The Crimson Petal and the White (5 page)

Suddenly Caroline and Sugar seem to have all the space in the world. They lean against the pedestal of one of the stone lions, eating cake with their heads thrown back and licking flecks of cream off their gloves. By the standards of respectability, they might as well be licking at gobs of ejaculate. A decent woman would eat cake only on a plate in a hotel, or at least in a department store – although there’s no telling who, or what, one might risk meeting in such a universally hospitable place.

But in Trafalgar Square shocking manners are less conspicuous; it is, after all, a popular haunt for foreigners and an even more popular haunt for pigeons, and who can observe perfect propriety in amongst so much filth and feather-flutter? The class of people who worry about such things (Lady Constance Bridgelow is one of them, but you are far from ready to meet her yet) will tell you that in recent years these miserable creatures (by which she would mean the pigeons, but possibly also the foreigners) have only been encouraged by the official sanctioning of a stall selling paper cones of birdseed at a halfpenny each. Sugar and Caroline, having finished their cakes, buy themselves a seed cone at this stall, for the fun of seeing each other flocked all about with birds.

It was Caroline’s idea; the stream of clerks is thinning now, swallowed up by the embassies, banks and offices; in any case, she’s already bored with them. (Before she fell from virtue, Caroline could be entranced by embroidery or the slow blinking of a baby for hours at a time: these days she can barely keep her attention on an orgasm – admittedly not hers – happening in one of her own orifices.)

As for Sugar, what amuses her? She’s regarding Caroline with a benign smile, like a mother who can’t quite believe what simple things delight her child, but it’s Caroline who’s the mother here, and Sugar a girl still in her teens. If scattering seed to a flock of badly behaved old birds gives her no pleasure, what does? Ah, to know that you’d have to get deeper inside her than anyone has reached yet.

I can tell you the answers to simpler questions. How old is Sugar? Nineteen. How long has she been a prostitute? Six years. You do the arithmetic, and the answer is a disturbing one, especially when you consider that the girls of this time commonly don’t pubesce until fifteen or sixteen. Yes, but then Sugar was always precocious – and remarkable. Even when she was newly initiated into the trade, she stood out from the squalor of St Giles, an aloof and serious child amongst a hubbub of crude laughter and drunken conviviality.

‘She’s a strange one, that Sugar,’ her fellow whores said. ‘She’ll go far.’ And indeed she has. All the way to Silver Street, a paradise compared to Church Lane. Yet, if they imagine her swanning up and down The Stretch under a parasol, they are wrong. She’s almost always indoors, shut in her room, alone. The other whores of Silver Street, working in adjacent houses, are scandalised by the small number of Sugar’s rendezvoux: one a day, or even none. Who does she think she is? There are rumours she’ll charge one man five shillings, another two guineas. What’s her game?

On one thing everyone’s agreed: the girl has peculiar habits. She stays awake all night, even when there are no more men to be had; what’s she
doing
in there with the lights on, if she’s not sleeping? Also, she eats strange things – someone saw her eat a raw tomato once. She applies tooth powder to her teeth after each meal, and rinses it with a watery liquid that she buys in a bottle. She doesn’t wear rouge, but keeps her cheeks terrible pale; and she never takes strong drink, except when a man bullies her into it (and even then, if she can get him to turn his back for an instant, she often spits out her mouthful or empties her glass into a vase). What
does
she drink, then? Tea, cocoa, water – and, judging by the way her lips are always peeling, in precious small quantities.

Peculiar? You haven’t heard the half of it, according to the other whores. Not only is Sugar
able
to read and write, she actually enjoys it. Her reputation as a lover may be spreading among men-about-town, but it can’t compare with the reputation she has among her fellow prostitutes as ‘the one who reads all the books’. And not tuppenny books, either –
big
books, with more pages than even the cleverest girl in Church Lane could hope to finish. ‘You’ll go blind, you will,’ her colleagues keep telling her, or, ‘Don’t you never think: enough’s enough, this one’s me last one?’ But Sugar never has enough. Since moving to the West End, Sugar has taken to crossing Hyde Park, over the Serpentine into Knightsbridge, and paying frequent visits to the two Georgian houses in Trevor Square, which may look like high-class brothels, but are in fact a public library. She buys newspapers and journals too, even ones with hardly any pictures in them, even ones that say they’re for gentlemen only.

Her main expense, though, is clothes. Even by the standards of the West End, the quality of Sugar’s dresses is remarkable; in the squalor of St Giles, it was astonishing. Rather than buying a discarded old costume off a butcher’s hook in Petticoat Lane, or a serviceable imitation of the current fashion from a dingy Soho shop, her policy is to save every sixpence until she can afford something that looks as though the finest lady’s dressmaker might have made it especially for her. Such illusions, though they’re on sale in department stores, don’t come cheap. The very names of the fabrics – Levantine
folicé
, satin
velouté
and Algerine, in colours of lucine, garnet and smoked jade – are exotic enough to make other whores’ eyes glaze over when Sugar describes them. ‘What a lot of trouble you go to,’ one of them once remarked, ‘for clothes that are stripped off in five minutes, for a man to tread on!’ But Sugar’s men stay in her room for a great deal longer than five minutes. Some of them stay for hours, and when Sugar emerges, she looks as though she hasn’t even been undressed. What does she do with them in there?

‘Talk,’ is her answer, if anyone is bold enough to ask. It’s a teasing answer, delivered with a grave smile, but it’s not the whole truth. Once she has chosen her man, she’ll submit to anything. If it’s her cunt they want, they can have it, although mouth and rectum are her preferred orifices: less mess, and more peace of mind afterwards. Her husky voice is the result of a knife-point being pressed to her throat just a little too hard when she was fifteen, by one of the few men she ever failed to satisfy.

But it isn’t simple submission and depravity that Sugar provides. Submission and depravity come cheap. Any number of toothless hags will do whatever a man asks if they’re given a few pennies for gin. What makes Sugar a rarity is that she’ll do anything the most desperate alley-slut will do, but do it with a smile of child-like innocence. There is no rarer treasure in Sugar’s profession than a virginal-looking girl who can surrender to a deluge of ordure and rise up smelling like roses, her eyes friendly as a spaniel’s, her smile white as absolution. The men come back again and again, asking for her by name, convinced that her lust for their particular vice must equal their own; Sugar’s fellow prostitutes, seeing the men so taken in, can only shake their heads in grudging admiration.

Those who are inclined to dislike her, Sugar strives to charm. In this, her freakish memory is useful: she’s able, it seems, to recall everything anybody has ever said to her. ‘So, how did your sister fare in Australia?’ she will, for example, ask an old acquaintance a year after they last met. ‘Did that O’Sullivan fellow in Brisbane marry her or not?’ And her eyes will be full of concern, or something so closely resembling concern that even the most sceptical tart is touched.

Sugar’s acute memory is equally useful when dealing with her men. Music is reputed to soothe the savage breast, but Sugar has found a more effective way to pacify a brutish man: by remembering his opinions on trade unions or the indisputable merits of black snuff over brown. ‘Of course I remember you!’ she’ll say to the loathsome ape who, two years before, twisted her nipples so hard she almost fainted in pain. ‘You are the gentleman who believes that the Tooley Street fire was started by Tsarist Jews!’ A few more such regurgitations, and he’s ready to praise her to the skies.

A pity, really, that Sugar’s brain was not born into a man’s head, and instead squirms, constricted and crammed, in the dainty skull of a girl. What a contribution she might have made to the British Empire!

‘Excu-
hoose
me, ladies!’

Caroline and Sugar turn on their heels, and discover a man with a tripod and camera pursuing his hobby not far behind them in Trafalgar Square. He’s a fearsome-looking creature with dark brows, Trollopean beard and a tartan overcoat, and the women jump to the conclusion that he wants them out of the way of his tripod-mounted ogre eye.

‘Oh no no
n-o-o
, ladies!’ he protests when they move aside. ‘I would be honoured! Honoured to preserve your image for all time!’

They look at each other and share a smile: here is another amateur photographer just like all the rest, as fervent as a spiritualist and as mad as a hatter. Here is a man sufficiently charismatic to charm the pigeons down into his chosen tableau – or if he isn’t, then sufficiently generous to buy lucky passers-by a halfpenny cone of birdseed. Even better when they provide their own!

‘I am truly grateful, ladies! If you could but dispose yourselves a
little
farther apart…!’

They giggle and fidget as the pigeons flutter all around, alighting on their bonnets, clawing at their outstretched arms, settling on their shoulders – anywhere the seed has spilled. Despite the flurry of movement so near their eyes, they do their best not to blink, hoping the decisive moment will catch them in a good light.

The photographer’s head moves to and fro beneath his hood, he tenses his entire body, and then there’s a shudder of release. Inside his camera, a chemical image of Sugar and Caroline is born.

‘A thousand thanks, ladies,’ he says at last, and they know that this means goodbye: not
au revoir
, but farewell. He has taken all he wants from them.

‘Did you ’ear what ’e said?’ says Caroline as they watch him carry his trophies towards Charing Cross. ‘For all time.
All time
. It couldn’t be true, could it?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Sugar, pensively. ‘I’ve been to a photographer’s studio once, and I’ve stood next to him in the dark room while he made the pictures appear.’ Indeed she remembers holding her breath in the red light, watching the images materialising in their shallow font of chemicals, like stigmata, like spirit apparitions. She considers telling Caroline all this, but knows the older woman would require each word explained. ‘They come out of a bath,’ she says, ‘and I’ll tell you what: they
stink
. Anything that stinks so much can’t last forever; I’m sure.’ Her frown is hidden under her thick fringe: she isn’t sure, at all.

She’s wondering if the photographs taken of her at that photographer’s salon will last forever, and hoping they don’t. At the time, while the business was being done, she felt no qualms, and posed naked beside potted plants, in stockings by a curtained bed, and up to her waist in a tub of tepid bathwater. She didn’t even have to touch anyone! Lately, however, she’s come to regret it – ever since one of her customers produced a thumb-worn photograph of an awkward-looking naked girl and demanded that Sugar strike exactly the same pose with exactly the same kind of hand-brush, of which he’d thoughtfully brought his own. It was then that Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of her bedroom, they vanish the moment they’re over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever:
that
is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.

You would probably think, if I showed you photographs of Sugar, that she needn’t have worried. Oh, but they’re charming, you’d say – innocuous, quaint, even strangely dignified! A mere century and a bit – or say, eleven dozen years later – and they’re suitable for reproduction anywhere, without anyone thinking they might deprave and corrupt the impressionable. They may even be granted an artistic halo by that great leveller of past outrages, the coffee-table book.
Unidentified prostitute, circa 1875
, the book might say, and what could be more anonymous than that? But you would be missing the point of Sugar’s shame.

‘Imagine, though,’ says Caroline. ‘A picture of you still bein’ there, ’undreds of years after you’ve died. An’ if I pulled a face, that’s the face I’d ’ave for ever … It makes me shiver, it does.’

Sugar strokes the edge of her parcel absently as she thinks up a way to steer the conversation into less tainted waters. She stares across the square at the National Gallery, and her painful memory of the hand-brush man fades.

‘What about painted portraits?’ she says, recalling Caroline’s exaggerated admiration for an art student who once fobbed her off, in lieu of payment, with a sketch he claimed was of the Yorkshire dales. ‘Don’t
they
make you shiver?’

‘That’s different,’ says Caroline. ‘They’re … you know … of kings and people like that.’

Sugar performs a chuckle of catty mischief from her encyclopaedic repertoire of laughs. ‘Kitty Bell had her portrait done, don’t you remember, by that old goat from the Royal Academy who fell for her? It was even hung at an exhibition; Kitty and I went to see it. “Flower Seller”,
they
called it.’

‘Ooo, you’re right too – the slut.’

Sugar pouts. ‘Jealous. Just think, Caddie, if you had a painter begging you to let him do your portrait.
You
sit still,
he
works, and then at the end of it, he gives you a painting in oils, like … like a reflection of how you’d see yourself in a looking-glass on the one day of your life when you were prettiest.’

Caroline licks the inside of the paper scoop, thoughtful, half-seduced by the mental picture Sugar has painted for her, half-suspecting she’s being gulled. But, teasing aside, Sugar sincerely believes Caroline would make a fine subject for a painting: the small, pretty face and compact body of the older woman are so much more classically picturesque than her own bony physique. She imagines Caddie’s shoulders swelling up out of an evening gown, smooth and flawless and peachy, and compares this rose-tinted vision with her own pallid torso, whose collar-bones jut out from her freckled chest like the handles of a grid-iron. To be sure, the fashions of the Seventies are growing ever more sylph-like, but what’s in fashion and what a woman believes in her heart to be womanly may not be the same thing. Any print-shop is stocked to the rafters with ‘Carolines’, and her face is everywhere, from soap-wrappers to the stone carvings on public buildings – isn’t that proof that Caroline is close to the ideal? Sugar thinks so. Oh, she’s read about the Pre-Raphaelites in journals, but that’s as far as it goes; she wouldn’t know Burne-Jones or Rossetti if they fell on top of her. (Nor is such a collision likely, given the statistical improbability: two painters, two hundred thousand prostitutes.)