The Crimson Petal and the White (30 page)

Henry stops in his tracks and gapes at the scene, played out not twenty feet from his nose. Too dismayed to approach the couple, too outraged to flee, he stands his ground, fists clenched. The woman, in between gulps, notices his arrival and, recognising him at once, exclaims, ‘Look, Dug! It’s our saviour!’ The pair of them convulse with laughter, wheezing and spluttering, their lips agleam with alcohol.

Speechless, Henry stands, cheeks burning, the nails of his fingers piercing the flesh of his palms, so hard does he clench his fists.

‘Make ’im go away, Dug,’ says the woman, evidently finding her enjoyment of the spirits hampered by this scowling booby. ‘Make ’im go away.’

Clumsily, the bristly man climbs over her skirts, almost pitching forward onto the steps, and positions himself in front of his companion. ‘Yaarr!!’ he shouts. When this has no immediate effect on the intruder, he turns and yanks his trousers down, baring his bony pale buttocks to Henry’s astounded gaze. He turns again, trousers slumped around his ankles, and assesses the effect upon the interloper. What next? Not suspecting that Henry is transfixed less by fear than by the sight of a stranger’s penis, he snatches this flaccid organ from its thatch of black hair and begins to spray urine into the air.

Henry Rackham, several yards out of reach, leaps backwards nevertheless, with a cry of disgust. The woman cries out too, her hilarity souring abruptly into fury as the steaming liquid spatters back onto her skirts.

‘Yer splashin’ me, yer bloody fool!’

In moments the pair of them are fighting, he slapping her fiercely around the ears, she jabbing and kicking his legs. He attempts to control her struggles by stamping one boot down on her skirts while he hauls up his trousers; without hesitation, she clubs him with the gin bottle, a vigorous overarm blow against his bony forehead that sends him sprawling down the steps.

‘Christ!’ she cries, as a long silvery arc of spilled alcohol hits the ground. The (miraculously unbroken) flask is hastily turned upright, and, while the man writhes at her feet clutching his bloody forehead, she shoves the bottle’s glistening neck deep into her mouth and sucks hard on what’s left.

For Henry, the ghastly spell is broken, and he is finally able to turn his back on these, the first poor people he has ever been intimate with, and lurch towards home.

Sitting in the Lumley Music Hall that evening, surrounded by men in cloth caps and women with teeth missing, William Rackham savours the fact that he can once more show himself in a place like this without fearing to be mistaken for a lesser being than he is. Now that the foundations of his wealth have solidified, and his ascension to directorship has become common knowledge (at least among those who make it their business to know ‘who’s who’), he can scarcely go anywhere without
someone
whispering, ‘That’s William Rackham.’ And, now that every stitch of his clothing is of the finest quality and the latest style, he can rest assured that even those humble souls who are ignorant of his identity must recognise him as a well-to-do gentleman – a gentleman who is sampling, for diversion’s sake, the entertainments of the not-so-well-to-do.

Of course, he’s not the only one here tonight who’s slumming. The Lumley’s audience is a curate’s omelette of mostly plain folk seasoned with a speckling of well-to-do gentlemen. But William likes to think he stands out by virtue of his beaver-skin frock-coat, his doe-skin trousers and especially his new top hat, the shortest one in the place. (No, no, not his
old
new hat, his
new
new hat – can’t you see it’s shorter? And it’s not a Billington & Joy job, either: Staniforth’s, ‘Hatters of Distinction since 1732’, if you please.)

The Lumley isn’t the kind of place where hats and cloaks are taken at the door, which makes it a sticky proposition for the overdressed, but at least it allows comparison of finery. Even so, it’s difficult to estimate how many persons of William’s own class are here tonight, as the hall is full, and any overview of the crowd is obscured by a froth of dowdy bonnets. The evening’s proceedings are by now well advanced and, in the warmth generated by the audience and hundreds of gas-lights, common men are removing jackets to reveal bare shirts, while the females fan themselves with cheap paper and plywood.

The row immediately in front of William holds no such females – regrettably enough, for Rackham wouldn’t mind catching a surplus breeze from a fluttering fan. He is, after all, not immune to what the ruder folk are feeling; his forehead is subject to the same sweat, and inside his layers of clothing he’s beginning to simmer. Perspiration prickles in his new beard, giving rise to itches he must resist the urge to scratch. Too many bodies crammed into one establishment! Couldn’t some have been turned away?

His new ulster hangs from the back of his seat, and his new cane lies across his knees, for he can imagine how desirable its silver knob might be to a thief. He also prefers to hold on to his triple-striped dog-skin gloves, even while applauding, unaware that this makes him look as if he’s beating a helpless rodent to death.

To the left of him sit Bodley and Ashwell. They, too, are overdressed, though less so than Rackham, for they know the Lumley better. They, too, are secure in their distinction from the common herd; slightly bored, they were, on Mount Parnassus, and so they thought, well, why not saunter down and see what’s on at the Lumley? And, having studied the bill, they really are looking forward to the Great Flatelli – ‘The Sensation of Sensations: The Magician of Emissions: Hear Him and Swoon!! All Italy Scandalised! France at his Feet! A One-Man Wind Ensemble!!!’

Already they’ve sat through a pretty but unfashionably plump girl singing humorous ballads, followed by the ‘London debut’ of Mr Epiderm, an old man with the curious ability to pull his skin out from his naked torso in elastic handfuls, and suspend heavy objects from it by means of metal pegs. It’s now a quarter past eight and the Great Flatelli has still not appeared. William and his two friends add their voices to the mutterings that accompany the efforts of a dapper little man on the faraway stage to reproduce the sounds of a bird being stalked, pursued and devoured by a variety of animals.

‘Bring on Flatelli!’ a brutish voice shouts, prompting William to reflect on how handy common people can be, when one wants something impolite said. Other hecklers join the cause, and the animal impressionist flails on under a thick cloud of ill-will.

Finally, at twenty-five to nine, the trumpeted Italian is brought on, to unanimous approval.

‘
Buona sera
, London!’ he bellows, scooping applause out of the air with his open hands and pressing it to his chest like invisible bouquets. Despite his oiled black moustache and black frock-coat, he’s suspiciously tall for an Italian, and his continental accent, when the clapping has faded and he begins his preamble, rings false in the ears of such sophisticates as Ashwell. (‘Jew. Wager anything you like: Jew,’ he mutters to William.)

‘My hunusual eenstrument,’ the great Flatelli is explaining,’ ees ’ere be’ind me. I tike eet wiz me airvrywhere I go.’ (Titters from the audience as he casts a pantomime glance over his shoulder.) ‘Eet rhequires no blowing, touching, squeezing …’ (Alto guffaws from a coterie of homosexuals at the back of the hall.) ‘But eet is a vairy
dell
icayte sound. I ask-a you to leesten vairy vairy carefooly. My first-a piece is a be-
oo
tifool old-a Eenglish …
air
. Eetsacalled “Greensleeves”.’

Index finger pressed to his lips to enforce absolute hush, Flatelli bends at the waist. A solemn-faced associate wheels a large brass amplification funnel, mounted on a trolley, across the stage until its burnished mouth is almost touching the great man’s backside. One final flourish (a ceremonial flipping up of the frock-coat’s tails) and the farting begins.

For several seconds, the unmistakable tune of ‘Greensleeves’ vibrates in the air, as accurate, in its reedy way, as anything played on comb-andpaper or even (stretching it a bit) bassoon. Then the laughter starts, swelling from a suppressed murmur to a raucous rumble, and William and his companions, seated far from the front, must lean forward, concentrating intently.

At the chime of ten, in a house otherwise deathly quiet, Agnes Rackham is lying in bed. She knows, even without consulting the servants, that her husband has not yet returned from the city; she’s abnormally sensitive to the shutting of any door in the house, feeling the vibration, she fancies, through the floor or the legs of her bed. She lies in darkness and silence, thinking, merely thinking.

In Agnes’s head, inside her skull, an inch or two behind her left eye, nestles a tumour the size of a quail’s egg. She has no inkling it’s there. It nestles innocently; her hospitable head makes room for it without demur, as if such a diminutive guest could not possibly cause any trouble. It sleeps, soft and perfectly oval. No one will ever find it. Roentgen photography is twenty years in the future, and Doctor Curlew, whatever parts of Agnes Rackham he may examine, is not about to go digging in her eye-socket with a scalpel. Only you and I know of this tumour’s existence. It is our little secret.

Agnes Rackham has a little secret of her own. She is lonely. In the closed-curtained, airless chamber of her room, in the thick invisible fog of perfume and her own exhaled breath, she is suffocating with loneliness. Looking back over her day, she can recall nothing that nourished her forlorn heart, only her greedy stomach which gets quite enough as it is – more than is good for it. At supper she ate (
over
-ate) alone, at dinner she ate (
much
too much) alone, tea and breakfast she couldn’t face for biliousness, luncheon she shared with William, but felt even lonelier than when he wasn’t there –
and
she ate too much,
again
.

Nor has this been a lonelier day than most: every day of her life is much the same. All through the long hours of sewing and staring out the window at what the gardener is up to, of making up her mind whether she’ll comb her own hair or have Clara comb it for her, she is longing for true companionship and suffering the lack of it. Doctor Curlew has never diagnosed this secret disease of hers, though she’s sure it makes her a great deal sicker than anything he claims to have found. What would he do, if he knew? What could he prescribe for her, to ease the pain of lying awake at night in an unkind world with not a soul to love her?

Oh, granted: her dreams, when they finally take her in, welcome her with open arms, but in the insomniac hours before sleep she lies marooned in her queen-sized bed, like the Lady of Shalott launched upon a dark lake in a vessel twice the size it need be.

What Agnes craves is not a man, nor even a female lover. She knows nothing of her body’s interior, nothing; and there is nothing she wants to know. Her loneliness, though it aches, is not particularly physical; it hangs in the air, weighs on the furniture, permeates the bed-linen. If only there could be someone next to her in this great raft of a bed, someone who liked and trusted her, and whom she liked and trusted in turn! There is no such person in the world. Dear Clara is paid to be agreeable; when her day’s work is done, she hurries upstairs for a well-earned rest from Mrs Rackham. The other servants have little to do with her; they fear her and, unbeknownst to them, she is a little afraid of them, too. A dog is out of the question; maybe she’ll get a kitten, if there’s a variety without claws? William’s brother Henry is terribly nice (she’s thinking of possible friends now, not of someone to share her bed) but altogether too serious; Agnes likes to keep her mind on pleasant things, not on all the problems of the world. As for William, he’s lost her trust forever. Whatever he does now, however wealthy he makes her, however courteously he addresses her over luncheon, however much freedom he offers her to accumulate more dresses, bonnets and shoes, however hard he tries to win her forgiveness, she can never forgive. One who sups with the Devil must use a long spoon; Agnes Rackham’s spoon, in supping with her husband, is the length of an oar.

With so little hope of friendship in her waking life, is it any wonder that Agnes prefers the company of the nuns at the Convent of Health? They welcome her and care for her, without any reward but to see her smile. One nun in particular has such a sweet, kind face … Yet Agnes’s visits to the Convent of Health are always over so soon: restricted, by an ungenerous God, to her short hours of sleep. The journey to the Convent, by train through an eternity of countryside, sometimes takes most of the night, so that the time left for the nuns to nurse her is pitifully brief – a few minutes only, before waking. On other nights, the journey there seems to take hardly any time at all – an express locomotive pulls her through a green blur – and she’s enveloped in the Holy Sisters’ care before her tears have even sunk into the pillow. But on those nights, the return journey must be long indeed, for by the time she reaches morning, she has forgotten everything.

Agnes doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a dream. In her philosophy, there are events that happen when one is awake, and others that happen when one is sleeping. She is aware that some people – men, in particular – take a dim view of what happens when the eyes are closed and the sheets are still, but she has no such doubts. To dismiss the night’s events as unreal would be to credit herself with the power of invention, and she knows instinctively that she is powerless to create. Creation out of nothing: only God can do that. How like men, in their monstrous conceit and their shameless blasphemy, to disagree! How like them to disown half their lives, saying none of it exists, it’s all phantasmagoria!

The difference between men and women is nowhere plainer, thinks Agnes, than in the novels they write. The men always pretend they are making everything up, that all the persons in the story are mere puppets of their imagination, when Agnes knows that the novelist has invented nothing. He has merely patchworked many truths together, collecting accounts from newspapers, consulting real soldiers or fruit-sellers or convicts or dying little girls – whatever his story may require. The lady novelists are far more honest: Dear Reader, they say, This is what happened to
me
.