The Crimson Petal and the White (96 page)

It’s in front of this nursery backdrop – evidently the least often used – that most of the studio’s props are to be found: not just the rocking-horse, toy locomotive, miniature writing-desk and high-backed stool that belong to the nursery, but a jumble of other accessories to the other backdrops, like a mountaineer’s walking-staff (for Artists and Philosophers), a large
papier-mâché
vase glued to a plywood pedestal, various clocks hung on brass stands, two rifles, an enormous ring of keys suspended by a chain around the neck of a bust of Shakespeare, bundles of ostrich feathers, footstools of various sizes, the façade of a grandfather clock, and many other less easily identifiable things. To Sophie’s horrified fascination, there’s even a stuffed, soulful-eyed spaniel which can be made to sit without demur at any master’s feet.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sugar observes William appraising her and Sophie. He looks slightly ill-at-ease, as if fretting that unforeseen complications may spoil the day’s business, but he doesn’t look disappointed with the outfits; and if he recognises that she’s wearing the same dress she wore when he first met her, he betrays no sign. The hitherto elusive Tovey takes his place behind the camera stilts and casts the hulking mechanism’s thick black cape over his head and shoulders. Thus he remains shrouded for the remainder of the Rackhams’ visit, his buttocks occasionally swinging, wagtail-like, under the light-proof fabric, his feet as deliberately placed as the legs of his tripod.

The exposures are made in a matter of minutes. Scholefield has dissuaded William from his original intention to have only one picture made; four can be accomplished in a single sitting, and needn’t be paid for or enlarged unless they give complete satisfaction.

So, William stands in front of the painted skyline and gazes into what Scholefield describes as ‘the distance’, a point which, in the confines of the studio, can be no further than the ventilation grille. Scholefield raises one fist, slowly, and rhapsodises: ‘On the horizon, bursting through the clouds: the sun!’ Rackham peers instinctively, and Tovey seizes the moment.

Next, William is persuaded to stand in front of the bookcase, holding a copy of
Rudimentary Optics
splayed open in his hands. ‘Ah yes,
that
notorious chapter!’ remarks Scholefield, peeking at the text as he gently pushes the book a little closer to the customer’s face. ‘Who would think that a tome as dry as this could contain such saucy revelations!’ William’s glassy expression becomes suddenly keen as he begins to read in earnest, and, again, Tovey doesn’t hesitate to act.

‘Ach, my little joke,’ says Scholefield, hanging his head in mock penitence. His manner is growing more flamboyant the longer he has his customers in his command; he might almost be tippling whisky from a hip-flask, or taking furtive sniffs of nitrous oxide.

Sitting on the sidelines with Sophie awaiting her turn, Sugar wonders if there’s another room to this studio, a secret chamber furnished for pornography. When Tovey and Scholefield are left to themselves at the end of a working day, is it only respectably-clad gentlemen and ladies they develop, or do they also pull naked prostitutes from the malodorous darkroom fluids, and peg them up to dry? What could be more Artistic, after all, than a set of card-sized photographs sold in a package labelled ‘For the Use of Artists Only’?

‘And now, your charming little girl,’ announces Scholefield, and with balletic efficiency he clears away the props from in front of the fake nursery, until only the toys remain. After an instant’s hesitation, he removes the locomotive; then, after deliberating slightly longer, he judges that Mr Rackham is not the sort of father who would adore to see his child perched side-saddle on a rocking horse, so he removes that as well. He leads Sophie to a spindly table and shows her how to pose next to it, surveys the scene with a nimble step backwards, and then leaps forward again, to remove the superfluous stool.

‘I shall now summon an elephant down from the sky,’ he declares, raising his hands portentously, ‘and balance it on the tip of my nose!’

Sophie does not raise her chin or open her eyes any wider; she only thinks of the part in
Alice’s Adventures
where the Cat says, ‘We’re all mad here.’ Is London full of mad photographers and sandwichboard-men who look like the playing-card courtiers of the Queen of Hearts?

‘Elephants having failed to come,’ says Scholefield, noting that Tovey has not yet made an exposure, ‘I shall, in disappointment, screw off my own head.’

This alarming promise, accompanied by a stylised gesture towards its consummation, succeeds only in putting a frown on Sophie’s face.

‘The gentleman wants you to lift your chin, Sophie dear,’ says Sugar softly, ‘and keep your eyes open without blinking.’

Sophie does as she’s told, and Mr Tovey gets what he wants at once.

For the group photograph, William, Sugar and Sophie are posed in the simulacrum of the perfect sitting-room: Mr Rackham stands in the centre, Miss Rackham stands in front of him and slightly to the left, her head reaching his watch-chain, and the unnamed lady sits on an elegant chair to the right. Together they form a pyramid, more or less, with Mr Rackham’s head at its apex, and the skirts of Miss Rackham and the lady combining at the base.

‘Ideal, ideal,’ says Scholefield.

Sugar sits motionless, her hands demurely folded in her lap, her shoulders ramrod straight, and stares unblinking at Scholefield’s raised finger. The hooded creature that is Tovey and his contraption has its eye open now; hidden chemicals are reacting, at this very instant, to the influx of light and a deepening impression of three carefully arranged human beings. She’s aware of William breathing shallowly above her head. He still hasn’t told her why they’re doing this; she’d assumed he would have told her by now, but he hasn’t. Dare she ask him, or is it one of those subjects that are liable to provoke him to a rage? How strange that an occasion which ought to fill her with hope for their shared future – a family portrait that installs her in the place of his wife – should arouse such foreboding in her.

What use can he possibly have in mind for this portrait? He can’t display it, so what does he mean to do with it? Moon over it in private? Give it to her as a gift? What in God’s name is she doing here, and why does she feel worse than if she were being made to submit to naked indignities for the Use of Artists only?

‘I think,’ says Scholefield, ‘we have quite finished, don’t you, Mr Tovey?’

To which his partner replies with a grunt.

Many hours later, back in Notting Hill, when night has fallen and all the excitement is over, the members of the Rackham household retire to bed, each to their own. All the lights in the house are extinguished, even the one in William’s study.

William snores gently on his pillow, already dreaming. The largest of Pears’ soap factories is ablaze, and he is watching the firemen labour hopelessly to save it. Permeating the dream is the extraordinary odour of burning soap, a smell he’s never smelled in real life, and which, for all its unmistakable uniqueness in the dream, he’ll forget the instant he wakes.

His daughter is fast asleep too, exhausted from her adventures and the distress of being scolded by Miss Sugar for being fractious and her after-dinner mishap in which she sicked up not just her beef stew but the cake and cocoa she had at Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms as well. The world is an awfully strange place, bigger and more crowded than she could ever have imagined, and full of phenomena even her governess quite clearly doesn’t understand, but her father said she is a good girl, and the Bay of Biscay is in Spain, should he ever ask again. Tomorrow is another day, and she’ll learn her lessons so well that Miss Sugar won’t be in the least cross.

Sugar lies awake, chamber-pot clutched in her arms, spewing a vile mixture of pennyroyal and brewer’s yeast. Yet, even in the midst of a spasm, when her mouth and nostrils are burning with poison, her physical misery is trifling compared to the sting of the words with which William sent her away from his study tonight:
Mind your own business! If it were any
affair of yours, don’t you think I would have told you? Who do you think you are?

She crawls into bed, clutching her belly, afraid to whimper in case the noise should travel through the walls. Her stomach muscles are sore from convulsing; there can’t be anything left in there. Except …

For the first time since falling pregnant, Sugar imagines the baby as … a baby. Up until now, she’s avoided seeing it so. It started as nothing more than a substanceless anxiety, an absence of menstruation; then it became a worm in the bud, a parasite which she hoped might be induced to pass out of her. Even when it clung on, she didn’t imagine it as a living creature clinging for dear life; it was a mysterious object, growing and yet inert, a clump of fleshy matter inexplicably expanding in her guts. Now, as she lies in the godforsaken midnight, clutching her abdomen in her hands, she suddenly realises her hands are laid upon a life: she is harbouring a human being.

What is it like, this baby? Has it a face? Yes, of course it must have a face. Is it a he or a she? Does it have any inkling how Sugar has mothered it so far? Is it contorted with fear, its skin scalded with sulphate of zinc and borax, its mouth gasping for clean nourishment amidst the poisons that swirl in Sugar’s innards? Does it regret the day it was born, even though that day has yet to come?

Sugar removes her palms from her belly, and lays them on her feverish forehead. She must resist these thoughts. This baby – this creature – this tenacious clump of flesh – cannot be permitted to live. Her own life is at stake; if William finds out she’s in the family way it will be the end, the end of everything.
You won’t go back on the streets, will you, Miss Sugar?
That’s what Mrs Fox said to her. And
I would sooner die
is what she promised in reply.

Sugar covers herself with a sheet in preparation for sleep; the nausea is ebbing and she’s able to drink a sip of water to rinse the pennyroyal and gall from her tongue. Her abdomen is still sore from ribcage to groin, as though she’s subjected rarely-used muscles to a regime of punishing exercise. She lays one palm on her belly; there’s a heartbeat there. Her own heartbeat, of course; it’s the same as the one in her breast and temples. The thing inside her probably hasn’t a heart yet. Has it?

Scholefield and Tovey are awake too; in fact, despite the lateness of the hour, they haven’t even left their premises in Conduit Street. Among other activities, they’ve been working on the Rackham pictures, attempting to produce miracles.

‘The head’s come out too small,’ mutters Tovey, squinting at a glistening female face that has just materialised in the gloom. ‘Don’t you think the head’s too small?’

‘Yes,’ says Scholefield, ‘but it’s useless for the purpose anyway. It’s too bright; she looks as if she has a lamp burning inside her skull.’

‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to photograph the three of them again, out of doors, in bright sunlight?’

‘Yes, my love, it would be simpler,’ sighs Scholefield, ‘but out of the question.’

They labour on, into the small hours of the morning. This commission of Rackham’s is a much more difficult challenge than the usual business of superimposing a boy’s face onto the body of a soldier, to give grieving parents an almost-authentic record of their missing son’s military eminence. This Rackham assignment involves all but insuperable incompatibilities: a face from a photograph taken in brilliant sunlight, by an amateur whose opinion of his own skills is grossly inflated, must be rephotographed, enlarged to several times its size, and imposed on the shoulders of a woman done in the studio by professionals.

By three o’clock, they have the best result that they can manage, given the raw materials. Rackham will simply have to be satisfied with this, or, if he isn’t, he can pay for the straightforward images of himself and his daughter, and forfeit the imperfect composite.

The photographers take themselves to bed in a little room adjoining the studio; it’s far too late now for them to catch a cab back to their house in Clerkenwell. Suspended from a wire in the darkroom hangs their day’s work: a fine photograph of William Rackham gazing into the Romantic eternity of a mountain summit, a fine photograph of William Rackham engrossed in the study of a book, a fine photograph of Sophie Rackham daydreaming in her nursery, and a most peculiar photograph of the Rackham family all together, with Agnes Rackham’s head transplanted from a summer long ago, abnormally radiant, like one of those mysterious figures purported by spiritualists to be ghosts captured on the gelatin emulsion of film, which were never visible to the naked eye.

THIRTY-TWO

S
ophie Rackham stands perched on a stool by the window and wiggles her bottom slightly, to test if the stool wobbles. It does, a little. Carefully, because she can’t see below her skirt, she shifts her feet for balance, until she’s secure.

I am going to grow bigger than my Mama,
she thinks, not defiantly, nor competitively, but because she has fathomed that her body is different in nature from her mother’s, and not destined to be petite. It’s as if she was fed a morsel of Alice’s Wonderland cake when she was a baby, and instead of shooting up to the ceiling in seconds, she is expanding the tiniest amount each minute of her life, an expansion that won’t stop until she’s very big indeed – as big as Miss Sugar, or her father.

Soon, she won’t need this stool to look out at the world. Soon, Miss Sugar – or
someone
– will have to arrange for her to get new shoes, new underwear, new everything, because she’s growing so big that almost none of her clothes fit her comfortably. Perhaps she’ll be taken into the city again, where there exist whole shops devoted to the selling of a single object, and each day they manage to sell one, because of the marvellous abundance of people endlessly surging through the streets.

Sophie lifts her spyglass, curling her fingers around the ridges of its telescoped design. She extends it to its full length of fourteen inches and peers out at Chepstow Villas. Pedestrians are few; nothing much is happening. Not like in the city.

Behind her, the handle of the school-room door squeaks. Can this be Miss Sugar returning already, even though she’s only just gone to help Papa with his letters? Sophie can’t turn too quickly in case she falls off the stool; if her spyglass shattered she would suffer seven hundred and seventy-seven years of bad luck, she’s decided.

‘Hello, Sophie,’ says a deep male voice.

Sophie is amazed to see her father standing in the doorway. The last time he visited her here, Beatrice was still her nurse, and Mama was at the sea-side. She wonders whether curtsying would make a good impression on him, but a wobble of the stool dissuades her.

‘Hello, Papa.’

He closes the door behind him, crosses the room and waits for her to step down onto the carpet. Nothing remotely like this has ever happened before. She blinks in his shadow, looking up at his frowning, smiling bearded face.

‘I have something for you,’ he says, his hands hidden behind his back.

Sophie’s thrill of anticipation is tempered with fear; she can’t help wondering if her father has come to tell her she’s to be removed to a home for naughty girls, the way her nurse used to threaten he might.

‘Here, then.’ He hands her a picture-frame the size of a large book. Enclosed behind the glass is the photograph of her taken by the man who claimed to be able to balance elephants on his nose. The Sophie Rackham captured by him is noble and colourless, all greys and blacks, like a statue, but awfully dignified and grown-up looking. The fake backdrop has turned into a real room, and the young lady’s eyes are beautiful and lifelike, with tiny lights glowing inside them. What a beautiful picture! If it had colours, it would be a painting.

‘Thank you, Papa,’ she says.

Her father smiles down at her, his lips forming the smile-shape jerkily, as though he’s unaccustomed to using the stiff muscles involved. Without speaking, he reveals another framed photograph from behind his back: a picture of himself this time, standing in front of the painted mountains and sky, gazing into the future.

‘What do you think?’ he asks her.

Sophie can barely believe her ears. Her father has never asked her what she thinks before, about anything. How is it possible that the universe could permit this? He is old and she is young, he is big and she is small, he is male and she is female, he is her father and she is only his daughter.

‘It’s very good, isn’t it, Papa?’ she says. She wants to tell him how real the illusion is, of him standing in front of those mountains, but she doesn’t trust herself not to get tongue-tied and betrayed by her puny vocabulary. Nevertheless, he seems to guess what she’s thinking.

‘Queer, isn’t it, the way w-we know that this photograph was made in an upstairs room in a crowded street, and yet here am I, standing in the w-wilds of Nature. But that’s what we must all do, Sophie: present ourselves in the best light. That’s w-what A-A-Art is for. And History too.’ His stutter is getting worse as his ability to condescend to her level of discourse reaches the end of its rope. He’s about to leave, she can tell.

‘What about the other picture, Papa?’ she can’t help asking as he takes a step backward. ‘The one of us all?’

‘It … it wasn’t a success,’ he says, with a pained look. ‘P-Perhaps we’ll go back one day, and try another. But I can’t p-promise.’

And, without further conversation or parting words, he turns on his heel and walks stiltedly out of the room.

Sophie stares at the closed door, and hugs her portrait to her chest. She can scarcely wait to show Miss Sugar.

Late that night, when Sophie has long been asleep and even the servants are going to bed, Sugar and William are still discussing business by lamp-light in the master’s study. It’s a never-exhausted subject, whose intricacy continues to deepen even when they’re too tired to speak of it anymore. A year ago, if someone had asked Sugar what the running of a perfumery might involve, she’d have replied: Grow some flowers, get them harvested, mix them up in a potage, add the essence to bottles of water or cakes of soap, affix a paper label to the results, and trundle it to shops by the cart-load. Now, such abstruse questions as whether that swindler Crawley can be trusted to estimate the cost of converting beam engines from twelve to sixteen horsepower, or whether it’s worth sinking more money into wooing the port authorities at Hull, can easily swallow up twenty minutes each, before the first item of unanswered correspondence is even lifted off the pile. Sugar has come to think that
all
professions are like this: simple to outsiders, inextricably complex to those within. Even whores, after all, can prattle about their trade for hours.

William is in a strange mood tonight. Not his usual bad-tempered self; more reasonable, and yet melancholy with it. The challenges of business, to which his response in the early days of his directorship was rash enthusiasm, and more recently pugnacious defiance, seem suddenly to have sapped his spirit. ‘Useless’, ‘profitless’, ‘futile’: these are words he resorts to frequently, with a heavy sigh, burdening Sugar with the task of re-inflating his confidence. ‘Do you really think so?’ he says, when she reassures him that Rackham’s star is still on the rise. ‘What a little optimist you are.’

Sugar, knowing she ought to be grateful he isn’t angry with her, is perversely tempted to snap at him. After what she’s endured with Sophie today, she has grievances of her own, and is in no mood to be his encouraging angel. When will someone reassure her that everything is going to be all right?

I’m carrying your child, William,
she’s tempted to tell him.
A boy, I’m
sure. The heir you want so badly, for Rackham Perfumeries. No one need know it’s
yours, except we two. You could say you got me from the Rescue Society, not knowing I was already with child. You could say I’m a good governess to Sophie and you
can’t bring yourself to condemn me for sins committed in my former life. You’ve
always said you don’t give a damn what other people think. And in years to come,
when your son has taken after you, and tongues have stopped wagging, we could be
married. It’s a gift from Fate, don’t you see?

‘I think you should leave things as they are,’ she advises, pulling herself back to the realities of beam engines. ‘In order to recoup your investment, you’d have to see ten years of good harvests and no expansion from your competitors. The risks are too great.’

This reminder of his rivals darkens William’s mood even further.

‘Ach, they’ll leave me flapping my arms in the wind from their coattails, Sugar,’ he says, half-heartedly miming the motion from where he sits slumped on the ottoman. ‘The twentieth century belongs to Pears and Yardley, I can feel it in my bones.’

Sugar chews her lower lip and suppresses an irritable sigh. If only she could set him to work drawing pictures of Australian kangaroos, or give him simpler sums to do! Would he reward her with a big smile then?

‘Let’s worry about the rest of our own century first, William,’ she suggests. ‘It’s what we’re living in, after all.’ To signal the importance of dealing with the correspondence item by item, in the order that it comes, she takes the next envelope off the pile and recites the sender’s name. ‘Philip Bodley.’

‘Leave that,’ groans William, allowing himself to slide further towards horizontal. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. With Rackham’s, I mean.’

‘It’s not trouble, though, is it?’ she murmurs sympathetically, trying to let him know with her voice that he can share his most secret woes with her, and she’ll fortify him, like the best wife in the world.

‘Trouble or not, it doesn’t concern you,’ he points out, not belligerently, but with mournful resignation. ‘Remember I do have
some
sort of life beyond this desk, my love.’

She takes the endearment at face value, or does her best to. After all, he’s alluding to how indispensable she is to his business, isn’t he? She picks up the next envelope.

‘Finnegan & Co, Tynemouth.’

He covers his face with his palms.

‘Tell me the worst,’ he groans.

She reads the letter aloud, pausing only when William’s snorts of annoyance and mutters of scepticism prevent him from hearing the words. Then, while he’s digesting the missive, she sits silent behind his desk, breathing shallowly, feeling the ominous distension against her tender stomach, feeling the gorge of aggrieved pride inching upwards.

‘Sophie was impossible this afternoon,’ she finally blurts.

William, preoccupied with the Solomonic challenge of deciding whether bone-idle dockhands are truly to blame for the delays in unloading shipments at Tynemouth or whether his supplier is lying to him again, blinks uncomprehendingly.

‘Sophie? Impossible?’

Sugar takes a deep breath, and the seams of her dress press in on her swollen bosom and belly. In a flash, she recalls Sophie’s excitement following the visit her father paid on her; her preening pride in the photograph; her babbly happiness and scatter-brained inattentiveness that gradually gave way, as the afternoon wore on, to tearful frustration at getting sums wrong and failing to memorise the names of flowers; her poor appetite at dinner-time and hungry fretfulness at bedtime; her general air of having been pumped full of a foreign substance she couldn’t digest.

‘She claims you told her we’re all going to go back to the photographers again, very soon,’ says Sugar.

‘I … I said no such thing,’ objects William, frowning as he comes to the conclusion that life is a morass of misconstruance and treachery: even one’s own child, as soon as one makes a generous gesture, calls trouble down upon one’s head!

‘She insists that you promised,’ says Sugar.

‘Well, she’s m-mistaken.’

Sugar rubs her tired eyes. The flesh of her fingers is so rough, and the flesh of her eyelids so tender, she feels she could do herself an injury.

‘I think,’ she says, ‘that if you mean to pay more attention to Sophie, it might be better to do it while I’m present.’

William rears up on his elbows and glowers at her, incredulous. First Sophie and now Sugar! How fertile with complications and inconvenience females can be!

‘Are you telling me,’ he enquires tersely, ‘w-when and under w-what circumstances I sh-should see my own daughter?’

Sugar tips her head in submission, softens her tone as much as she can. ‘Oh no, William, please don’t think that. You’re doing wonderfully well, and I admire you for it.’ Still he glowers; dear Christ, what else can she say? Should she keep her mouth shut now, or is there anything useful she can do with it?
My my, you’ve learned a dictionary full of words, haven’t you,
dear
? Mrs Castaway taunts her from the past.
And only two of them will do
you the slightest bit of good in this life: ‘Yes’, and ‘Money’
.

Sugar takes another deep breath. ‘Agnes’s requirements made things so difficult for you,’ she commiserates, ‘for
so
many years, and now it’s awkward, I know. And Sophie really is terribly grateful for any interest you show in her, and so am I. I only wonder if it might be possible for you … for
us
… to be together a little more often. As a … as a family. So to speak.’

She swallows hard, fearful that she’s gone too far. But wasn’t it he who wanted a photograph of the three of them together? What was that picture leading to, if not to this?

‘I’m doing all I p-possibly can,’ he warns her, ‘to keep this w-wretched household functioning.’

His self-pity tempts her to shoot back a volley of her own, but she manages to resist; he’s clenching his fists, his knuckles are white, his face is white, she ought to have known better, their future is about to shatter like a glass flung against a wall, God let her find the right words and she’ll never ask for anything more. With a rustle of skirts she slips from behind the desk and kneels at his side, laying her hand solicitously over his.

‘Oh, William,
please
let’s not call this household wretched. You have achieved great things this year,
magnificent
things.’ Heart thumping, she slides her arm around his neck, but thank God, he doesn’t push her aside or explode into a rage. ‘Of course what befell Agnes was a tragedy,’ she presses on, stroking his shoulder, ‘but it was a mercy too, in a way, wasn’t it? All that worry and … and scandal, for all those years, and now at last you’re free of it.’ He is slackening; first one of his hands, then the other, settles on her waist. What a narrow escape she’s had! ‘And Rackham’s is having such a
superb
year,’ she goes on. ‘Half the problems we’re facing are caused by its growth, we mustn’t forget that. And it’s a
happy
household you have here, honestly it is. All the servants are very friendly to me, William, and I can assure you, from what I’ve overheard, they’re quite contented, and they think the world of you …’