The Crimson Petal and the White (53 page)

‘Are you all right, Shush?’

Sugar composes her face. ‘A slight headache,’ she says. ‘The sun’s awfully bright.’

How long have Caroline’s window-panes been so appallingly begrimed by soot? Surely they weren’t so dirty last time? Did the room always smell this way?

‘Beggin’ yer pardon, Shush. I ain’t done me ablutions yet.’

Caroline carries her ceramic bowl to the far side of the bed, more or less out of sight, as a concession to her guest. She crouches down, and busies herself with her contraceptive ritual: the pouring of the water, the unscrewing of the phials. Sugar feels a chill as she watches her friend unabashedly hike up her rumpled shift, one hand already gripping the plunger with its old rag head, her buttocks plumper than Sugar remembers, dimpled and smeared with semen.

‘Ach, it’s a bother, ain’t it?’ mutters Caroline, squatting to her task.

‘Mm,’ says Sugar, looking away. She herself has not performed this ritual for some time – since moving to Priory Close, in fact. It’s not practical, when William stays the whole night, and even when he doesn’t stay … well, she takes long, long baths. Submerged in all that warm, clean water, her legs drifting gently apart underneath a white blanket of aromatic foam, surely she’s as thoroughly cleansed as it’s possible to be?

‘Almost finished,’ says Caroline.

‘No hurry,’ says Sugar, wondering if William is knocking at the door of their love-nest this very minute. She watches the bed-sheet billow placidly in the warm breeze, its glistening shapes already fading to snail-crusts. God, these sheets are filthy! Sugar is stung with guilt, that she discards scarcely used sheets in her local park every week, while Caroline has to toil and sleep on these old rags!
Here are some almost-new sheets for
you, Caddie – they only need to be washed
… No, it’s out of the question.

Caroline walks to the window, carrying her heavy bowl. From the waist up, she disappears behind the billowing sheet, ghost-like.

‘Mind yer ’eads,’ she murmurs impishly, and sends the slops trickling illicitly down the back of the building.

‘I must tell you,’ she says a few minutes later, when she’s settled on the bare mattress, half-dressed now and combing her hair, ‘I must tell you about me newest regular – Well, four times now I’ve seen ’im.
You’
d like ’im, Shush. Very well spoken ’e is.’

And she begins to tell the story so far of her meetings with the sombre, serious man she’s nicknamed ‘The Parson’. It’s a dirt-common tale, nothing remotely novel in the world of prostitution. Sugar can barely disguise her impatience; she’s convinced she knows how this story ends.

‘And then he takes you to bed, yes?’ she suggests, to hurry Caddie up.

‘No!’ cries Caroline. ‘That’s the queer part!’ She wiggles her naked feet in suppressed mischief. Dirty feet they are too, thinks Sugar. How can anyone expect ever to make an escape from St Giles with feet as dirty as that?

‘Perhaps he’s queerer than you think,’ she sighs.

‘Nah,’ e’s no marjery, I can tell!’ laughs Caroline. ‘I did ask ’im, only last week, if it would be such a terrible thing if ’e took me to bed – just the once – so as ’e could see if ’e liked it, or at least see what the fuss was about for other people.’ She squints with the effort of recalling precisely her Parson’s reply. ‘Standing there at the window ’e was, same as always, never looking at me once, and ’e told me … what was it? …’e told me that if all men like ’imself gave in to temptation, there would always be poor fallen widows like me, always starvin’ children like me own boy was, always wicked landlords and murderers, because the Lord God was not loved enough by those as ought to know better.’

‘So what did
you
say?’ asks Sugar, her attention wandering over the innumerable taints of poverty in Caroline’s room: the skirting-boards too rotten to paint, the walls too buckled to paper, the floorboards too worm-eaten to polish: nothing here could be beautified by anything but fire and a wholly new start.

‘I said I didn’t see ’ow men like ’imself could stop women like me becoming poor fallen widows, or children from starvin’, except by marryin’ and pervidin’ for ’em.’

‘So has he offered to marry and provide for you?’

‘Nearly!’ laughs Caroline. ‘Second time I saw ’im,’ e offered to get me honest work. I asked ’im if it would be factory work, and ’e said yes, and I told ’im factory work wasn’t wanted. Well, I thought that was the end of that, but last week ’e was on about it again. Said ’e’d made enquiries, and ’e could get me some work that wasn’t in a factory, but in a kind of store. If I was willin’,’ e could arrange it with just a word in the right person’s ear, and if I doubted the truth of it, the name of the concern was Rackham’s Perfumeries, what I must ’ave ’eard of.’

Sugar jerks like a startled cat, but fortunately Caroline has moved to the window, idly stroking the sheet. ‘And what did you say then?’

‘I said that
any
work ’e could get me would wear me out, wear me to death, for much less than a shillin’ a day. I said that for a poor woman, all “honest” work is as near to bein’ killed slow as makes no difference.’ Abruptly she laughs, and fluffs out her newly combed hair with a few flicks of her hands. ‘Ah, Sugar,’ she says, spreading her arms wide to indicate her room and all it represents. ‘What line of work but
this
pervides the needs of life, for ’ardly no toil, and then enough rest and sleep into the bargain?’

And fine clothes and jewellery
, thinks Sugar.
And leatherbound books and silver
-
framed prints and cab-rides at the wave of a glove and visits to the opera and an Ardent bath and a place of my own
. She looks into Caroline’s face and wonders,
What am I doing here? Why am I welcome? Why do you smile at me so?

‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘Do you want some money?’ Well, no, she doesn’t say that – not the part about money. She only says, ‘I have to go.’ ‘Oh! What a shame!’

Yes, a shame. Shame. Shame. ‘Do you want some money?’ Say it: ‘Do you want some money
?’

‘I–I’ve left my place in an awful mess. I came straight here, you see.’

Say it, you coward. ‘Do you want some money?’ Five simple words. Stashed in
your purse you have far more than Caddie will earn in a month. So say it, you coward … you louse … you whore!

But Caroline smiles, embraces her friend, and Sugar leaves without giving her anything but a kiss.

In the cab on her way back to Priory Close (‘and there’s an extra shilling for you if you’re quick about it’) Sugar stews in her iniquity. The soles of her shoes stink; she longs to wipe them on the lush green grass in the park where she leaves the bed-sheets each week. The parcel’s always gone when she next comes – doesn’t that mean that poor folk are finding it? Or if it’s a park warden who finds it, those sheets will surely be donated to poor folk eventually? Christ, with all the do-gooders that infest London, surely some of them will have this sort of thing in hand?
Coward
.
Whore
.

When Sugar was poor, she always fancied that if she ever became rich, she’d help all the poor women in her profession, or at least all those she knew personally. Daydreaming in her room at Mrs Castaway’s, elbows resting on the pages of her novel, she would imagine calling on one of her old friends, bringing along a supply of warm winter blankets or meat pies. How easy it would be to do such things without the stench of charity! She’d brandish her presents not in the way that a hoity-toity benefactress distributes kindness to inferiors, but rather with robust glee, the way one urchin displays to another an audaciously ill-gotten gain.

But now that she has the wherewithal to fulfil those fantasies, the stench of charity is as real as the horse-shit on her shoes.

Safely back in her own rooms, Sugar prepares for William’s return. Then, as the afternoon drags on and he doesn’t appear, she loiters into the study and, pricked by self-reproach, pulls her novel out of its hiding-place. Breathing deeply, she deposits the ragged burden on the writing-desk and seats herself behind it.

The light is falling now in such a way that the glass of the French windows is almost a mirror. In amongst the greenery of her garden hovers her own face, perched on an insubstantial body that wafts out of the ground like smoke. The dark leaves of the rose-bushes impose a pattern on the skin of that face; her hair, motionless in reality, swirls and flickers with every gust of wind outside; phantom azaleas shiver in her bosom.

The Fall and Rise of Sugar
. So says her story’s title, familiar as a scar. She recalls her visit to the lavender fields in Mitcham. How the lowly Rackham workers ogled her as she walked near! In their eyes she was a lady paying a visit on the toiling poor; there was no sign of recognition, only that peculiar mixture of feline resentment and canine respect. Each one of those workers, as they shrivelled meekly away from the sweep of her skirts, was convinced
she
couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to lie shivering under a blanket that’s too thin for the season, or have shins bloody with flea-bites, or hair infested with lice.

‘But I do know these things!’ protests Sugar, and indeed the pages that lie before her on the ivory-handled writing-table were conceived in poverty, and are full of it. Wasn’t her childhood every bit as hopeless as the childhood of anyone toiling for Rackham Perfumeries? Granted, her lot is better than theirs
now
, but that’s irrelevant: theirs could improve too, if only they were clever enough … Yet, on that day in the lavender fields, how hopelessly, how enviously they stared at the fine lady walking beside their employer!

‘But I am their voice!’ she protests again, and hears, in the intimate acoustic of her silent study, a subtle difference in the way her vowels sound today, compared to how they sounded before the Season. Or were they always as dulcet as this?
Tell us a story, Shush, in that fancy voice of yours
, that’s what the girls in Church Lane used to say, half-teasing, half-admiring.
What sort of story
? she’d ask, and they’d always reply,
Something with revenge in it. And bad words. Bad words sound funny when you say them, Sugar
. But how many of those girls could read a book? And if she told the lavender workers that she once lived in a London slum, how many of them would believe her, rather than spit on the ground?

No, like all the would-be champions of the poor throughout human history, Sugar must confront a humiliating truth: the downtrodden may yearn to be heard, but if a voice from a more privileged sphere speaks on their behalf, they’ll roll their eyes and jeer at the voice’s accent.

Sugar chews her lips fretfully. Surely her miserable origins count for
something
? She reminds herself that if William should decide to cast her out of this luxurious nest, she’d be homeless and without income, in direr straits even than the workers in the lavender fields. And yet … And yet she can’t banish from her mind the wrinkled, ragged men and women bowing to her, shuffling away backwards; the uneasy murmurs of ‘’
Oo’s that?’ Oo’s that?
’ Sugar stares at the reflection in the French windows, the flickering head and shoulders augmented with leaves and flowers.
Who am I
?

My name is Sugar
. So says her manuscript, shortly after the introductory tirade against men. She knows all the lines by heart, having re-written and re-read them countless times.

My name is Sugar – or if it isn’t, I know no better. I am what you would call
a Fallen Woman
…

Rather than see the embarrassingly pompous sentence:
Vile man, eternal
Adam, I indict you!
that lies in wait at the end of the paragraph, she flips the page, then the next, and the next. With sinking spirits, she leafs through the densely-inked pages. She’d expected to meet herself here, because this namesake of hers shares her face and body, right down to the freckles on her breasts. But in the yellowed manuscript she sees only words and punctuation marks; hieroglyphs which, although she remembers watching her own hand write them – even remembers the ink drying on particular blotted letters – have lost their meaning. These melodramatic murders: what do they achieve? All these straw men meeting grisly ends: what flesh-and-blood woman is helped by it?

She could ditch the plot, maybe, and substitute a less lurid one. She could aim to tread a middle ground between this gush of bile, and the polite, expurgated fictions of James Anthony Froude, Felicia Skene, Wilkie Collins and other authors who’ve timidly suggested that prostitutes, if sufficiently deserving, should perhaps be excused hellfire. With a new century only a generation away, surely the time is ripe for a stronger message than
that
? Look at this stack of papers – her life’s work – there must be hundreds of things worth salvaging!

But as she skims the pile, she doubts it. Permeating almost every line, souring every remark, tainting every conviction, is prejudice and ignorance, and something worse: blind hatred for anything fine and pure.

I watched the Fine Ladies parading out of the Opera House
. (So wrote the Sugar of three years ago, a mere child of sixteen, cloistered in her upstairs room at Mrs Castaway’s, in the grey morning hours after the customers had gone home and everyone else was asleep).
What shams they were!
Everything about them was false. False were their pretenses of rapture at the music;
false were their greetings to each other; false their accents and their voices
.

How vainly they pretended that they were not Women at all, but some other,
higher form of Creature! Their ball-gowns were designed to give the impression that
they did not walk on two fleshy legs, but rather glided on a cloud. ‘Oh, no,’ they
seemed to say. ‘I do not have legs and a cunt between them, I float on Air. Nor have
I breasts, only a delicate curve to give shape to my bodice. If you want anything so
gross as breasts, go see the udders of wet-nurses. As for legs, and a cunt between
them, if you want those, you will have to go to a Whore. We are Perfect Creatures,
Rare Spirits, and we trade only in the noblest and finest things in Life. Namely, Slave
Labour of poor seamstresses, Torture of our servants, Contempt for those who scrub
our chamber pots clean of our exalted maidenly shit, and an endless round of silly,
hollow, meaningless pursuits that have no