The Apple (9 page)

‘Excuse me, Mr Rackham,’ says Letty, suddenly standing in front of him with a cup of coffee. ‘Mrs Rackham wants to know if you need the doctor.’

‘Mrs Rackham?’ he echoes. ‘Doctor?’ He has momentary difficulty summoning a mental picture of either of these persons. Then he recalls old Doctor Curlew, white-haired and cadaverous. The image of Mrs Rackham comes a moment later.

‘Tell her I’m improving.’

‘Yes, Mr Rackham.’

‘What’s she doing today?’

‘Receiving a visit from Mr St John, Mr Rackham.’

‘He was here yesterday, too.’

‘Yes, Mr Rackham.’

He nods to dismiss her. It’s important that she knows he has a grip on what’s happening in his own house.

Alone with his coffee, William reflects on his remarriage. Constance has been a benign, unobtrusive presence in his life. Of all the many disappointments he’s had to swallow during the last fifteen years, Constance has been among the smallest. In the grievous aftermath of losing his family, she offered him another, and he was relieved of the pain of being pitied: ‘That’s William Rackham, poor wretch: his wife walked into the Thames.’ Constance did her very best to write a new chapter of the Rackham family history; she wears his name proudly in public. Only … She never did give him the heir she hinted she might, and now she is past the age for such things, and they scarcely see each other. He labours in his study; she socialises. He cannot picture any part of her below the chin.

Sugar had sharp hips, such sharp hips. You felt them digging into your abdomen as you moved inside. The palms of her hands were rough-textured: some sort of skin ailment. Odd that he never feared catching pox from her. God knows what depravities she indulged in before he discovered her; she had a reputation for doing what other girls refused.

Anything you ask of me
.

How warm her body was, how accommodating! How divine it was, to slide his prick into her silky cunt! And more than this, how divine to know that her answer to his every question was Yes, Yes, Yes. Not in a mindless, obedient fashion, like a servant; more like … a friend.

Once again, he returns, in his memory, to the afternoon in the lavender field. There is something about that day which resists bitter reappraisal; all the dark muck of betrayal, the oily filth of cynicism, can be emptied over it and nothing sticks; the day is left clean and fresh-smelling. How is it possible, after all that’s happened? Yet here he goes again, stepping back into the April of 1875, standing once more together with Sugar on the crest of Beehive Hill. They’re facing north-east: there’s a swathe of rain far, far away, sprouting a rainbow. William stares at his mistress from behind, his hand shielding his eyes against the sun. Sugar’s long skirts rustle in the breeze, her shoulderblades poke through the tight fabric of her dress as she lifts her arm to shield her face. The wind rises; the lavender stirs gently below as though he and Sugar were on the prow of a boat adrift on a lilac sea.

What is she looking at? The same thing he is looking at. And what is that? Everything and nothing. There is a kind of fear in her eyes; a recognition that there is too much beauty here, that the universe is too big and humans too small. With a few words, if he speaks now, he can restore the balance. With a few words, if he can only find them in time … But then Sugar raises her arm higher still, and shifts the inclination of her hips, and her dress clings to her body differently from how it clung a moment before, and he sees the slight swell of her bosom through the fabric, and he recalls how those breasts feel against his palms. Abruptly he aches to strip her naked, to push her down on her hands and knees, to spread the cheeks of her arse until her cunt yawns open …

Anything you ask of me
.

He forces his eyes open. It is wrong for a man past his middle years to reminisce tenderly about a whore. He is a respectable man, not some dissolute bohemian. The idle friends of his youth are long gone, unfit companions for a man of his standing. He is a pillar of the community, a pillar. His hand is down his trousers, massaging his erection, or pushing it down, he’s not sure which. How hungry she was for him! – if what she said could be believed. And no woman can be believed. The world is a sticky mess of betrayal.

Agnes. If he has amorous thoughts, they ought to be about her. She was his flower, his little treasure. She was innocent and unpolluted. No man had laid a hand on her naked flesh until he came. She lay beside him, under him, stiff and clammy, like a chilled ham carved into the shape of a woman. He should never have touched her. Why did he touch her? Because she was the most delicious little thing, and he had earned the right to have her. A man is not a saint.

He leans his head back against the top of his chair. Digs the hard wood into his scalp, to combat the throbbing in his brain. Today can still be a productive day, if he can get his fever under control. The medicine should begin to take effect any minute now.

Oh, what a pretty girl she was. Pretty as a blossom, and as pale. Spoiled blossoms, the mortuary slab. The machines in his factory in Surrey; God damn the man who sold them to him. A fortune’s-worth of lavender petals, all spoiled, tainted with engine oil, suffused with the ineradicable smell of burning. Nothing to be done but wait for the next harvest. At the mercy of Nature and his competitors. Lord save him: no one else will. Sugar’s lips: how dry they were, how feathery against his own. How satisfying she was to kiss. But he has no business thinking of her, no business. That afternoon in April is a mirage; it never was; it is a pretty illusion shimmering over a clump of ordure.

The corpse on the mortuary slab. Men had forced him to look at a body half eaten away by fish. The face was a skull. He had said it was Agnes. Was it Agnes? He looks again. The face fleshes out a little, then a little more, teasingly taking on human form in increments of skin. He stares, transfixed. Like a candle magically unmelting itself, the woman’s flesh is restored on the bone, until Agnes’s eyes, cheeks and mouth are clearly recognisable. Yes, yes, he should never have doubted. The ambience of the mortuary loses its harshness, and before long, the trolley on which Agnes lies is more like a bed, and she wears a white gown like a nun or an angel, faintly glowing in gentle light.

Now happy memories of his lost little wife take hold of him. He recalls the enchanting, peculiar lass she was when they first met, a sweetly scented stranger. She was seventeen, but looked younger. She held herself as though she’d developed a bosom only yesterday or the day before, and hadn’t a clue what to do with it. If she was aware of being watched, she could walk with gracious poise, but if she forgot herself, she would skip along in a flurry of skirts, and if she was tickled by some remark or occurrence, she would giggle infectiously like a child. Seated in the right sort of chair in the right sort of setting, however, she resembled a portrait of a lady by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She could certainly act as demurely as any duchess who ever hid her smile behind a fan. She wore only bright colours, and favoured white, so that in the noonday sunlight she shone so brilliantly that he must cup his hand over his brow.

Go play with someone else. You are hurting me
.

He butts his head against the chair-back, groaning. Fate is cruel, fate is vicious. All one’s overtures of love are rejected, all one’s well-meaning is misunderstood, all one’s business plans come to nought. No, No, and No –
that
is Fate’s answer. Even the chance to have a son and see the next generation reaping fruit where one’s own labours were unrewarded: Fate said No. Who will inherit his empire? ‘Empire’? Well, whatever it is, who will inherit it? Constance. She who meets him daily for dinner as though they were both guests in a hotel, conversing politely, their eyes slightly glazed as they stare into the invisible horizons of their separate lives. What Constance knows about toiletry manufacture would fit on the head of a pin. She will bury him, shed a few tears, feed his business into the mouth of one of the bigger fish, and move on. Good old Constance, patient Constance, forbearing Constance. Waiting all these years while he sits at his desk, scribbling himself sum by sum into his coffin.

Somewhere, though, he has a child. His sole issue. God alone knows where she is; the police certainly don’t. Sophie. He named her Sophie. She might have been the delight of his old age. She might have given him a grandson to pass the business onto. She might, for all he knows, be working in a brothel, servicing drunken louts while Sugar sits counting the money. She might, for all he knows, be dead.

Anguish blurs his vision as he tries to imagine his daughter as an adult. Instead, he sees only a crimson, swollen child’s face streaming with tears, and hears Sophie’s whining voice pleading not to be separated from her beloved Miss Sugar. Oh, the poisonous cleverness of that woman, to have bewitched his daughter just as she bewitched him! ‘Stop that now, Sophie,’ he commanded her, but she was unable to obey. ‘Open your pretty blue eyes and look at me,’ he commanded, but she defied him.

Blue eyes. Yes, she had blue eyes. Pretty blue eyes indeed. Like her mother. ‘She has your eyes’ – that’s what he told Agnes, directly after the birth, when the midwife had hustled the baby out of the room and Agnes lay delirious in her bloody bed. It was the most encouraging thing he could think of to say, given the severity of his disappointment in the sex of his child. ‘She has your eyes.’

‘No!’ Agnes screamed, hiding her face behind her hands as though he were attempting to dig her eyeballs out of their sockets with a spoon. ‘No one has my eyes! No one but me!’

Mimicking his wife’s self-protective motion, William jerks his hands up to his face, which is cold and damp. In doing so, he knocks over the port bottle. Fortunately it’s empty, although he can’t recall drinking the rest. It rolls off his desk onto the floor, landing with a musical clunk. He bends down in his chair to retrieve it.

In the dizzy swirl of darkness that follows, he tumbles freely. It is not at all like falling off a chair onto the floor. It is like being an umbrella snatched up by a gust of wind, or a top hat blown off a man’s head, spinning through the air, beyond reach, to land God knows where. Will someone catch him?

You poor baby
.

A female voice. He is on his back. He is no longer falling. The darkness has given way to a pulsating red, and he lies in an underground subway, or perhaps a sewer, staring up at the vaulted brickwork. Each brick glows as though heated in a forge. Sweat prickles up through his pores; trapped warmth seems to swell inside his skin, threatening to burst out.

Suddenly hovering over him is a young whore with dark hair and a powdered face. Her eyes gleam with murderous delight. He tries to crawl away, but many hands seize hold of his clothing and begin to rip him naked. Only when they are finished with him do they allow him to slither away on a slick of filthy water and his own blood.

Help me
, he mouths, for he has lost the power of speech.

I’m here, William
.

Sugar’s voice. He recognises it at once, even after fifteen years without it. Warm, sincere, slightly hoarse. The most beguiling voice in the world.

‘Leave me in peace,’ he groans.

Let me help you
.

‘You’ve helped me enough,’ he retorts, shutting his eyes tight. ‘My dear Agnes is dead. You’ve taken my daughter from me. I am old before my time.’

Shhhhhhhh
…

He feels her hand on his face. Her palm is as rough as ever, rough as bark. She strokes his cheek with breathtaking tenderness. He hasn’t felt a touch so tender in the five and a half thousand days since she left him. If he opens his eyes, he knows he’ll see her, and that he will weep with joy at seeing her, and that he will confess that he has lost his way, that he has been wandering all these years like an abandoned child in a dark forest, longing for her to find him and take him home. He senses she’s bending down to kiss him; the soft curls of her abundant hair fall against his neck and shoulders; her breath dampens his lips.

‘Mr Rackham?’

He struggles weakly against her embrace (what kind of fool does she think he is?), while at the same time he yearns to be enfolded in her arms, to wail into her bosom, to disappear between her legs.

‘Mr Rackham?’

Her gentle touch on his cheek becomes a pat, then a hesitant slap. He opens his eyes. There are two women squatting over his body, each seizing him under an armpit and attempting to heave him up off the carpet. Their faces swim into focus. One face is Letty’s. The other – better-preserved, bright-eyed, sharp-nosed – is his wife’s.

‘I’m all right,’ he croaks. ‘Leave me.’

‘You’re awful hot, Mr Rackham,’ says Letty.

‘Burning up, I’d say,’ says Constance, laying a hand on his forehead, unfussily, as though assessing the warmth of a teapot.

‘I have a fever,’ he concedes. ‘It’ll pass.’

‘Doctor Curlew is on his way,’ says Constance.

‘No, no,’ he mutters, as they help him back onto his chair. ‘No.’

‘It’s done, William.’

He groans again, this time in annoyance. He cannot afford to lose more time than he has already lost. Rackham Toiletries is under siege from competitors. Its territory must be defended.

‘Leave me, leave me,’ he implores.

The two women glance at each other. He is not so feverish that he fails to notice them sharing a glimmer of illicit intimacy. Women against men. So profound and universal is this female antagonism that it can even cross the gulf between mistress and servant. He knows, oh yes he knows.

‘Leave me.’

The two women do as he asks. Letty can hardly disobey, can she? As for Constance, dear sweet Constance, dear patient Constance, she gives him one of her mildly hurt looks. She’ll cheer up, no doubt, as soon as she steps out into her congenial playground of social intercourse. She’ll drink her tea, her little finger raised, her sparkling eyes focused on whomever has dropped in on her today, while her husband toils un-noticed behind one of the many closed doors upstairs.