The Crimson Petal and the White (19 page)

Agnes sighs. ‘I’m being as devout as I possibly can,’ she says, ‘in the circumstances.’

William thinks better of pursuing this subject; it can only lead to trouble. Instead, he eats his sausage while it’s still warm. Inside his mind, a naked woman with flame-red hair is lying face-down on a bed, semen glistening white on her crimson-lipped vulva. It occurs to him that he has not yet seen her breasts. Staring deeper into his thoughts, he wills her to turn, to rotate at the waist, but nothing happens – until Agnes breaks the silence.

‘I wonder if …’ She puts one nervous hand to her forehead, then, catching herself, slides it over to her cheek. ‘If this weather were to go for ever … Raining, I mean … Rain would become normal, and dry skies something rather queer?’

Her husband stares at her, demonstrating his willingness to wait as long as it may take for her to resume making sense.

‘I mean,’ she continues, inhaling deeply, ‘What I imagine is … The whole world might so …
fit
itself around constant rain, that when a dry day finally came, hu-husbands and wives … sitting at breakfast just like this … might find it awf-awfully strange.’

William frowns, stops chewing sausage for a second, then lets it pass. He cuts himself another mouthful; in the luminous dimness of the rain-shrouded dining-room, a silver knife scrapes against porcelain.

‘Mmm,’ he says. The hum is all-purpose, incorporating agreement, bemusement, a warning, a mouthful of sausage – whatever Agnes cares to glean from it.

‘Do go on, dear,’ she urges him weakly.

Again William racks his brains for news of mutual acquaintances.

‘Doctor Curlew …’ he begins, but this is not the best of subjects to share with Agnes, so he changes it as smoothly as he can. ‘Doctor Curlew was telling me about his daughter, Emmeline. She … she doesn’t ever wish to remarry, he says.’

‘Oh? What does she wish to do?’

‘She spends almost all her time with the Women’s Rescue Society.’

‘Working, then?’ Disapproval acts like a tonic on Agnes’s voice, giving it much-needed flavour.

‘Well, yes, I suppose it can hardly be called anything else …’

‘Of course not.’

‘… for although it’s a Charity, and she’s a volunteer, she’s expected to do … well, whatever she’s asked to. The way Curlew describes it, I understand she spends entire days at the Refuge or even on themselves, and that when she visits him afterwards, her clothes fairly stink.’

‘That’s hardly surprising – ugh!’

‘They claim an amazing rate of success, though, to be fair – at least so the doctor tells me.’

Agnes peers longingly over his shoulder, as if hoping a giant-sized parent might come rushing in to restore decorum.

‘
Really
, William—’ she squirms. ‘Such a topic. And at the
break
fast table.’

‘Hm, yes …’ Her husband nods apologetically. ‘It is rather … hm.’ And he takes a sip of his tea. ‘And yet … And yet it is an evil that we must face, don’t you think? As a nation, without quailing.’

‘What?’ Agnes is forlornly hoping the topic will disappear if she loses the thread of it irretrievably enough. ‘What evil?’

‘Prostitution.’ He enunciates the word clearly, gazing directly into her eyes,
knowing
, God damn it, that he is being cruel. In the back of his mind, a kinder William Rackham watches impotently as his wife is penetrated by that single elongated word, its four slick syllables barbed midway with t’s. Agnes’s cameo face goes white as she gulps for air.

‘You know,’ she pipes, ‘when I looked out of my window this morning, the rose bushes – their branches – were jogging up and down so – like an umbrella opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and …’ She shuts her lips tight, as if swallowing back the risk of infinite repetition. ‘I thought – I mean, when I say I thought, I don’t mean I actually
believed
– but they
seemed
as if they were sinking into the ground. Flapping like big green insects being sucked down into a quicksand of grass.’ Finished, she sits primly in her chair and folds her hands in her lap, like a child who has just recited a verse to the best of her ability. ‘Are you quite well, my dear?’

‘Quite well, thank you, William.’

A pause, then William perseveres.

‘The question is,
Is reform the answer
? Or even possible? Oh, the Rescue Society may claim some of these women now live respectably, but who knows for certain? Temptation is a powerful thing. If a reformed wanton knows very well she can earn as much in an afternoon as a seamstress earns in a month, how steadfast will she be in honest work? Can you imagine, Agnes, sewing a great mound of cotton shifts for a pittance, when if you will but remove your own shift for a few minutes …’

‘William,
please
!’

A trickle of remorse stings his conscience. Agnes’s fingers are gripping the tablecloth, wrinkling the linen.

‘I’m sorry, dear. Forgive me. I’m forgetting you haven’t been well.’

Agnes accepts his apology with a quirk of the lips that could be a smile – or a flinch.

‘Do let’s talk about something else,’ she says, almost in a whisper. ‘Let me pour you some more tea.’

Before he can protest that a servant should be summoned to perform this task, she has grasped the teapot’s handle in her fist, her wrist shaking with the effort of lifting it. He rears up in his seat to help her, but she’s already standing, her petite frame poised to support the massive china pot.

‘Today is a special day,’ she says, leaning over William’s tea-cup. ‘I intend,’ (slowly pouring) ‘to put my heads together – Cook and I – our heads together, to bake you your favourite chocolate and cherry cake, that you haven’t had in
so
long.’

William is touched by this – touched to his soul.

‘Oh, Aggie,’ he says. ‘That would be simply wonderful.

The vision of her standing there, so small and frail, pouring his tea, suddenly overwhelms him. How despicably, how unfairly, he has treated her! Not just this morning, but ever since she first began to loathe him. Is it really her fault that she turned against his love, began to treat him as if he were a brute, turned him, finally, into a brute? He ought to have conceded that she was a flower not designed to open, a hothouse creation, no less beautiful, no less worth having. He should have admired her, praised her, cared for her and, at close of day, let her be. Moved almost to tears, he reaches out his hand across the table.

Abruptly, Agnes’s arm begins to shake, with mechanical vehemence, and the spout of the teapot rattles loudly against the rim of William’s cup. In an instant the cup has jumped out of its saucer, and the white of the tablecloth erupts with brown liquid.

William leaps from his seat, but Agnes’s hand has already shivered out of the teapot’s grip, and she totters away from the table, eyes wild. The shoulders around which he tries to cast a comforting arm seem to convulse and deflate and, with a retching cry, she falls to the floor. Or sinks to the carpet, if you will. Whatever way she gets there, she lands without a thump, and her glassy blue eyes are open.

William stares down in disbelief, though this is not the first time he’s seen her sprawled at his feet; he is sick with concern, and hatred too, for he suspects she conspired in her collapse. She, in turn, stares up at him, bizarrely calm now that she can fall no farther. Her hair is still neat, her body is arranged as if for sleep. Shallow breaths, lifting her bosom, reveal that the body underneath the blue dressing-gown is more adult than its tiny size suggests.

‘I made a mistake, getting up today,’ she reflects, spiritlessly, her gaze drifting from her husband to the plaster rosettes on the ceiling. ‘I thought I could, but I couldn’t.’

Fortuitously – for the Rackhams at least – it’s at this moment that Janey enters the room, sent to clear the breakfast table.

‘Janey!’ William barks. ‘Run to Doctor Curlew’s house and tell him to come at once.’

The girl curtseys, primed to obey, but she’s stopped in her tracks by the sound of her mistress’s voice coming up from the floor.

‘Janey can’t go,’ the recumbent Mrs Rackham points out, a little wheezy from carpet dust. ‘She’s needed in the kitchen. And Letty will be busy with the beds now. Janey, tell Beatrice she’s to go; she’s the only one we can spare.’

‘Yes ’m.’

‘And call Clara to me.’

‘Yes ’m.’ Without waiting for a word from the master, the girl hurries off.

William Rackham dawdles near his wife, awkwardly flexing his hands. Once upon a time, when Agnes’s illness was still new, he used to lift her up into his arms, and carry her from room to room. Now he knows that merely picking her up is not enough. He clears his throat, straining to find a way of demonstrating his remorse and his forgiveness.

‘You aren’t hurt, are you, my dear? I mean, in your bones? Should I even have called for Doctor Curlew, d’you think? I did it without thinking, in my … my agitation. But I daresay you don’t need a doctor, now. Do you?’ He holds it out to her: a tempting offer, for her to take or leave as she chooses.

‘It’s kind of you to think so,’ she responds wearily. ‘But it’s too late now.’

‘Nonsense. I can call the girl back.’

‘Out of the question. As if it weren’t bad enough, what’s become of this household, without you running about in your slippers, chasing after a servant.’

And she turns her head away from him, towards the door through which rescue will come.

Clara arrives a few seconds later. She takes one look at her master, and another at Mrs Rackham. It’s only natural, this appraisal: natural to link, with a glance, the upright man and the supine woman. And yet William detects something more in Clara’s glance, a glower of accusation, which outrages him: he has never struck anyone in his life! And if he ever does, by God this insolent little beast is likely to be the first!

Clara, however, is already ignoring him; she’s pulling Agnes to her feet (or is Agnes rising by her own efforts? – the deed is done with remarkably little fuss) and, shoulder to shoulder, the two women walk out of the room.

Now, who shall we follow? William or Agnes? The master or the mistress? On this momentous day, the master.

Agnes’s collapse, though dramatic, is of no great significance; she has collapsed before and will collapse again.

William, on the other hand, proceeds directly to his study and, once seated there, does something he’s never done before. He reads his father’s papers, and he re-reads them, and then he ponders them, peering out into the rain, until he begins to understand them. He has been shocked into a state of acute wakefulness; he is ready. The pages of Rackham Perfumeries’ history glow on the desk before him, veined with vertical shadows: rivulets of rain running down his window. He reads, pen poised. This is the day, the stormy and significant day, when he will bring his unruly future to heel.

Fearlessly, he opens his mind to the mathematics of manure, the arithmetic of acreage, the delicate balances between distillation and dilution. If he encounters a word that’s nonsense to him, he roots it out in the reference books his father has thoughtfully provided, such as
A Lexicon
of Profitable Vegetation
and
The Cultivator’s Cyclopaedia of Perfumes and Essences
. As of last night, ignorance of the inner workings of Rackham Perfumeries is a luxury he can no longer afford.

Of course he wants to put Agnes out of her misery. Each time a new economy is imposed – another servant lost, another extravagance denied – she takes a turn for the worse. A coachman and carriage would do more to woo her back to health than any of Curlew’s prescriptions. But Agnes is not at the heart of why he squints over his father’s smudged and faded handwriting, tolerating his father’s crude provincial spelling and crude provincial mind, puzzling over the technicalities of extracting juice from dry leaves. At the heart lies this: if he’s to have Sugar all to himself, the privilege is going to cost him dear. A small fortune, probably, which he has no choice but to defray with a
large
fortune.

He pauses in his labours, rubs his eyes, itchy from lack of rest. He flips backwards through the handwritten essay his father has prepared for his illumination, and re-reads a paragraph or two. There’s a missing link in the life cycle of lavender as his father chronicles it (if life cycle is the correct term for what happens to a flower after it is cut). Here on this page, the newly filtered oil is described as having an undesirable ‘still smell’; on the next page, the smell is apparently gone, with no mention of how it was removed. William passes one hand through his hair, feels it standing up from his scalp, ignores the feeling.

Still smell – quo vadis?
he jots in the margin, determined to survive this ordeal with his sense of humour intact.

* * *

Downstairs in the dining-room, Janey has an important task of her own. She is to remove all evidence of what Miss Tillotson described as a ‘disaster’ on the breakfast table. Janey, too downtrodden to dare ask what exactly this word means (she’d always thought it had something to do with the Navy) has come here prepared for the worst, with bucket and mop, her pinafore weighed down with rags and brushes. She finds an abandoned but perfectly lovely-looking breakfast and, on closer examination, one spilled tea-cup. No debris on the floor. Only what Janey herself has brought in, on the bottom of her bucket: a few crumbs of dirt from the uncarpeted nether regions of the Rackham house.

Hesitantly, the girl reaches for a slice of cold bacon, one of three still glistening on the silver dish. She takes it between her stubby fingers, and begins to nibble on it. Theft. But the wrath of God shows no interest in coming down upon her head, so she grows bolder, and eats the whole rasher. It’s so delicious she wishes she could post one home to her brother. Next, a muffin, washed down with a sip of stewed tea. Mrs Rackham’s uneaten kidneys she leaves alone, not sure what they are. Her own diet is what Cook decides will agree with her.

Wicked just like everyone says she is, Janey lowers her weary body into Mrs Rackham’s chair. Though only nineteen, she has legs as dense and varicose as rolled pork, and any opportunity to rest them is bliss. Her hands are lobster-red, in vivid contrast to white china as she inserts her finger into the handle of her mistress’s cup. Shyly, she extends her pinkie, testing to see if this makes any difference to the way the cup lifts.