The Crimson Petal and the White (38 page)

The hammering from upstairs suddenly ceases, and silence falls. Nineteen years have passed since Mrs Castaway and Sugar embarked on their life together in the creaking warren of Church Lane; six years have passed since the howling night Mrs Castaway (then in much shabbier garb in the candle-flickering gloom of the old house) tiptoed up to Sugar’s bed and told her she needn’t shiver anymore: a kind gentleman had come to keep her warm. Ever since then, there has been something of the nightmare about Mrs Castaway, and her humanity has grown obscure. Sugar strains to recall a Mrs Castaway much farther removed in time, a mother less vinegary and more nourishing, a historical figure called simply ‘Mother’ who tucked her in at night and never mentioned where money came from. And all the while, the Mrs Castaway of here and now stirs her glue-pot, every so often removing the brush and anointing her scrapbook with a gob of adhesive gruel.

‘I hear …’ says Sugar, almost choking, ‘I hear from Amy you’re considering Jennifer Pearce as my replacement.’

‘Nobody could replace you, dear,’ the old woman smiles, her teeth flecked with scarlet.

Sugar winces; tries to disguise the wince with a twitch of her nose.

‘I didn’t think men were to Miss Pearce’s taste.’

Mrs Castaway shrugs. ‘Men are not to
anyone’
s taste, dear. Still, they rule the world and we must all fall on our knees before them, hmm?’

Sugar’s arms have begun to itch, her forearms and wrists especially. Suppressing the temptation to pounce on them and scratch them raw, she tries to steer the conversation back to Jennifer Pearce. ‘She’s well known in flagellating circles, Mother. It makes me wonder if … if you’re planning to change the character of the place.’

Mrs Castaway hunches over her handiwork, pushing the shoulder of the latest Magdalen a little closer to the hip of the adjacent saint while the glue is still viscid enough.

‘Nothing stays the same forever, dear,’ she mutters. ‘Old ducks like me and Mrs Wallace, we’re …’ she looks up, eyes wide and theatrical, ‘we are hawkers in the marketplace of passion, and we must find whatever niche is not already filled.’

Sugar seizes herself by the forearms, squeezes tight.
Why did you do it
? she thinks.
To your own daughter?
Why?
It’s a question she’s never dared ask. She opens her mouth to speak.

‘Wh–what was the arrangement?’ she says. ‘Between you and M-Mr Hunt, I mean?’

‘Come now, Sugar,’ chides Mrs Castaway. ‘You’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. You don’t want to bother your pretty head with
business
. Leave that to the men. And to shrivelled old relics like me.’

Is that a glint of supplication in the old woman’s shiny pink eyes? A glimmer of fear? Sugar is too despondent, and maddened by the itch, to pursue her further.

‘I must go, Mother,’ she says.

‘Of course, dear, of course. Nothing to hold you here, is there? Onward and upward with Mr Hunt!’ And again she bares her crimson-flecked teeth in a mirthless crescent of farewell.

A few minutes later, outside in Regent Street, Sugar tears off her gloves, pushes her tight sleeves up to the elbows and scratches furiously at her forearms until her skin is the texture of grated ginger-root. Only the fear of William Rackham’s displeasure inhibits her from drawing blood.

‘God damn God,’ she whimpers, while smartly-dressed passers-by edge uneasily away from her, ‘and all His horrible filthy Creation.’

* * *

Back in her rooms, her very own rooms in Marylebone, Sugar lies in the bath, almost wholly submerged in a coverlet of aromatic suds. The humid cubicle of air around her is vague with steam, the mustard colour of the walls softened to egg yellow. Dozens of little ‘R’s, on the bottles and jars and pots all about, twinkle through the lavender-scented mist.

Thirteen
, she thinks.
I was thirteen
.

Below the water, her arms sting and prickle, a much preferable sensation to the itching. In one hand she clutches a sponge, bringing it up to her cheeks every time the tears tickle too much.

You understand
, Mrs Castaway told her long ago,
that if we are to have a
happy and harmonious house here, I can’t treat you any differently from my other
girls. We are in this together.
In what, Mother?

Sugar shuts her eyes tight and squeezes the sponge against them. Once upon a time this little sponge was alive and swam in the sea. Was it softer then, or hard and fleshy? She knows nothing about sponges, has never been to the sea, has never been outside London. What’s to become of her? Will William tire of her and flush her back onto the streets?

He hasn’t been to visit her since he installed her in these rooms, days and days ago. Frightfully busy, he said he would be … But how busy can he be, not to find time for his Sugar? Maybe he’s tired of her already. If so, how long can she cling to this little nest? The rooms are paid for and her allowance is set to come directly from the bank, so there’s nothing to fear except William himself. Maybe he’ll lack the stomach to evict her? Maybe she can stay here for years provided she keeps very, very quiet … Maybe he’ll pay a murderer to slit her throat …

Sugar laughs despite herself. What time of month is it? Likely as not she’s brewing the curse, to be thinking thoughts as daft as these.

How much foam one little bottle of Rackham’s Lait de Lavage makes! She must compliment William on it the next time he comes. Will he believe her, though, if she’s sincere? How is she to tell him she admires something of his, if she really does admire it? What tone of voice could she use?

‘Your bath lotion is a wonderful thing, William,’ she says, in the privacy of her misty bower. Her words ring false, false as whores’ kisses.

‘Your bath lotion is
superb
.’ She frowns, scoops a handful of froth from the surface of the water. She attempts to toss the trembling bubbles into the air, but they cling to her palm.

‘I
love
your bath lotion,’ she croons. But the word
love
rings falser than all the others put together.

For days, Sugar waits for William to come. He doesn’t come. Why doesn’t he come? How many of a man’s waking hours can possibly be swallowed up by an already established, successful concern? Surely it’s a simple matter of writing the occasional letter? Surely William doesn’t have to oversee every tiny flower and approve its rate of growth?

On the night when she was first given these rooms, she felt as if she’d been allotted a little corner of Paradise. The slate was wiped clean, and she was determined to savour
everything
in her new life – the solitude, the silence, the freedom from filth, the fresh air, her little garden, walks in leafy Priory Close, meals in the best hotels. She would write her novel to a thrilling conclusion while birds sang in the trees.

But, almost at once, the halo began to fade from her luxurious sanctum, and by the fifth day, it’s pale indeed. The quiet of this place unnerves her: each morning she wakes, much earlier than she ever did in Silver Street, to the sepulchral stillness of suburbia, invisibly surrounded by neighbours who might as well be dead. Her little garden, by daylight, is a shady, half-subterranean affair, fenced all around by iron spikes. Peeping above the rose-bushes, she has a mole’s-eye view of the stony rim of a footpath along which nobody ever seems to walk, whatever the time of day. Oh,
one
morning she did hear voices, deep male voices, and she dashed to the window to listen, but the speakers were from a foreign country.

Every dawn she washes and dresses, then has nothing to do: the books with which William has furnished the bookcases – technical tomes about maceration and enfleurage and distillation, merely to fill up the shelves – mean nothing to her … She’ll write her novel, of course, when the crates arrive. When
will
they arrive? When William Rackham gives the word. In the meantime, she spends a remarkable amount of her time in the bath. The opportunity to take her meals in the hotels of Marylebone, so precious to her at first, has fallen far short of Sugar’s expectations. For one thing, every time she leaves the house, she fears that William will come visiting at the very moment she sits down to breakfast or luncheon. Besides, the food in the Warwick and the Aldsworth is really nothing special, and they don’t have the cakes she likes, only oatcakes, which are no damn use at all. Also, she’s convinced the attendants in the Warwick look at her queerly, and whisper amongst themselves when she pretends to be engrossed in her omelette or her kippers. As for the Aldsworth, oh God, the expression on that waiter’s face when she asked for extra cream! How was she to know only a whore would ask for extra cream! She can’t go back there, no she can’t – not unless William himself escorts her …

What in God’s name is keeping him? Perhaps he tried to visit on the day she went to Mrs Castaway’s – an excursion she put off as long as she could, for fear of just that thing. Perhaps, what with meals and going out to the local shops to buy chocolates, spa water, and new bed-sheets, she has missed him half a dozen times already!

Finally, mercifully, on the morning of the sixth day … no, William doesn’t come, but something else does: the curse. And, damned nuisance though the bleeding is, Sugar feels much better in her spirits: a dark cloud lifts from her prospects and she can see her way forward at last.

All she need do is make it impossible for Rackham to discard her, before he even
begins
to think of doing so. She must weave herself inextricably into the pattern of his life, so that he comes to regard her not as a mere dalliance, but as a friend, as precious as a sibling. Of course, to earn such a place in his life, she must know everything,
everything
about William Rackham; she must know him better than his wife knows him, better than he knows himself.

How to begin? Well, waiting for him in the empty silence of her rooms is emphatically
not
the answer: it merely tempts Fate to sweep her into the gutter. She must act, and act at once!

In the spectral glow of another overcast mid-morning, with a storm predicted, Agnes Rackham stands at her bedroom window, blinking hard. The apparition has vanished. It will return. But for now it’s gone.

Not since her childhood visions of her favourite saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, has she felt this way. It all went wrong after that terrible day when Lord Unwin told her
he
was her father now, and there’d be no more Virgin Marys, no more crucifixes, no more rosaries and no more Confessions for her. How fervently she prayed then, for the strength to preserve the flame of her faith against the huffing and puffing of this big bad Protestant wolf. Alas, at ten years old she was poorly equipped to fight like a martyr. Any resistance to her step-father’s edicts was crushed by a new nurse from the Anglican camp, and there was no help from Mother, who seemed wholly under her new husband’s evil spell. Agnes’s desperate calls to Saint Teresa, which once were intimate conversations, soon sounded like the lonesome whisperings of a child frightened of the dark.

Now, thirteen years later, it looks as though something divine and mysterious is afoot once more. Miracles are in the air.

She wanders through the upper floors of the Rackham house, entering each room except the Ones Into Which She Must Never Go. The servants are all downstairs working, so their rooms are conveniently vacant: Agnes enters them one by one and stands at their tiny windows, looking out into the Rackham grounds from half a dozen vantage points. Letty’s window, in particular, has a nice view of the mews behind Chepstow Villas. The apparition doesn’t manifest, though.

Dreamily, Agnes returns to her own bedroom. And there, out of her own window, in the side lane not fifty yards away, she sees it again! Yes! Yes! A woman in white, standing sentinel, gazing directly at the Rackham house through the wrought-iron railings. This time, before the apparition has a chance to disappear into the ether, Agnes raises her hand and waves.

For several seconds, the woman in white stands motionless and unresponsive, but Agnes waves on and on, energetically wiggling her hand like a toy rattle on her flimsy wrist. Finally, the woman in white waves back, with a gesture so delicate and hesitant she might never have waved at a human being before. A boom of thunder penetrates the clouds. The woman in white melts away into the trees.

By lunchtime, Agnes’s excitement has scarcely abated; extreme joy pulses in her wrists and her temples. The elements outside are wild in sympathy, sending lashings of rain against the windows and whoops of wind down the chimneys, urging her to whirl freely with arms flung wide. Yet she knows she must control herself and be demure, she must act as though the world is just the same today as it was yesterday, for her husband is a man and if there’s one thing men despise it’s happiness in its raw state. So, chairs scrape and dishes clink as she and William seat themselves in their appointed places at the dining-room table, murmuring thanks for what they are about to receive. Precious little light gets through the storm’s watery shimmer and, though Letty has parted the curtains as far as they will go, it isn’t enough, and finally a trinity of flaming candles must be set down between the Rackhams to clarify their radically different meals.

‘I have a guardian angel, dear,’ says Agnes as soon as the servants have finished serving up – before she’s even speared her first cube of cold pigeon breast out of its nest of lettuce and artichoke bottoms.

‘A what, dear?’ William is even more preoccupied than usual, having been (he keeps declaring to anyone in range) up to his ears in work.

‘A guardian angel,’ affirms Agnes, glowing with pleasure.

William looks up from his own plate, piled high with hot pigeon pie and buttered potato waffles.

‘You’re referring to Clara?’ he guesses, really in no mood for playful feminine effusions when he has the problem of Hopsom & Co. to solve.

‘You don’t understand, dear,’ insists Agnes, leaning forward, radiant, her food quite forgotten in the urgency of sharing her vision. ‘I have a
real
guardian angel. A divine spirit. She is watching over our house – over
us
– every instant.’