The Crimson Petal and the White (15 page)

‘Perhaps,’ he ventures, ‘it’s time you took me home and… introduced me to your family.’

Sugar nods once, slowly, her eyes half-closing as she does so. She knows when simple, mute assent is called for.

It is, in any case, almost closing time. Rackham could have guessed this even without consulting his watch, for, on The Fireside’s stage, the singer is sharing a heaving chest full of sentiment with the last tipsy patrons. The patrons bray in approximate unison with his warble, a beery confraternity, as serving-maids remove empty glasses from slackening grasps. It’s an old song, a rousing bit of doggerel almost universally (if the universe is considered to extend no further than England) sung at pub closing time:

‘
Hearts of oak are our ships,

Jolly tars are our men:

We are always ready,

Steady, boys, steady,

We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again!
’

‘Last drinks, ladies and gentlemen, please!’

William and Sugar winch themselves out of their seats; their limbs are stiff from too much conversation. Rackham finds that his genitals have gone to sleep, though a faint galvanic tingling between his legs reassures him that the anaesthesia will pass away soon enough. In any case, he’s no longer in a mad hurry to perform feats of lascivious heroics: he still hasn’t asked her if she’s read Flaubert…

Sugar turns to leave. The burden of rainwater having wholly evaporated, during the course of the evening, from her dress, she looks lighter in colour, all in green and pale grey. But sitting so long on her wet skirts has pressed anarchic pleats into them, crude triangles pointing up towards her hidden rump, and Rackham feels strangely protective towards her for her ignorance of this, wishing he could get Letty to iron Sugar’s skirts for her and make them neat, before he removes them once and for all. Made awkward by these feelings of tenderness, he follows her through The Fireside, stumbling past empty tables and unpeopled chairs. When did all these people leave? He didn’t notice their departures. How much has he drunk? Sugar is erect as a lance, walking straight towards the exit without a word. He hurries to catch up, breathing deeply of the air she lets in as she opens the door.

Outside in, it’s no longer raining. The gas-lights glow, the footpaths shine, and most of the hawkers have retired for the night. Here and there, women less beautiful than Sugar loiter under yellowish lamps, sour-faced, commonplace, and surplus to requirements.

‘Is it far?’ enquires Rackham as they turn the corner into Silver Street together.

‘Oh no,’ says Sugar, gliding two steps ahead of him, her hand trailing behind almost maternally, the gloved fingers wiggling in empty air as if expecting him to seize hold like a child. ‘Close, very close.’

SIX

J
ust three words, if spoken by the right person at the moment, are enough to make infatuation flower with marvellous speed, popping up like a nub of bright pink from unfurling foreskin. Nor need those three magic words be ‘I love you’. In the case of Miss Sugar and George W. Hunt, venturing out into dark wet streets after heavy rain, walking side by side under gas-lamps and a drained empty sky, the three magic words are these: ‘Watch your step.’

It’s Sugar who utters them; she’s taken hold of her companion’s hand and, for a moment, steers him closer to her, away from a puddle of creamy vomit quivering on the cobbles. (It’s probably brown, but the gas-light adds a yellowish tinge.) William registers everything at once: the vomit, barely visible inside his own sprawling shadow; his feet, stumbling, almost tripping on the hems of Sugar’s skirts; the gentle tug on his hand; the faint hubbub of strangers’ voices nearby; the sobering chill of the air after the boozy warmth of The Fireside; and those three words: ‘Watch your step.’

Spoken by anyone other than Sugar, they would be words of warning, or even threat. But, issuing from her slender throat, modulated by her mouth and tongue and lips, they are neither. They are
an invitation to be
safe
, a murmured welcome into a charmed embrace that wards off all misfortune, an affectionate entreaty to keep firm hold of the woman who knows the way. William disengages his hand from hers, worried that a respectable person of his acquaintance might, even at this late and unlikely hour, chance upon him here. Yet his freed hand tingles, through the leather of his gloves, at the after-feel of her grip – strong as a cocky young man’s handshake.

Watch your step
. The words are still resounding in his head. Her voice … husky, yes … but such a musical tone, an ascending trio of notes,
do
re fa
, an imperfect but delightful arpeggio of feminine breath, an air played on the
flûte d’amour
. What must a voice like that sound like in the crescendo of passion?

Sugar is moving faster now, gliding over the dark cobbles at a speed he would reserve for daytime. Beneath her skirts, she must be taking deplorably unfeminine steps, to move at the same pace as him: all right, granted, he may not be the tallest of men, but his legs are surely no shorter than normal – indeed, if the stunted lower classes were admitted into the equation, might his legs not be longer than average? And what’s that sound? He’s not … panting, is he? Christ Almighty, he mustn’t pant. It’s all the beer he’s drunk, yes, and the exhaustion he’s been suffering lately, mounting up. Even as Sugar beckons him, with an almost imperceptible gesture, to follow her into a dark, narrow close, he turns his head back into the fresher air and sniffs deeply, trying to snatch a second wind.

Maybe the girl is hurrying because she fears he’ll grow impatient, or that he’ll baulk at following her into a dark passage of uncertain length harbouring God knows what. But William has entered many pleasure houses from alleys as dark and narrow as this one; he has, in his time, descended stone stairwells so deep that he began to wonder if his paramour’s boudoir was burrowed straight into one of Bazalgette’s great sewers. No, he is not unreasonably fastidious, and not the claustrophobic sort, although naturally he has a preference for bright, airy brothels (who wouldn’t?). However, he’s so smitten with Sugar that, to be honest, he’d willingly follow her into the rankest cloaca.

Or would he? Has he lost all reason? This girl is nothing more than a …

‘This way.’

He hastens after her, following the words like a scent trail. Oh my, her voice is like an angel’s! An exquisite whisper leading him through the dark. He would follow that whisper even if there was nothing attached to it. But she is more than a whisper – she is a woman with a brain in her head! He has never met anyone remotely like her, except himself. Like him, she thinks Tennyson isn’t up to much lately and, like him, she believes trans-Atlantic cables and dynamite will change the world far more than Schliemann’s rediscovery of Troy, despite all the fuss. And what a mouth and throat she has! ‘Anything you ask of me’: that’s what she promised him.

‘We’re here,’ she says now.

But where is ‘here’? He looks all about him, trying to get his bearings. Where is Silver Street? Is Mrs Castaway’s address yet another of
More Sprees
’ falsifications? But no: aren’t those the lights of Silver Street shining on the far side of this modest Georgian house? This is just a back entrance, yes? It’s not a bad-looking place, solid and without any evidence of decay, although it’s hard to tell in the dark. But the contours of the house look straight and symmetrical, defined by the lights of Silver Street beyond, a haze of gaseous radiance around the gables and rooftop like a … what’s the word he’s looking for? an aurora? an aura? – one is spiritualist nonsense, the other a scientific phenomenon, but which? … aur-aur-aur … The Fireside’s deceptively frothy ale has numbed his brain’s voice and given his thoughts a stutter.

‘Home,’ he hears Sugar say.

A complicated knock – the tattoo of secrecy – admits Sugar and her companion into Mrs Castaway’s dimly lit hallway. William expects to see a spoony-man holding the inner doorknob, a leering stubbly-faced ape such as ushered him out the back door in Drury Lane, but he is wrong. Standing there, a good eighteen inches lower than his first gaze, is a small boy, blue-eyed and as innocent looking as a shepherd’s lad from a Nativity scene.

‘Hello, Christopher,’ says Sugar.

‘Please come into the front room, sir,’ says the boy, reciting his line primly, casting a glance of infant collusion at Sugar. Intrigued, William allows himself to be led into the sombre but sumptuously papered vestibule, towards a door that stands ajar, emitting warmth and light. The child runs ahead, disappearing into the glow.

‘Not yours, is he?’ William asks Sugar.

‘Of course not,’ she replies, her eyebrows raised, mock-scandalised, her lips curving into a grin. ‘I’m a spinster.’

In the dimness of the vestibule, the glow of the door they’re approaching illuminates Sugar’s mouth strangely, outlining the rough, peeling texture of her lips in pure white. William wants to feel those feathery lips closing around the shaft of his prick. More urgently, though, he wants to empty his bladder – no, not into her mouth, anywhere – and then lay himself down to sleep.

As he enters the parlour, it’s as if he is already dreaming. An obscure female figure sits in a far corner, face turned away from him, smoke rising from her hair. A tentative violoncello is playing, invisible and plaintive, then stops with an asthmatic scrape of catgut. The upper parts of the walls, seamed with a dado rail, are painted lurid peach, and crowded with framed miniatures; the lower parts are papered with a dense design of strawberries, thorns and red roses. And, in the centre of the parlour, directly under a bombastic bronze chandelier, sits Mrs Castaway.

She is an old woman, or badly preserved, or both. Dressed for going out of doors, bonnet and all, she is clearly not about to do so, stationed snug as a judge behind a narrow desk. The desk is strewn with snippets of paper, cuttings from journals. A pair of oversized dressmaking scissors snickers in her hand, paring away an almost substanceless rind of paper which slips over her knuckles and flutters into her lap. She looks up, stops scissoring, in honour of her guest’s arrival; carefully she disentangles the shears from her fingers and lays the gleaming metal to one side.

From head to hems she is decked out entirely in one colour: scarlet, which William has never seen on any other English woman in his lifetime. Her mouth, too, is painted the same hue, the hundred tiny wrinkles around her lips tainted, so that when she smiles in welcome the effect is disturbingly like a furry red caterpillar responding to stimulus.

At first William thinks she must be insane, a mad old witch compelled to make bizarrely manifest her status as a ‘scarlet’ woman, but then he detects a certain dignity about her, a self-possession, that makes him more inclined to think her attire is an elaborate joke. She wouldn’t be the first madam he’s met with her tongue planted in her cheek. In any case (he notices now) the scarlet is softened by one dissenting shade, that of the veil pinned back onto her bonnet. This is the same colour exactly as the Rackham Perfumeries emblem, the dusty pink rose.

‘Welcome to Mrs Castaway’s, sir,’ she says, white teeth seeming to revolve like cogs behind her cochineal lips. ‘
I
am Mrs Castaway, and these are my girls.’ She waves one hand vaguely about, but William cannot yet take his eyes off her. ‘The use of the room upstairs will cost you five shillings, though what happens there, and for how long, is for you and Sugar to put a value to. If you wish, there can be good wine waiting for you, for an additional two shillings.’

‘Wine, then,’ William says. Lord knows he has enough strong drink in him, but he doesn’t wish to impress the madam as tight-fisted. As he stumbles forward to pay (What fool placed the edge of a rug just there, where a man must put his foot?) he surveys the old woman’s body more analytically: she’s an ugly old bird, he decides. And ugliness is not what he came here to see.

Freed from Mrs Castaway’s spell, William is able to take in the rest of the room. Its giddying effect is not, he reassures himself, a symptom of his own inebriation: the whole parlour really
is
a grotesquerie. The framed prints, he notices now, all depict Mary Magdalen: a varied assortment of half-naked, half-clothed versions of her, repentant or otherwise, some of them painted by pious Christians, others sly caricatures intended as pornography. Dozens of replicas of that same expression of sad serenity, of renunciation of the all-too-wicked flesh, of surrender to a God who makes all other males redundant. Mary Magdalen in full colour, from Romish prayer cards; Mary Magdalen in black-and-white, from Protestant journals; Mary Magdalen with halo and without; Mary Magdalen large as the frontispiece of a penny magazine; Mary Magdalen tiny as a locket miniature. It’s like Billington & Joy in here!

In the armchair by the hearth, still ignoring everybody, sits the young woman William is later to know as Amy Howlett. She’s a compact thing, sloe-eyed and sulky, with pitch-black hair and a figure rather like … well, rather like Agnes’s really, packed into a smart if severe black, white and silver dress. He can see her face now; she is, shockingly, smoking a cigarette, without even the mitigation of a holder, and if she has any inkling that, in England at least, a man may more often have seen a penis in a woman’s mouth than a cigarette, she betrays no sign. Instead, frowning, she sucks, her eyes focused on the little glow-tipped cylinder of rice-paper and tobacco between her pretty fingers. In nonchalant defiance, she glances at him through a haze of smoke, as if to say, ‘So?’

Nonplussed, William looks away towards the hearth, and catches sight of the polished neck of a violoncello, poking up over the back of an armchair facing the fire. There’s a woman’s neck showing, too, and a skull’s-worth of mousy hair as thin as cobwebs.

‘Do play on, Miss Lester,’ says Mrs Castaway. ‘This gentleman appreciates fine things, I’m sure.’

Miss Lester’s head turns; she looks for William over the back of the armchair, her cheek resting on the antimacassar, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes deep-set in their sockets. But locating where in the world he might be costs her too much effort, and she turns again, back to the fire. The see-sawing moan of the ’cello resumes.

Just as he begins to wonder what these peculiar people would do with his unconscious body if he were to fall to the floor, William is much relieved to feel Sugar’s hand slip into his. She squeezes once, to bid him come.

Mounting the stairs, William feels his ears burning red, his brow prickling with sweat. His bladder aches with every step, his balance is not the best, his vision requires regular eye-blinks to clear the gathering mists. Time is running out on his sexual coup.

‘My room is the first upstairs,’ whispers Sugar at his side. She is lighting their way with a candle; her posture is ramrod-straight and her arm holds the spear of wax without a tremble. The receding song of the ’cello provides the melody to the rhythm of their footfalls.

William, glancing back downstairs to make sure he is out of the madam’s earshot, mutters, ‘Your Mrs Castaway is a queer fish.’

He has quite forgotten the claim made by the Drury Lane ‘twins’, that Mrs Castaway is Sugar’s own mother, though if reminded he would probably dismiss it as whores’ claptrap anyway.

‘Oh, very queer indeed,’ agrees Sugar with a smile, and sweeps her skirts over the last steps and onto the landing. ‘Try to think of her as a sort of Janus in red taffeta, and this door as … well, whatever door you most dearly wish to go through.’ She opens it wide and beckons him across the threshold.

William sways after her, blinking sweat from his eyes. If only he could turn her off for just a few moments, like a machine, while he took the opportunity to wash his face, run a comb through his hair, empty his aching bladder. Mercifully, Sugar’s bed-chamber is bright and airy, free of that waxy smell which so sickened him in Drury Lane. Higher-ceilinged than most upstairs rooms, it is lit by gas rather than candlelight and, though there’s a fire glowing in the hearth, there’s also a blessed whiff of fresh, ice-cold air filtering through from somewhere.

As soon as he has cast off his coat and waistcoat, William heads for the bed, a queen-sized and much augmented edifice much more impressive than his own at home (that is, the one he sleeps in, not the conjugal one in what’s become, over the years, Agnes’s private bedroom). Sugar’s has a canopy of green silk mounted on it, an awning fit for a king. The drapes hang slightly parted, gathered in with golden cords, and all around the base is a sumptuous valence in a (sadly) unmatching shade of … what would one call it? … mint. A shame. He looks across the room at Sugar, who stands by the door still, hesitating to remove her gloves, waiting for his approval or the lash of his tongue. He smiles, signalling that she needn’t fret; he’ll overlook the mint valence. It’s a mere hiccup of taste, a regrettable touch of ‘make-do’, no doubt forced upon the house by economy. Even in this, he and Sugar are soulmates of a kind: why, think of the humiliating hat he would have been wearing, if he’d met her only a few days earlier!