The Crimson Petal and the White (31 page)

For this reason, Agnes much prefers novels written by ladies. She gets
The London Journal
and
The Leisure Hour
every week, bringing her all the latest instalments from the pens of Clementine Montagu, Mrs Oliphant, Pierce Egan (not a man, surely?), Mrs Harriet Lewis, and all the rest. As a special treat, Mudie’s Circulating Library brings her bound volumes of Mrs Riddell and Eliza Lynn Linton, so she can read a whole story without delay.

Even when Agnes is not bedridden, novels are
such
a boon, for they bring a steady supply of noble and attractive human beings into her life which, it must be said, the world at large is not generous with. A sympathetic heroine, she finds, is almost as good as a friend of flesh and blood. (What a repulsive expression ‘flesh and blood’ is, though, when one thinks about it!)

Lately, Agnes Rackham hasn’t much time for reading. All her waking hours are spent preparing for the Season. Chiefly she’s in thrall to her sewing-machine, constructing dress after dress, or else leafing through magazines in search of patterns. Acres of material have passed under the needle already; acres more are still to be done. Nine complete dresses hang on frames in her dressing-room; a tenth stands in the darkness of her bedroom, still half-finished on the dummy.

Ten won’t be nearly enough, of course. How sincere is William
really
when he says she has his blessing to have ‘any number of dresses’ made for her by a dressmaker? What number does he have in mind? Is he aware how much she would cost him if she took him at his word? She dreads a return to the kind of intercourse they were having not so long ago, with him irritable and intolerant of the needs of her sex, barely able to control his exasperation and his disapproval, while she is perpetually close to tears.

It’s a pity she can’t do what many other ladies with sewing-machines are doing just now – altering beyond recognition gowns they wore in previous Seasons. In an afternoon of madness on New Year’s Day, inspired by a novelty sewing pattern she chanced to find in a magazine, she ruined all her best dresses. She remembers clearly (how odd the things one remembers, and the things one forgets!) the fatal text: ‘
Fabric remnants and outmoded
curtains need not lie idle. Turn them into an Effortless Amusement for you and a
Delight for your Children
.’ Neat diagrams and simple instructions imparted the knack of fashioning, ‘
with only a quarter-hour’s stitching apiece
’, life-like, three-dimensional humming-birds.

An irresistible mania, whose intensity she’s even now chilled to recall, gripped her then. She had no remnants in the house, yet the desire to turn remnants into humming-birds raged in her like a fever. Despite Clara’s pleas that if Madam could only wait until morning, she could have a pile of remnants from Whiteley’s in Bayswater, the torture of waiting even a single minute was unbearable. So, she fell upon her ‘old’ dresses – ‘I shan’t be wearing these again,’ she insisted – and sliced into them with her dressmaking shears. By nightfall, the floor was a chaos of cannibalised ball-gowns and bodices, and dozens of humming-birds had been made: soft satin birds, drooping like sick things; hard spry birds made of stiff petticoat; white silken birds trembling in the breeze from Agnes’s furious pedalling of the sewing-machine; dark velvet birds sitting quite still. Odd, how some of her dresses were ruined instantly, as if the scissors had punctured them like a bladder, while others more or less kept their shape and were merely … disfigured. To these she returned again and again with her scissors, to make more birds.

‘I must,’ sighs Agnes into her pillow now, ‘have been mad.’

Her eyelids flutter shut in the darkness. Somewhere nearby, a train whistle blows. The sun rises – not slowly, according to its usual custom, but in a few seconds, as if fuelled by gas. The big wide world glows green and blue, the colours of travel, and everything disagreeable disappears.

Outside Agnes’s bedroom, in what men and historians like to call ‘the real world’, the night is not yet over. In the poorer streets, the grocer, the cheese-monger and the chop-house man haven’t shut up shop; their customers are match-sellers and cress-sellers and street-walkers, come to claim their reward for long hours of standing in the cold. Beggar children come too, pestering the merchants for unsaleable fragments of ham or Dutch cheese to take back home for Father’s supper. And for Father, there are countless drinking-houses open all night.

It is through the streets of this ‘real’ world – not far from the Lumley Music Hall – that three well-to-do, slightly drunk gentlemen, Messrs Bodley, Ashwell and Rackham, stroll, march and stagger. They scarcely notice the dark, the cold and the drizzle, except to note that their half-shouted altercation doesn’t echo as it should.

‘
Caput mortuum
!’ cries Bodley, resorting to the old school insults.

‘
Bathybius
!’ retorts Ashwell.

‘Stone-deaf cretin!’ bawls Bodley.

‘Unswabbed haven of earwax!’ hisses Ashwell. ‘It was “The Collier’s Daughter”, and
nothing
will convince me otherwise.’

‘It was “Weep Not, My Pretty Bride”, or I’m a Christ-killer. Shall I sing the chorus for you, idiot?’

‘What difference would
that
make, fool? You’d have to
fart
it to convince me!’

William Rackham has not contributed a word to the debate, content merely to watch.

‘What is
your
opinion, Bill?’ says Bodley.

Rackham scowls in annoyance: he was so keen to show off his new cane tonight that he left his umbrella at home, and now the rain is setting in. ‘God only knows,’ he shrugs. ‘The whole thing was a damn fiasco. I could barely hear a thing. The Lumley was
quite
the wrong place for such a performance. It should’ve been somewhere small and intimate. And with an audience well-bred enough to behave themselves.’

Bodley strikes himself on the forehead with his palm, and reels back.

‘Lord Rackham has spoken!’ he proclaims. ‘Tremble, impresarios!’

‘A church,’ says Ashwell. ‘That’s the place for the Great Flatelli, eh, Bill? Smallish crowd, everyone on their best behaviour, superb acoustics …’

William spits into the gutter, whose sodden contents are just beginning to move. ‘I’m glad
you
two are so easy to please. In
my
view, we’ve been shamefully short-changed tonight. Think of the poorer folk, who can ill afford to waste their wages on such a … such a puffed-up swindle!’

‘D’you hear that, Ashwell? Think of the poorer folk!’

‘Toiling all week to hear a good fart, and what do they get?’

‘Fuck-all!’

‘I’m going home,’ says Rackham, peering through the gas-lit drizzle for a cab.

‘Aww, no, Bill, don’t leave us all alo-o-one.’

‘No, damn it, I’m going home. It’s cold and it’s raining.’

‘There are plenty of warm dry places for a man to crawl into, aren’t there, Ashwell?’

‘Warm and wet, heh-heh-heh.’

Inspired, Bodley unbuttons his overcoat and begins to rummage in the pockets within. ‘I just so happen to have on my person … Bear with me, friends, while I fumble …’ – he whips out a crumpled tract the size of a cheap New Testament and waves it in the lamp-light – ‘A brand,
spanking
new edition of
More Sprees in London
. A year in the making, no expense spared, all lies guaranteed true, all virgins guaranteed intact. I’ve been studying it ass … assiduously. Some of the houses have moved up a few rungs since the last edition. There was one in particular …’ (he flips the already dog-eared pages) ‘Ah! yes, this one here: Mrs Castaway’s. Silver Street.’

‘A hop, skip and a jump away!’ says Ashwell.

‘Sugar,’ declares Bodley. ‘That’s the girl: Sugar. Words can’t do her justice, it says here. Luxury for the price of mediocrity. A treasure. On and on in that vein. And the house is awarded four stars.’

‘Four stars! Let’s go this minute!’ Ashwell wheels round and waves his cane in the air. ‘Cab! Cab! Where’s a cab!’

For a moment William’s blood runs cold, as he imagines Sugar has betrayed him and is conducting business as usual. Then he reminds himself what a catalogue of fictions
More Sprees
is. The Sugar who exists in its pages is not the real one he knows.

While Bodley and Ashwell lurch backwards and forwards in the rain, singing ‘Cab!’ and ‘Sugar!’ in silly voices, William thinks of her as she was when he last saw her – only three days ago. He remembers the look on her face when he disabused her of her ignorance. ‘I am William Rackham,’ he told her. ‘The head of Rackham Perfumeries.’ Why shouldn’t she know?

Once he’d let the cat out of the bag, however, and lapped up Sugar’s surprise and admiration, he wished he had more cats to let out, to receive more of the same. Guessing that her good fortune must seem to her like a dream, he made it more real by telling her that anything she might desire (in the way of perfumes, cosmetics and soaps) was hers for the asking. To which she responded, naturally enough, with a request for a Rackham’s brochure.

‘Cab! Cab!’ Ashwell is yelling still. ‘Come, stout companions, let’s try around the corner!’

‘Steady on, Ashwell,’ cautions William, ‘Have you considered the possibility this girl you want may not be available?’

‘Damn it, Bill; where’s your sense of adventure? Let’s take our chances!’

‘
Our
chances?’

‘Three men; three holes – the arithmetic of it is perfect!’

William smiles and shakes his head.

‘My friends,’ he says, bowing mock-solemnly. ‘I wish you the best of luck finding this … what’s her name? … this Sugar. I regret I’m too tired to go with you. You can tell me all about it when next we meet!’

‘Agreed!’ cries Bodley.
‘Au revoir
!’ And he reels off on Ashwell’s arm, singing ‘Off to Mrs Castaway’s! Off to Mrs Castaway’s!’ all the way to the corner.

‘
Au revoir
!’ William calls out after them, but they’re already gone.

The drizzle is drizzle no longer; heavy raindrops splash against his ulster, threatening to turn it into a water-logged burden, and there’s still no cab in sight. Yet, oddly, his irritable mood is passing from him now that he’s alone; Bodley and Ashwell, always such a tonic for him in the past, were tonight more like a dose of cod liver oil. What a tiresome thing it is to be a sober man among soused companions! Perhaps he should’ve drunk more, but damn it, he didn’t wish to … Why drink half a dozen glasses when two are enough to warm the stomach? And why reel from woman to woman when one is enough to satisfy the loins? Or is he merely getting old?

‘Are you needin’ a numbrella, good sir?’

A female voice at his side. He whirls to face her; she is young and shabbily dressed, with comely brown eyes, well-shaped eyebrows, too spade-like a jaw – quite fuckable, really, all things considered. She shelters under an umbrella that’s ragged and skeletal, but holds in her free hand a much more substantial looking one, furled.

‘I suppose I am,’ says Rackham. ‘Show me what you have there.’

‘Jus’ one left, good sir,’ she replies apologetically, rolling her eyes at the weather as if to say, ‘I had dozens to begin with, but they’ve all been bought.’

William examines the parapluie, weighing it in his hands, running one gloved finger along its ivory handle, peeking into its waxy black folds. ‘Very handsome,’ he murmurs. ‘And belonging, if I read this label correctly, to a Mr Giles Gordon. How peculiar that he should have discarded it! You know, miss, his address is so nearby, we could even ask him how well this umbrella served him, couldn’t we?’

The girl bites her lip, her pretty eyebrows contorted in agitation.

‘Please, sir,’ she whines. ‘Me ol’ man give me that umbrella. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t usually do this sort o’ fing, it’s just the umbrella came me way, and …’ She gestures helplessly, as if trusting him to understand the economics of it: a high-class umbrella is worth more than a low-class woman.

For a moment she and he are locked in an impasse. Her free hand squirms against her bosom: protective, suggestive.

Then, ‘Here,’ he says gruffly, handing her a few coins – less than the umbrella is worth, but more than she would have dared ask him for her body. ‘You’re too sweet a girl to go to gaol on my account.’

‘Oh,
fank
you sir,’ she cries, and runs off into the nearest alley.

William frowns, wondering if he’s done the right thing. With gloriously perverse timing, a cab rolls jingling round the corner, rendering his purchase futile; nor does he want another man’s parapluie lying about his house. With a pang of regret, he tosses the thing away: perhaps the girl will find it again, or if she doesn’t, well … nothing goes to waste in these streets.

‘What’s yer pleasure, guv?’ yells the cabman.

Home
, Rackham is thinking, as he seizes hold of the hand-grip and pulls himself up out of the muck.

ELEVEN

S
ugar’s forehead lands with a soft thud on the papers she has been toiling over. Half past midnight, Mrs Castaway’s. Musty quiet and the smell of embers and candle-fat. The cobwebby mass of her own hair threatens to stifle her as she comes back to life with a gasp.

Raising herself from her writing-desk, Sugar blinks, scarcely able to believe she could have fallen asleep when, only an instant before, she was so seriously pondering what word should come next. The page on which her face landed is smudged, still glistening; she stumbles over to the bed and examines her face in the mirror. The pale flesh of her forehead is branded with tiny, incomprehensible letters in purple ink.

‘Damn,’ she says.

A few minutes later she’s in bed, looking over what she has written. A new character has entered her story, and is suffering the same fate as all the others.

‘
Please,’ he begged, tugging ineffectually at the silken bonds holding him fast to the
bedposts. ‘Let me go! I am an important man!’ – and many more such pleas. I paid
no heed to him, busying myself with my whet-stone and my dagger.

‘
But tell me, exalted Sir,’ I said at last. ‘Where is it your pleasure to have the
blade enter you?
’

To this, the man gave no reply, but his face turned gastly grey
.

‘
The embarassment of choices has taken your tongue,’ I suggested. ‘But never
fear: I shall explain them all to you, and their exquisite effects …’

Sugar frowns, wrinkling the blur of backwards text on her forehead. There’s something lacking here, she feels. But what? A long succession of other men, earlier on in her manuscript, have inspired her to flights of Gothic cruelty; dispatching them to their grisly fate has always been sheer pleasure. Tonight, with this latest victim, she can’t summon what’s needed – that vicious spark – to set her prose alight. Faced with the challenge of spilling his blood, she hears an alien voice of temptation inside her:
Oh
,
for God’s sake, let the poor fool live
.

You’re going soft
, she chides herself.
Come on, shove it in, deep into his throat
,
into his arse, into his guts, up to the hilt
.

She yawns, stretches under the warm, clean covers. She has slept here alone for days now; it smells of no body but hers. As always, there are half a dozen clean sheets on the bed, interleaved with waxed canvas, so that each time a sheet is soiled she can whip it off, revealing a fresh layer of bedding. Before William Rackham came into her life, these layers were stripped off with monotonous regularity; now, they stay in place, all half-dozen of them, for days at a time. Christopher climbs the stairs every morning to collect soiled bedding, and finds nothing outside her door.

Luxury.

Sugar slides deeper under the covers, her manuscript weighing heavy on her breast. It’s a rag-bag of a thing, made up of many different sized papers, sandwiched in a stiff cardboard folder on which are inscribed many titles, all crossed out. Underneath this inky roll-call of erasures, one thing survives:

‘
by
“Sugar
”.’

Her story chronicles the life of a young prostitute with waist-length red hair and hazel eyes, working in the same house as her own mother, a forbidding creature called Mrs Jettison. Allowing for a few flights of fancy – the murders, for instance – it’s the story of her own life – well, her early life in Church Lane, at least. It’s the story of a naked, weeping child rolled into a ball under a blood-stained blanket, cursing the universe. It’s a tale of embraces charged with hatred and kisses laced with disgust, of practised submission and the secret longing for vengeance. It’s an inventory of brutish men, a jostling queue of human refuse, filthy, gin-stinking, whisky-stinking, ale-stinking, scabrous, oily-nailed, slime-toothed, squint-eyed, senile, cadaverous, obese, stump-legged, hairy-arsed, monster-cocked – all waiting their turn to root out the last surviving morsel of innocence and devour it. Is there any good fortune in this story? None! Good fortune, of the William Rackham kind, would spoil everything. The heroine must see only poverty and degradation; she must never move from Church Lane to Silver Street, and no man must ever offer her anything she wants – most especially, rescue into an easier life. Otherwise this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks becoming one of those ‘Reader, I married him’ romances she so detests.

No, one thing is certain: her story must not have a happy ending. Her heroine takes revenge on the men she hates; yet the world remains in the hands of men, and such revenge cannot be tolerated. Her story’s ending, therefore, is one of the few things Sugar has planned in advance, and it’s death for the heroine. She accepts it as inevitable, and trusts that her readers will too.

Her readers? Why, yes! She has every intention of submitting the manuscript for publication once it’s finished. But who on Earth would publish it, you may protest, and who would read it? Sugar doesn’t know, but she’s confident it has a fighting chance. Meritless pornography gets published, and so do respectable novels politely calling for social reform (why, only a couple of years ago, Wilkie Collins published a novel called
The New Magdalen
, a feeble, cringing affair in which a prostitute called Mercy Merrick hopes for redemption … A book to throw against the wall in anger, but its success proves that the public is ready to read about women who’ve seen more than one prick in their lives … ) Yes, there must be receptive minds out there in the world, hungry for the unprettified truth – especially in the more sophisticated and permissive future that’s just around the corner. Why, she may even be able to live by her writing: A couple of hundred faithful readers would be sufficient; she’s not coveting success on the scale of Rhoda Broughton’s.

She snorts, startled awake again. Her manuscript has slid off her breast, spilling pages onto the bed-clothes. Page one is uppermost.

All men are the same, it says. If there is one thing I have learned in my time
on this Earth, it is this. All men are the same.

How can I assert this with such conviction? Surely I have not known all the men
there are to know? On the contrary, dear reader, perhaps I have!

My name is Sugar
…

Sugar sleeps.

* * *

Henry Rackham removes the wrapping-paper from the red hearts, dark livers and pale pink necks of chicken he has bought from the pet-meat man, and throws a few morsels to the kitchen floor. His cat pounces instantly, seizing the meat in her mouth, her sleek shoulders convulsed with the effort of swallowing. Once upon a time, Henry would murmur pleas of restraint, for fear she’d make herself sick; now he looks on, acquiescent in the ravenous face of Nature. He knows that in a few minutes, she’ll be lying in front of the fire, as serene and innocent as the moon. She will purr at his touch, licking his hand which, although he has washed it, still smells – to her – of his gift of bloody flesh.

What is there to be learned from cats? thinks Henry. Perhaps that all creatures can be peaceable and kind – if they’re not hungry.

But how to explain the iniquity of those who have sufficient to eat? They hunger in a different way, perhaps. They are starving for grace, for respect, for the forgiveness of God. Feed them on that, and they will lie down with the Lamb.

Henry walks noiselessly in his thick knitted socks, into his sitting-room, and kneels at the hearth. Sure enough, no sooner has he stirred the fire than his cat comes to join him, purring and ready for sleep. Out of the blue he finds himself remembering, as he often does, his first meeting with Mrs Fox – or at least the first time he became aware of her. Inconceivable though it now seems that he could have failed to notice a woman of her beauty, she claims she was worshipping alongside him for weeks before the incident he so clearly recalls.

It was in 1872, in August of that year. She shone a bright fresh light into what had until then been the
camera obscura
of the North Kensington Prayer and Discussion Assembly. She was like the answer to his prayers, for he harboured in his heart the conviction that Christ never intended Christianity to be quite as Jesuitical as the N.K.P.D.A. would have it.

It was Trevor MacLeish who provoked her to make herself manifest on that day in August. A Bachelor of Science, and always abreast of the most recent developments in that sphere, he voiced his misgivings on the manner of receiving Holy Communion. ‘It has been conclusively proven,’ he said, ‘that disease may be communicated from person to person when utensils and especially when drinking vessels are shared.’ He argued for a new procedure of drinking Communion wine out of a number of individual cups, as many as there were Communicants. Someone asked if the wiping of a cup’s rim were not sufficient to remove the Bacteria, but MacLeish insisted that it was impervious to such measures.

In fact, MacLeish had brought to the Assembly a petition on this matter, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, and lacking only signatures. Henry was glum at the prospect of signing, believing the whole affair to be ridiculous, but fearing to say so, in case he were accused of Papist primitivism. Then up spoke a young lady, new to their midst, a Mrs Fox by name, saying,

‘Really, gentlemen, this is a quibble, refuted by the Bible.’

MacLeish’s countenance fell, but at Mrs Fox’s direction, Bibles were opened to Luke, Chapter 11,
vv
. 37–41, and she read the lines aloud without even being invited to do so, putting especial emphasis on the words: ‘
Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your
inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.
’

To see MacLeish folding his petition under the table, face red as a beetroot, was a pleasure; to be alerted to Mrs Fox’s existence, a delight. That a person of the fair sex, and one additionally hampered in her religious growth by her beauty, should be so well versed in the Bible, was almost a miracle. Henry yearned to hear her speak again. He loves to hear her still.

The next time William visits Sugar, he brings with him two publications, both promised when last they met.

‘Oh! You remembered!’ she cries, with a puppyish embrace. She’s dressed as if going out, in dark blue and black silk, not a hair out of place, not a crease out of line. Her soft sleeves whisper and rustle as she squeezes her arms around his waist, her hair is fragrant and slightly damp.

He notices, over her shoulder, that her bedroom is immaculately tidy: she always keeps it so for him. There are pale rectangles on the wallpaper, unstained by smoke, where those feeble pornographic prints used to hang, and although it’s months since they disappeared, their absence never fails to thrill him, for it was to please him that Sugar removed them. How did she put it? Ah yes: ‘This room is no one’s business now but yours and mine!’ A golden tongue she has, in more ways than one.

He seizes her by her bony shoulders and pushes her, affectionately, to arm’s-length. She grins at him, twice as beautiful as last time. Dozens of times he’s seen her, and each time it’s as if he’s seen her only dimly before, and this is the fully-lit reality! Her mouth is fuller, her nose is more perfect, her eyes are brighter, and her eyebrows have (how could he not have noticed this before?) bristles of dark purple within the auburn.

‘Yes, yes of course I remembered,’ he grins back. ‘My God, you are a lovely thing.’

She lowers her face, blushing. Yes, that’s a blush, he’ll swear – and no one can fake a blush! She’s genuinely flattered, he can tell!

‘Which first?’ he says, pulling both of the promised pamphlets into view.

‘Whichever you wish,’ she says, stepping back towards the bed.

He hands her his newly-cut copy of Mr Philip Bodley and Mr Edward Ashwell’s book,
The
Efficacy of Prayer
. This little tome, he explains, has already caused a sensation, principally among the dozens of clergymen with whom Bodley, son of Bishop Bodley, conducted his ‘informal’ chats. Libel actions aplenty have been threatened but as the book discloses initials and localities only (Reverend H. of Stepney: ‘
Why God should deem
it so essential I suffer lumbago I cannot hope to understand
’) they’re likely to come to nothing.

Perched on the edge of the mattress, Sugar leafs through the slim volume, quickly appraising its thrust. She knows men like Bodley and Ashwell. They talk loudly, are subject to fits of sniggering, and pretend they wish to deflower virgins when what they secretly desire is a milky cuddle from a fat matron.

(
If, at a conservative estimate, 2,500,000 British infants per day pray for the health
of their mamas and papas, can we conclude, from current mortality rates, that the
Almighty’s juvenile applicants would be better advised to safeguard their parents by
other means
?)

Oh yes, she knows men like this all right. They’re always half-drunk, half-stiff, they beaver away endlessly, they can’t spend, they won’t leave. Must she praise their handiwork now? Sugar re-plays, in her uncanny memory, the way William has talked about these friends of his, these cronies from his fading youth. Can she take a risk?

She smiles. ‘How perfectly …’ (she consults his face, decides to gamble) ‘childish.’

For a moment William’s brow creases; he hovers on the brink of disapproval – maybe even anger. Then he permits himself to savour his own superiority to his friends, his annoyance with their immature shenanigans. The air between him and Sugar is suddenly sweet with lovers’ concord.

‘Yes,’ he says, almost in wonder. ‘Isn’t it?’

She arranges herself more comfortably, leaning one elbow on the mattress, allowing her hip to rise up through her trailing skirts.

‘Have they nothing better to do, do you think?’