The Crimson Petal and the White (7 page)

Clara hates her dowdy servant’s uniform fervently, and she knows only too well that for Christmas this year she’ll get exactly the same gift parcel she got
last
Christmas. Every year the same insult! – seven yards of double-width black merino, two yards of linen, and a striped skirt. Just what’s needed to make a new uniform – well, fancy that. Damn William Rackham and his stinginess – he deserves everything that befalls him!

All year she slaves to make her mistress beautiful, breaking her fingernails on the clasps of Mrs Rackham’s corsets, simpering in feigned admiration, and now, five years on, what has she to show for it? Her own body is thickening in the middle, and grievance is etching lines in her face. She possesses nothing that would make a man look at her once, let alone twice. Nothing, that is, until now. With her heart in her mouth, she hurries back towards the corsetry department, where she’ll duck behind a curtain and stuff her illicit purchase, parcel and all, into her capacious drawers.

Although it was partly for fear of such wickedness that he insisted on chaperoning Clara today, there’s really nothing William can do to prevent it. All he can verify, without soiling his mind with money matters, is that Clara does indeed, as agreed, emerge from the store with one big parcel in her arms. The theft she’s now committing, easily detected and mercilessly punished in stricter households than the Rackhams’, will go unnoticed.

For all his chagrin at his wife’s frailty, William hasn’t quite grasped just how ignorant Agnes has become, with every passing month of her seclusion, of what’s what in the world at large. He would never guess, for example, that she could possibly entrust the costing of eighteen yards of material to a servant. Instead, he’s relieved that she’s no longer having dresses made for her, because that indulgence cost him a fortune in the past – a fortune wasted, given how little of her life Agnes spends out of bed.

Luckily, Agnes seems to agree. In giving up her dressmaker for a mechanical toy, she has side-stepped social disgrace as deftly as possible, by claiming genteel boredom as her excuse. The tedium of convalescence can be whiled away so much more agreeably, she says, with a diverting (never to mention money-saving) invention like the sewing-machine. Anyway, she’s a modern woman, and machines are part of the modern landscape – or so William’s father keeps declaring.

She’s putting on a brave face, William knows that. In her more reproachful moments, Agnes lets him know how humiliating it is to maintain a pretence of genteel boredom when anyone can see she’s economising. Couldn’t he make a gesture to appease his father – write a letter or something – that would make everything all right again? Then they could have a coachman at last, and she could – but No, William warns her. Rackham Senior is an unreasonable old man and, having failed to bully his first-born, he has turned his bullying on William. If Agnes feels she’s suffering, can she not spare a thought for what her husband must endure!

To which Agnes responds with a forced smile, and a declaration that the silvery Singer really is an amusing novelty, and she’d best be getting back to it.

Agnes’s willingness to save money on clothes pleases William well enough, but he’s less pleased with having to buy his new hat from Billington & Joy and pay for it on the spot, as if it were a roasted chestnut or a shoeshine, rather than having it fitted at a prestigious hatter’s and adding its cost to a yearly account. Why, the top-notch gentleman visits his hatter every few days just to have his hat ironed! How has it come to this? Penury, penury and piecemeal disgrace, for a man by rights so rich! Isn’t it true that Billington & Joy stock shelves full of Rackham perfumes, soaps and cosmetics? The name Rackham is everywhere! And yet he, William Rackham, heir to the Rackham fortune, must loiter around hat stands, waiting for other men to replace hats he wishes to try on! Can’t the Almighty, or the Divine Principle, or whatever is left now that Science has flushed out the stables of the universe, see there’s something wrong here?

But if It does, It snubs him regardless.

At a quarter to eleven, William Rackham and Clara meet briefly outside the emporium. Clara has a large, crackling parcel clasped to her bosom, and walks more stiffly than usual. William has his new hat screwed firmly on his head, the old one now removed to that hidden store-room where the unwanted hats, umbrellas, bonnets, gloves and a thousand other orphaned things are banished. Where do they go, in the end? To Christian missions in Borneo, perhaps, or a fiery furnace. Certainly not to Church Lane, St Giles.

‘It suddenly occurs to me,’ says William, squinting into the servant’s eyes (for he is exactly her height), ‘that I have some other business to attend to. In town, I mean. So, I think it would be best if you returned alone.’

‘As you wish, sir.’ Clara dips her head meekly enough, but still William thinks he detects a note of sly mockery, as if she thinks he’s lying. (For once, she isn’t thinking that at all: she’s merely savouring how convenient it will be not to have the secret package squashed against her itchy buttocks all the way home in the omnibus.)

‘You won’t lose that, will you?’ says William, pointing at Agnes’s bounty of silk.

‘No, sir,’ Clara assures him.

William tugs his watch out of his fob-pocket into his palm and pretends to consult it, so that he has an excuse for looking away from the irritating little minx he pays
£
21 a year to be his wife’s closest companion.

‘Well, off you go then,’ he says, and ‘Yes, sir,’ she replies, and off she goes, mincing as if she’s straining not to fart. But William doesn’t notice. In fact, much later today, when he sees Clara flitting around his house with a waist she didn’t possess before, he won’t notice that either.

It wasn’t always thus. In the past, William Rackham was very much the sort of man to notice small, even tiny, differences in dress and personal appearance. In his University prime, he was quite a dandy, with silver-handled cane and a shoulder-length mane of golden hair. In those days it was perfectly normal for him to dawdle in front of the flower vases in his own ‘set’ for half an hour at a time, selecting a particular flower for a particular buttonhole; he might spend even longer matching silk neckties of one colour with waistcoats of another, and his most dearly beloved trousers were dark blue with mauve checks. On one memorable occasion, he instructed his tailor to shift a waistcoat’s buttonhole to discourage one troublesome button from peeping out indiscreetly behind the overcoat. ‘A quarter of an inch to the right, no more, no less,’ he said, and God help the fellow if it weren’t done just so.

In those days, William was proud to correct faults of dress few people had the good taste to perceive in the first place. Now his shrinking fortunes make him prey to faults which anyone, even his servants, can perceive all too clearly.

Nervously, William feels above his head, to check that everything is still in place. It is, but he has good reason to worry. Only an hour ago, in a mirror, he saw a vision so shocking that he still can’t erase it from his mind. For the first time since rashly whipping off his old hat in Regent Street, he was made aware of the anarchy that had broken out on his scalp.

Once upon a time William’s hair was his proudest feature: all through his childhood it was soft and golden-bronze, cooed over by aunts and passing strangers. As a student at Cambridge, he wore it long, to his shoulders, brushed back without oil. He was slender then, and his flowing hair disguised the pear shape of his head. Besides, long hair stood for Shelley, Liszt, Garibaldi, Baudelaire, individualism – that sort of thing.

But if his intention, in getting those long locks cut shorter a few days ago, was to retreat into anonymity, it had all gone terribly wrong. Reflected in the looking-glass, he saw what his hair had done in defiance of the ruthless barbering; it had sprung loose from oily restraint, and risen up in outright rebellion against him. God in Heaven, how many onlookers witnessed him in this state, a clown with a ludicrous crown of tufts and crinkles! With a spasm of embarrassment, right there in Billington & Joy’s hat department, William hid his fleecy halo under the nearest hat he could lay his fingers on. And that was the hat, despite many subsequent tentative choices, he finally bought.

Since then, he’s combed the halo flat, and applied more oil, but has it learned its lesson? With his fingertips he touches it nervously, smoothing it under the hat-brim. His bushy sideboards prickle. ‘I want it like Matthew Arnold,’ he told his barber, but instead he got the Wild Man of Borneo. What has he done? He’d convinced himself (well, almost) that a modest new exterior would help him stride forwards into the final quarter of the century, but does his hair have other ideas?

As William walks in the general direction of the Thames, he keeps an eye out for an alley in which, hidden from judgemental eyes, he can run a comb through his hair again. He has offended against decent manners quite enough for one morning.

At last a suitable alley offers itself, an alley so narrow it doesn’t merit a name. William slips inside it immediately. Standing there in the dimness between the filthy walls, only a few steps from Jermyn Street, he has to be careful not to tread in maggoty garbage as he chastises himself with his ivory-handled comb.

A voice behind him – an ugly, nasal sound – makes him jump.

‘Are you kind, master?’

William spins around. A mousy-haired little whore, easily forty or even more, is toddling out of the gloom towards him, wrapped in what appears to be an old tablecloth. What the devil’s she doing in this part of town, so close to the palaces and the best hotels?

Speechless with disgust, William retreats. Four hasty steps take him back into the sunshine. A prickle of sweat has broken out on the scalp he’s just combed, and against all reason he imagines his hair springing up, popping his hat off like a cork.

Minutes later, not far short of Trafalgar Square, William Rackham passes a pastry shop. It occurs to him that he would enjoy a small treat.

Of course, what he
really
ought to do, if he wishes to dine, is make his way to the Albion or the London or the Wellington, where his old school chums are probably sitting even now, lighting up their first cigar of the day – that is, if they’re not still sleeping in the arms of their mistresses. But William is in no mood to go to any of these places. At the same time he’s afraid that if he eats a cake in Trafalgar Square, he might be spotted and shunned forever after by an important acquaintance.

Ah, to be a carefree student again! Was it really twelve years ago that he did all manner of outrageous things in the company of his laughing, fearless companions, without anyone ever doubting his status? Didn’t he go to public houses, the working man’s sort with no screens dividing the classes, and drink himself stupid, right there in amongst the toothless old women and tosspots? Didn’t he buy oysters from street stalls and toss them into his mouth? Didn’t he wink saucily at promenading matrons just to scandalise them? Didn’t he sing bawdy songs, in a louder and fruitier baritone than any of his friends, while dancing bareheaded on the Waterloo Bridge?

Oh, my love is a thing of airs and graces
,

Her chins are held to her neck with laces
,

Her hair is red, likewise her nose,

From out her skirts an ill wind blows …

Why, he could still sing it now!

Everyone in the patisserie is all ears, ready. ‘Yes, that one please,’ he mouths,
sotto voce
. He’ll risk it, yes he’ll risk it (the cake, that is, not the bawdy song), if only out of nostalgia for his old abandoned self.

And so William takes his chocolate and cherry confection into the Square with him and nurses it, worrying. The lower half of his body is only just beginning to respond to the suggestion made to him by the alley prostitute and, since she’s by now out of sight, out of mind and out of the question, he ogles a trio of French girls scampering gleefully among the pigeons.

‘
Moi aussi! Moi aussi!
’ they’re shrieking, for there’s a photographer nearby, pretending to be taking pictures of things other than them. They are pretty, their dresses are pretty, they move prettily, but William can’t give them the attention they merit. Instead he broods on a glowing memory of the photograph that was taken of him a week ago, just prior to getting his locks cut shorter. The last photograph, in other words, of the old (the
young
) William Rackham.

This photograph is already hidden away in a drawer at home, like pornography. But the image is sharp in his mind: in it he is still a Cambridge gallant, quite the cocky scholar, wearing the canary-yellow waistcoat which even the current generation of swells wouldn’t dare to wear. The facial expression, too, is a relic of the past, in the sense that he no longer wears
that
either; it’s the one that Downing College put on his face, contrary to the hopes of his father: good-humoured contempt for the workaday world.

The difficult part was explaining to the photographer the reason for the outdated clothes, namely that this picture should be regarded as a … (how should one put it?) a retrospective record of history, a re-capturing of the past. (He needn’t have bothered: the walls of the photographer’s foyer were crowded with slightly faded debutantes in resurrected triumphal gowns, tubby old men squeezed into slender military uniforms, and a variety of other resurrected dreams.)

‘
Moi aussi, oh maman
!’

Back in Trafalgar Square, a silky white girl of about nine is given permission to pose for the man with the camera. One sprinkle of seed and she’s deluged with pigeons, just in time for the exposure. She squeals excitedly, arousing the jealousy of her companions.

‘
Et moi maintenant, moi aussi
!’

Another girl clamouring for her turn, and William is already bored. Having finished his cake, he pulls on his gloves and continues on his way to St James’s Park, gloomily asking himself
how
, if such enchanting sights bore him so soon, will he
ever
be able to stand being the head of Rackham Perfumeries?