Read The Crimson Petal and the White Online
Authors: Michel Faber
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Library, #Historical
Sugar joins the motley queue of working folk and well-heeled connoisseurs to pay for admission. Although only two bodies separate her from Rackham and his companions, she overhears their conversation only imperfectly through the raucous babble of the crowd.
‘… if
I
had no arms,’ Ashwell is saying, ‘… Impressionist painter!’
‘Yes!’ cries Bodley. ‘Specially made dummy arms! One hand purposefully clutching a paint-brush!’
The three men laugh uproariously, though Sugar fails to see anything witty. Art has never been her strong suit; all those Magdalens and Virgin Marys hoarded by Mrs Castaway put her off. Now, waiting in line to enter a low Soho theatre, she makes a mental note: brush up on Art.
Inside the Tewkesbury, a converted wool hall just about big enough for chamber concerts, but utilised instead for exhibitions of freaks and illusionists, Sugar shuffles amongst the herd of bodies. How horrid they smell! Don’t any of them bathe? She can’t recall ever noticing before the sheer uncleanness of common people. Rationing her breaths in the oppressive air, she takes her seat one row behind William and his friends.
On stage, a succession of entertainers fritters the time away – whetting audience appetite, with their mediocre songs and surpriseless magic, for the main attraction. Bodley and Ashwell mutter loudly, and share private jokes; William endures passively, as though his companions are children whom he has indulged with an outing.
At last there’s a surge of applause and whistling in the theatre, and a stage-hand places a large four-legged stool on the boards, close to the footlights. Moments later, a violin and bow are deposited on a red velvet cushion next to the stool, earning more applause and a few cheers. Finally, Unthan walks on. He’s a short man, smartly dressed in the garb of an orchestra musician, complete with tails but devoid of sleeves. His clean-shaven face, obviously not English, is in its structure a little simian, with a monkey’s look of alert melancholy. His curly hair has been persuaded to adhere in straight furrows by much oil and combing.
With the profoundest solemnity Unthan takes his seat and begins, with his feet, to remove his shoes and stockings; titters from the audience leave him unmoved. He neatly folds the stockings and places each one into its corresponding shoe, then takes between his naked toes the body of the violin and deftly lifts it up onto his left shoulder, pinning it there with his chin. His left leg he lowers to the floor while the toes of his right move crablike along the violin’s neck until they rest on the lower notes of the fingerboard. With no visible difficulty, the contorted Unthan fetches up the bow with his left foot and swings it up to rest on the strings. There’s a faint clattering from the orchestra pit, then the ensemble begins to play, softly and sadly, a tune which sounds almost recognisable to all those present – until the Pedal Paganini begins his performance.
Unthan plays execrably, sending a shiver of squeamishness, even outrage, through the theatre. Music is being molested here! Yet there is pity, too, excited by the spectacle of the little cripple sawing away, his face proud and sombre despite its monkeyish shape and the mass of crinkly hair working loose over his wrinkled brow. By the time Unthan has, some twenty minutes later, exhausted his modest repertoire, the audience’s mood has shifted, and many patrons – including Sugar – have damp eyes without knowing why. In the echoing decay of the orchestra’s final crescendo, Unthan fiddles one last vibrato flourish and, with a jerk of his feet, lets both violin and bow fall into his lap. He utters a startling cry of triumph or agony, then prostrates himself, the last of his hair unravelling. A full three minutes of thunderous applause ensues.
‘Ha ha!’ hoots Bodley. ‘Jolly good!’
Afterwards, Messrs Bodley, Ashwell and Rackham stroll the streets of Soho, drunk as lords. All three are in high spirits, despite the drizzle; Unthan, they agree, was worth the price of admission – an all-too-rare circumstance in a world where, too often, pleasures fail to live up to the claims made for them.
‘Well, friends,’ declares William. ‘After this ape … ape … apex, all exshperience must be a shtep downwards. I’m going home.’
‘My God, Bodley!’ exclaims Ashwell. ‘Do you hear this?’
‘Can’t we tempt you with a fuck, Bill?’
‘Not with
you
, Philip.’
‘A cruel thrust.’ The men are slowing to a standstill, allowing Sugar to move from shadow to shadow, closer and closer, until she’s ensconced in a cul-de-sac barely wide enough for her skirts. Her veil is damp with breath, her back wet with sweat, as she strains to hear. ‘Ach, but it’s spring, Bill,’ Bodley says. ‘London’s a
bloom
with cunt. Can’t you smell it on the air?’
Rackham pokes his nose clownishly upwards, and sniffs. ‘Horse dung,’ he pronounces authoritatively, as if analysing the constitution of a manufactured fragrance. ‘Dog shit. Beer. Cigar shmoke. Soot. Tallow. Rotting cabbage. Beer – did I shay beer already? Macassar oil, on my own head. Not an ounce of cunt, sirs; not sho much as a drachm.’
‘Oh? That reminds me, Bill,’ says Ashwell. ‘There’s something Bodley and I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a while. You recall the night we saw the Great Flatelli? Afterwards, we consulted
More Sprees In London
, and there was one girl described in the most glowing terms …’
‘Sshugar, as I recall, yes?’ William, for all his inebriation, sounds nonchalant.
‘Well, the queer thing is, Bodley and I went to her house, but when we presented ourselves, we were told she wasn’t at home.’
‘You poor gyps,’ mocks William. ‘Didn’t I warn you that might happen?’
‘Yes, I recall you did,’ pursues Ashwell. ‘However, we tried a second time, much later that evening …’
‘—and a
third
time,’ interjects Bodley, ‘a few weeks later …’
‘Only to be told that this Sugar girl had been “removed” altogether! “A rich man has taken her for his mistress,” the madam told us.’
Sugar, her breath suddenly intolerably humid inside her veil, fumbles to pin the gauze back against her bonnet.
‘What a shame,’ William mock-commiserates. ‘Pipped at the post!’
Inch by inch, Sugar leans her face forward, thankful for the rain as it cools her cheeks and prevents her breath clouding out of the shadowy passage to betray her.
‘Yes, but by whom, one wonders? By whom?’
The men are in her sights now; fortunately they’re looking away. William laughs, and what an impressively natural performance it is! ‘No one
I
know, I’m sure,’ he says. ‘All the rich men of my acquaintance are pillars of
deshency. That’s why I reshort to you two, for relief!’
‘But seriously, Bill … if you should hear a whisper …’
‘… About where this girl is to be found …’
‘If not now, then when her master has tired of her …’
‘We’re still dying to have a bash.’
William laughs again.
‘My, my: all this devotion – caused by one li’l entry in
More Shprees in
London
. Ah, the power of … of advertising!’
‘We do hate to miss anything,’ admits Bodley.
‘The curse of being a modern man,’ opines Ashwell.
‘Now, friends, goodnight,’ says Rackham. ‘A most diverting evening thish’s been.’
The men shake gloved hands, and half-embrace, whereafter Bodley, being the best whistler of the three, pulls one glove off and shoves his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, to summon a hansom for William.
‘Mush obliged,’ says William. ‘I really muzzbe getting home.’
‘Of course, of course. And we really must … must what, Ashwell?’
The two comrades are dawdling off into the dark already, leaving Rackham stationed under a lamp-post in expectation of speedy deliverance. Sugar appraises her man from the rear as he stands there. His hands are clasped behind his back, just over the part where, when naked, his unusually protuberant tailbone nestles between his buttocks. He seems taller than she remembered; his elongated shadow, pitch-black against the gas-lit cobbles, is cast straight towards her.
‘It’s high time
we
were in bed, too,’ Bodley is saying – or is it Ashwell? Their bodies are out of sight now, and their voices growing fainter.
‘Quite so. Any particular … ?’
‘I thought Mrs Tremain’s.’
‘The wine’s not so good there.’
‘True, but the girls are first-rate.’
‘Will they let us bring our own in?’
‘Our own girls?’
And they’re gone. For a few seconds William stands motionless, his head raised skyward as though he’s listening for the approach of a cab. Then, startlingly, he claps one palm against the lamp-post and twirls slowly around it, like an urchin child at play. He chuckles as he walks this narrow circuit, and his free hand swings through the air.
‘Abandon hope, you bumblers!’ he crows. ‘She’s gone … Shafe from
you
… Shafe from
all
of you! No one else will ever touch her …’ (Round and round the lamp-post still he twirls.) ‘No one!’
And, as he laughs again, a hansom rattles into view.
Sugar waits until he has climbed aboard before emerging from her hiding-place; his cheery cry of ‘Chepshtow Villas, Notting Hill!’ lets her know there’s no hurry to follow. He’s going home to sleep – and so, at last, can she.
As the clatter of hoofs recedes, she limps into the light. Her muscles, tense as bowstrings for so long, have seized up, and one of her legs is completely numb. The grime of the alley’s cramped walls has smirched her skirts on both sides, a glistening sooty brand on the pale material. Yet she is elated. Rackham is hers!
She hobbles along the road, grunting and chortling as the feeling returns to her nerves, longing to sink into her warm bath at home, knowing she’ll sleep like a baby tonight. She tries to whistle for a cab, but no sooner does she purse her lips than her mouth widens into a grin and she giggles throatily. Cackling, she hurries towards the thoroughfare.
On her way, she meets a man walking unsteadily in the opposite direction; a massive man, a swell in every sense of the word, whose drunkenness is proclaimed on the breeze. When his downcast eyes see the swirling hems of a woman’s dress sweeping over the dark footpath towards him, he raises his face in curiosity. At once his puffy features light up in recognition, though Sugar can’t recall ever setting eyes on him before.
‘Is it … is it not Sugar?’ he stammers, rocking on his feet. ‘My prodigal siren, where have you been? I beg you, take me to your bed, wherever it is, and cure this cockstand!’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says Sugar, bowing slightly as she hurries past, her eyes fixed on the greater lights. ‘I’ve decided to become a nun.’
SIXTEEN
‘B
etween the bottomless gutter of damnation and the bright road to Paradise,’ cries a matronly voice, ‘stand we!’ Emmeline Fox cringes, and obscures her grimacing mouth behind her steamy tea-cup. Mrs Borlais is getting carried away again. ‘We can but extend our hands – oh,
let
us pray that some desperate soul seizes hold of us!’
All around the meeting hall, the other members of the Rescue Society glance at each other, trying to determine whether their leader is calling them to prayer in the literal sense, or whether this is mere inspirational rhetoric. A dozen sensibly dressed ladies, most of them even less comely than the grey-faced Mrs Fox, reach a silent consensus, and their eyes remain open, their hands unsteepled. Outside the sooty windows of their Jermyn Street headquarters, London’s unconverted millions teem, shadowy ungraspables flickering past the glass.
Mrs Nash approaches Mrs Fox, teapot in hand. A simple soul, is Mrs Nash; she’s hoping that in this Refreshment Interval between the Discussion and the Going-Forth there’s enough time left to pour her fellow Rescuers another cup of tea.
But no: ‘Sisters, it’s time we were on our way,’ declares Mrs Borlais, and she sets the example by waddling out into the vestibule. Among the seated there is a rustle of disinclination, not because they fear the challenge of evangelism but because Mrs Hibbert forgot the biscuits today and had to go out and buy some, which means that most of the Rescuers are only on their first biscuit – some yet to take their first bite. Now their leader beckons them to rise, what can they do? They may be about to wrestle with Vice in the dark cesspools of Shoreditch, but can they be so bold as to walk out into the street eating biscuits? No.
Mrs Borlais senses the wavering of enthusiasm, and takes it to be faintheartedness.
‘I implore you all to remember, Sisters,’ she calls, ‘that saving a soul from damnation is a thousand times more worthwhile than wresting a body from the claws of a savage beast. If you saved a person from a savage beast, you’d feel the pride of it as long as you lived! Be proud, then, Sisters!’
Mrs Fox is first to stand behind Mrs Borlais, despite having no patience with such vainglorious stuff. In her opinion, the attitude of the Rescuer doesn’t matter – whether she’s proud or discouraged, zealous or weary. These things are transient. A million Christian people in the past felt pride, a million felt discouragement, and all that’s left of them now is their souls, and the souls they were able to save. ‘The Rescue, not the Rescuer’: this has always been Emmeline’s motto, and should have been the motto of the Rescue Society, too, if she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.
‘Let’s be off, then,’ she says breezily, to bridge the gap between savage beasts and uneaten biscuits.
They go then, the Rescuers, all eight of them. United, as always, like soldiers in mufti. Yet, less than an hour after the Going-Forth, Emmeline Fox has strayed away from the main group and is in delicate pursuit of a pregnant child in a foul-smelling cul-de-sac.
Sugar, for her part, is sitting in a spic-and-span, brightly lit tea-room in Westbourne Terrace, toying with a cold cup of the house speciality and a nibbled scone, eavesdropping on a servant. The servant sits at one table, eating and drinking merrily, gossiping with a chum; Sugar sits alone at another table, her unfocused eyes fixed on the reflection of the ceiling lamp floating in her tea, her back to the conversation, her ears burning.
Don’t be judgemental: this is not the way Sugar usually occupies her Tuesday afternoons; in fact, it’s her first time. No, really! William Rackham is in Cardiff, you see, until Thursday, and Agnes Rackham is indisposed. So, rather than being idle, what’s the harm in following Clara, Agnes’s lady’s-maid, on her afternoon off, and seeing what comes of it?
Indeed, it’s proved well worthwhile so far. Clara is a wonderfully loquacious creature, at least in the company of an Irish girl she calls (if Sugar hears rightly) ‘Shnide’ – another lady’s-maid, identically dressed. The tea-room is quiet, with only five customers; the ever-improving facilities of Paddington Terminus are bleeding it dry. Fortunately for Sugar, who might have had difficulty eavesdropping in the clinking hustle-bustle of the station, Clara and Shnide are agreed that it’s much nicer here, away from all the smelly foreigners and children. Sugar sips very slowly at her tea, occasionally toys with a minuscule mirror-image of Clara and Shnide in her teaspoon, and lets the efflux of gossip and discontent flow into her ears.
This is what she learns: William Rackham is nasty piece of work, a tyrant. His grasp on the workings of his household has metamorphosed from a limp-wristed dabble to an iron fist. Once upon a time he couldn’t bear to look you in the face, now he ‘stares right through you’. Last week he gave a speech about how other men as wealthy as himself would get themselves grander servants in a flash, but that
he
won’t dream of it, for he knows how hard his own girls work to earn their keep. Of course now everyone below stairs is terrified.
But William Rackham isn’t the worst of it: no, the brunt of Clara’s spite is borne by her own mistress, a sly, two-faced creature who feigns illness and frailty one day, the better to bully her unsuspecting servants with a sudden display of bad temper and outrageous demands the next.
‘Last December,’ complains Clara, ‘I thought she was going to die. Now sometimes I think
I
will.’
Clara is considering, she says, finding a new position with less difficult masters, but she’s worried the Rackhams won’t write her a good testimonial. ‘It would be just like them,’ she hisses. ‘If I’m good, they won’t let me go; if I’m bad, they’ll kick me into the gutter.’
‘Slaves, that’s what we are,’ affirms Shnide. ‘No better than slaves.’
The conversation moves on to the topic of Clara’s and Shnide’s men friends; they each have a lover, it transpires. Sugar is taken aback to learn this: she’s always forgetting that unattached women seek out male company when they’ve no need to. Pimps she can understand; rich benefactors, too. But friends? Friends with no money, living in lodging-houses, like Clara’s Johnny and Shnide’s Alfie? What can the attraction be? Sugar is all ears, but by the time the servants kiss and rise to leave, she’s none the wiser. How can these two bundles of spite, this petty pair of gossips, profess ‘love’ for anybody? (Particularly if that body is a man’s gross and dog-smelly one, hairy-faced, oily-headed, dirty-fingernailed … )
‘Mind what I said,’ says Shnide. ‘Don’t let him walk all over you.’
Who is she referring to? Clara’s Johnny? Or William Rackham? Clara simpers as though she feels quite capable now of subjugating either man, or both.
You simpleton!
Sugar feels like shouting at her.
This true love of yours
most likely has his cock stuck deep in a trollop! And William will throw you into
the street like a rotten apple if you dare to defy him!
Her anger is ferocious, having not existed a moment before; it bursts fully formed out of silent obscurity, like a fire in a shuttered warehouse. She bites her lip as the servants prattle their way out of the door, onto the sunny street; she squeezes her tea-cup in her hands, praying she doesn’t shatter it, half-wishing she might.
‘Nice cup of tea, was it?’ says the tea-room proprietor sarcastically soon after, as Sugar is paying her pittance for the privilege of eavesdropping in comfort for an hour.
Watch your step
, hisses Sugar inside her hot skull.
You need all the bloody
custom you can get
.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, and demurely inclines her head, the very picture of a lady.
A couple of hours later, Agnes Rackham is standing at the window of Clara’s bedroom – not a place she normally haunts, but nowadays there’s no telling when one’s guardian angel is going to pop up, and these attic bedrooms make such excellent roosts from which to glimpse her. Squinting through the glass, Agnes examines the sun-dappled trees under which her guardian angel sometimes materialises, on the eastern periphery of the Rackham grounds. There’s no one to be seen there – well, no one of consequence. Shears is fussing about, tying metal wires around the stems of the flowers to make them grow straight, pulling up weeds and stuffing them into the pockets of his trousers. If only he would go away, perhaps her guardian angel would appear. She’s shy of strangers, Agnes has found.
Clara’s bedroom smells unpleasantly of perfume. How odd that the girl should be scrupulously odourless while working, but that when she comes finally to bed, she should anoint herself with scent. Agnes leaves the window and bends to sniff the servant’s pillow. It stinks of something vulgar: Hopsom’s, perhaps, or one of Rackham’s cheaper lines. How regrettable that William must put his name to such garbage; in the Future, if his star continues to rise, perhaps he’ll produce only the most exquisite and exclusive perfumes – perfumes for princesses.
Agnes sways on her feet. The pain in her head is bad again; if she’s not careful, she’ll pitch forward and be found sleeping on Clara’s bed, her face nestled in that pungent pillow. She straightens, returns to the window. And there, under the sun-dappled trees, barely distinguishable through the incandescent lances of the freshly painted fence, moves the flickering form of her guardian angel. Within moments, it’s gone, sucked back into the ether; there’s not even time for a wave. But it was there.
Agnes hurries out of Clara’s room, breathing deeply. Her heart flutters in her chest, her bosom tingles as if there’s a hand pressed hard against each breast, the pain in her head is ebbing deliciously, dwindling to a small lump of coldness behind her left eye, quite bearable; the fist of ice lodged in her skull has melted to the size of a grape.
She descends the stairs – the dreary uncarpeted servants’ stairs – to where the proper parts of the house begin. Hurrying to the parlour, she’s surprised and delighted all over again by the new wallpaper there, and she takes a seat at the piano. Open before her is the sheet music of ‘Crocuses Ahoy!’, marked with her own annotations to warn her when the demisemiquavers are coming. She plays the opening bars, plays them again, plays them over and over. Softly and sweetly, using this piano phrase as accompaniment, she hums a new melody, her own, purely out of her head. The notes she sings, hesitant at first, resolve themselves into a fetching tune. How inventive she is today! Quite the little composer! She resolves to sing this song of hers as long as she can stand it, to send it as far as Heaven, to nag it into the memory of God, to make time pass until someone is summoned to write it down for her, and it’s printed up nicely and ferried to the far corners of the earth, for women everywhere to sing. She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.
Later, when she’s tired of composing, Agnes goes to her bedroom and plays with her new hats. She parades them in front of the mirror, holding her head high, smoothing the wrinkles out of her silky hips. Reflected back at her she sees a confident young woman (this word is all the rage in the ladies’ journals lately, so it must be safe to use), well-armoured in her shiny bodice; a proud, elegant woman with nothing to be ashamed of.
‘I am again a beauty,’ she hears herself say.
She picks up the nearest of many hatboxes, lifts its lid and pulls out the mass of crêpe paper. The glass eyes of a stuffed thrush twinkle emerald against the jade felt of the hat on which the bird is fixed. Agnes lifts the treasure from its box by the brim, and tentatively strokes the thrush’s feathered shoulder. A year ago she would have been afraid of it, in case it came back to life on her head; now she’s merely looking forward to showing it off in public, because it really will look awfully pretty.
‘I am not afraid.’
No, Agnes is not afraid – and lately has been proving as much, everywhere. Like a person contriving to pass a vicious dog by hailing it cheerily, she is able to walk into ballrooms and dining-halls that bristle with dangers, and simply sweep past them all. No doubt many of the ladies who call out to her so pleasantly are hiding sharp feminine hatreds with which they’d love to stab her, but Agnes doesn’t care. She’s the equal of any of them!
Already she has a number of triumphs to her credit, because the Party that Lasts a Hundred Days is well underway, and Agnes Rackham is proving to be one of its unexpected luminaries, all the more fashionable for the slight
frisson
of risk posed to those jaded diversion-seekers who flit towards her light.
‘
Agnes Rackham? No really, dear: delightful! Yes, who’d have imagined it? But
let me tell you about her dinner party! Everything was black and white: I mean
everything, dear. Black tables and chairs, white table-cloth, black candle-holders
,
white crockery, cutlery painted white, white napkins, black finger-bowls. Even the
food was black and white, I tell you! There was sole, with blackened skin still on
,
and the mushrooms were black, and so was the baked pumpkin … in white sauce
.
Alfred was cross, though, that there was no red wine – only white! But he bucked
up as the evening went on. Mrs Rackham was so cheerful, she was singing to herself
,
in the sweetest voice. No one knew how to behave at first – should we just pretend
we didn’t hear? – but then Mr Cavanagh, the barrister, started singing ‘pom pom
pom’ in a baritone underneath her, like a tuba, and everyone decided it must be all
right. And after dinner there were ices – with licorice sauce! By that time we were
all feeling ever so unconventional, we were almost wicked, and no one minded a bit
.
Such a
peculiar
woman, is Mrs Rackham. But oh! such a delightful time we had
.
I almost
fainted
with amusement!
’