The Crimson Petal and the White (21 page)

‘Wh-what’s wrong with her, Bodley?’

There is a terrible pause, then Bodley gravely announces: ‘I’m afraid it’s … epistaxis! A proboscidiferous haemorrhage! Quickly, child: who is to have custody of the doll?’

William collapses back into his chair, struck by relief and anger. ‘Bodley!’ he yells over Sophie’s ceaseless wailing. ‘This is no laughing matter. A child’s life is a fragile thing!”

‘Nonsense,’ tushes Bodley, still on his knees before the child. ‘A biff on the nose, is it then? How did you get that, hmm? Sophie?’ She screams on, so he tugs the legs of her doll to get her attention. Encouraged by her reaction, he lifts her pinafore, exposing her toy.

‘Now, Sophie,’ he cautions, ‘you must put your little friend down. You’re frightening him to death!’ Instantly the pitch of Sophie’s wailing drops considerably, and Bodley pushes through. ‘From the way you’re weeping he must think he’s about to be orphaned – left all alone! Come now, put him down – or no, give him to
me
for a moment. Look, his eyes are wide with fright!’ The doll, a Hindoo boy with ‘Twinings’ embroidered on his chest, is indeed wide-eyed, his chocolate-brown bisque head disturbingly lifelike in comparison with his limp rag body, a soft hemp skeleton swathed in cotton clout suggestive of smock and pantalettes. Sophie looks her coolie in the face, sees the fear there – and hands him over to the gentleman.

‘Now,’ Bodley goes on, ‘you must prove to him that you’re really all right, which you can’t do with all that blood on your face.’ (Sophie’s wailing has been reduced to a snivel, though her nose is still bubbling crimson.) ‘Ashwell, give me your handkerchief.’

‘
My
handkerchief?’

‘Be reasonable, Ashwell; mine is still fashionable.’ Never taking his eyes off Sophie, and holding her doll in one arm, he extends his other arm behind him, wiggling the fingers impatiently until the handkerchief is surrendered. Then he sets to, mopping and dabbing at Sophie’s face, so vigorously that she sways on her feet. As he wipes, he catches sight of Janey out of the corner of his eye, and instructs her, in a sing-song school-masterly tone:

‘Come now, Janey. I shall need a wet cloth presently, shan’t I?’

The servant gapes, too dazed to move.

‘Wet cloth,’ simplifies Bodley patiently. ‘Two parts cloth, one part water.’

A nod from William frees Janey to run off on this errand, even as the handkerchief begins to unmask the features of his only child. She is merely sniffling now, lifting her head in rhythm with the stranger’s strokes against her face, trusting him instinctively.

‘Look!’ says Bodley, directing her attention to the Hindoo boy. ‘He feels much better, don’t you see?’

Sophie nods, the last tears rolling out of her enormous red-rimmed eyes, and stretches out her arms for her doll.

‘All right,’ judges Bodley. ‘But mind! You mustn’t get him all bloody.’ He takes a fold of her pinafore between two fingers and holds it up so she can see how wet it is. Without demur, she allows him to lift the offending garment over her head; he has it off with a swift one-handed motion.

‘There now,’ he says, tenderly.

Janey returns with the wet flannel, and makes as if to wipe Sophie’s face with it, but Bodley takes the cloth from her and performs the task himself. Sophie Rackham, her features now uncamouflaged and her cheeks less swollen, is revealed a plain, serious-looking child, certainly no candidate for a Pears’ Soap advertisement – or a Rackhams’ one, at that. Her large eyes are china blue, but protruding and cheerless, and her curly blonde hair hangs limp. More than anything else she has the air of a domestic pet bought for a child who has since died; an obsolete pet that is given food, lodging, and even the occasional pat of affection, but no reason for living at all.

‘Your little friend has a stain on him; we must wash it off,’ Bodley is saying to her. ‘Every second counts.’

She lays her tiny hand on his, and together they sponge at the blood on the Hindoo’s back; she would do anything for this sympathetic stranger, anything.

‘I once knew of a doll who got cranberry sauce all over her hair,’ he tells her, ‘and no one saw to it until much too late. By then, it was hard as tar – with the consequence that her hair had to be shaved off, and she caught pneumonia.’

Sophie looks at him anxiously, too shy to ask the question.

‘No, she didn’t die,’ says Bodley. ‘But she has remained, from that day onward, entirely bald.’ And he raises his eyebrows as far as they will go, pouting in mock disappointment at the idea of one’s eyebrows being the only hairs left on one’s head. Sophie chuckles.

This chuckle, and the screams she came in with, are the only sounds you are going to hear her utter, here in her father’s smoking-room. Nurse is always telling her she knows nothing, but she knows that well-behaved children are neither seen nor heard. Already she has caused a fuss for which she will no doubt be punished; she must become silent and invisible as soon as possible, to placate what’s coming to her.

Yet, even as Sophie stands mute, hunching her shoulders to take up less room, William is amazed at how big she’s grown. It seems like only last week that Sophie was a newborn babe, sleeping invisibly in her cot, while elsewhere in the house, a feverish Agnes lay sobbing in hers. Why, she’s not even a toddler anymore, she’s a … what would one call it? a girl! But how is it possible that he hasn’t noticed the transformation? It’s not as if he doesn’t see her often enough to note her progress – he glimpses her, oh … several times a week! But somehow, she never impressed him as being quite so …
old
. God almighty: he remembers now the day when his father gave that hideous doll to the baby Sophie – something he picked up on a trade visit to India, a Twinings mascot originally meant to sit astride a tin elephant filled with tea. Wasn’t it on that same day that his father loudly declared, in front of the servants, that William had better start ‘boning up’ on the perfume trade? Yes! And this child, this plain-faced girl with blood on her feet, this overgrown infant whose back is turned to him as she and his old chum Philip Bodley indulge in foolishness together …
she
is the living embodiment of the years since; years of veiled threats and enforced economies. How he would like to be the sort of father depicted in ladies’ journals, lifting his smiling tot like a trophy in the air while his adoring wife looks on! But he hasn’t an adoring wife anymore, and his daughter is tainted by misery.

He clears his throat. ‘Janey,’ he says, ‘don’t you think Mr Bodley has done quite enough?’

Who to follow now? Janey, I suggest. Mr Bodley and Mr Ashwell are about to leave anyway, and William Rackham will then immediately resume his study of the Rackham papers. He’ll barely move for hours, so unless you are madly curious about the cost of unwoven Dundee jute as a cheap substitute for cotton wool, or the secrets of making potpourri-scented migraine sachets, you are likely to have a more interesting time with Janey and Sophie as they sit in the nursery, waiting for Beatrice to return.

Janey squats beside Sophie on the floor, clutching her abdomen, suffering the wickedest stomach pains she’s ever had in her life. It must be the stolen morsels of the Rackhams’ breakfast she ate… her punishment from God, a skewer going right through her guts. She rocks to and fro, arms wrapped around her knees, Sophie’s blood-soaked pinafore folded in her lap. What on Earth is she supposed to do with it? Will she be punished by Cook for leaving the kitchen? Will she be punished by Nurse for allowing the Rackhams’ child to come to harm? Punished by Miss Playfair, for rushing to investigate Sophie’s screams instead of finishing the cleaning of the dining-room? Punished by Miss Tillotson for … whatever Miss Tillotson feels like punishing her for today? How did this happen to her, these bloody mishaps and tasks undone, and she to blame, and a thousand girls jostling to take her place? Oh please, let Mr Rackham not dismiss her! Where could she go? Home is too far away, and it’s raining so hard! She’ll end up on, she will! Her honour is all she has to her name, but she
knows
she’s not brave enough to starve for it! But no, please no: she’ll work harder for the Rackhams, yes she will, harder than she’s ever worked before; she just needs a little more time to learn what her new duties actually are.

‘Who was that man?’

Janey turns towards the unfamiliar sound of Sophie Rackham’s voice. She squints, trying not to look at Sophie’s Bristol top spinning on the floor in front of the little girl’s skirts, for fear it might make her feel more bilious.

‘Beg pardon, Miss Sophie?’

‘Who was that man?’ the child repeats, as the top spins drunkenly on to its side.

‘What man, Miss Sophie?’ Janey’s voice is squeezed thin with pain.

‘The nice one.’

Janey struggles to remember a nice man.

‘I din’t know nobody there, I never seen them before,’ she pleads. ‘Except Mr Rackham.’

Sophie spins her top again. ‘He’s my father, did you know?’ she says, frowning. She’s keen to teach Janey the facts of life: servants deserve to learn things too, in her opinion. ‘And
his
father, my father’s father, is a very ’portnant man. He has a long beard, and he goes to India, Liv’pool, everywhere. He’s the same Rackham that you see on the soap and the perfume.’

Janey’s soap is made of leftover slivers from the kitchen, doled out by Cook on a weekly basis, and she has never in her life seen a bottle of perfume. She smiles and nods, in agony, pretending to understand.

‘The nice man,’ Sophie tries again. ‘Has he never come to the house before?’

‘I don’t know, Miss Rackham.’

‘Why not?’

‘I … I used to work all the time only in the scullery. Now I work in the kitchen too – and I bring out the food sometimes, and… and other fings. But I ain’t … I ain’t been out in the ’ouse much yet.’

‘Me neither.’ It’s a shy pleasure, this illicit comradeship with the lowliest of servants. Little Sophie peers directly into Janey’s face, wondering if anything unusual is going to happen, now that they’ve shared such intimacy. This could be a special day, the beginning of a new life; why, this is the way friendships start in storybooks! Sophie opens her eyes as wide as she can and smiles, giving the servant permission to speak her heart, to propose (perhaps) a secret rendezvous after bedtime.

Janey smiles back, whey-faced, rocking on her heels. She opens her lips to speak, then suddenly pitches forward on her knees and spews a pale shawl of vomit onto the nursery floor. Two open-mouthed, silent-scream retches, and she spews again. Bile, stewed tea, Cook’s morning gruel and glimmering bits of bacon puddle out onto the polished boards.

Seconds later, the nursery door swings open: it’s Beatrice, returning at last. In the rest of the Rackham house, as by a wave of a magic wand, everything is back to normal: Doctor Curlew is climbing the stairs to Mrs Rackham’s bedroom, Mr Rackham’s old schoolfriends have left, Letty is back from the stationers, the rain is waning. Only here in the nursery – where, by rights, everything should always be perfectly under control – is anything amiss: a revolting stench; Sophie dishevelled, tangle-haired, barefoot; the scullery maid on her hands and knees, with no bucket or mop in sight, stupidly staring down at a pool of sick in the middle of the room, and … what’s this? Sophie’s pinafore, covered in blood!

Growing erect with fury, Beatrice Cleave brings the full power of her basilisk stare to bear on the Rackham child, the bane of her life, the sinful creature who cannot be trusted for five minutes, the useless daughter of an undeserving heir to an unworthy fortune. Under the weight of that stare, little Sophie cowers, points a trembling, grubby finger at Janey.

‘
She
done it.’

Beatrice winces, but resolves to resume the war on the child’s grammar later,
after
a few other mysteries have been solved.

‘Now,’ she says, hands on hips, even as the first rays of sunshine flicker in through the nursery window, turning the pool of vomit silver and gold. ‘From the beginning …!’

EIGHT

B
efore we go on, though … Forgive me if I misjudge you, but I get the impression, from the way you’re looking at the Rackhams’ house – at its burnished staircases and its servant-infested passageways and its gaslit, ornately decorated rooms – that you think it’s very old. On the contrary, it’s quite new. So new that if, for example, William decides it really
will not do
to have a trickle of rain stealing through the French windows in the parlour, he only has to ferret out the business card of the carpenter who guaranteed the seal.

In the boyhood of Henry Calder Rackham, when Notting Hill was a still a rural hamlet in the parish of Kensington, cows grazed on the spot where you have seen, fifty years later, William and Agnes making their own less successful attempt to breakfast together. Porto Bello was a farm, as was Notting Barn. Wormwood Scrubs was scrub, and Shepherds Bush was a place where one might find shepherds. The raw materials of the Rackhams’ dining-room were, in those days, still untouched in quarries and forests, and William’s bachelor father was far too busy with his factories and his farms to give serious thought to housing, or even siring, an heir.

All the years leading up to his marriage, Henry Calder Rackham lived in a rather grand house in Westbourne, but liked to joke (especially when talking to intractable snobs whose friendship he couldn’t win) that his true home was Paddington Station, for ‘a man’s business is liable to go to the dogs every day that he don’t go and see how his workers are getting on.’ Work has never been a dirty word to Henry Calder Rackham, although – bafflingly – this has never yet earned him the devotion of his own employees. To those that toil in his factories, the sight of him pacing the iron ramps above their heads in his black suit and top hat falls short of inspiring solidarity. But then, perhaps he’s a simple country man at heart … although the workers in his lavender fields don’t seem to have warmed to him much either. Could it be they labour under the misapprehension that the sturdy rustic clothes he wears whenever he visits them are an affectation, rather than his preferred garb?

Another thing for which he feels he’s been given too little credit is his passionate nature. Gossips in both city and country were wont to mutter that he’d have more hope wooing a mechanical grinder than a human female. Imagine their surprise, then, when he suddenly married a damn fine-looking woman! Dumbstruck, they were, every time he showed her off.

Still, if the arrival of his wife took them unawares, her departure, nine years later, surprised no one. Indeed, her adultery seemed to be common knowledge long before he, its victim, learned of it; most galling, that. Then there was endless speculation about whether he disowned her, or if she ran off willingly. What did it matter? She evaporated from his life, leaving behind two infant boys. But, ever practical even in grief, he hired an additional servant to provide such services as his sons’ mother had provided, and got on with his work.

Years went by, the boys grew up with no ill effects whatsoever, and business prospered, until eventually Rackham Senior must give some thought to where young Henry, his heir, was to live. By this time, the 1850s, the prime parts of Notting Hill were rural no longer. The Potteries to the west of the town were still infested with gypsies and piggeries, and the abortive attempts to turn half the parish into a race-course had tainted the character of the whole area, but there were signs that the cluster of houses around Ladbroke Square might become desirable residences. And, by the late 1860s, sure enough, the locale was recognised as a place where prominent men who did not aspire to the very
best
Society might be satisfied to live. Also, it was handy for the railways, which Henry the Younger would be needing to use often, once he’d assumed control of the business.

So, Henry Senior bought his heir a large and handsome house in Chepstow Villas, barely ten years old and in tip-top condition. As for where William, the second son, would eventually live, well … that was for the boy himself to sort out.

Now the future is here, and the history of the Rackham empire has run contrary to prospectus. Henry Senior’s side of the bargain has been amply fulfilled: he has, by a combination of robust charm and discreet money-lending, lodged himself in polite Society, counting magistrates, peers and all manner of gentlefolk among his friends. But Henry Junior, his first-born, is living like a monk in a pokey cottage near Brick Field, while William, having enjoyed the best education money could buy, is content to occupy the house in Chepstow Villas, playing the gentleman without the independent means to do so. It’s years now since the boy left university, and he still hasn’t earned a penny of his keep! Is this how William means to go on, leaving his old father burdened with responsibility, while he writes unpublished poems for his own amusement? It’s high time he noticed that the ‘R’ insignia is wrought into the very ironwork of the gates that surround him!

The house is showing signs of strain. The gardens are a disgrace, especially around the edges of the building and behind the kitchen. There’s no carriage, no horse in the stable. The coachman’s tiny bungalow, never yet inhabited by a coachman and converted by William, during a short-lived passion for painting, into a studio, now stands useless. The low greenhouses lie like glass coffins, filled to bursting with whatever weedy rubbish can grow without a gardener. All very regrettable, but only natural: Henry Senior, in his attempt to cure William, has inflicted on the household a series of traumatic shocks, and as a consequence all its servant blood has been drawn away from the peripheries to the beleaguered heart.

Inside, there’s really nothing in particular to impress anyone, except a foreigner like you. You may admire the many high-ceilinged rooms, the dark polished floors, the hundreds of pieces of furniture destined for the antiques shops of your own time, and most of all, you may be impressed by the dumb industry of the servants. All these things are taken for granted here. To the Rackhams’ dwindling circle of acquaintances, the house is tainted: it smells of cancelled
soirées,
dismal garden parties, the sound of Agnes breaking glass at dinner, embarrassed goodbyes, the glum exodus of guests. It smells of deserted rooms where tables stand groaning with delicacies, empty floors ringing with the heavy footfalls of a forsaken host. No, there’s no reason why anyone should go back to the Rackhams’ again, not after all that’s happened.

In Agnes Rackham’s bedroom, the curtains are thick and almost always drawn, a detail not lost on snoopers who peek across from Pembridge Mews. Those drawn curtains have unfortunate consequences within: Agnes’s room must be lit all through the daylight hours, and smells very strongly of burnt candle-fat (she doesn’t trust gas). Also, on those rare occasions when she ventures out and the candles are snuffed (for she has a fear of the house burning down) her room is dark as a tomb on her return.

This is what we find on the morning when Agnes returns from her brave attempt at a connubial breakfast. She and her lady’s-maid stand at the bedroom door, breathing heavily from the long ascent of the stairs. Clara cannot, at one and the same time, carry a candle and support her mistress, so the door is elbowed open, and the pair of them shuffle inside, lacking bearings in the gloom. By sheer chance, just as the door of Agnes’s bedroom is opened, the main door downstairs is slammed shut, so that Agnes actually hears her husband leaving the house. Where to? she wonders, as she’s led into a room that has become unrecognisable since she was last in it.

The white bed looms unambiguous, but what’s that in the corner? A skeleton half-smothered in bandages? And next to that… a large dog?

Clara lights an oil-lamp, and the mysterious figures are clarified: a cast-iron dressmaker’s dummy swathed in strips of dress material and, standing at the ready like a silver-plated Doberman, the sewing-machine.

‘Give me your hands, Mrs Rackham.’

Agnes shuffles to obey, but not like an old woman – more like a child being taken back to bed after a nightmare.

‘Everything will be all right now, Mrs Rackham.’ Clara pulls back the bedclothes. ‘You can have a peaceful little rest now.’ To the tune of these and other perfunctory soothings, Clara undresses her mistress and puts her to bed. Then she gives Agnes her favourite brush, and Agnes automatically begins to groom her hair, worrying at the tangles caused by her fall.

‘How do I look?’

Clara, who is folding her mistress’s dressing-gown to pillow-slip size, pauses to make her appraisal.

‘Beautiful,’ she says, smiling, ‘ma’am.’

Her smile is insincere. All her smiles are; Agnes knows that. But they’re offered ungrudgingly in the line of duty, and have no harm hidden behind them, and Agnes knows this too, and is grateful. Between her and her maid there’s an understanding that in return for life-long employment, Clara will satisfy any whim, be witness to any fiasco, without ever complaining. She will be a comfort from dawn to midnight, and occasionally at sticky moments in between. She will be a confidante to anything Agnes might confide, no matter how daft, and, if asked to forget it an hour later, will scrub it entirely from her mind as if it were a careless spill of milk.

Most importantly, she will aid and abet her mistress in the disobeying of all orders given by those two evil men, Doctor Curlew or William Rackham.

For Agnes, life with Clara provides her with a game she can play in perfect safety, a regimen of gentle exercise with a benign familiar. With Clara’s help, she will re-learn the social skills she sorely needs for the London Season. For example, she sometimes bids Clara pretend to be this lady or that, and together they act out little dramas, so that Agnes can practise her responses. Not that Clara’s play-acting is terribly convincing, but Agnes doesn’t mind. Too real an imitation might unnerve her.

Heartened now by the sensation of soft tidy hair on her head, she lays down her brush and settles back against the pillows.

‘Clara: my new toilet book,’ she commands softly. The servant hands over the volume, and Agnes opens it to the chapter entitled ‘Defending Yourself Against the Enemy’ – the enemy in this case being old age. She rubs her cheeks and temples, obeying as closely as possible the text’s instructions, although she has trouble rubbing ‘in a direction contrary to that which the wrinkles threaten to take’, because she hasn’t any wrinkles yet. ‘Change hands in case of fatigue’, says the book – and she’s certainly fatigued. But how, if she only has two hands, can she change them? And how does she know if she’s touching herself correctly, with the right amount of ‘firm, gentle pressure’; and what are the consequences of not using a lubricant, as the writer recommends? Books never address what one really needs to know.

Too weary to continue her exercises, she turns the page to see what’s next.

The skin of the face wrinkles for the same reason and by the same mechanisms that
the skin of an apple wrinkles. The pulp of the fruit under the skin shrinks and
contracts as the juices dry up …

Agnes claps shut the book at once.

‘Take it away, Clara,’ she says.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Clara knows what to do: there’s a special room farther along the landing, where unwanted things go.

Next, Agnes glances surreptitiously at the sewing machine.

Clara misses nothing. ‘P’raps, ma’am,’ she says, ‘we might carry on with your new dress? The most difficult part is over, isn’t it, ma’am?’

Agnes’s face lights up. What a blessing that there
is
something to do, something with which to fill the time – at a time like this. After all, she’s not forgotten that very soon she’ll have to receive Doctor Curlew.

For the love of God, why did she reject William’s offer to stop Beatrice fetching him? He was willing to do it – willing to rush through the house, onto the street if need be, to undo the message! And she refused him! Madness! But, lying there on the floor, she had, for a brief moment, an intoxicating power over him – the power to scorn his offer of the olive branch. Standing up to him like that – admittedly, while lying at his feet – was revenge of sorts.

Agnes stares at the half-finished dress, imagines it wreathing her own body like silken armour. She smiles shyly at Clara, gets a smile in return.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do believe I’m well enough to go on.’

Within minutes, the whirring of the sewing-machine is muffling the ticking of the clock. With each seam and tuck they complete, the two women interrupt their labours, remove the dress from the machine, replace it on the dummy. Over and over, the sexless frame is clothed anew, each time appearing a little more shapely, a little more feminine.

‘We are weaving magic!’ chortles Mrs Rackham, almost forgetting that Doctor Curlew is on his way, satchel swinging in his gloved fist.

But her sewing is more than mere distraction. She needs at least four more dresses if she’s to have any hope of taking part in the Season next year and, by Goodness, next year she
shall
take part. For, if there’s one thing that has shaken Agnes’s faith in her own sanity, it was being unable to participate in the Season this year. And if there’s one thing that can restore her faith, it is (so to speak) redressing that lapse.

It’s true that from birth she has been groomed to do nothing especially well except appear in public looking beautiful. But that’s not the reason she’s making these splendid dresses, these elaborate constructs in which she hopes to sweep across other people’s floors. Taking part in the Season is, to her, the One Thing that will prove beyond doubt that she isn’t mad. For, in her uncertainty where exactly the borderline between sanity and madness is supposed to lie, Agnes has chosen a line for herself. If she can only keep on the right side of it, she will be sane, first in the eyes of the world, then in her husband’s, and finally even in Doctor Curlew’s.

And in her own eyes? In her own eyes she is neither sane nor insane; she is simply Agnes… Agnes Pigott, if you don’t mind. Look into her heart, and you will see a pretty picture, like a prayer-card depicting the girlhood of the Virgin. It’s Agnes, but not as we know her: it’s an Agnes who’s ageless, changeless, spotless, no step-daughter of any Unwin, no wife of any Rackham. Her hair is silkier, her dresses frillier, her bosom subsided to nothing, her very first Season still to come.