The Crimson Petal and the White (49 page)

Walking behind the Rackhams so often, Sugar has learned to read the signs of their personal disharmony. Their bodies, even when fully clothed, are anathema to each other. And yet they are occasionally, unavoidably, arm in arm. On these occasions William escorts his wife nervously, as if fearful she might fall to bits at his side and cause all eyes to turn on him and the mess he has made on a public footpath. Agnes, for her part, glides irrelative to him, a mechanism that cannot be hurried. Then again, whenever something in the distance attracts her attention – a lady she simply must speak to, for example – she tends to accelerate and pull him along, like a railway car whose mail-hook has accidentally become hitched to the sleeve of a gentleman.

At one juncture in the Grand Garden Fête, a large blue balloon is floating overhead, high above the marquees, inspiring excited gesticulations from the crowd. Agnes notices nothing. Sugar observes William speaking down to his wife, urging her to look up at the moonlit curiosity. But though Agnes nods, as if to say, ‘That’s nice, dear’, she doesn’t deign to raise her head. It will take more than a floating blue balloon, it seems, to win back her approval.

Even more remarkable is the incident at the Sandown Park Races – another superb opportunity to be the Rackhams’ shadow, and in broad daylight.

Of Sandown Park itself Sugar sees precious little, as it’s utterly aswarm with spectators. Half of London’s population, drawn from all classes, seems to be here (well, excluding the desperately poor, Sugar has to admit … but
besides
them, everybody). There’s scarcely an inch of ground not trampled by the surging horde of men, women, children and dogs. Sugar catches only the most fleeting glimpse of what has ostensibly brought people here: race-horses and their riders. The stocky old nags and ponies pulling the carts of refreshments move in ignorance of the fact that somewhere nearby, equines of a superior caste are prancing or possibly even galloping like the wind. Every now and then, a cry goes up and Sugar thinks the race has begun, or been won, but then one knot of the crowd untangles slightly and the commotion is revealed to be something else: a fainting, an eruption of fisticuffs, a carriage rolling over someone’s foot.

But, little though she sees of the races, Sugar does see a lot of the Rackhams. Agnes, as petite as any jockey, stands well back from the throng for fear of getting trampled. Poor William! How impotently he flexes his hands! How beseechingly he looks to the heavens for a loan of some charm to melt his wife’s heart! Maybe he yearns to lift her up onto his shoulders, like a small child, for a better look … Instead, he keeps insinuating his own bulky body into the crowd, hoping thereby to clear a space for Agnes to toddle in. Even if she never sees the horses, she might, with his help, catch a glimpse of the Sultan of Zanzibar, and he’s sure she’d like that!

‘It’s diabolical this year!’ William exclaims, in an ingratiating attempt to voice her own thoughts. But she turns her face away from him, a glint of terror in her eyes, appalled at his casual invocation of the demonic forces all around them.

So, the Rackhams remain on the fringes, and Sugar, instead of watching horses race, watches the
pas de deux
of a married couple. The wife huddling close to her protector, yet shrinking from his touch; the husband stiff with gallantry and annoyance, despairing of finding room in the rudely jostling real world for a creature so fragile. There seems no limit to the repertoire of movements for expressing this subtle discord between them.

After a while, Sugar becomes aware of another dancer on the fringes of the crowd: a pickpocket. At first she takes him for a dandy, a foppish character too timid to risk himself in the thick of the mob, but then she observes the poise with which he hovers behind each person, the almost lascivious pleasure with which he sidles close to them and then withdraws, like a pollinating insect or the world’s gentlest rapist. He is, without a doubt, having a sublimely satisfactory day.

It ought not to trouble Sugar in the slightest when the rogue’s leisurely progress brings him closer and closer to William and Agnes; after all, they can easily afford to get robbed, and their reactions to such a misfortune can only add to Sugar’s store of knowledge. She verifies with a glance that Agnes’s soft pink purse is, in accordance with the very latest fashion, hung at the back of her dress, a godsend to thieves. Mrs Rackham is therefore (as they say in the trade) asking for it. So, why shouldn’t Sugar simply stand back and enjoy witnessing a true professional at work? This fellow’s a damn sight more graceful than the ballet dancers at the Crystal Palace last week …

And yet, and yet … The pressure of conscience as Sugar watches the tooler’s approach is almost unbearable, like a blunt knife held hard to her throat. She must warn Mrs Rackham! How can she not warn Mrs Rackham! How can she just stand here, a mute accomplice to this parasite? Sugar clears her throat, unheard in the hubbub of the crowd, and rehearses what she’ll shout to Agnes. Her voice will be all the uglier for shouting.
Who
on earth is that common female, bawling so hoarsely at me
, Agnes will think …

It’s too late; the moment has come and gone. The pickpocket has floated past Mrs Rackham’s skirts, pausing for an instant only. In that instant, Sugar knows, he has sliced her purse wide open with a blade as sharp as a surgical scalpel, and scooped out whatever he fancied. William he leaves unmolested; he’s got enough watches already, probably.

Queasy with shame, Sugar watches the pickpocket dance his way gently through the crowd, until he’s lost to view. Many people are rearing up on their toes now, erect as can be, craning their necks: the race is almost finished. William makes one last desultory attempt to clear a path for Agnes and usher her into the front line; his hand hovers awkwardly at her back, hesitating to touch her. It’s then that he notices her purse, hanging limp like the skin of a burst balloon. He bends and whispers in her ear.

Agnes turns away from the throng of spectators, her face white as marble. She takes a few steps forward, away from the commotion, and comes to a halt on a bare patch of ground about ten feet from Sugar, whose veiled and parasol’d presence she ignores. Her eyes are wide open, staring fixedly at emptiness, and brimming with tears. A great, ecstatic cheer goes up behind her; caps are thrown in the air and top hats are waved.

William hurries to Agnes’s side, enfolds her shoulders in his comforting arm.

‘Come on, tell me, what have you lost?’ he implores her, a little gruffly, patently keen to replace it and have done with this fuss.

‘The photograph of my mother,’ says Agnes, shivering under his hands. ‘The rest doesn’t matter.’

‘What photograph?’ says William, bemused, as if she has just confessed to carrying a stuffed zebra or a cast-iron cheese press in her reticule.

‘The photograph of my mother,’ says Agnes, her cheeks shining with tears. ‘In a locket frame. I carry it everywhere.’

William opens his mouth to protest the folly of this, thinks better of it. After a few seconds he volunteers, ‘I’ll find the photographer. If he’s an orderly sort of fellow, he may have the original plates …’

‘Oh, don’t be such an
idiot
, William,’ says Agnes, closing her swollen eyes. ‘It was a photograph made long before we met. You didn’t even
exist
, then.’

William removes his palms from her shoulders, lays one behind his head, and looks back at the crowd while he digests Agnes’s devastating logic. The race is over, and already a number of smartly-dressed onlookers are walking off towards their waiting broughams and cabs. Another occasion to be seen at has been ticked off the Season’s calendar, and the fashionable ladies, as they disperse, glance surreptitiously at the hems of their dresses in case the race-course grounds have soiled them.

‘Let’s go home, dear,’ says William.

Agnes stands frozen in her small square of no-man’s-land, still weeping.

‘Home?’ she echoes, as if she can’t imagine what fantastical place he might mean.

‘Yes,’ says William, leading his little wife towards the exit, past the dawdling woman with the cheap parasol. ‘This way.’

And so the Rackhams hail their cab, and Sugar hails hers. So often it has ended like this: so often that by now it’s become almost routine. The Rackhams take their leave from some Season event or other, headed for ‘home’, and Sugar, their shadow, hurries back to her own rooms in Priory Close, gambling that tonight will be the night that William comes. She cannot be forever walking twenty steps behind him, or haunting the perimeters of his house and gardens; sometimes, she must be where he expects her to be, ready to receive him.

So far, her instincts for when to follow and when to dash back to Priory Close haven’t been what you’d call unerring. In three weeks, William has come to visit her twice. On one occasion, she was caught completely unprepared, having only just walked in the door, still smelling of the same smoky theatre he himself had come from. (After a moment’s hesitation, she decided honesty was the safest policy, and encouraged him to marvel at the coincidence of them both attending the same play. It was quite an agreeable conversation, really, followed by a fuck as passionate as any Rackham has ever spent on her.) On the other occasion, Sugar returned to her rooms to find a handwritten note on the floor of her receiving hall:

Heartbroken, I can no longer wait;

Was I untimely, or You too late?

(For days afterwards, she puzzled over this doggerel, subjecting it to exhaustive exegesis, straining to guess the author’s true feelings.)

Now, returning from her day at the races, Sugar lets herself into her unlit love nest, instantly annoyed at the quiet that allows her to hear her own breathing. She has a headache; she tears the ugly bonnet from her head, pulls the combs from her hair, and runs her fingers through. The severe parting in the middle of her scalp has been in place so long that it hurts to disturb it. Sweat has eaten away at the tender flesh behind her ears. Her face, she notes in the hallway mirror, is dusky with grime.

While the bath is filling, Sugar ferrets about for something to eat. She hasn’t eaten all day, except for an apple in the morning, a cream bun she devoured in the cab on the way to Sandown Park, and a single bite of sausage at the race-course. That sausage, bought sizzling hot from a stall, was a mistake: it looked just like the bangers she used to love when she lived in Church Lane, when Mr Bing the sausage man used to wheel his steaming cart from door to door, and she and Caroline would haul themselves out of bed and buy the biggest, fattiest, sootiest specimens they could get. But the sausage today didn’t taste like Mr Bing’s bangers; it tasted like pig offal fried in dirty paraffin. Honestly, who could possibly digest such garbage? She spat it out, and felt bilious for hours.

Now she’s hungry. Starving! And there’s never anything to eat in these damn rooms of hers! The whole place smells faintly of lavender soap when it should smell of food and wine and love-making. (In her peevish mood, nothing will satisfy her short of William sound asleep in her bed while she devours juicy mouthfuls of hot roast chicken. As for where that chicken is supposed to come from, well … if Rackham can arrange for half a dozen Japanese quince trees to be delivered to his garden in Notting Hill, surely he could manage one chicken in Marylebone … !)

In the study, on the writing-table where her novel never lies, there sits a fist-sized lump of bread. It’s all that’s left of the loaf she bought on Friday, at a street stall on the way back from the Crystal Palace. The woman selling it squinted at Sugar in surprise, for her regular clientele was down-and-outs, not ladies in long furry capes.

The bath is filled now. Sugar munches on the stale bread (its shape is awfully peculiar – have mice been at it, perhaps? – best not to think about it) and swallows convulsively to get it down her throat. Is this the life of luxury to which she thought she was graduating when she left Mrs Castaway’s? And what about the way William crowed when he was twirling around the lamp-post? ‘Safe from all of you’ – that’s what he said … ‘No one else will ever touch her’ – so why in God’s name doesn’t he come and touch her himself! Is he fed up with his prize already? And that damned note:
Was I untimely, or You too late
? What did he
mean
?

Sugar takes her bath. As usual, she stays in it for far too long, chiding herself with empty threats, sinking deeper and deeper under the sudsy scum, keeping very still so that the cold water doesn’t tickle her. It’s late at night before she’s out, near midnight before her hair is dry. She sits on her immaculate king-size bed, fragrant and clean, dressed in a snow-white shift.

Come on, you swine,
she thinks.
Rescue me
.

SEVENTEEN

H
andsome and high-minded Henry Rackham, who once upon a time seemed destined to become the Rackham of Rackham Perfumeries, and now is merely
the
brother of that eminent man, stands alone in a turd-strewn street, his rain-dappled topcoat steaming faintly in the afternoon sun, waiting for a prostitute.

No, it’s not as bad as it appears: he’s waiting for a
particular
prostitute.

No, no, still you misunderstand! He hopes to speak with the woman he met here a few weeks ago, in order to … in order to bring their conversation to a more fitting conclusion. Or, as Mrs Fox might put it (she being a champion of plain speaking), to make amends for being such an ass.

Having given the matter much thought, he has decided that his mistake, and therewith his sin, was not that he spoke to this woman in the first place. No, his sin came later. Everything was going so well until he was distracted by fleshly curiosity, and then, provoked by his prurience, she lifted her skirts and … well, the rest is branded on his memory, like a dark triangular stigma on the pale flesh of his brain. But he was as much to blame as she, and in any case the question remains: what now? She is a soul in peril, and it would be a mockery of Christ’s teaching if no one ever spoke to her but bad men, and she were shunned by decent Christians.

This is why he’s standing here in Church Lane, St Giles. His hamper of food he has already given away to urchins (genuinely
hungry
urchins, he tries to reassure himself) and his shoes have already sunk several times into ordure. He has refused the offer of a feeble, ferret-like man to clean his shoes for him; instead, he has knelt in the street and done the job himself, attempting while doing so to engage the ferret-like man in conversation about God. (No success; the man snorted in bemusement and walked off.) Several individuals have called out to him, ‘Hoy, parson!’ and laughed, melting into dark doorways and windows as soon as he’s turned around. So far, no one has attempted to attack or rob him. From such small acorns, ministries may grow.

So, Henry waits on the corner of Church Lane and Arthur Street, sweltering in the sun, squinting at the passers-by. In the short time he has been standing here, four prostitutes – or women he assumes to be such – have spoken to him. They have (respectively) offered him punnets of watercress, directions, a nice shady place to rest, and ‘the most reliefsome cuddle in London’. To which his replies have been (respectively) ‘No thank you’, ‘No thank you’, ‘No thank you’, and ‘No thank you, God forgive you’. He is waiting for the woman in the terracotta dress. Once he has made good his sin with her, he can begin to consider others.

At last she comes, but looking so different that if it weren’t for her heart-shaped face being still vivid in his mind, he would have let her walk by. As it is, he has to lean forward and peer closely to make sure it’s really the same person. She has different clothes on, you see, a phenomenon that rather fazes him, for in his mind she had become a symbolic creature, fixed in appearance like a painting hung in church. Nevertheless, pink shawl and shabby blue dress aside, it’s she, gingerly negotiating the mucky cobbles as before. Henry clears his throat.

The woman (yes, her pretty upturned nose is unmistakable!) doesn’t notice him, or at least feigns not to, until they’re almost touching. But then she cocks her head towards his, anoints him with her gaze, and smiles broadly.

‘’Ello, sir,’ she says. ‘More questions?’

‘Yes,’ he replies at once, in a firm voice. ‘If you’ll permit me.’

‘For two shillin’s, I’ll permit damn near anyfink, sir,’ she teases him. ‘Anyfink
you
can put to me, anyhow.’

Henry’s jaw stiffens. Is she implying he’s less manly than other men? Or merely that he’s less depraved? And why is her Cockney accent so strong? Last time they spoke, there was a Northern cadence to it …

She tugs at his sleeve in amiable reproach, as though already well familiar with his tendency for wool-gathering and determined to stop it getting out of hand. ‘But let’s not do it in the street this time,’ she suggests. ‘Let’s talk in a nice quiet room.’

‘By all means,’ agrees Henry at once, and it’s her turn to be surprised. A queer expression crosses her face, half-protective, half-fearful – but only for a moment.

‘That’s us agreed, then,’ she says.

He walks at her side, and she leads him along, frequently checking his progress as she might an unreliable dog’s. Does she think he’s a simpleton? He oughtn’t to care what she thinks. God alone will understand why he has accepted her invitation.

‘It ain’t fancy,’ she says, ushering him towards a decaying Georgian house. Henry’s impression, at a glance, is of a façade the colour and texture of pork rind; the crumbling stucco might be blisters of mould. But before he can examine it too carefully, she has pulled him across a yard littered with chicken feathers, through a doorway and into a dim vestibule. ĶĶHe, Henry Rackham, would-be pastor of this parish, has crossed the threshold of a whore-house.

There are Turkish carpets underfoot, but they are threadbare, and the floorboards sigh softly beneath them. The walls of the corridor are concave on one side and convex on the other; striped wallpaper bulges and wrinkles like ill-fitting clothing, medallioned with framed prints whose glass is opaque with fug. Radiating from deeper inside the house is a smell of stale humidity, suggestive of … suggestive of all manner of things Henry Rackham has never known.

‘Plenty of fresh air upstairs,’ says the woman at his side, clearly worried he’ll leave her yet. If she only knew how salutary it is for him to be confronted with this squalor! On more than one occasion, he’s asked Mrs Fox to describe to him what a house of ill repute is really like and, despite her frankness, he’s still pictured it through a rosy tint of bacchanalian fantasy. Nothing – not common sense, not conscientious study of reports, not Mrs Fox’s word – has been able to banish from his mind the vision of a bawdy-house as a sumptuous grotto of sensual delight. Now, sobered by the smell of truth, he steps into the receiving room: a dismal parlour, a gloomy gallimaufry of exhausted furniture and jaundiced ornamental crockery and military paraphernalia, lit by oil-lamps despite the sunshine straining to penetrate thick curtains the colour of bacon.

Blocking the passage to the staircase sits a ruined old man in a wheelchair, his human features almost entirely obscured by scarves and knitted coverlets.

‘Sevenpence for use of the room,’ he mumbles, addressing no one in particular. Henry bridles, but his prostitute bats her eyelashes at him apologetically, as if she couldn’t have guessed he’d be so ignorant as to imagine she had a room of her own.

‘It’s only sevenpence, sir,’ she whispers. ‘To a man like you …’

Even as Henry is fetching the coins out of his trouser pocket, the truth is dawning on him: this woman is a convenience of the poor, for the poor. She’s not meant for his consumption; possibly no gentleman of his class has ever set foot in this crumbling, malodorous lair. The very clothes on his back are worth more than anything in the room – furniture, crockery, war medals and all.

‘I don’t have sevenpence, here’s a shilling,’ he mutters shamefacedly as he hands the coins down. A gnarled claw closes on the money, and a woolly muzzle of scarf sags off the fellow’s face, revealing a swollen strawberry of a nose, varicose cheeks and a disgustingly gummy mouth.

‘Don’t be expecting change,’ the old man wheezes, emitting an oral flatus of ulcer and alcohol, and abruptly wheels out of the way, allowing Henry and the prostitute to pass through.

‘So,’ says Henry, taking a deep breath as they begin to mount the stairs together. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Caroline, sir,’ she replies. ‘And watch yer step, sir – the ones wiv the nails in are a bit chancy.’

Two shillings buys Henry twenty minutes. Caroline sits on the edge of her bed, having given Henry her solemn promise not to do anything mischievous. Henry remains standing, stationed at the open window. He scarcely looks at Caroline as he asks his questions; instead he appears to be addressing the blackened rooftops and debris-strewn pathways of Church Lane. Every so often, he turns to look at her for half a second, and she smiles. He smiles back, for politeness’ sake. His smile, she thinks, is an unexpectedly sweet thing to behold. Her bed, he thinks, is like a manger lined with rags.

In his twenty minutes, Henry learns a good deal about the different kinds of prostitute, and their habitats. Caroline is a ‘street girl’ who lodges in a house for whose use she (or preferably her customer) pays rent every time she enters. She assures him, though, that the mean and gloomy appearance of this place is entirely due to the ‘tight’ nature of its owner, Mrs Leek, and that there are other such lodging-houses whose owners take ‘a real interest’. In fact, she knows of one house in particular that’s owned by the mother of one of its girls. It’s ‘like a palace, sir’ – not that Caroline has ever been there – nor to a palace, neither – but she can imagine it must be true, because the same madam used to run a house in Church Lane, just three doors along from here, that’s got a bad sort of people in it now, but when Mrs Castaway was there, you could eat off the floors it was so clean. And the daughter has since become the mistress of a very rich man, but even when she lived here she was always like a princess – not that Caroline has ever seen a princess in the flesh, but she’s seen pictures, and this girl Sugar looked no worse. So you see what can be done when the folk in charge takes an interest. Take Caroline’s bedroom, now: it’s nothing to be proud of, she knows. ‘But if it was
you
, sir, workin’ ’ere, wiv ’
im
downstairs and the place smellin’ so bad of damp, would you be fagged polishin’ the bedknobs and puttin’ posies in a vase? I
don’t
fink so.’

Henry enquires about brothels, and learns that they too are ‘a mixed bag’. Some are ‘prisons, sir, prisons’, where bullies and old hags keep the wretched girls ‘’alf naked and ’alf starved’. Others are owned by ‘the importantest people’, and the girls ‘don’t get out of bed except for bishops and kings’ (a statement Henry needs to ponder momentarily.) One thing is clear to him: the neat distinctions made by books don’t mean much in the real world. There is a hierarchy, yes, but not of categories, rather of individual houses, even individual prostitutes, and the mobility that’s possible between one social division and the next is remarkable.

He learns more about Caroline, too, in the twenty minutes his two shillings have bought him. To his dismay, she has nothing but contempt for the virtue she once possessed. Virtue don’t pay the rent, she sneers; if those folk who so value virtue in a woman had been prepared to house, feed and clothe her instead of just spectating on her pitiful struggles, she might have remained virtuous much longer.

And Heaven? What’s Caroline’s opinion of Heaven? Well, she doesn’t see herself going there, but nor does she see herself going to Hell, which is only for really ‘bad’ people. About God and Jesus she has no opinions, but she considers the Devil ‘useful’ if he really does punish the wicked, and she hopes that the wicked people she’s known, particularly the owner of a certain dress-making firm, may suffer dreadful tortures after their deaths, though she has a feeling they’ll skip out of it somehow.

‘And would you ever consider returning home?’ says Henry, when her weariness of so much talking has brought her Northern accent once more to the fore.

‘Home? Where’s that?’ she snaps.

‘Yorkshire, I’d say,’ says Henry gently.

‘You been there?’

‘I’ve visited.’

The bed creaks as she stands up from it. He can tell from her peevish sigh that his twenty minutes are, in her rough innumerate estimation, up.

‘I fink they’ve got all the whores they need in Yorkshire, sir,’ she says bitterly.

In parting, they’re awkward with each other, each aware that Henry has crossed a boundary, that he has caused pain. Henry is mortified to be leaving her with this shadow of grief on her face: for all that he came here hoping to put the fear of God into her, he can’t bear to have caused her the prick of homesickness. She’s such a cheerful soul by nature, he can tell; how despicable of him to rob her of her smile! She, for her part, doesn’t know how to send him on his way, poor duffer. Kissing him would violate their agreement, but shutting her bedroom door on his earnestly frowning face seems awful harsh.

‘Come on, sir, I’ll see you down the stairs,’ she says, softening.

A minute later, Henry Rackham stands in the alley, staring up at the house he has just left, at the upstairs window through whose filthy glass he has looked with his own eyes. A weight has lifted from his shoulders, a weight so burdensome that to be rid of it makes him almost giddy. Christ Jesus stands by his side here in the alley, and God is looking down from Heaven.

How relieved he feels! If there weren’t so much muck on the cobbles just here, he would sink to his knees in grateful prayer. For she – the woman Caroline – touched his hand as he was leaving, and she looked into his face, and he felt no lust for her whatsoever – not for her, not for any of her kind. The love he felt for her, as he returned her smile, was the same love he feels for any man, woman or child in peril; she was a poor thing suspended unawares above the Abyss.

Nothing is impossible now, between him and all the Carolines of this vast metropolis! Let other men seek to win their bodies; he and Mrs Fox will strive to win their souls!

‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.’

With these words, delivered in a girlish rush, Agnes Rackham makes the leap back into the body which last sat here thirteen years ago. Unconsciously she hunches her shoulders to negate the few inches she’s grown, and so put before her eyes exactly that part of the confessional grille she always stared at as a child. The grille is unchanged in every vividly remembered detail: its wooden lattice-work is neither more nor less polished, its curtain of gold-threaded hemp neither more nor less frayed.