The Crimson Petal and the White (39 page)

The corners of William’s mouth twitch in a grimace of disappointment which he manfully attempts to convert into a smile. He’d been under the impression Agnes was much improved, after the fiasco on the kitchen floor and two days fast asleep on Curlew’s horse dope.

‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘I hope she doesn’t come in and steal the new cutlery.’

There is a pause while William cuts his pie and concentrates on conveying it to his mouth without soiling his now luxuriant beard. Thus occupied, he fails to notice that the atmosphere in the room has undergone a chemical change every bit as remarkable as the transition from crushed flower-petals to oily perfume pomade.

‘I think she’s probably from the Convent of Health,’ Agnes declares tremulously, pushing her all-but-undisturbed plate aside, napkin clenched in one white fist.

‘The Convent of Health?’ William looks up, chewing. In the distorting light of the new silver candelabrum (perhaps
fractionally
too big for their dining table?), his wife’s eyes appear to be unequal in size – the right slightly rounder and shinier than the left.

‘
You
know:’ she says, ‘the place I go when I’m asleep.’ ‘I–I confess I wasn’t aware where you’ve been going,’ he says, grinning uneasily, ‘when you’re asleep.’ ‘The nuns there are really angels,’ Agnes remarks, as if to lay an old misconception to rest. ‘I’ve suspected that for a long time.’

‘Aggie …’ says William, in a gently warning tone. ‘Perhaps a different subject now?’

‘She waved to me,’ persists Agnes, trembling with indignation. ‘I waved to her, and she waved back.’

William slaps his knife and fork onto the table and fixes her with his sternest paternal stare: his tolerance is near its limit.

‘Does she have wings, this guardian angel?’ he enquires sarcastically.

‘Of course she has wings,’ Agnes hisses back. ‘What do you take me for?’ But, in his eyes, she can see the answer. ‘You don’t believe me, do you, William?’

‘No, dear,’ he sighs, ‘I don’t believe you.’

The pulse in her temples is clearly visible now, like an insect trapped between translucent flesh and swelling skull.

‘You don’t believe in anything, do you?’ she says, in a low, ugly voice he’s never heard from her before.

‘I–I beg your pardon, dear?’ he stammers.

‘You believe in nothing,’ she says, glaring at him through the candle-flame, her voice harsher with each successive syllable, all trace of its lilting musicality lost in a snarl of disgust. ‘Nothing except William Rackham.’ She bares her perfect teeth. ‘What a fraud you are, what a fool.’

‘I
beg
your pardon, dear!?’ He’s too astonished to be angry; in truth, he is afraid, for this new voice of hers is as strange and shocking in her rosebud mouth as the growl of a dog, or a Pentecostal torrent of tongues.

‘Beg all you like –
fool
,’ she spits. ‘You make me
sick
.’

He springs to his feet, scattering food and cutlery everywhere. The candelabrum topples with a crash of flame, molten wax and silver, provoking from him a bellow of alarm as he pounces on the candles, dousing them with a smack of his palm.

By the time he’s reassured that there isn’t going to be an inferno, Agnes is already on the floor, lying not in her usual swoon of decorous recline, but in a twisted rag-doll sprawl of slack limbs and exposed petticoats, as if a crack marksman has just shot her through the spine.

In the shadowy porch of 22 Priory Close, in response to his first pull on the bell, the door swings open and William Rackham is welcomed inside. For a moment he’s dazzled, failing to recognise the white-clad woman before him; Sugar’s hair hangs newly washed and dark against the snowy silk of her bodice, and her normally pale cheeks are blushing. He has caught her unawares, in fragrant disarray, preparing herself for him.

‘Come in, come
in
,’ she implores, for the fierce rain at his back is slanted almost horizontal, pelting past him into the hall.

‘High time I stopped this foolishness and got a coachman,’ he mutters as she ushers him inside. ‘This is intolerable …’ He shies in surprise as she jumps to his aid, cooing nurturingly, laying her hands on his shoulders to help him remove his waterlogged ulster.

‘New dress?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she admits, blushing deeper still. ‘I bought it with the money you sent.’ Her attempt to hang his coat on the coat-stand fails instantly, as the sodden garment topples the dainty pole. She catches it in her arms as the metal clatters to the floor. ‘I didn’t mean to be extravagant,’ she frets, lifting the coat above her head, and hooking its furry collar over a light fitting. ‘It’s just that my old clothes haven’t come yet.’

Rackham smacks his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Ach! Forgive me!’ he groans. ‘I’ve been up to my ears in work.’

‘William, your hand …’ She grasps it, turning the palm up to reveal scalds and fresh blisters. ‘Oooh, how awful for you …’ And, tenderly, she kisses the burns with her soft dry lips.

‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘A mishap with some candles. But how could I have left you in this state for so long … I’ll get those crates sent first thing tomorrow. If you knew what I’ve had on my mind … !’

With a wet thud, his ulster falls again.

‘Damn it all!’ he explodes. ‘I should’ve bought you a
decent
coat-stand. Damn Jew said it was sturdier than it looked. Flimsy rubbish!’ He kicks the recumbent sculpture where it lies, triggering a buzz of vibrating brass.

‘No matter, no matter,’ Sugar hastily reassures him, scooping the coat off the floor and bearing it into the sitting-room. A fire is blazing in the hearth; the straight-backed chair from the writing-desk makes a good drying frame, she’s found.

Rackham follows on, embarrassed that this exquisite creature in white silk should be doing work more suited to a shapeless drudge in calico and black. How lovely she is! He wants to seize hold of her and … and … well, to be honest, he doesn’t want to do anything to her tonight. Rather, he wishes
she
would gather his head to her breast – her fully-clothed, silky white breast – and merely, gently, stroke his hair.

‘I’m a poor excuse for a benefactor,’ he sighs, as she arranges his coat on the makeshift rack. ‘I leave you stranded without fresh clothes, for days. Then I shamble through your door, as though I’ve just been dredged from the Thames – and within moments I’m making an ass of myself, kicking the place down …’

Sugar straightens, looks her Rackham square in the eyes for the first time since his arrival. There’s something wrong, she realises now: something weightier than rickety coat-stands or a spate of bad weather. His contorted face, his stooping posture … He might almost be the William Rackham she met in The Fireside on that first night, hunched and mistrustful like a recently whipped dog – except that tonight he smells of less easily definable desires.

‘Something is troubling you,’ she says, in her softest, most respectful voice. ‘You aren’t a man to concern himself with trifles.’

‘Ach, it’s nothing, nothing,’ he replies, eyes downcast. (How perceptive she is! Is his very soul naked to her gaze?)

‘Business?’

He sits heavily in an armchair, blinking dazedly at the glass of brandy hovering before him – exactly what he wanted. He accepts it from her hand, and she glides backwards to the other armchair.

‘Business, yes,’ he says.

He begins with a heavy heart, sighing deeply in expectation of having to explain the most fundamental principles. But, to his amazement, she needs no such thing; she understands! Within minutes he and Sugar are discussing the Hopsom dilemma – in detail – quite as if she were a business ally.

‘But how can you know all this?’ he interjects at one point.

‘I’ve made a start on the books you put on my shelves,’ she grins. (Yes, indeed she has: screeds of closely-printed tedium, made bearable only by the anticipation of an opportunity like this one.)

Rackham shakes his head in awe. ‘Am I …
dreaming
you?’

She stretches slightly in her seat and breathes deep, allowing her bosom to swell into view. ‘Oh, I’m very real,’ she reminds him.

And to the dilemma of Hopsom & Co. they promptly return. Sugar manages her side of the discussion better than she could have hoped, but then everything William knows of perfumery seems to have been cribbed from books and nothing from experience. Anyhow, the underlying principles of commerce are so simple, even an imbecile could understand them: convince your customers you’re generous when in fact you’re forcing them to pay dear for what you have produced cheap. Conversation with a boring man likewise has its underlying principles. Principle One: humbly apologise for your ignorance, even when you know what he’s about to explain. Principle Two: at the point when he grows weary of explaining, appear to grasp everything in an instant.

‘I’m not a businessman by nature, I’m more of an artist,’ William says, with a stoical sigh. ‘But in the end, that may be all to the good. The born businessman is unadventurous, fearful of changing the way things are, if they’re ticking along. The born artist is prepared to dare.’ Softly bleating these words, he strikes her as the last person to
dare
anything. What’s
wrong
with him tonight? At least he’s swallowing the brandy …

The
real
problem with Hopsom, after all her gentle probings and reassurances, at last comes out in the open. And what a puny little problem it is! The company is a minor manufacturer of toiletries, dwarfed by Rackham’s as Rackham’s is dwarfed by Pears. Until now, it has not sold lavender in any form, but William was recently approached by Mr Hopsom, with a view to the leasing of some of Rackham’s lavender-producing farmland, if there’s any to spare. William promised to consider it, but no sooner was Hopsom out the door than he conceived a notion much more radical than the mere leasing of land. Instead, why shouldn’t Rackham supply Hopsom with lavender in its fully refined forms – soaps, waters, oils, talcums and so on – at a price much lower than what it would cost Hopsom to produce the same items in his own much smaller factories? Hopsom could then sell them under the Hopsom name. And what, asks Sugar, would be the advantage to Rackham of such an arrangement? Why, it would solve the problem of what to do with crops and manufactures that turn out … how shall we say it? … less than perfect. Every year an unconscionable amount of harvested lavender is thrown away, which might just as well be refined for what it’s worth. Also it seems a waste to discard finished products (soaps and so forth) that are a mite misshapen, or have pock-marks or streaks of undissolved colour.

Not that the lavender produce passed on to Hopsom would
necessarily
be inferior; to the contrary, every effort would be made, as always, to ensure that all crops were perfect, and every manufacture flawless. It might well be that, nine times out of ten, there would be no difference anyone could tell between (for example) the lavender water bearing Hopsom’s label and that which bore Rackham’s.

Ah, but … ah, but … What of that one-in-ten eventuality? What if (just for the sake of argument) Hopsom’s found itself in receipt of a quantity of substandard perfume, or if a newly-delivered crate of soaps should contain, by an accident of bad luck, a disproportionate number of visibly deformed specimens? What if (to speak plainly) Mr Hopsom should consider himself short-changed, and
complain
? Indeed, what if (driven – just for the sake of argument – by a perverse ingratitude for the generous terms on which his company had been given the goods) he tried to drag Rackham’s name through the mud?

‘You needn’t worry any more, William: I have your answer,’ says Sugar.

‘There cannot
be
a satisfactory answer,’ he moans, accepting his fourth glass of brandy. ‘Everything depends on chance …’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ she placates him. ‘This Mr Hopsom: do you happen to know if his Christian name is Matthew?’

‘Matthew, yes,’ says William, frowning with the effort of imagining where, in his cast-off books, she could possibly have gleaned such a fact.

‘Known to some as “Horsey” Hopsom?’

‘Why … yes.’

Sugar chuckles wickedly, and swoops across the room to kneel at his feet.

‘Then if Mr Hopsom ever causes you any bother,’ she says, propping her thin white arms on one dark trouser-leg, ‘I suggest you whisper two short words in his ear.’ And, leaning closer still to him, slapping his thigh in a gentle pantomime of rhythmic chastisement, she whispers, ‘Amy Howlett.’

William looks into her bright eyes with a mixture of mistrust and wonderment for several seconds, then laughs out loud.

‘By God,’ he cries. ‘This really is the limit!’

‘Not at all,’ murmurs Sugar, nuzzling her cheek into his lap. ‘There are no limits to the heights that can be attained by a man like you …’

She moves her palm onto the spot where his sex should, by now, be swelling to erection, but it seems she’s misjudged him. The conversation has gone surpassingly well: the Hopsom’s problem is solved: and yet … and yet Rackham fidgets under her touch, awkward and unready.

‘
Dear
William,’ she commiserates, falling back, clasping her hands demurely in the lap of her own billowing skirts. ‘You are
still
troubled. Yes you are: I can tell. What on earth can be the matter? What terrible thing has upset you so?’

For a full twenty seconds he stares at her, dark-browed and wavering. Has she dared too much? He coughs, to clear his throat for whatever words may come.

‘My wife,’ he says, ‘is a madwoman.’

Sugar cocks her head, in a mute gesture of aghastness, after considering and rejecting such declarations as ‘Really?’, ‘Well, fancy that!’ and ‘How dreadful!’ All her working life, men have been telling her their wives are mad, and still she hasn’t hit upon a serviceable way of responding.

‘She was a sweet, kind-hearted girl when we first married,’ he laments, ‘a credit to anyone. She had some odd ways, but who hasn’t? I couldn’t have known she’d become a candidate for an asylum; that, in my own home, she would …’ He stops short, closes his eyes in pain. ‘There was no happier girl when I first met her. Now she despises me.’