The Crimson Petal and the White (100 page)

‘Tomorrow afternoon …’ she echoes. ‘You mean … today?’

‘Yes.’

She blinks repeatedly. Her eyelids feel like they’re lined with grit. ‘Couldn’t it be another day?’ she suggests, very soft, to keep her voice sweet. ‘You’d benefit from a lie-in, don’t you think, after … well, after the night you’ve had?’

‘Yes,’ he concedes, ‘but this visit was a-a-arranged qu-quite some time ago.’

Sugar, still blinking, strains to comprehend. ‘But surely it’s for
you
to decide—’

‘There’s another p-person coming too. S-someone whom I’m loath to i-inconvenience.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’ He cannot look her in the eye.

‘I see.’

‘I … I hoped you would.’

He reaches out to touch her. The aroma of alcohol still exudes from his pores, released in a waft from his armpits as he leans across the bed to lay his palm on her shoulder. His stubby fingers smell of semen and the perfume of street-walkers.

‘I haven’t told you o-often enough,’ he says hoarsely, ‘w-what a treasure you are.’

She sighs, and squeezes his hand briefly, letting it go before he has a chance to lock his fingers into hers.

‘We’d better sleep, then,’ she says, turning her face away and dropping her cheek against the pillow. ‘My eyes, as you’ve pointed out, are bloodshot and ugly.’

She keeps still, feigning cataleptic exhaustion, staring at his shadow on the wall. She sees the magnified black shape of his hand hovering in the space above her, trembling in its arrested impulse to soothe the anger from her flesh. The stale air of her little bedroom, already muggy with burnt writing-paper, burnt book-binding thread, and the scent of betrayal, grows intolerable with the tension of his yearning to make amends. If she could force herself to sit up for just one second, ruffle his hair and kiss him on the forehead, that would probably do the trick. She nuzzles her cheek harder into her pillow, and closes her fist under it.

‘Good night,’ says William, getting to his feet. She doesn’t reply. He picks up the lamp and carries its light out of her room, closing the door gently behind him.

* * *

Next day, shortly after lunch, Sophie emerges from the school-room, ready to accompany her father and Miss Sugar to the factory where soap is made. Her face has been washed with that same soap this morning, by Rose (for Miss Sugar is slightly too crippled to wash and dress anyone just at the moment). Rose has a different way of combing and pinning Sophie’s hair and when Miss Sugar sees it she looks as though she wants to take the pins out and begin from the beginning. But she can’t because Rose is watching and Father is waiting and Miss Sugar is wrestling with her crutch, trying to walk in such a way as to pretend she hardly needs it and is just taking it along in case she gets tired.

Sophie has been thinking a lot about Miss Sugar lately. She has come to the conclusion that Miss Sugar has another life beyond her duties as a governess and a secretary to Father, and that this other life is rather complicated and unhappy. This conclusion came to her quite suddenly, a few days ago, when Sophie peeked through the crack in her school-room door and witnessed her governess being carried up the stairs by Papa and Rose. Once long ago, on an occasion when Sophie disobeyed Nurse’s command not to peek out of the nursery door, she saw her Mama being carried up those same stairs, looking remarkably similar to Miss Sugar: unladylike, all rumpled skirts and dangly limbs, with only the whites of her eyes showing. There exist, Sophie has decided, two Miss Sugars: the self-possessed custodian of all knowledge, and an overgrown child in trouble.

When the time comes to descend the stairs, Miss Sugar attempts two or three steps with the crutch, then hands the crutch to Sophie to hold while she leans heavily on the banister the rest of the way. Her face has no expression on it except for a half or perhaps a quarter smile (Sophie has just been introduced to fractions) and she gets to the bottom without showing much effort, although her forehead is twinkly with sweat.

‘No, I’m quite all right,’ she says to Father as he looks her up and down. He nods and allows Letty to dress him in his overcoat, then strides out of the door without a backward glance.

Father is seated inside the carriage before you can say Jack Robinson. Sophie and Miss Sugar approach more slowly, the governess limping across the carriage-way with that same quarter-smile on her reddening face. Cheesman stares at her with his big head tilted to one side, his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat. His eyes and Miss Sugar’s meet, and Sophie understands at once that Miss Sugar hates him.

‘ ’Ere now, Miss Sophie,’ says Cheesman when Sophie comes within arm’s length and, reaching down, he snatches her off the carriage-way, through the cabin door and onto her seat, with a single sweep of his strong arms.

‘Allow me, Miss Sugar,’ he grins, as if he means to sweep her up too, but he merely extends a steadying hand as Miss Sugar climbs into the cabin. She’s
almost
safely inside, when she sways back a little – and instantly Cheesman’s hands are on her waist, then they disappear behind her bottom. A rustling sound issues from Miss Sugar’s horse-hair bustle as the coachman pushes her up.

‘Take care, Cheesman,’ hisses Miss Sugar as she claws the coach’s upholstery and pulls herself inside.

‘Oh, I always do, Miss Sugar,’ he replies, bowing so that his smirk is hidden in the upturned collars of his coat.

In a jiffy, they’re on the move, with horse-harness jingling and the ground shaking the frame of the carriage. They’re going all the way to a place called Lambeth! Miss Sugar has shown it to her on a map (not a very good or clear map, it must be admitted; it seems that the persons who make school-books are more interested in drawing ancient Mesopotamia at the time of Asshurbanipal than the London of today). Anyway, Lambeth is on the
other
side of the River Thames, the side that doesn’t have the Rackham house and the church and the park and the fountain and Mister Scofield & Tophie’s photography shop and Lockheart’s Cocoa Rooms where she ate the cake that made her sick, and all the rest of the known world.

‘You are turned out very nicely, Sophie,’ says her Father. She blushes with pleasure, even though Miss Sugar frowns and looks down at her own shoes. One of those shoes is very tight, swollen by the sore foot inside. The leather is stretched and shiny, like a ham. Miss Sugar needs new shoes, or at least one. Sophie needs new shoes, too; her feet are very pinched, even though she hasn’t fallen downstairs or anything of that sort: only grown bigger, from age. Wouldn’t it be good if Miss Sugar suggested a visit to a shoe shop, after the visit to Papa’s soap factory? If time is short, it would be a sensibler place to go than a Cocoa Room, because food ceases to exist as soon as you swallow it, whereas a well-fitting pair of shoes is a lasting boon for the feet.

‘And after you’ve seen my factory, we’ll go to Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms,’ says Father, nodding across to Sophie with his eyes exaggeratedly wide. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Papa,’ Sophie says. Merely to be addressed by him is a privilege worth any disappointment.

‘I have told that fool Paltock he’s to sort himself out by the thirty-first of this month,’ he goes on. ‘It was high time, don’t you think?’

Sophie ponders this for a moment, then realises that her role in the conversation has come to an end.

Miss Sugar draws a deep breath and looks out of the window.

‘You know best, I’m sure,’ she says.

‘When I say “that fool”, I didn’t call him that in my letter, of course.’

‘No, I should hope not.’ Sugar pauses, chewing at tiny flakes of dry skin on her lips. Then: ‘He’ll transfer his allegiances to your competitors without the slightest scruple, I’m sure, and at a time when it inconveniences you to the maximum degree.’

‘All the more reason to give him a nudge now, before the Season.’

Sophie turns her head to the window. If her father should feel any further need to speak to her, he’ll no doubt summon her attention.

The journey through the city is wonderfully interesting. Apart from Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, whose trees she recognises in passing, and the big marble arch, everything is new to her. Cheesman has been instructed ‘not to get us snarled in traffic’, and so he steers the carriage through all sorts of unfamiliar thoroughfares, re-joining Oxford Street only when unavoidable. When he comes to the so-called circus at which, on their previous outing, Sophie was disappointed not to witness any lions or elephants, he doesn’t turn right towards the bright commotion, but keeps going straight.

Soon the buildings and shops are looking neither grand nor cheerful – indeed, they look shabby, and so do the people on the footpaths. All the men bear a strange resemblance to Mr Woburn the knife-sharpener who comes to the Rackham house, and all the women look like Letty except not as neat and clean, and nobody sings or shouts or whistles or declares they’ve something that only costs a ha’penny and is worth half a crown. They move like dreary phantoms through the grey chill, and when they lift their faces to note the passing of the Rackham carriage, their eyes are black as coals.

The paving under the wheels of the carriage becomes more and more uneven, and the streets narrower. The houses now are in a frightful state, all jumbled together and falling apart, with long sagging lines of people’s underclothes and bed-sheets hung in plain view, as if no one here is the least bit ashamed of wetting the bed. There’s a horrid smell of dirty things, substances that Shears might use to make plants grow or kill them, and the women and children have hardly any clothes on.

As they rattle through the worst street yet, Sophie notices a little girl standing barefoot by a large iron bucket. The child, dressed in a button-less blouse so large that its ragged hem clings to her filthy ankles, taps the bucket idly with a stick. Yet, although in these respects the girl is as different from Sophie as the trolls in Uncle Henry’s fairytale book, their faces – the girl’s face, and Sophie’s face – share such a striking resemblance that Sophie is agog, and leans her head out of the carriage window to stare.

The urchin child, finding herself the object of unwelcome attention, reaches down into her bucket and with a single unhesitating motion hurls a small missile. Sophie doesn’t pull her head back; she can’t quite believe that the dark thing flashing through the air exists in the same world as her own body and the carriage in which she sits; rather, she’s entranced by the expression of stubborn malevolence on her twin’s face … entranced for an instant only. Then the projectile hits her right between the eyes.

‘What the devil … !’ yelps William, as his daughter sprawls backwards onto the cabin floor.

‘Sophie!’ cries Sugar, lurching violently as Cheesman reins the carriage to a halt. She scoops the child into her arms, relieved to see only bewilderment, no blood. No serious harm has been done, thank God: there’s a mucky brown mark on Sophie’s brow, and in her flailings for balance she has (with the unerring bad luck that attends such mishaps) squashed the fallen dog turd between her palm and the toe of Father’s left shoe.

Instinctively, Sugar grabs the nearest loose cloth – the embroidered antimacassar from the seat next to William’s – and begins to wipe Sophie’s face with it.

‘Haven’t you got a handkerchief!’ barks William, in a state of furious agitation. His fists are clenched, his chest heaves, he thrusts his angry face out of the window, but the urchin has vanished like a rat. Then, noticing that Sophie’s hand is still dark with dogshit, he recoils against the wall of the cabin, away from any further besmirching.

‘Stop thrashing about, you stupid child!’ he yells. ‘Sugar, take her glove off first! God almighty, can’t you see … !’ The two females, cowed by his rage, fumble to obey. ‘And what were you doing,’ he bawls at Sophie, ‘poking your head out like that, like an imbecile? Have you no sense whatsoever?’

He’s trembling, and Sugar knows his outburst is as much from distress as anything else; his nerves have never quite recovered from his beating. She cleans Sophie as best she can, while William jumps out of the cabin and washes his shoe, with the help of a rag supplied by Cheesman.

‘A splash of beer’s the remedy for that, sir,’ chirrups the coachman. ‘I always keep some ’andy for just such a purpose.’

While the men are busy, Sugar examines Sophie’s face. The child is sobbing almost imperceptibly, her breaths shallow and quick, but there are no tears, and not so much as a whimper of complaint.

‘Are you hurt, Sophie?’ whispers Sugar, licking the tip of her thumb and wiping one vestigial smudge of muck from the child’s pale flesh.

Sophie juts her jaw forward, and her eyes blink hard.

‘No, Miss.’

For the continuation of the journey, Sophie sits as still as a waxwork or a parcel, responding only to the joltings of the carriage wheels. William, once his explosion of temper has settled, becomes aware of what he’s done, and shows his contrition with such offerings as ‘Well,
that
was a n-narrow escape, w-wasn’t it, Sophie?’ and ‘We sh-shall have to get you some n-new gloves now, sh-shan’t we?’ – all delivered in a jolly tone that’s pitiful and irritating in equal measure.

‘Yes, Papa,’ says Sophie quietly, displaying her good manners but nothing more. Her gaze is unfocused; or rather, it is focused upon some layer of the cosmos that’s invisible to gross creatures called William Rackham. Never has her resemblance to Agnes been as remarkable as it is now.

‘Look, Sophie!’ says William. ‘We’re about to cross Waterloo Bridge!’

Obediently, Sophie looks out of the window, her head pulled well back from the aperture. After a minute or two, though – to William’s palpable relief – the magic of a vast body of water viewed from a great height does its work, and Sophie leans forward, her elbow resting on the window-ledge.

‘What do you see, hmm?’ says William, clownishly attentive. ‘Barges, I expect?’

‘Yes, Papa,’ says Sophie, staring down into the churning grey-green expanse. It’s scarcely recognisable as the neat blue ribbon on the map that Miss Sugar showed her this morning, but if this bridge they’re crossing is Waterloo Bridge then they must be very near Waterloo Station, where her Mama got lost while searching for the Music School. Sophie peers down into the distant water and wonders which bit of it, exactly, is the bit where her mother sank under the waves and drank more water than a living body can hold.