The Crimson Petal and the White (81 page)

I am carried into the Convent, into a warm cell at its very heart, which glows in colours
from the stained glass windows. I am lifted off my stretcher & on to a sort of high bed – like
a pedestal with a matress on top. The awful pains in my swollen stomach, the giddy biliusness
I have been suffering each day, return with a vengeance. It is as if the demon inside me fears the
Holy Sister’s healing powers, & seeks to take firmer hold.

My Holy Sister leans over me; She is many different colours in the light of the stained
glass, Her face is buttercup yellow, Her breast is red, Her hands are blue. She places them
gently on my belly, and inside me the demon squerms. I feel it pushing and lungeing in rage and
terror, but my Sister has a way of causing my belly to open up without injury, permitting the
demon to spring out. I glimpse the vile creature only for an instant: it is naked and black, it is
made of blood & slime glued together; but immediately upon being brought out into the light,
it turns to vapour in my Holy Sister’s hands.

Falling back in
exzaustion
, I see my belly shrinking.

‘There now’, my Holy Sister says to me with a smile. ‘It is over.

Sugar flips to the end of the volume, hoping for more; there isn’t any. But … but there must be! Her curiosity is aroused, she’s gripped by Agnes’s narrative as she never was before, and besides, she’s arrived at the period she most fervently wishes to know about: the early days of William and Agnes’s marriage. Breathing shallowly in anticipation, she fetches, from the pile stacked against her thigh, the next diary in chronological sequence. She’s seen it before. It reveals nothing. She finds the next one.

It begins:

“
Season”al Reflections, by Agnes Rackham

Ladies, I ask you: Can there be any greater annoyance, than hat pins which
are too blunt to penetrate a perfectly ordinary hat? Of course, when I say “ordi

nary”, I don’t mean to imply that my hats are not “extraordinary” in the sense of

Sugar stops reading and lays the diary down, confused and disappointed. Ought she press on? No, she simply hasn’t the stomach for more of this stuff, especially on the night before Christmas. Besides, it’s late: a quarter to twelve. Overcome suddenly by that peculiar breed of tiredness which waits for a clock’s permission before it strikes, she can barely summon the energy to stow the diaries back under her bed; only the thought of Rose discovering her snoring under a mound of them in the morning prods her to action. Secret safely concealed, Sugar has one last piss in the pot, slips inside the sheets, and blows out the candle.

In the pitch dark, she lies listening, her face turned towards the window her eyes cannot yet descry. Is it snowing still? That would explain how little street noise she can hear. Or are there no revellers? In Silver Street, Christmas Eve was always a noisy affair, with street musicians competing for festive generosity, a cacophony of accordions, barrel-organs, fiddles, pipes, drums – all woven together in a web of unintelligible chatter and uproarious laughter, a web that was spun to the top floors of the tallest houses. No hope of sleeping amid such a hubbub – not that anyone at Mrs Castaway’s was trying to sleep, busy instead with organ-grinding of an unmusical kind.

Here in Notting Hill, the sounds are fainter and more cryptic. Are those human voices, or the snortings of a horse in the stable? Is that a fragment of a minstrel’s tune being blown across the grounds from Chepstow Villas, or the squeak of a gate, much nearer by? The wind whimpers under the eaves, fluting across the chimney tops; the rafters creak. Or is that the creaking of a bed, inside the house? And is that whimpering Agnes’s, as she tosses in her poisoned sleep?

You ought to help her. Go help her. Why don’t you help her?
nags Sugar’s conscience, or whatever she’s to call that unruly spirit whose sole delight is to pester her when she craves rest.
They’re keeping her doped because she says
things they don’t care to hear. How can you let them do it? You promised you would
help her.

This is a low blow, a promise scavenged from the meeting in Bow Street, when Agnes collapsed in the mud, and her guardian angel came to her rescue.

What happened was … I promised to help her get home, no more,
she protests.
Didn’t you say, ‘I’ll be watching you to see that you’re safe’
I meant, only to the end of the street.
Ooooh, you are a slippery, cowardly slut, aren’t you?

The wind is blowing harder now, cooing and lowing all around the house. A shaft of whiteness plummets through the gloom past Sugar’s window. Agnes in a white night-gown? No, a quantity of snow dislodged from the roof-tiles.

Why should I care what happens to Agnes?
she sulks, turning her face into her pillow.
She’s spoilt, and addle-brained, and a bad mother, and … and she’d spit
on a prostitute in the street, if spitting were fashionable.

Her mischievous opponent doesn’t deign to answer; it knows she’s remembering the tremble of Agnes’s shoulders beneath her hands, there in the alley, as she whispered into the poor woman’s ear: ‘Let this be our secret.’

I’m in William’s house. I could get into terrible trouble.

The unruly spirit is silenced by this – or so she imagines, for a minute or two. Then,
What about Christopher?
, it harangues her.

Sugar balls her fists inside the bedclothes and digs her brow into the pillow.
Christopher can take care of himself. Am I supposed to rescue everyone in
this damned world?

Oh, poor baby
, is the mocking rejoinder.
Poor cowardly slut. Poor whore,
poor-whore, poor-hoor, pooor-hoooor …

Outside in the windswept streets of Notting Hill, someone blows a horn and someone else raises a joyous cheer, but Sugar doesn’t hear them; she’s narrowly escaped learning what really happens on Christmas Eve, to little girls who stay awake too long.

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘M
erry Christmas! Merry Christmas, one and all!’

Thus blusters Henry Calder Rackham upon entering his son’s house, as if he were Old Father Christmas himself, or at the very least Charles Dickens bellowing from a rostrum.

‘Merry Christmas to
you
, Father,’ William responds, embarrassed already, not just because of his father’s jovial effusion, but also because of the difficulty the maid is having divesting the old man of his coat. Like Lord Unwin, Henry Calder Rackham appears to have made an abrupt transition from portliness to fat, during the same passage of time in which William has transformed himself from an effete good-for-nothing into a captain of industry.

‘Ah, that
smell
,’ rhapsodises the elder Rackham. ‘I can tell already this visit will prove my undoing!’ And with that, he allows himself to be ushered into his son’s parlour, where he receives a warm welcome from the servants. ‘Hrrmph! Haven’t seen
you
before!’ he says to the new ones, and ‘Ah!:
you’re
– No, don’t tell me!’ he says to the old ones, but they take it in good part, and within minutes he’s the ring-leader, commandeering the rituals of fun and sentiment. ‘Where are the crackers? Where are the crackers?’ he demands, rubbing his hands, and lo! the crackers are fetched forth.

The progress of Time, which had rather slowed down since the opening of the gifts this morning, speeds up once more, as William’s father devotes himself single-mindedly to the playing of parlour games. ‘Splendid! Splendid! Whatever next?’ he cries, as William watches in bemusement, unable to reconcile the festive buffoon with the stubborn old tyrant who made this house such a miserable place for so long.

Odd twinge of embarrassment notwithstanding, William feels quite tolerant of – even grateful for – his father’s vulgarity today; it serves to keep the Christmas spirit buoyant whenever this terrible business with Agnes might have dragged it down. Everyone here is acutely aware (well, everyone except the likes of Janey) that the mistress of the house lies senseless upstairs, and that the master is sick at heart. He’s done his best not to mope, but every so often the pity of Agnes’s plight attacks him with a vengeance, and a pall of silence threatens to descend over the celebrations. You’d think a bevy of women could keep a house humming amiably for a day! But no: a male is needed, and William is tired of being that male.

All right, it’s true that the gardener put in an appearance this morning, which lifted William’s burden for a while, but a damn short while it was. Ten minutes, and Shears had already fled what he plainly regarded as a rampant superabundance of femaleness, for the safety of his outhouse. Cheesman would’ve been more use, but he’s gone altogether – visiting his mother, a likely story.

So, with a parlour full of the fairer sex, all constrained by good manners to carouse as demurely as possible, the coming of Henry Calder Rackham – a roly-poly old man full of good-natured bombast – offers nothing less than William’s rescue. Bluster on, old man! This is just what’s required, to while away the long hours till dinner.

Mind you, the day has gone very well so far. Rather better, to be honest, than in previous years, when Agnes (beautiful though she invariably looked) was apt to sour the frivolity with damn queer remarks – remarks intended, he could only presume, to lift Christmas up from its nadir of commercialism and restore its proper religious significance.

‘Have you ever wondered why we don’t celebrate Childermas anymore?’ she enquired one year, her gift from William lying half-unwrapped and forgotten in her lap.

‘Childermas, dear?’

‘Yes: the day that King Herod slaughtered the Innocents.’

This year, thank God, such conversations have not arisen. And,

regrettable though the circumstances may be, the absence of Agnes from the festivities has made possible one happy benefit: the presence of her daughter downstairs. Yes, after years of strictly segregated Christmases, with Sophie being smuggled her presents and lukewarm portions of Christmas dinner in the nursery while the rest of the family fussed around the mistress downstairs, the child finally has her chance. Which is a jolly good thing, William thinks, and not before time! She’s a pleasant little creature, with a most winsome smile, and far too big now to be treated like a baby. Besides, despite his willingness, in years gone by, to play along with Agnes’s notion of Christmas as a ritual for grown-ups, he’s always secretly thought there’s something melancholy about a Christmas tree without a child frolicking in front of it.

Last year, the opening of the presents was blighted by all manner of restraints – odious economies, the dark cloud of Henry Calder Rackham’s mistrust of his son, Agnes’s haughty contempt for anything that smacked of cheapness or make-do, and the servants’ fidgetings of unrest and ingratitude.

This year, the same ceremony, conducted with all the household on their knees in front of the Christmas tree in an ever-burgeoning froth of coloured paper, has proved highly satisfactory. Freed from the shackles of his debt, William decided to be a fountain of generosity. (To the dubious Lady Bridgelow, when she warned him of the perils of spoiling one’s servants, he replied: ‘You have too little faith in human nature, Constance!’) Thus, while Lady Bridgelow has no doubt upheld convention and given her female servants a parcel containing the fabrics for making a new uniform,
his
female servants received a parcel containing their new uniform ready-made (honestly, why oblige the poor biddies to sew their own clothes, when ready-made is the way of the future?). Not only this, but each servant received extra parcels which, instead of containing the sort of mundane objects they might have expected – kitchen implements for the cook, a new scrubbing brush for the scullery maid, and so forth – contained out-and-out luxuries. God Almighty, he’s a rich man now: does he
really
need to solicit a sour and grudging ‘thank-you-sir’ for the derisory gift of a soup-ladle or a wash-pail, when he can sit back and enjoy an expression of genuine, unfeigned pleasure?

So, this morning, each girl got (to her considerable astonishment) a box of chocolate bon-bons, a pair of kid gloves, a bronze-plated button-hook, and a delicate Oriental fan. The gloves were, he feels, an especially inspired gesture; they demonstrate that William Rackham is a master who appreciates that his servants are not mere household fixtures and drudges, but women who might wish to enjoy some sort of life on their afternoons off, in the world
out there.

It was damned interesting observing each girl’s essential nature asserting itself once the first flush of surprise had faded. Clara promptly restored the suspicious glint to her eye, the obstinate set to her mouth, and requested leave to attend to Mrs Rackham. Rose stacked her gifts carefully at her side, and resumed her vigilance of the party, in case anything should go wrong. Poor Janey continued to fondle and stare at her gifts, overwhelmed by their exoticism and by the implication that a dogsbody like her could possibly make use of them. Letty, ever the placid simpleton, hugged her treasures in the lap of her skirt and looked around in wonder, as if it had only just become clear to her that she needn’t worry her head about anything anymore, ever. The new kitchenmaid, Harriet, and the laundrymaid, whose Irish name he can neither spell nor pronounce, both betrayed a sly impatience to indulge in their windfalls, an eagerness to gobble chocolates or go gallivanting down the street with their kid gloves on. By contrast, Cook (not a girl anymore, admittedly) made a show of good-humoured incomprehension, as if to say, ‘Mercy! What could a person of my age and station possibly do with such things?’ But she was flattered, he could tell … her sex made sure of that.

Sugar was a trickier challenge. How to reward her for all she’s done, without arousing the suspicions of the others? For a time he considered the possibility of celebrating a second, clandestine Christmas alone with her in her bedroom, but as the day drew near he decided this would entail too great a risk – not of detection, but of his responsibilities crowding in on him, claiming every spare moment.

No, better to honour her publicly. But with what? By all means, for appearances’ sake, she should get her own kid gloves, bon-bons, button-hook and fan, but what more could he give her that wouldn’t set the others’ tongues wagging, while doing justice to her unique qualities? This morning, in front of the Christmas tree, with all the household looking on, he was proud to see the wisdom of his choice thoroughly confirmed.

Sugar, when Letty handed her the mysterious box, was surprised enough by how big and heavy it was, but when she removed its red wrapping-paper and hefted its contents into the light, her eyes widened further still, and her mouth fell open.
Ah
, thought William,
a response like that can’t be
faked!
Straining to keep his own face impassive, he watched her gape, speechless, at the leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare, each manufactured to the highest standards – the tragedies a dark maroon tooled with gold, the comedies a rich umber tooled with black, and the histories pure black tooled with silver. The other servants stared too, of course – the illiterate ones in bafflement, the readers in something closer to envy. But not
quite
envy – for what joy would they get from a set of Shakespeare, if it were theirs? And what more sensible, what more
defensible
gift could there be, than books for a governess to share with her pupil?

Sugar, of course, knew better. Choked with emotion, she could barely speak her thanks.

As for what to give Sophie … now
that
was an even thornier problem. After much soul-searching, William decided that this year, the convention of presenting Sophie with a gift ‘from Mama’ should be suspended. In previous years, Beatrice Cleave took care of this little subterfuge, at Christmases and birthdays, and the child was none the wiser. This year, several things conspired against it: his disinclination to burden Sugar further, Doctor Curlew’s stern disapproval of the custom, Agnes’s absence from the celebrations, and an uneasy sense that Sophie has surely grown too old to believe such a threadbare lie.

So: no gift ‘from Mama’. Doctor Curlew has assured him there’ll come a time when Agnes, cured of her delusions, will give her daughter something far more precious than any gaudy parcel. Maybe so, maybe so … but this morning, William made sure that Sophie wasn’t starved of gaudy parcels.

In recognition of how much she’s grown, he gave her gloves of her own, delicate pigskin miniatures to make her feel like a little lady. A turtle-shell hair-brush, too, he gave her, and a whale-bone hairclip, an ivory-handled mirror, and a chamois purse to put them in.

All these things she received with evident wonderment and pleasure. Her greatest amazement, however, came when she unwrapped the largest parcel under the tree, and found it to contain a surpassingly beautiful doll. Everyone in the room gasped and cooed to see it: a sumptuous French construction dressed as if for the theatre, with an alabaster-pale bisque head and an elaborately curled mohair wig topped with an ostrich-plush hat. In one hand it held a blue fan; in the other, nothing. Its satin gown (lower-cut in the bodice than any English doll’s) ballooned out below the wasp waist, a rosy pink hemmed with white plush. Most unusually of all, the doll was mounted, by means of firmly glued shoe-soles, on a wheeled trolley, allowing it to be trundled back and forth across the floor.

‘By gad,’ William’s father ruefully exclaimed, ‘this is a class above the cheap nigger doll I got her a few years ago, ain’t it?’

But Henry Calder Rackham had a surprise up his sleeve – or rather, under his chair, and he produced a cylinder wrapped in plain brown paper and string (which William had taken to be a bottle of wine) and handed it to Sophie, as soon as her wits were recovered from the shock of her father’s generosity.

‘There, dear,’ the old man said. ‘I think you’ll find
this
is a superior thing to a lump of old rag from a tea-chest …’ And he leaned back in satisfaction as Sophie unwrapped … a steely-grey spyglass.

Once again, there were gasps and murmurs among the servants, of wonderment and incredulity. What could this thing be? A bottle jack? A kaleidoscope? A fancy receptacle for knitting-needles? William knew at once, but was privately of the opinion that a spyglass is hardly the thing to give to a young miss. And, as the awed Sophie turned the apparatus over in her hands, he also noted that the metal was somewhat pitted and scratched.

‘This ain’t a toy, Sophie,’ the old man said. ‘It’s a precision instrument, entrusted to me by an explorer I once met. Let me show you how it works!’ And, crawling on his knees, he traversed the ribbon-strewn carpet to Sophie’s side, and demonstrated the telescope’s function. Within seconds she was swivelling the thing to and fro, her expression flickering between radiant joy and frustration as she focused on deliriously vague wallpaper and monstrous disembodied eyes.

And William himself? What did
he
get? He struggles to remember … Ah yes: a lace coverlet for a cigar-box, embroidered by Sophie (unless her governess helped her, in which case Sugar’s skills as a seamstress leave a lot to be desired!) with a facsimile of his own face, copied directly from a Rackham soap-wrapper. Oh, and also: a quantity of middling-quality cigars, courtesy of his father. That, Lord help him, was the sum total of his Christmas bounty! Pitiful, but such is the fate of a man with a pack of servants, one small female child, a brother gone to an early grave, a mother cast out in disgrace, a father without a generous bone in his body, two old chums whom he has offended, and a wife who cannot be trusted while she’s awake. What other man in England is in such a predicament? God willing, it won’t last forever.

‘Musical chairs!’ exclaims Henry Calder Rackham, clapping his hands with a fleshy
whup-whup-whup
. ‘Who’s for musical chairs?’

* * *