The Crimson Petal and the White (37 page)

Indeed, as she and William lie on their newly christened bed together, she’s growing increasingly desperate to be alone. This gift of his … She won’t be able to believe it exists until he disappears and it fails to disappear with him. What can she do to make him go! Her kisses on his chest increase in frequency, like a nervous tic; she pecks softly in a line towards his genitals, hoping to force the issue one way or the other.

‘I must go,’ he says, patting her between the shoulder-blades.

‘So soon?’ she croons.

‘Duty calls.’ He is already donning his shirt. ‘In any case, I expect you’ll be wanting to get familiar with your little nest.’

‘
Our
little nest,’ she demurs. (
There
are your trousers, you fool!
There
!)

Minutes later, as he’s stroking her goodbye, she kisses his fingers, and says, ‘It’s as if all my birthdays have come at once.’

‘Dear Heaven!’ Rackham declares. ‘I don’t even know when your birthday is!’

Sugar smiles as she selects, from the jumble of contending responses in her head, the perfect sentence to send him on his way,
les mots justes
for the closure of this transaction.

‘
This
will be my birthday from now on,’ she says.

After the door shuts, Sugar lies unmoving for a minute or two, in case William returns. Then, slowly, she swings her legs over the side of the bed, finds her feet on the unfamiliar floor, and stands up. Her camisole, much rumpled, falls down over her breasts. Pensively she smooths it with her palms, wondering if William’s boast that he has thought of ‘everything’ includes such a thing as an iron. Item by item she re-dresses herself. With a tiny clothes-brush from her reticule she brushes her skirts, which come up nicely. Exchanging the clothes-brush for a hand-mirror, she tidies her hair a little, and peels a flake or two of skin from her dry lips before leaving the bedroom.

‘
Slow
ly,
slow
ly,’ she cautions herself, aloud. ‘You’ve all the time in the world now.’

First of all she goes to … her study. Yes, her study. She stands at the French windows, looking out at the garden. In the morning it will be sunlit, won’t it, and dew will be twinkling on the neat beds of grass and the exotic plants she doesn’t have names for. Through her one little window at Mrs Castaway’s, there was never anything to see except dirty roof-tops and impatient human traffic; here, she has grass and … pretty green stuff.

The red roses in the hallway are another matter: they get up her nose, quite literally. How long ought she leave them there in that vase, before tossing them in the garbage where they belong? Always she has detested cut flowers, and roses in particular: their smell and the way they fall apart when past their bloom. The flowers she can tolerate – hyacinths, lilies, orchids – die firm on their stems, in one piece to the last.

Still, the bouquet is an emblem of the care with which William Rackham has prepared this place for her. What a lot of trouble he has gone to: how richly he has repaid the trouble
she
has gone to in cultivating him! The more she explores her rooms, the more evidence she finds of his thoughtfulness: the glove-stretcher and the glove-powderer, the shoe tree and the ring stand, the bellows for the fire, the bedwarming pans. Did he really think of all these things, or did he simply blunder through a Regent Street emporium and buy every damn thing in sight? Certainly there are some queer objects lying about. A magnetic brush, still in its box, claims to curl hair and cure bilious headaches. An expertly stuffed ermine lies curled up in front of her wardrobe as though waiting to be skinned, made into a stole, and hung up inside. Ornaments of silver, glass, pottery and brass jostle one another on the mantelpieces. Two dressing-tables stand side by side, one larger than the other but less attractively finished, inviting the conclusion that Rackham, after buying the one, had second thoughts and bought the other as well, leaving the final choice to her. Does this signal his blessing on any changes she wishes to make? Too soon to tell.

Damn those roses! They’re filling the whole place with their stink … but no, that’s not possible, not from one vase of blooms. There’s a mysterious surfeit of perfume in the atmosphere, as if the entire building has been sponged with scented soap. Sugar wrenches the French windows open, and fresh night air shoots up her nostrils. She pokes her face out into the dark, breathing deeply, sniffing the subtle odour of wet grass and the unsubtle
absence
of all those smells she’s so accustomed to: meat and fish, the droppings of cart-horses and ponies, sullied water gurgling down drainpipes.

A warm reflux of semen trickles down her thighs and into her pantalettes as she stands sniffing; she winces, clutches herself, pushes the windows shut with her free hand. What to do next? Wouldn’t it be astonishing if she opened the door of this wardrobe here and found, just where she needed it to be, the big silvery bowl and the box of poison powders? She opens the wardrobe door. Empty.

She runs back to the bedroom, checks under the bed on both sides. No chamber-pot. What does Rackham think she is? A … ? The word she’s looking for, if it exists, eludes her … In any case, she’s just remembered that she has a bathroom. Sweet Jesus, a bathroom! She stumbles there immediately.

It’s an eerie little chamber, with a burnished wooden floor the colour of stewed tea, and shiny tricoloured walls – glazed bronze tiles on the dado, then a band of black wallpaper like a ribbon round the room, then a satiny coat of mustard-yellow paint up to the ceiling. All this casts a most peculiar light on the ceramic bathtub, washbasin and lavatory.

Sugar sits on the privy. It’s just like the one downstairs at Mrs Castaway’s, except it smells absurdly of roses: an essence sprinkled in the water.
I’ll soon fix that
, she thinks, and empties her aching bladder. She runs some water into the washbasin as she pisses, preparing to wash with a luxurious cotton towel. Every horizontal surface, she notes, is crowded with Rackham produce: soaps of all sizes and colours, bath salts, bottles of unguent, pots of cream, canisters of powder. The ‘R’s are all facing front, their orientation identical. She pictures William spending an age in here, arranging the containers thus, standing back to appraise the ‘R’s with narrowed eyes, and it makes her shiver in pleasure and fear. How he craves to please her! How insatiable is his need for recognition! She’ll have to anoint herself with every damned thing here, and sing its praises to him afterwards, if she knows what’s good for her.

But not tonight
. Sugar flips the lavatory lever, and all her waste, magically, is swallowed into an underground Elsewhere.

Emerging from the bathroom, she notes that the rest of the place is still there, luxurious and silent, littered with shiny objects she’s only just beginning to recognise as her own. Abruptly, her shoulders begin to shake and tears spring into her eyes.

‘Oh dear God,’ she sobs, ‘I’m
free
!’

She bursts into motion once more, dashing from room to room again, but this time more badly behaved: not girlish, not squealing in musical delight, but rampaging like a gutter infant, grunting and crying in ugly jubilation.

‘It’s all
mine
! It’s all for
me
!’

She snatches the roses from their vase, crushing their stems in her fist, and starts waving them around in a mad spilth of water. She whacks the blooms against the nearest doorjamb, crowing with angry satisfaction as the petals fly apart. She wheels about, whipping the disintegrating bouquet against the walls, until the floor is strewn with red and the stems are limp and splintered.

Then, ashamed and unnerved by her orgy, she stumbles over to the bookcase – the beautifully crafted, lustrously polished, glass-fronted, locked-with-a-brass-key bookcase that is
hers
, all hers – and swings its doors wide open. She selects from the shelves the most important-looking volume, carries it to the armchair in front of the fire, and, seating herself, begins to read. Or at least, pretends to; her mind has come too far adrift from its moorings for her to admit she’s not actually reading. One elbow on the chair’s arm, she sits demurely; she is buzzing with demureness. One hand cradles the book in her lap, the other presses knuckles against her cheek in a cosmetic pose of support. Sugar stares at the printed page, but what she pictures before her glassy eyes is not the words but herself sitting alone in an elegant, well-furnished room, Sugar demurely reading a book, anchored to this room of her own by a heavy volume.

For a measureless time she sits like this, every so often turning a page. She watches, from somewhere on high, the pale, intricately patterned fingers moving over the minute print. But for the ichthyosis afflicting them, they might be the hands of a well-born lady (and might there not be ladies afflicted by this condition?) moving across the pages. Sugar feels certain that somewhere, in a tranquil mansion, a genuine lady must at this very moment be sitting just as she is here, reading a book. The two of them are as one, reading together.

Eventually, however, the spell stretches thin, unfeasibly thin. She concedes she is not reading this book; that she has not the faintest idea what is in it nor even what it is called. In the same way as a painter, upon realising the light has failed, resignedly packs up his materials, Sugar shuts her book and lays it on the floor beside her chair. And, when she stands up, she finds she’s preposterously weary, weak at the knees and damp with sweat from head to foot.

She staggers into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. A crystal jug of water and a glass tumbler stand side by side on the bedside table: Sugar snatches up the jug and pours water directly into her mouth, heedless of spillage, two pints of it at least. When she’s satisfied, she sinks back on the pillows, her neck and breast plastered with wet hair.

‘Yes, I
am
free,’ she says again, but less ecstatically now. Her eyelids are falling shut; parts of her body feel numb, already asleep. She staggers to her feet in order to inspect the bedroom wardrobe. Empty. Of all the things Rackham has taken it upon himself to select for her, he has stopped short of nightwear. Couldn’t he have told her, when he came to fetch her from Mrs Castaway’s, to take a night-dress along! … Ah, but that would have given away his grand surprise.

Reeling with exhaustion, Sugar manages to extinguish all the lights and return to the bedroom, where she pulls off her clothing, lets it fall in a heap on the floor, and crawls into bed. After only a few moments, however, she crawls out again, her sleep-hungry body protesting against this delay at the very brink of sweet oblivion. Kneeling beside the bed, she lifts a corner of the sheet off the mattress, to verify what she knows already: that this bed, unlike her old bed at Mrs Castaway’s, doesn’t have several layers of clean sheets and waxed canvas. The sheet Rackham has soiled is the only sheet there is. She yanks it off the bed, and lays her naked body down on the bare mattress.

You can buy all the sheets you want tomorrow
, she tells herself, as the warm luxurious covers settle over her. Gratefully she allows unconsciousness to spread up, like a tide, into her head. In the morning she will give thought to what she needs that Rackham hasn’t provided; in the morning she will design the armour of an independent life.

In the morning she will discover she’s forgotten to extinguish the fires, and the hearths will be black with exhausted ash, and there will be no warmth wafting up from Mrs Castaway’s overheated parlour downstairs, and no Christopher waiting outside her door with a bucket of coals. Instead she will have to suffer, for the first time in her life, the unmitigated rawness of a new day.

PART 3

The Private Rooms and the Public Haunts

THIRTEEN

A
pproaching the city by an unfamiliar route, her vision clouded by morning fog and the steam snorting up from the cab-horse’s mouth, the elegant young woman feels as though she’s never been here before. She’d thought she knew these streets like the back of her hand but, admittedly, even her own hands are a little strange to her, tightly enclosed in a virgin pair of the whitest dogskin gloves.

The Season has almost begun, and more and more of the Best People are leaving their country seats for London; Oxford Street is clogging up with human traffic, so the cab-man has veered off into the smaller streets, nimbly negotiating the intricacies of the social maze. One minute the elegant young woman is being pulled past elegant young houses built for the
nouveaux riches
, the next she’s craning her head at older, grander terraces owned by the old and grand, the next she’s rattling past ancient tenements which once housed peers and politicians but now, in overcrowded squalor, house a vast troop of serfs. Hollow-eyed men and women stare from every mews and stairwell, half-starved from the long wait for the Season, hungry for the work that it will bring. They can barely wait to start sweeping horse-shit from the path of advancing ladies, and taking in young gentlemen’s washing.

At last the cab-man steers his horse into Great Marlborough Street and everything looks suddenly familiar.

‘This will do!’ cries the young lady.

The cab-man reins the horse in. ‘Didn’t you say Silver Street, miss?’

‘Yes, but this will do,’ repeats Sugar. Her courage is failing, and she needs more time before facing Mrs Castaway’s. ‘I feel a little giddy – a walk will do me good.’

The cab-man eyes her slyly as she alights. Her easy candour with him counts against her; she cannot be what he at first took her to be.

‘Watch yer step, miss,’ he grins.

She smiles back as she hands him the fare, a saucy quip on the tip of her tongue – why not share, to the full, this moment of recognition, rogue to rogue? But no, she might meet him again one day, with William in tow.

‘I sh’ll take care,’ she says primly, and turns on her heel.

The sun has shed its cover of clouds by now, beaming all over the West End. The chilly air turns mild, but Sugar shivers beneath her dress and coat, for her camisole and pantalettes, clumsily washed in the bath-tub and dried in front of the fire, are still damp. Also, she had a mishap ironing one of the bed-sheets and burned a hole in it; she’ll have to judge if her allowance (the first envelope from Rackham’s banker arrived in this morning’s post) is enough to defray such mishaps. He’s given her an awful lot of money – enough to get a less elegant-looking woman instantly arrested, unless she took the bank-notes to a fence for conversion into coin – but maybe he won’t send her so much in future, and this is just to get her started. Perhaps, to spare herself the embarrassment of asking Rackham for a laundry maid after all, she could buy herself new sheets and underclothes every week! The thought is seductive – and shameful.

Carnaby Street is littered with beggars, many of them children. Some clutch worthless posies or punnets of watercress; others make no pretences, extending grubby palms and naked forearms that are bruised and blood-scabbed. Sugar knows all the tricks: the putrid shank of meat hidden inside a raggedy shirt, seeping pitifully through; the fake sores created with oatmeal, vinegar and berry juice; the soot-shadows under the eyes. She also knows that human misery is only too real, and there are drunken parents waiting to beat a child who fetches too little money home.

‘Ha’penny, miss, ha’penny,’ pleads a stunted girl in mud-coloured clothes and oversized bonnet. But Sugar has no small change, only a couple of new shillings and Rackham’s bank-notes. She hesitates, fingers pinched and clumsy inside her new gloves; she keeps walking; the moment is gone.

At Mrs Castaway’s, she lets herself in the back way. Although it seems wrong to sneak into the house like a thief, it seems equally wrong to knock at the front door without a customer at her side. If only the house could be magically emptied of people for the duration of her visit! But she knows that her mother scarcely ever leaves the parlour, that Katy is too ill to go out, and that Amy sleeps till midday.

Sugar creeps up the stairs to her room. The house smells the same: musty and overbearing, a stale accumulation of bandaged water pipes and cosmetic repairs to the crumbling plaster, of cigar smoke and alcohol sweat, of soap and candle-fat and perfume.

In her bedroom, a surprise. Four large wooden crates, sitting ready to be filled, lids leaning up against them, generously hemmed with tacks. Rackham really has thought of everything.

‘A big giant brought ’em,’ says Christopher from the doorway, his childish voice making Sugar jerk. ‘Said ’e’d come back for ’em when ’e got the word.’

Sugar turns to face the boy. He has shoes on and his hair is combed, but otherwise he’s just as she would expect to see him, standing in her doorway with his bare arms ruddy and swollen, ready for the day’s load of dirty linen.

‘Hello, Christopher.’

‘Carried ’em on one shoulder,’ e did,’ eld wiv one finger. Like they was straw baskets.’ Plainly, it’s important to the boy not to be dragged into awkward adult complications. Sugar’s abrupt disappearance from his life is nothing to get excited about; not compared to the amazing strength of the giant stranger who carried big wooden crates with one finger. Christopher looks straight at her like the African explorer-man on the tea-tin staring down the savages; if Sugar took him for the sort of fellow that gets attached to anyone, she’s got another think coming.

Sugar chews her lips miserably as the seconds pass and Christopher shows no sign of moving.

‘Good boxes, them,’ he comments, as if in his young life he’s had to master carpentry along with everything else. ‘Good wood.’

Turning her back to him to hide her distress, Sugar begins to pack. Her novel, she finds, is safe and sound, apparently untouched during her absence. She fetches it to her breast, transfers it as quickly as she can to the bottom of the nearest crate. Still the boy’s eyes grow large at the sight of all that scribbled paper.

‘Didn’t you never send them letters?’ he asks.

‘Plenty of time yet,’ sighs Sugar.

Next she loads her books in – the proper, printed books written by other people. Richardson, Balzac, Hugo, Eugène Sue, Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Pratt. A Manila folder containing cuttings from newspapers. Handfuls of penny dreadfuls with lurid covers: swooning or dead women, furtive-looking men, roof-tops and sewers. Pamphlets on venereal disease, on the shapes and measures of the criminal brain, on the feminine virtues, on preventing skin discoloration and other marks of age. Pornography, in verse and prose. A volume of Poe clearly stamped on the flyleaf,
Property
of W.H. Smith’s Subscription Library,
with a stern warning that all books containing maps or pictures will be carefully checked to be sure they are ‘perfect in numberandcondition’. A New Testament given to Katy Lester by the Rescue Society. A slim volume,
Modern Irish Poets,1873
(unread, the gift of a customer from Cork). And on and on, half a crate full.

‘’Ave you read all them?’

Sugar begins to toss shoes and boots on top. ‘No, Christopher.’

‘Got more time for readin’ in the new place?’

‘I hope so.’

The ingredients for her douche she wraps in a towel and tucks under the slate-grey boots that need new soles and eyelets. There’s no point taking the douche bowl now that she has her own bath-tub.

‘Good bowl, that.’

‘I don’t need it, Christopher.’

He watches as she fills the second crate, a long oblong one that looks like an unvarnished coffin. It’s ideal for Sugar’s dresses – as Rackham no doubt anticipated. One by one, she lays the long garments into it, arranging the layers so that the shapely bodices and bulbous bustles pile up in equal measure. The dark green dress, the one she was wearing on the rainy night she met William, has, she notes, subtle dustings of mildew on the pleats.

The dresses fill two and a half crates; the hats and bonnets account for most of the remaining space. Bending down to cram the hat-boxes closer together, Sugar senses another presence in the doorway.

‘So, what’s he like, this Mr Hunt of yours?’

Amy has stepped across the threshold, obscuring Christopher behind her skirts. She’s only half-dressed, indifferent to her shock of uncombed hair and the dark-areola’d breasts hanging loose inside her chemise. As always, that maternal bosom serves only to emphasise how completely she ignores her son, the unwanted product of her womb.

‘No worse than most,’ Sugar replies, but the crates lean heavy against the claim. ‘Very generous, as you see,’ she’s forced to add.

‘As I see,’ says Amy, unsmiling.

Sugar tries to think of a topic of conversation that might interest a prostitute whose specialties are foul language and dripping molten candle-fat onto the genitals of respectable men, but her brains are crammed with what she’s learned in bed with William. The analogy of odours as keys of an instrument? The difference between simple and compound perfumes?
Did you know, Amy, that from the odours available to us, we may produce, if we
combine them correctly, the smell of almost any flower, except jasmine?

‘So how has everyone been?’ sighs Sugar.

‘Just as usual,’ Amy replies. ‘Katy’s hangin’ on, not dead yet. Me, I keep scum off the streets.’

‘Any plans?’

‘Plans?’

‘For this room.’

‘Her Downstairs is after Jennifer Pearce.’

‘Jennifer Pearce? From Mrs Wallace’s house?’

‘What I said.’

Sugar breathes deeply, longing for rescue. Conversations with Amy have never been easy, but this one is exceptional. Sweat is breaking out under her fringe, and she’s tempted to plead a dizzy turn and flee downstairs.

‘Well,’ says Amy suddenly, ‘I’d better tart myself up for my own admirers. Today could be the day I meet my Prince, eh?’ And she slouches out, knocking Christopher off-balance like a skittle.

Sugar sags where she stands, leaning her palms on the rim of a crate in fatigue.

‘You know, Christopher,’ she confesses to the boy, ‘this isn’t easy for me.’

‘I’ll do it for yer, then,’ he says, and walks to her side, immediately laying hold of a spiky wooden lid. ‘The man left ’is ’ammer, and the nails is all in.’ Keen, he hefts the lid onto its matching crate, almost impaling Sugar’s knuckles in the process.

‘Yes … yes, you do that … thank you,’ she says, stepping back, sick with inability to touch him, to kiss him, to ruffle his hair or stroke his cheek; sick with shame at the way she backs out towards the door and steps out on the landing – that same spot where, so many times, he has set down the pail of hot water for her. ‘Mind your fingers, now … !’

And, to the sound of his happy hammering, she retreats below.

Hesitating at the back door of the house of ill repute known as Mrs Castaway’s, Sugar gives herself permission to leave forever without saying any more goodbyes. Nothing happens; the hesitation is unbroken. Next, she tries to
force
herself to leave. Again, failure. Force is a language she understands, but only when it comes from without. She turns towards the parlour.

Her mother is ensconced in the usual spot, busy at her usual pursuit: the pasting of paper saints into scrapbooks. Sugar is unsurprised, yet disheartened, to find her at it again, scissors snickering in her bony claws, pot of paste at the ready. Her back is curved, the spine wilting over the table, the crimson bosom sagging, almost touching the low mound of images, a jumble of haloed maidens in shades of engraved grey, or pink and blue.

‘No end to my labours,’ she sighs to herself, or perhaps as a way of acknowledging Sugar’s approach.

Sugar feels her brow spasm in annoyance. She knows only too well the lengths her mother goes to in order to ensure the endlessness of her labours; a small fortune per month is spent on books, journals, prints and holy cards, dispatched from all corners of the globe. Religious publishers from Pennsylvania to Rome are no doubt positive that the world’s devoutest Christian is to be found right here in Silver Street, London.

‘Wee-ell now,’ croons Mrs Castaway, focusing her bloodshot eyes on a fresh Magdalen from the Bible Society of Madrid. ‘Your cup rather runneth over, wouldn’t you say?’

Sugar ignores the barb. The old woman can’t help it, this harping on the soft fortune of the young, contrasted with her own lamentable fate. God himself could fall down on one knee before Mrs Castaway and propose, and she would dismiss it as a pitiful compensation for what she’s suffered; Sugar could be burnt to death in a house fire, and Mrs Castaway would probably call her lucky, to have so much valuable property sacrificed just for her.

Sugar takes a long breath, glances at Katy Lester’s ’cello case leaning against the empty armchair by the hearth.

‘Katy never seems to get up anymore,’ she remarks, her voice raised slightly to compete with Christopher’s ceaseless banging upstairs.

‘She was up yesterday, dear,’ murmurs Mrs Castaway, deftly wielding her scissors to create another human-shaped snipsel. ‘Played most attractively, I thought.’

‘Is she still … working … ?’

Mrs Castaway lays the snipsel on an already crowded page of her scrapbook, experimenting with where it should go. She has complicated principles determining where the saints can be pasted; overlaps are permissible, but only to disguise incomplete bodies … This new weeping beauty could be glued so as to cover another’s missing right hand, and then the narrow wedge of space remaining could be filled with … where’s that tiny wee one, from the French calendar … ?

‘Mother, is Katy still working?’ repeats Sugar, louder this time.

‘Oh … Forgive me, dear. Yes, yes, of course she is.’ Mrs Castaway stirs the glue-pot pensively. ‘You know, the closer to death she comes, the more popular she is. I’ve had to turn callers away, can you imagine? Even extortionate fees don’t seem to deter them.’ Her eyes go misty, reflecting the perversity of an imperfect world, and her own regret that she’s too old to take full advantage of it. ‘Sanatoriums could make a fortune, if only they knew.’