The Crimson Petal and the White (61 page)

With a guttural cry, Henry rushes from the room, flinging the door so wide that it rebounds juddering from the wall. William stumbles out in weary pursuit and, seeing that his brother is already half-way across the tiled floor of the receiving hall, calls after him:

‘Forget about being a saint, Henry! Show her you’re a man!’

Whereupon, feeling he’s said enough, he steps back into the dining-room, and leans his back against the nearest wall, breathing hard. Faintly he can hear an altercation at the front door: Letty pleading with Mr Rackham to let her help him with his coat, and Henry carrying on like a baited bear: then the whole house seems to shake with the impact of the door slamming shut.

‘Ah, well,’ croaks William (for he has yelled himself hoarse), ‘it’s all said now. We shall see what we shall see.’

His heart is beating hard – provoked, no doubt, by the sight of his brother’s clenched fists and look of fury, a fearsome combination William hasn’t had to face since his brother was a child. He shambles to the dining-room table, fetches up a glass and fills it from the almost empty wine bottle. Then, having drunk the restorative potion to the dregs, he makes his way upstairs, mounting the steps with an increasingly resolute tread, heading not for his own bedroom but Agnes’s.

By God, he’s had enough of other people’s prudish quirks and sickly evasions. It’s high time, he’s decided, to father a son.

In the small hours of the morning, Henry sits in front of his fireplace, feeding into the flames everything he has written for the past ten years or more: all the thoughts and opinions he’d hoped one day to broadcast from the pulpit of his own church.

What a preposterous glut of paper and ink he has amassed, loose leaves and envelopes and journals with spines and notebooks sewn with string, all neatly filled with his blockish, inelegant handwriting, all annotated with symbols in his own private code, signifying such things as
further study
needed or but is this really true?
or
expand
. The saddest hieroglyph of all, found in the margins of almost every scrap of manuscript from the last three years, is an inverted triangle, suggestive of a fox’s head, meaning:
Ask opinion
of Mrs Fox
. Page after page, Henry burns the evidence of his vanity.

Puss purrs at his feet, wholly approving of this game, which is making her fur so warm that it almost glows. Coal is pleasant enough, and slow to be consumed, but paper is incomparably better, if a man can only be encouraged to keep it coming.

Henry is busy now with a fat ledger, a cast-off (along with a dozen more such) from his father, during a ‘spring cleaning’ of the Rackham offices in 1869. ‘It pains me to see good paper destroyed,’ he remembers telling the old man. ‘I can put these to another use.’ Vanity! And what’s this?
Rejoice, and be Exceeding Glad
, says the inscription on the cover: one of the many titles he daydreamed for his first published collection of sermons. Again, vanity! With a scowl of anguish, he rips the cardboard from the spine, and throws it into the flames.

The heat flares fierce, and he leans back in his chair, closing his eyes until it abates. He is weary, terribly weary, and tempted to sleep. Sleep would come so easefully to him, if only he kept his eyes closed for another few moments. But no, he’ll not sleep. Everything must be destroyed.

Before he can resume his task, however, he’s jolted almost out of his skin by a knock at the front door.
Who the devil … ?
He glances at the clock on the mantelpiece: it’s exactly midnight; time for all good folk to be in bed, even zealous lassies galvanised by the plight of the islanders of Skye. Yet the knocking goes on, soft but insistent, luring him out into the unlit hallway. Could this caller be some vile cut-throat, come to kill him and pillage his house for the few antiquated valuables that are in it? Well, come on, then.

Standing at the door in his socks, Henry opens it a crack, and peers out into the dark. There on the footpath near his doorstep, cloaked from head to toe in a voluminous cape and hood, stands Mrs Fox.

‘Do let me in, Henry,’ she says affably, as if there’s nothing odd about the situation, other than that he is being ungentlemanly enough to keep a lady waiting in the cold.

Dumbfounded, he steps backwards, and she slips into the vestibule, pulling the hood off her head. Her hair thus revealed is loose, free of combs and pins, and more abundant than he’d ever thought it was.

‘Go back into the warm room, you silly man,’ she scolds him gently, walking straight there without waiting on formalities. ‘It’s raw weather, and you’re not dressed.’

Indeed, when he looks down at himself, he can’t deny he’s in his nightshirt.

‘What … what brings you here?’ he stammers, following her into the light. ‘I … I can hardly believe … I thought …’

She stands behind his vacant armchair, her hands laid on the antimacassar. Her face has lost its ghastly pallor, her cheeks are no longer sunken, her lips are moist and roseate.

‘They’re all wrong, Henry,’ she says, her voice warm and full, wholly cured of its consumptive wheeze. ‘All tragically mistaken.’

He stands gaping, his arms hanging paralysed at his sides, the hairs on the nape of his neck all a’prickle. Puss, still curled up by the hearth, looks up at him in languid disdain, as if to say,
Don’t put on so!

‘Heaven isn’t a vacuum, or a great fog of ether, with ghostly spirits floating all about,’ Mrs Fox continues, lifting her hands from his chair to mime, with an impish wiggle of her fingers, the effete flutter of wings. ‘It’s as real and tangible as the streets of London, full of vigorous endeavour and the spark of life. I can’t
wait
for you to see it – it will open your eyes, Henry, open your eyes.’

He blinks, his breath taken by the reality and tangibility of
her
, the sharply familiar shape of her face and the look on it: that disarming stare, half-innocent, half-argumentative, which has always accompanied her most heretical statements. How often has she made him feel like this: shocked at how blithely she flirts with blasphemy; worried that her views will attract the wrath of the powers that be; but enchanted by the glimpse she shows him of what, all of a sudden, is revealed as the most elementary truth. He moves towards her, as he has moved towards her so many times before – to caution her, restrain her with the frown of his orthodoxy, while at the same time exhilarated by the desire to see things exactly as she does.

‘And I was right, Henry,’ she goes on, nodding as he approaches. ‘The people in Heaven feel nothing except love. The most wonderful … endless … perfect … Love.’

He sits – falls, almost – into his chair, looking up at her face in awe and puzzlement. She unclasps the cloak at her neck, and lets it fall to the floor. Her naked shoulders shine like marble; the undersides of her exquisite breasts brush against the top of his chair as she bends down to kiss him. Her face has never looked like this in his dreams: every eyebrow-hair sharp, the pores on the sides of her nose large as life, the whites of her eyes slightly bloodshot, as if she has been weeping but feels better now. Tenderly she lays her hand on his cheek; purposefully she hooks her fingers under his jaw and guides him towards her lips.

‘Mrs Fox … for all the world, I wouldn’t …’ he tries to protest, but she can read his mind.

‘There’s no marriage in Heaven, Henry,’ she whispers down to him, leaning further and further over his chair, so that her hair falls onto his chest, and her breath is warm against his brow. ‘Mark, chapter twelve, verse twenty-five.’

She’s tugging the night-shirt up from his knees, but he grasps her gently by the wrists, to keep her from uncovering his nakedness. Her wrists are strong, with a pulse in them, a heartbeat of blood against his palms.

‘Oh Henry,’ she sighs, twisting her body around to one side of his chair, resting her buttocks on the arm of it. ‘Stop pussyfooting; there’s no stopping what has been begun, can’t you see that?’

Holding her like this, her wrists still trapped in his hands, he becomes aware of a strange and delicate balance, an equilibrium of will and sinew and desire: his arms are the stronger, and he can bend her however he wishes; he can fold her shut, covering her breasts with her own elbows, or he can spread her arms wide; yet, in the end, the way they move is hers to decide, and the power is hers to wield. He lets her go, and they embrace; for all that he isn’t worthy, he lays claim to her as if he is, as if sin has yet to be invented, and they are two animals on the sixth day of Creation.

‘They’re all jackals, Henry,’ she whispers, ‘and you are a lion.’

‘Mrs Fox …’ he gasps, suddenly stifling in his night-shirt. The fire in his hearth has made the room so hot there’s no need for clothing, and he allows Mrs Fox to make him as naked as herself.

‘You know, Henry, it’s high time you called me Emmeline,’ she murmurs in his ear, as with one sure hand she finds his manhood and guides it into the welcoming place that God has made, it seems, for no other purpose than to receive him. Once joined, they are in perfect agreement how to proceed together; he moving deep inside her, she clinging tighter and tighter, her cheek pressed hard against his, her tongue, cat-like, licking his jaw. ‘My love, ye-e-es,’ she croons, covering his ears with her hands in case the distant, nagging clang of a fire-engine bell should distract him from the call to rapture. ‘Come into me.’

TWENTY-ONE

I
n a few ticks of the clock, it will be September 29th, in the year of Our Lord 1875. Trapped with no hope of escape in the House of Evil, a fortnight after the twin calamities of Henry Rackham’s death and the unspeakable misfortune that befell her own person under the same malignant moon, Agnes sits up in bed and pulls the bell-cord. More blood has flowed: Clara must come at once, to wash her and change the bandages.

The servant responds promptly, and knows what she’s wanted for; she carries a metal bowl of steaming water. In it, soap and sponge float like dead sea creatures removed from their natural element.

‘There’s
more
coming,’ whispers Agnes anxiously, but Clara is already pulling back the bedclothes to expose her mistress’s swaddled nappy. Hers is not to question why Mrs Rackham behaves as though the common female curse requires the sort of attention one might give to a mortal wound; hers is but to serve.

‘This is the sixth day, ma’am,’ she says, rolling the blood-stained cloth into a wad. ‘It will surely be over tomorrow.’

Agnes sees no justification for such optimism, not with the fabric of the universe torn asunder.

‘God willing,’ she says, looking away from her stigma in disgust. How sure she’d been that she was cured of this affliction, imagining it to have been a disease of girlhood that passes when one becomes mature: how much joy it must be giving the Devil, to disillusion her!

Agnes looks away while the only part of her body that she has never examined in a mirror is washed and dried. She, who is intimately acquainted with each and every hair in her eyebrows, who keeps every incipient facial freckle under daily surveillance, who could, if required, draw accurate sketches of her chin from a number of angles, has only the vaguest notion of what she calls her ‘nethers’. All she knows is that this part of her is, by a deplorable fault of design, not properly closed, and therefore vulnerable to the forces and influences of Evil.

Doctor Curlew is undoubtedly in league with these forces, and can barely conceal his delight at her fall: and just when William had begun to take a dislike to him, too! All through the Season, the doctor’s visits were mercifully restricted, but yesterday, William allowed him to stay a full hour, and the two men even retired to the smoking-room and spoke at length –
about what?
In nightmares, Agnes pictures herself fettered in the courtyard of a mad-house, molested by ugly crones and grunting idiots, while Doctor Curlew and William walk slowly out of the gates. She also dreams of bathing in a tub filled with warm, pure water, and falling asleep, and waking to find that she’s up to her neck in cold blood, thick and sticky as aspic.

Exhausted, she falls back against her pillow. Clara has gone and she’s clean and snug inside the bedclothes. If only sleep would carry her to the Convent of Health! Why has her Holy Sister forsaken her? Not a glimpse, not a fingerprint … At Henry’s funeral, Agnes looked and looked for her guardian angel to appear, even distantly in the trees beyond the graveyard. But nothing. And, at nights, even when the dream starts promisingly, she never gets farther than the railway station; instead, she waits anxiously inside a train that vibrates ominously but never moves, patrolled by porters who never speak, until it becomes horrifyingly clear that the train is not intended as a vehicle at all, but as a prison.

‘Sister, where are you?’ cries Agnes in the dark.

‘Right nearby, ma’am,’ responds Clara through a crack in the bedroom door a few moments later – rather bad-temperedly, if her ears do not deceive her.

‘The mail, Mr Rackham, if you please,’ says Letty next morning, hesitating to enter the master’s study. She holds a silver tray piled high with letters and condolence cards.

‘Only the white letters, thank you, Letty,’ says William, not rising from his seat behind the desk, and beckoning the servant inside with a single flick of his fingers. ‘Take the cards to Mrs Rackham.’

‘Yes, Mr Rackham.’ Letty separates the business correspondence – the ‘wheat’, so to speak – from the black-bordered chaff, deposits the harvest on a small clear area of the master’s cluttered desk, and leaves the room.

William rubs his face wearily before he tackles what the day has brought; he’s red-eyed with lack of sleep, the grief of losing his brother, the sorrow of wounding his wife, and … well … the ordeal of inconvenience. Nothing, he finds, causes more inconvenience than a death, unless it be a marriage.

Granted, Black Peter Robinson provisioned the household in double-quick time. Barely twenty-four hours after the order was put in, the boxes of crape dresses, mourning bonnets, jackets, shawls
et cetera
, were delivered, sped through the post by those magic words ‘immediately for funeral’. But that was the beginning, not the end, of the brouhaha. No sooner were the servants shrouded in black, than they were rushing about shrouding furniture and fixtures, hanging up black curtains, tying black ribbons to bell-pulls and God knows what else. Then the absurdity of choosing a coffin … It’s one thing to have had fifty kinds of coat-stand to choose from when furnishing Sugar’s rooms, but what manner of man would have the appetite, upon the death of his own brother, to peruse five hundred designs of coffin? ‘A gentleman with your own high standards, sir, such as we can see from the quality of Rackham’s own manufacture, will see the difference immediately, between the Obbligato Oak and the Ex Voto Elm …’ Vultures! And why must William be the one responsible for this orgy of otiose expenditure? Why couldn’t Henry Calder Rackham have organised it? The old man has little enough to do nowadays. But: ‘People will be looking to
you
, William. I’ve been put out to pasture; in the world’s eyes,
you’re
“Rackham” now.’ Wily old blackguard! First tyranny and bullying, now flattery! To what end? – that William Rackham should be the poor devil who must plough through reams of paperwork detailing coffins and coffin mattresses and wreaths and hatbands and God knows how many hundred things else, to be arranged on top of all his other tasks, and in the grip of brotherly grief.

As for the funeral itself … ! If there’s one thing he
would
gladly have paid an outrageous sum for, that thing would be a miraculous drug to erase the whole lamentable ceremony from his mind. It was a lugubrious sideshow, an empty ritual to no one’s benefit, presided over by the insufferable Doctor Crane in the driving rain. What a shuffling herd of sanctimonious hypocrites attended, with MacLeish – a man Henry couldn’t stand while he was alive – foremost among them! Honestly, the only person outside the family who had any
bona fide
claim to be there was Mrs Fox, and she was in hospital at the time. Yet there were two dozen mourners at the graveside. Two dozen surplus dullards and pompous make-weights! The whole performance, what with all the coaches-and-fours, pages, feather-men,
et cetera
, will have cost William, when all the accounts are settled, no less than
£
100. And for what?

Not that he begrudges his brother the money; he would gladly have given Henry three times that sum, to buy a decent house, instead of the shabby fire-trap in which he perished. It’s just that … God damn it, what good does it do Henry, to be mourned with so much bother? This mania to bedeck every person and every object in black: what’s the point of it? The Rackham house is now as gloomy as a church – gloomier! Servants creep about like sacristans … the bell is muffled, so he can’t even
hear
the damned thing half the time … the whole ritual has a Papist flavour. Really, this kind of doleful charade ought to be left to the Romish Church: just the sort of foolishness they’d imagine might bring a man back from the dead!

Remembered with fondness by all who were blessed to know him – the world’s
loss was Heaven’s gain
– that’s what William composed for Henry’s tombstone, with a little help from the stone-mason. The mourners craned their heads to read it – were they thinking brother could have done better credit to brother? Sentiments look different when they’re in cold hard print – the coldest, hardest print imaginable.

William gathers the morning’s letters into his hands and shuffles the envelopes, noting the names of the senders: Clyburn Glassmakers; R. T. Arburrick, Manuf. of Boxes, Crates &c; Greenham & Bott, Solicitors; Greenham & Bott, Solicitors; Henry Rackham (Snr); The Society for the Advancement of Universal Enlightenment; G. Pankey, Esq.; Tuttle & Son, Professional Salvagers.

This last one William slits open first, and extracts eight folded pages each bearing the letterhead TUTTLE & SON, PROFESSIONAL SALVAGERS. The covering note says:

Esteemed Mr Rackham,

Herewith a list of the items salvaged from 11 Gorham Place, Notting
Hill, on September 21, 1875, following the partial incineration of those
premises. All items not included in this list may be presumed destroyed or
else stolen by unscrupulous persons arriving at the site before Tuttle & Son
.

CATEGORY 1: WHOLLY OR SUBSTANTIALLY UNDAMAGED

1 Cat (currently held in custody by our selves, please advise
)

1 Stove

1 Kitchen cabinet with 4 drawers

Divers kitchen implements, pots, pans &c

Divers kitchen goods, condiments, spices &c …

William flicks through the pages, noting odd items here and there:

Divers framed prints, namely
,

‘A Summer’s Day’ by Edmund Cole

‘the pious ragamuffin’ by alfred wynne forbes

‘No Apparent Title’ by Mrs F. Clyde

‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins’ by John Bramlett, R.A ….

Books, 371 in number, mostly on Religious subjects (Full list supplied
on request)

World globe, mounted on brass stand (slightly singed)
…

At the sight of this, William utters a helpless snort of pity and exasperation. A singed world globe! What is he, or anyone else for that matter, to do with a singed world globe? In the turmoil that followed the news of Henry’s death, he thought he was showing good sense in calling the salvagers in, to prevent Henry’s house being looted by the undeserving poor, but, having averted that disgrace, what now? Where is he to put Henry’s worldly goods? If he can’t have his flesh-and-blood brother alive, what use is it to possess his stove or his wash-basin?

William tosses the list onto his desk, and rises from his chair to stand at the study window. He peers across the grounds of his property, to the street beyond, where Agnes claims she sees angels walk. Only drab pedestrians walk there now, all of them shorter and less upright than Henry. Ah, the tall and upright Henry! William wonders if he’s a hypocrite to be grieving, when his brother annoyed him insufferably while alive? Maybe so, but blood is blood.

They were children together – weren’t they? He makes an effort to retrieve memories from their shared childhood, when Henry was too young yet to erect a barrier of piety between them. Very little comes. Vague pictures, like botched photographs, of two boys playing games in plots of pasture that have long ago been transformed into streets, all evidence buried in the foundations.

Of Henry in later years, the memories are not fond. William recalls his brother at university, walking purposefully across the sunlit lawn towards the library, half a dozen books pressed to his breast, affecting not to hear the jovial shouts of William, Bodley and Ashwell as they sprawled picnicking. Then, jumping ahead, he recalls Henry’s poky little house, packed to the rafters with the paraphernalia of religion, devoid of cigars, cushions, strong drinks, or anything else that might encourage visitors. He recalls Henry stopping by the Rackham house almost every Sunday, to pass on all the fine and thought-provoking things his brother had missed.

With effort, William travels farther back in time, and sees before him the twelve-year-old Henry reciting, after family prayers, a discourse of his own composition, on the correlation between temporal and spiritual labour. How the servants fidgeted in their hierarchy of seats, not knowing whether (when it was over) they should applaud or keep a respectful silence!

‘Very good, very good,’ pronounced Henry Rackham Senior. ‘What a clever boy I’ve got, eh?’

William becomes conscious of a pain in his right hand, looks down, and finds he is pressing his fist against the window-ledge, bruising the skin against the wood. In his eyes, tears of childish jealousy. Echoing in his ears, the words of the firemen who assured him that Henry was undone by smoke long before he was taken by the flames.

Wiping his face on his sleeve, he feels a convulsive tickle in his upper chest which threatens to develop into a fit of sobbing, when he’s interrupted by another knock at his door.

‘Yes, what do you want?’ he calls hoarsely.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ replies Letty, opening the door a slit. ‘Lady Bridgelow is here. Is you or Mrs Rackham at home?’

William yanks his watch from his waistcoat pocket to check the time of day, for he’s never known Lady Bridgelow to visit outside the hours appointed by convention. Indeed she hasn’t: rather, it’s his own internal sense of time that’s awry. Lord, he has lost
hours
in daydreaming and melancholy reminiscence! He’d thought he was indulging himself for a few minutes only, but he’s been doing it all morning, and here he stands, his eyes wet with tears of jealousy for an act of fatherly favouritism eighteen years past! Is this how madmen and hypochondriacs occupy themselves during the long hours of an idle day? Lord Almighty! Sadness has its place, but ultimately someone needs to grasp the nettle of responsibility;
some
¬
one
needs to keep the wheels of life turning.