his shirt-collar. An intolerable itch attacks the insides of his nostrils and, before he can fetch his handkerchief from his pocket, he sneezes mightily. A hundred specks of opaque, watery snot are sprayed all over his desk. They glimmer on the surface of the dark green leather inlay.

William Rackham stares at the vista in dismay. If he summons a servant to clean up the mess, she will take one look at his desk, and another at his guilty face, and judge him to be no better than a helpless infant. But surely a man of his standing should not be cleaning up snot? And what should he use to clean it if he did? His handkerchief is white silk, and his desk is stained with ink, mottled with dusting-powder and, to be quite frank, a little mildewy on parts of the leather surface. His sleeve … Almighty God, is this a fair fate for a man who has already suffered a thousand humiliations? Wiping up snot with his sleeve?

He bends in his creaky chair and, with his free hand, retrieves a couple of crumpled sheets of paper from the wicker waste-basket. If he wields them with care, they will serve as cleaning-rags. Best possible use for them, really, these letters from people who no longer welcome the overtures of William Rackham, Esq.

Two sheets of crumpled paper. His correspondence has dwindled remarkably in the last decade and a half, dwindled along with his empire. ‘Empire’? Too grand a word, he knows. It never quite applied to Rackham Perfumeries, did it? But what word to use instead? ‘Business’ sounds grubby. ‘Concern’, that’s the safest. His dwindling concern.

Ah, but who could have blamed him for using the word ‘empire’, in those heady years when the world lay before him? Who could have failed to be swept up in his own pride, when he first mounted the crest of Beehive Hill, and looked down upon the vast rolling fields of lavender, the shimmering lake of
Lavandula
, his industrious domain? It seemed inconceivable that his manufactures should not make their way into every shop in the country – and for a brief time, in the mid-1870s, it was almost so. Nowadays, Newcastle, Leeds and Glasgow are still strongholds of his merchandise, and, for some reason that he’s never fully understood, regular shipments go to Calcutta. But here at home … He uncrumples a letter from a household goods emporium in Walthamstow, whose manager points out that the toiletries shelves are already overflowing with other men’s soaps and bathwaters. William sweeps the hateful piece of paper back and forth across his desktop, mopping the specks of snot with it. A second letter – unsolicited mail from the Tariff Reform League – scuffs the leather dry. All is well, until the next sneeze.

William tosses one of Frampton’s Pills of Health into his mouth and washes it down with a gulp of port. Alcohol is the best thing, really, for colds; better than any number of quack remedies and expensive drugs. Were it not for the absolute necessity of remaining sober enough to do his work, he would polish off a few bottles of port and wake up a day or two later, cured.

He picks up his pen, loads it with ink, and begins to write. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Determination is all. There is no time for self-pity. Push ahead, ignoring one’s suffering, and before one knows it the job is done.

Minutes later, a knock on his study door. It’s Letty, the maid, bringing him a plate of bread and cold meats.

‘The luncheon you asked for, Mr Rackham,’ she says.

He cannot recall asking for this. It does look like the sort of thing he would ask for, though, if he were peckish, which he suddenly remembers he is.

‘Thank you, Letty,’ he says.

She carries her serving-tray to his desk, puts the plate on the old brown ledger-book according to long-established custom.

‘Cup of tea, Mr Rackham?’

‘No thank you, Letty, I have a fever.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Rackham. Coffee?’

The half-empty bottle of port is standing on the desk, in plain view. William appraises the servant’s face, finds it vaguely well-disposed and unjudgemental, as always.

‘Yes, some coffee,’ he says. And, with a nod that is half-way to a curtsey, the servant backs out of the room.

Good old Letty. He likes her. She’s not pretty anymore, and she’s grown rather scrawny and wrinkled, and walks with an unladylike gait, the result of crumbling hip-bones. But a servant shouldn’t be ladylike anyway; Rose was like that, with airs above her station. She left him in the lurch after only a few years of service, poached by a richer man. Letty is loyal, God bless her. And who’d have her now, if she weren’t? She’s lucky to have an indulgent master. He will keep her until she drops.

William lays aside his correspondence and selects a slice of meat. Roast beef, from yesterday’s dinner. Still succulent, with a nice crisp rind and a pink blush in the middle. His latest cook is not at all bad, despite her lack of talent for desserts. Lord, how many cooks has he had in the last fifteen years? It must be half a dozen. Why can’t these women remain in a good position when they’re put in one?

‘This is an unhappy house, Mr Rackham,’ one of the departing cooks told him. Stupid pug-faced biddy: she did precious little to make it happier! Her breakfast toast always had an ashy texture, and her puddings never had enough sugar in them. He would probably have dismissed her, if she hadn’t left first, and if it hadn’t been such an inconvenience to lose her.

The thought of puddings makes William crave something sweet. His luncheon plate is all savoury: roast beef, silverside, smoked ham. Even the butter on the bread is generously salted. Could he call Letty back and ask her to fetch him some marmalade? Or better still, some cake and custard? Or even better yet, some hot apple crumble, dusted all over with sugar?

Anything you ask of me
. That’s what she said. That’s how she snared him. Sugar. The whore who called herself Sugar. Promised him all his dreams fulfilled. As whores always do.

No day goes by when he doesn’t think of her. He had hundreds before her, and he’s had a few since, but she was the one who wrote herself into his heart – and then stabbed it with the pen, god damn her.

He leans his head back wearily, eyes shut. The vision of Sugar that looms in the darkness ought to be a lurid spectre, a cloaked phantom with a skeleton head, as befits those creatures who lure upright men into alleyways and taint them with disease. But instead, he recalls a brilliant April afternoon in his lavender fields, when Sugar walked at his side, looking as fresh and lovely as the sunlit blooms all around. Her gloves and bonnet were so white he could scarcely look at them. Her face was in shade, gaze downcast, except when he urged her to look at something. Then her eyes were shiny with awe; the wonders he was showing her were too much to take in. He felt as if he owned the whole world, the sky above, and, most keenly of all, this exquisite girl with her long pale neck and her ochre curls haloed with gold.

Of course she was false to the bone. How could he have failed to guess that? A hard-up whore and a successful businessman – the arithmetic of it is too obvious for words. Before he met her, he was a healthy fellow, strong and upright. And then …? It’s difficult, looking back, to see precisely how she made the fabric of his life unravel, what strings she pulled. But the evidence is overwhelming: within a year of becoming ensnared in her wiles, he was a stuttering invalid, and his family was utterly destroyed.

Oh, Agnes! Oh, his poor little wife! He let himself be distracted, and she perished for lack of his nurture. Sickly thing that she was, she might yet have thrived; there were signs she was improving. Who’s to say he might not have rescued her, had he not been bamboozled by Sugar’s constant whisperings in his ear? How can he ever forgive himself for allowing a viper into his home, installing her in his household, entrusting his daughter into her care? And who’s to say Sugar didn’t exert her poisonous influence over Agnes too, to fatal effect? Everything she ever did had one purpose only: to make herself the next Mrs Rackham. But damn her, there could only ever be one Mrs Rackham, and that was his dear little Agnes!