The Crimson Petal and the White (106 page)

One is an appeal on behalf of India’s lepers who, according to a Mrs Eccles of Peckham Rye, can be wholly cured if each businessman in Britain earning in excess of a thousand pounds per annum donates just one of those pounds to the post office box address below. Another is from the William Whiteley emporium in Bayswater, expressing confidence that every Notting Hill resident will by now be aware that Whiteley’s has added ironmongery to its cornucopia of departments, and that ladies shopping without a male escort and requiring luncheon can safely visit the refurbished refreshment room. The third is from a gentleman living a few hundred yards away in Pembridge Villas, enclosing a filthy sheet of paper decorated with hollyhock emblems and an ornate letterhead too damaged by muddy shoeprints to decipher. Inscribed in
faux
-Gothic calligraphy is the following list:

Minuet: 10

Gavotte: 9½

Cachucha: 8½

Mazurka: 10

Tarantella: 10

Deportment during engagements/partings: 10

Deportment during lulls: 9½

Well done, Agnes!

To which the gentleman from Pembridge Villas adds, on a separate clean sheet:

My wife is of the opinion that this may once have belonged to you.

Rose, when she brings her master the second mail, is discomposed to find him hunched over his study desk, sobbing into his hands.

‘Where is she, Rose?’ he groans. ‘Where is she hiding?’

The servant, unaccustomed to such intimacy from him, is caught off-guard.

‘Could she have gone home, sir?’ she suggests, nervously fingering the empty silver tray.

‘Home?’ he echoes, removing his hands from his face.

‘To her mother, sir.’

He stares at her, open-mouthed.

* * *

Having made himself sweaty and breathless by running from where he left Cheesman’s carriage ensnared in the Regent Street traffic, William Rackham knocks at the door of the house in Silver Street – the house that never was, despite the claims of
More Sprees in London
, in Silver Street proper.

After a long pause, during which he inhales deeply and attempts to calm the beating of his heart, the door is opened a crack. A beautiful brown eye peeps out at him, the focal point of a long, thin plumb-line vignette of alabaster skin, crisp white shirt, and coffee-coloured suit.

A woman’s silky voice speaks. ‘Have you an appointment?’

‘I w-wish to see Mrs Castaway.’

The eye half-shuts, displaying a luxurious eyelash. ‘Whether you’ll see her or not,’ replies the voice, honeyed with insolence, ‘depends on how bad a boy you’ve been.’

‘What!’ William cries. ‘Open the door, madam!’

The strange woman widens the slit until the steel chain that’s hung across it is stretched taut. Her mannish hair, oiled flat to her scalp, her coat and trousers – as smart as any swell’s – and her Mornington shirt-collar complete with cravat, send a chill of disgust down William’s spine.

‘I w-want a few w-words with Mrs Castaway,’ he reiterates.

‘You’re behind the times, sir,’ says the Sapphist, bringing a cigarette holder into view, and taking a puff on it, quick as a kiss. ‘Mrs Castaway is dead. Miss Jennifer Pearce is the proprietress here now.’

‘It’s … it’s a-actually news of Sugar that I’m after.’

‘Sugar’s gone, and so are the rest of last year’s girls,’ the woman retorts, smoke leaking from her nostrils. ‘Out with the old, in with the new, that’s our philosophy.’ And indeed, what Rackham can see of the house’s interior is renovated beyond recognition. An unfamiliar face peeks out of the parlour, followed by a body: an exquisitely dressed apparition in blue and gold Algerine.

‘It’s m-most important I find Sugar,’ he insists. ‘If you have any inkling of her w-w-whereabouts, I implore you tell me. I’ll pay you w-whatever you ask.’

The madam dawdles nearer, lazily swinging a tightly-furled fan as if it were a whip.

‘I have two things to say to you, sir,’ she declares, ‘and you needn’t pay for them. Firstly, the girl you call Sugar has renounced the gay life, as far as we know: you may care to rummage around for her in the kennels of the Rescue Society. Secondly, in our opinion, your soaps and ointments are not improved by having your image stamped upon them. Lord grant us
some
places where we don’t have to see a man’s face. Close the door, Amelia.’

And the door closes.

For a few moments following this outrage, William considers knocking afresh and this time demanding satisfaction, on pain of police escort. But then he cautions himself that these vile creatures may well be telling the truth about Sugar. She isn’t in
this
house, that’s clear enough; and if not here, then where? Is it really conceivable that Sugar might throw herself on the mercy of the Rescue Society? How else to explain the curious coincidence of Emmeline Fox sending Sugar a parcel only a few days ago? Is this yet another example of a clammy collusion between two tragically misguided females? Determined not to let anger cloud his reason, he wanders away from Mrs Castaway’s, back to the hurly-burly of Silver Street.

‘Missis play the piano, sir?’

After an excruciating omnibus ride, in which he sat face to face with a smirking dowager – she with an advertisement for Rackham’s Damask Rose Drops above her head, he with an advertisement for Rimmel’s Eau de Benzoin above his – William disembarks in Bayswater, and proceeds directly to the long row of modest little houses in Caroline Place. There he steels himself for his next struggle against the tightening bonds of tragedy.

Having received no answer the first time, William knocks louder and more insistently at the door of Mrs Emmeline Fox. The front window is shrouded with curtains, but he has seen two auras – auroras? – of lamp-light glowing through the layers of faded lace. Henry’s cat, roused by the commotion, has leapt onto the sill and now butts and strokes his furry snout against the cobwebby cross-piece of the window-frame. He looks fully twice the size he was when Mrs Fox first bore him away from the Rackham house.

‘Who is it, please?’ Through the wooden barrier comes Mrs Fox’s voice, sounding sleepy, although it’s two in the afternoon.

‘It’s William Rackham. May I speak with you?’

There is a pause. William, windblown and conspicuous in the street, fidgets in frustration; he’s well aware that a visit of this kind – unaccompanied man upon lone woman – offends propriety, but surely Mrs Fox, of all people, ought to be prepared to bend the rules?

‘I’m not decent,’ comes her voice again.

William blinks at the brass number on her door, dumbstruck. At the street corner, a dog yaps joyously at a mongrel companion on the other side, and a boy in shirtsleeves casts a suspicious glance at the tubby bearded man with the angry face.

‘Couldn’t I come to see
you
,’ Mrs Fox goes on, ‘a little later this morning? Or afternoon?’

‘It’s a matter of great urgency!’ protests William.

Another pause, while Henry’s cat stretches himself to his full height against the window-panes, revealing a heroic girth and two downy balls.

‘Please wait a minute,’ says Mrs Fox.

William waits. What the devil is she doing? Ushering Sugar and Sophie out of her back door? Stowing them in a wardrobe? Now that he’s made the effort to come here, his initial suspicion that Mrs Fox might hold a clue to Sugar’s whereabouts has swollen into the manic conviction that she’s harbouring the fugitives herself.

After what seems an age, Mrs Fox opens up to him, and he steps inside her vestibule before she has a chance to object.

‘How can I help you, Mr Rackham?’

With a glance he appraises the state of her house – the musty smell, the subtle patina of dust, the iron bed-frame leaning against the wall, the piles of books on the stairs, the burlap sack marked
GLOVES FOR IRELAND
blocking access to the broom-cupboard. Mrs Fox stares at him tolerantly, only the slightest bit shamed by her poorly kept house, waiting for him to offer her an explanation for his boorish imposition. She’s dressed in a calf-length winter coat with a black fur collar and cuffs, buttoned up to the breastbone. Under that, instead of a blouse or a bodice, she’s wearing a man’s shirt that’s none too clean and far too big for her. Her boots are buttoned only so much as will prevent them sagging like black banana peels off her naked ankles.

‘My daughter has been abducted,’ William declares, ‘by Miss Sugar.’

Mrs Fox’s eyes widen, but not nearly as much as such shocking news
ought
to widen them. Indeed, she looks half-asleep.

‘How … extraordinary,’ she breathes.

‘Extraordinary!’ he echoes, bewildered at her sang-froid. Why the devil

doesn’t she swoon, or drop to her knees with her hands clasped to her bosom, or lift her feeble fist to her brow and cry ‘Oh!’?

‘She impressed me as such a nice, well-meaning girl.’

Her placid leniency provokes him to anger. ‘You were deceived. She’s a madwoman, a vicious madwoman, and she has my daughter.’

‘They seemed fond of each other …’

‘Mrs Fox, I don’t wish to argue with you. I–I …’ He swallows hard, wondering if there’s a way to broach his intentions that doesn’t make him out to be an utter barbarian. There isn’t. ‘Mrs Fox, I wish to satisfy myself that Sugar – that Miss Sugar and my daughter are not in this house.’

Emmeline’s lips part in astonishment.

‘I cannot consent to that,’ she murmurs.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Fox,’ he replies hoarsely, ‘but I must.’ And, before her glare of disapproval can unman him, he stumps past her, into the kitchen, where he immediately collides with an interlocked bale of Henry’s chairs. The room, small to begin with, is bizarrely cluttered with two of everything: two stoves, two crockery cupboards, two ice pails, two kettles, and so on and so on. There’s a bread-loaf with a knife stuck in it, and fifteen, twenty tins of salmon and corned beef, lined up like soldiers on a bench that’s been sponged clean but still shows rosy-yellow stains of blood. There’s barely room to stand, let alone conceal a tall woman and a substantial infant. The garden, clearly visible through the rain-washed kitchen window, is a wilderness of lush, inedible greenery.

Already knowing himself to be in the wrong, but unable to stop, William lurches out of the kitchen and inspects the other rooms. Henry’s cat follows at his heels, excited by so much physical activity in a house whose pace is usually so sedate. William dodges the ricks of dusty furniture and does his best to avoid kicking boxes, mounds of books, neatly addressed parcels awaiting only postage stamps, bulbous sacks. Mrs Fox’s parlour shows evidence of devoted industry, with dozens of envelopes filled and ready for sending, a map of the metropolis spread open on the writing-desk, and numerous receptacles containing glue, ink, water, tea, and a dark-brown substance with a milky scum on top.

He thunders up the stairs, blushing as much from shame as effort. At the door of the bedroom, a cardboard box is littered with cat turds. Inside, Mrs Fox’s bed is rumpled, and a pair of male trousers, much sullied by cat fur, lies prone on its coverlet. Hanging from a hat-stand is an immaculate and neatly ironed outfit of bodice, jacket and dress, in the sober colours that suit Mrs Fox best.

William can bear it no longer; his fantasy of wrenching open a wardrobe and, with a cry of triumphal relief, pulling Sugar and his terrified daughter into the light has withered utterly. He returns downstairs, where Mrs Fox stands waiting for him, her face upturned, her eyes gleaming with reproach.

‘Mrs Fox,’ he says, feeling dirtier than the contents of the cardboard box on the landing. ‘I–I … How … This violation of your p-privacy. How can you ever f-forgive me?’

She folds her arms around her chest, and squares her jaw.

‘It’s not for me to forgive you, Mr Rackham,’ she remarks coolly, as though merely reminding him that the Christian faith they nominally share is not of the Catholic brand.

‘I was … not in m-my right m-mind,’ pleads William, shuffling towards the front door, worried that – on top of everything else – he’ll step on Henry’s cat, which is cavorting around his ankles, biting his trousers. ‘I-is there n-nothing I can do to redeem m-m-myself in your estimation?’

Mrs Fox blinks slowly, hugging her bosom harder. Her long face has, William notices belatedly, an odd beauty about it, and – God in heaven, can it be? – is that a
smile
teasing the corners of her lips?

‘Thank you, Mr Rackham,’ she says suavely. ‘I’ll give your offer serious thought. After all, a man of your resources is ideally matched with the many worthy things that need doing in this world.’ She gestures towards the philanthropic jumble of her house. ‘I’ve taken on more work than I can manage, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So … Yes, Mr Rackham, I look forward to your assistance in the future.’

And, unorthodox to the last, she – not he – opens the door, and bids him good day.

‘Miaow!’ concurs Henry’s cat, prostrating himself happily at his mistress’s feet.

Chastened to the point where he would welcome a thunderbolt from heaven to blast him painlessly to a cinder, William returns to his own house. Have the police called? No, the police haven’t called. Does he want his luncheon warmed? No, he does not want his luncheon warmed. Coffee, bring him coffee.

Unendurable though the tension is, he has no choice but to endure it, and to carry on his business as normal. More mail has arrived, none of it regarding Sugar or his daughter. One letter is from Grover Pankey, Esq., calling him ill-bred, and severing all connexion with him. So deranged are William’s spirits that he considers challenging Pankey to a duel: the ugly old cur is probably a crack shot, and would put William out of his misery with one puff from his pistol. But no, he must keep his head about him, and make overtures to that Cheadle fellow in Glamorgan. Cheadle’s ivory pots are light as sea-shells, but strong enough to survive being squeezed hard in one’s fist. William knows: he’s tried it.