The Crimson Petal and the White (24 page)

Open on her escritoire lies a medical tract, stolen from the public library’s reading room in Trevor Square. The text itself would be no surprise to him; he’s likely to have seen it all before:

No woman can be a serious thinker, without injury to her function as the conceiver
and mother of children. Too often, the female ‘intellectual’ is a youthful invalid or
virtual hermaphrodite, who might otherwise have been a healthy wife
.

Let us close our ears, then, to siren voices offering us a quantity of female
intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled and sickly race. Healthy serviceable wombs are of more use to the Future than any amount of feminine scribbling
.

No, it’s not the text, but Sugar’s handwritten comments in the margins that her new benefactor must at all costs not see:
Pompous oaf!
here;
Tyranny!
there;
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
over there and, scrawled under the conclusion in angry blotted ink:
We’ll see about that, you poxy old fool! There’s
a new century coming soon, and you and your kind will be DEAD!

As Doctor Curlew rummages in the compartments of his satchel for the leech box, he spies, under his patient’s bed, the cover of a journal not sanctioned by him. (It’s the
London Periodical Review
, which Agnes is reading for the perfectly innocent reason that she wishes to know what she’s supposed to think of the new paintings she’s not been able to see, the new poetry she hasn’t read, and the recent history she hasn’t witnessed, in case, next Season, she is put on the spot for an opinion.)

‘Pardon me, Mrs Rackham,’ he says, still unaware that she no longer hears him. He has the offending item in his hand, and holds it up for her unseeing eyes to recognise. ‘Is this your journal?’

He doesn’t wait for a reply; his admonition is impervious to excuses. Nor would it have made any difference if the item had not been the
London
Periodical Review
but Mrs Henry Wood’s
The Shadow of
Ashlydyat or some such rubbish. Excessively thrilling reading, excessively taxing reading, excessively pathetic reading, too much washing, too much sun, tight corsets, ice-cream, asparagus, foot-warmers: these and many more are causes of the womb’s distress. But no matter, he has a remedy.

Doctor Curlew appraises for a moment the patch of white skin behind one of Agnes’s ears, then places, with precision, the first of the leeches there. Agnes chooses this inopportune moment to venture out of her dream, in case the real world should, in the interim, have become safe again. She observes the leech being conveyed through the air towards her, clamped in the tongs. Before she can retreat into unconsciousness she has felt the cold touch of the instrument behind her ear, and though she cannot feel the leech begin to suck, she nevertheless imagines a watery spiral of blood swimming up through her innards towards her head, like a crimson worm in a viscous medium. But then she’s back in her dream and, by the time Doctor Curlew applies the second leech, the passenger train is again in motion.

Gently, the doctor’s hands turn her head one hundred and eighty degrees on the pillow, for the process must be repeated on the other side.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Rackham.’

Agnes doesn’t stir: her journey has vaulted forward to its end. Two old men are carrying her stretcher from the railway terminus, deep in the heart of the countryside, to the gates of the Convent of Health. A nun rushes to open the gates, giant iron gates that rustle with ivy and hollyhock. The old men gently put the stretcher down on the sunlit grass and doff their caps. The nun kneels beside Agnes and lays a cool palm on her brow.

‘Dear, dear child,’ she chides in loving exasperation. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

Passion spent, William is able to examine his prize more closely, studying her in loving detail. She lies cradled in his arm, apparently asleep, her eyelashes still. He combs his fingers through her hair, admiring all the unexpected colours to be found in it, hidden inside the red: streaks of pure gold, wisps of blond, single strands of dark auburn. Her skin is like nothing he’s ever seen: on every limb, and on her hips and belly, there are … what can he call them? Tiger stripes. Swirling geometric patterns of peeling dryness alternating with reddened flesh. They are symmetrical, as if scored on her skin by a painstaking aesthete, or an African savage. (Doctor Curlew, if he were here, could have told William, and Sugar for that matter, that she suffers from an unusually generalised psoriasis which, in places, crosses the diagnostic line into a rarer and more spectacular condition called ichthyosis. He might prescribe expensive ointments which would have no more effect on the cracks in Sugar’s hands or the flaky stripes on her thighs than the cheap oil she’s already using.) To William, the patterns are beguiling, a fitting mark of her animal nature. She smells like an animal too: or what he imagines animals smell like, for he’s no animal lover. Her sex is luxuriantly aromatic, her shame-hair twinkles with sweat and semen.

He lifts his head slightly to get a better view of her breasts. Supine, she’s almost flat-chested, but her nipples are full and unmistakably female. (And, when she’s the other way around, there’s enough for him to hold onto.) In truth, he’s delighted with every inch of her; she might almost be a thing designed for no purpose but to bring him to orgasm.

He squeezes her shoulders, to rouse her enough for a question he has been wanting to ask her for the best part of an hour.

‘Sugar?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Do you … Do you
like
me?’

She laughs throatily, turns her head against his, nuzzles his cheek.

‘Oh William, yessss,’ she says. ‘You’re my rescuer, aren’t you? My champion …’ She cups his genitals in her rough palm. ‘I can scarcely believe my good fortune.’

He stretches, closes his eyes in languor. She chews surreptitiously at her peeling lips, worrying at a wedge-shaped flake of skin that’s almost, but not quite, ready to come off. She must leave it alone, or it’ll bleed. How much money will she ask for this time? His big soft hand is on her breast, his heart is beating against her sharp shoulder-blade. On his face, an expression of happiness. It occurs to her – well, no, she suspected it from the moment she first looked in his eyes – that for all his transgressive posturing he is an infant searching for a warm bed to sleep in. If she will but smooth his greasy golden curls off his sweaty brow, he’ll give her anything she asks for in return.

He’s breathing deeply now, almost unconscious, when there’s a soft, hesitant knock at the door.

‘What the devil?’ he mutters.

But Sugar knows that knock.

‘Christopher!’ she calls,
sotto voce
. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m very sorry,’ comes the child’s voice through the key-hole. ‘But I’ve a message from Mrs Castaway. For the gentleman. To remind ’im – in case it’s slipped ’is mind, like – of ’is appointment. With a Mister Wilkie Collins.’

William turns to Sugar and smiles sheepishly.

‘Duty calls,’ he says.

Several hours later, Agnes Rackham feels the small feminine hands of Clara stroking her mechanically through the bedclothes, but she’s too deeply inside her dream to recognise them.

The dream, having reached its heavenly conclusion, has started again from the very beginning. She’s on her way to the Convent of Health: a train compartment has been specially prepared for her, to look as much like her own room as possible; she lies in a berth by the window, and on the walls there is proper wallpaper, and framed portraits of her mother and father.

She raises herself up from her pillow to look out onto the platform, which is bustling with activity, with passengers rushing to and fro, luggage-boys tottering under suitcases, pigeons fluttering up to the domed ceiling high above and, on the far platform nearest the street, the cab-horses stamping impatiently. The unsavoury man who had tapped on her window with his finger is gone, and in his place, a smiling old stationmaster strolls up and calls to her through the glass,

‘Are you all right, Miss?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, settling back into her pillow. Outside, a whistle is blown, and with nary a jolt the train rolls into motion.

An hour or so later still, William Rackham, ensconced in his study, rummages in the drawers of his desk and realises, with a slight shock, that there are no more Rackham papers he hasn’t read. He has finally ploughed through them all; he has extracted their essence. A large, leather-bound notebook lies open, and in it, in his own squarish handwriting, a number of unanswered questions. He’ll have answers to those questions soon enough.

Light-headed with Madeira and achievement, he tears the brown wrapper off a virgin parcel of Rackham Perfumeries letterhead, extracts a sheet, positions it carefully on the desk, secures it with his elbow, dips pen in ink, and writes under the company’s rose insignia:

Dear Father
,

NINE

C
ome with me now, away from the filthy city streets, away from rooms that stink of fear and deceit, away from contracts forged in mucky cynicism. Love exists. Come with me to church.

It’s a cold but sunny Sunday morning, four months later. The air is pure, with nothing added to it but a subtle scent of rain and, here and there, a sparrow in flight. All along the path to the church, the dark wet grass is dotted with tiny white buds that will soon be daffodils. Maturer blossoms are to be found—

(What? Sugar? Why are you thinking about Sugar? Don’t worry about her anymore; she’s spoken for! And try also to put William from your mind. Everything is in hand, I assure you. A series of increasingly cordial letters have been exchanged between father and son; the transfer of power was smooth. Oh, to begin with, the old man was a doubting Thomas, and mistrusted William’s detailed description of the Rackham company, the duties of its director, and the exact manner in which William meant to discharge these duties, as nothing more than a ploy to wheedle the wherewithal for an extravagant Christmas. Soon enough, however, the old man was convinced that a birth scarcely less miraculous than the Saviour’s had occurred: the advent of William Rackham, captain of industry. Now everything has been made sweet, and William’s humiliations are a thing of the past, so let’s not dwell on them any longer.)

As I was saying, maturer blossoms are to be found inside the church: in translucent grey vases, and on the bonnets of some of the congregation. Not only flowers, but also stuffed birds and butterflies on the headgear of the more fashionable ladies here. They file out of the pews, eyeing each other’s dresses and bonnets, and only that peculiar soul Emmeline Fox is unadorned. She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong. Walking at her side, as always, is Henry Rackham, the man who should by rights have been
the
Rackham of Rackham Perfumeries, but who (as everybody knows by now) has lost that claim for good.

Henry is a handsome man, taller than average – well, taller than his brother, anyway – bluer of eye and firmer of chin. Also, unlike his brother, his hair – no less gold – sits on his head most decorously, and his midriff is trim. In earlier years, before it became obvious he had no intention of claiming his birthright, he was sought out by a succession of eligible young ladies, each of whom found him to be a decent if over-serious man, each of whom hinted that the inheritor of a large concern would need a devoted wife, and each of whom melted away from him as soon as he spoke disparagingly of money. One of these ladies (present in church today, newly married to Arthur Gillow, the Ice Chest manufacturer) even kissed him on the brow, to see if it cured his shyness.

This is not the love I spoke of. The love I spoke of is real. It is the love of two friends for their God, and for each other.

Henry approaches the vestibule of his church – well, not a church of his
own
, sadly, but the church he attends – and sniffs the fresh air wafting in from outside. He has no interest in perfume, except to note that each week there seems to be more of it within these walls. Today it emanates as strongly from those ladies (within earshot of the rector) who are speaking of Scriptural matters, as from those, farther away, discussing the coming London Season.

He and Mrs Fox are loath to linger now that the service is over, scorning the opportunity to gossip with Notting Hill’s other churchgoers. They shake the rector’s hand, Henry commends him on his refutation of Darwinism, and they are on their way. The gossips stare after them but, having been thus snubbed every Sunday for months, don’t bother passing comment. So much has already been said about Henry Rackham and Mrs Fox, that if neither of them will rise to the bait, despite everyone’s best efforts to whisper as
clearly
as possible, well, what’s the use?

Henry and Mrs Fox walk gingerly down the steep gravel path that leads to the churchyard, each using a furled umbrella as a walking stick, rather than taking each other by the arm. At the bottom of the slope the path curves sharply, running along the churchyard for a while before becoming part of the main road; that’s the way they walk, with butter-yellow tombstones to the right of them, and black-trunked evergreens to the left.

‘How beautiful this morning is,’ says Emmeline Fox. (No, she means it! No, she is
not
making conversation! Your time in and in houses of ill repute has made you cynical; it’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and here is someone expressing her delight.) She is full of the love of God’s creation, full to overflowing. The glories of God are copious, endless; they enter her from all directions… (What are you
thinking
? You’ve
definitely
been too long in the wrong company!)

‘Beautiful, yes,’ agrees Henry Rackham. He looks around, inviting the glory of Nature to flood into him, but Nature is reluctant to comply. He squints into the green-tinted light, yearning to feel the same as his enraptured companion.

The problem is, although the sun is beaming through the trees just like in Dyce’s painting of
George Herbert in
Bemerton, it fails to impress him half as much as the quilting on Mrs Fox’s bodice. And, although lively new sparrows are rustling through the leaves and hopping across the cobblestones, they cannot compete with Mrs Fox’s grace as she walks. And as for the falling of light, that phenomenon is most admirable on her face.

How handsome she is! She dresses like an angel – an angel in grey serge. Try as he might to ‘consider the lilies of the field’, they are too common and gaudy for him; he cannot prefer them to Mrs Fox’s sober finery. Her voice, too, is low and musical, like… like a softly-played bassoon; so much more soothing than the twitterings of sparrows or other women.

‘Have I lost you, Henry?’ she says suddenly.

He blushes. ‘Do go on, Mrs Fox. I was merely admiring … the miracle of God’s creation.’

Mrs Fox hooks the handle of her umbrella on her belt so she can lift both her gloved hands up to her forehead. The steep slope of the path has made her perspire; she dabs her skin under the thick frizz of her hair.

‘I was merely saying,’ she says, ‘that I wish all this fighting over our origins would come to an end –
any
sort of end.’

‘Pardon me, Mrs Fox, but what do you mean, “any sort of end”?’ Henry’s questions to her are always gently posed, for fear of offending her.

‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘If only it could be resolved once and for all where we come from: from Adam, or from Mr Darwin’s apes.’

Henry stops in his tracks, amazed. Each time they meet, just when he least expects it, she unveils something like this.

‘But my dear Mrs Fox – you cannot be serious!’

She looks aside at him, licks her lips, but says nothing to soothe his alarm.

‘My dear Mrs Fox,’ he begins again, blinking at the sun-dappled road ahead of them. ‘The difference between belief in the one descent rather than the other is the difference … why, between Faith and Atheism!’

‘Oh Henry, it isn’t,
really
it isn’t.’ Her voice is impatient now, passionate, alerting him to the fact that she’s about to talk of her work with the Rescue Society. ‘If only you could know the wretches I work among! You’d see that the debate that rages in our churches and town halls means nothing to them. It’s seen as a spat between one set of stuffed shirts and another. “I know all about it, miss,” they say. “We’re to choose who was our grandparents: two monkeys or two naked innocents in a garden.” And they laugh, for both strike them as equally ridiculous.’

‘In
their
eyes, perhaps, but not in the eyes of God.’

‘Yes but Henry, can’t you see that they will not be brought to God by seeing us quarrelling. We must accept that they don’t care where life comes from. What is far more important to address is that they despise our faith.
They
, Henry, who were once the backbone of the Church, in the days when the world was not yet blighted with cities and factories. How it saddens me to think of them as they were then, tilling the land, simple and devout … Look there!’

She points to a meadow some distance away which, on closer scrutiny, is a site of swarming industry. There are tiny workmen, cartloads of timber and earth, and a giant machine of mysterious function.

‘Another house, I suppose,’ sighs Mrs Fox, turning her back on it and leaning her bustle against a stile. ‘First come the houses, then the shops, then finally …’ (she rolls her eyes at the impiety of Commerce) ‘the Universal Provider.’ She rubs her gloved hands along her thin arms, shivering. ‘Still, I suppose your father will be pleased.’

‘My … father?’ Henry is slow to catch her drift; the only father to whom he gives regular thought is in Heaven.

‘Yes,’ prompts Mrs Fox. ‘More houses, more people – more business, yes?’

Henry leans gingerly against the nearest stile to hers. Discomfited though he is by his connection with the arch-profiteer who gave him his name, he feels constrained to defend him.

‘My father likes Nature as much as anyone,’ he points out. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t want any more of it despoiled. Anyway, perhaps you haven’t heard? He’s stepped down from the directorship of Rackham’s, and William has taken charge.’

‘Oh? Is he ill?’

Henry, unsure which Rackham she has in mind, replies: ‘My father’s fit as a whale. As for William, I don’t know what’s come over him.’

Mrs Fox smiles. The essential and irreconcilable differences between Henry and his brother are a source of secret pleasure to her. ‘How very unexpected,’ she declares. ‘I always took your brother to be a man full of plans, but not much fruition.’

Henry blushes again, aware he’s the sibling of a profligate, a ne’er-dowell. What has
he
, Henry, achieved in life? Does Mrs Fox look down her nose at him, too, for his failure to grasp his destiny? (And why are people always remarking that her nose is long? It’s the perfect length for her face!)

She’s still leaning against the stile, head back, eyes shut, so near to him that he can hear her breathing and see the breath coming out of her parted lips. He indulges a fantasy, despising himself for it, but indulging all the same. He imagines himself a vicar, digging in the rich dark earth of a vicarage garden, with Emmeline at his side, golden in the sunlight, holding a seedling tree ready for planting. ‘Tell me when,’ she says to him.

With effort, he leaves this blissful day-dream, and focuses on reality. Mrs Fox’s demeanour has changed. She looks less spirited than before – almost dejected. A simple sequence of expressions, this, incalculably common in human history, yet they wrench at his heart.

‘You look sad,’ he finally succeeds in saying.

‘Oh Henry,’ she sighs, ‘There’s no stopping what has been begun; you know that, don’t you?’

‘B-begun?’

‘The march of progress. The triumph of the machine. We are on a fast train to the twentieth century. The past cannot be restored.’

Henry ponders this for a moment, but finds he cares little for the past or the future as abstracts. Only two things glow clear in his brain: the fantasy of digging the vicarage garden with Mrs Fox, and the urgent desire to remove her unhappiness from her.

‘The past is more than pasture,’ he suggests, wincing at his own unintended wit. ‘It’s standards of conduct, too. Don’t you think we can keep those if we wish?’

‘Oh, it would be nice to think so. But the modern world seduces righteousness, Henry – in every conceivable way.’

He blushes, thinking of her flock of prostitutes, but she means more than that.

‘Last week,’ she says, ‘I was in the city, on my way to visit a wretched family I’d visited before, to plead with them once more to listen to the words of their Saviour. I was tired, I felt disinclined to walk far. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the Underground Railway, pulled by an engine, mesmerised by the alternation of darkness and light, speeding through the earth at the cost of a sixpence. I spoke to no one; I might as well have been a ghost. I enjoyed it so much, I missed my stop, and never saw the family.’

‘I… I confess I don’t quite divine the point you are making.’

‘This is how our world will end, Henry! We’re foolish to imagine the Last Days will be ushered in by a giant Antichrist brandishing a bloody battle-axe. The Antichrist is our own
desires
, Henry. With my sixpence, I absolved myself utterly of responsibility – for the welfare of the poor filthy wretches who slaved to dig out that railway, for the grotesque sum of money spent on it, for the violation of the earth that ought to be solid beneath my feet. I sat in my carriage, admiring the dark tunnels flashing by me, not having the foggiest notion where I was, mindless of everything except my pleasure. I ceased to be, in any meaningful sense, God’s creature.’

‘You are being hard on yourself. A single ride in the Underground isn’t going to hasten Armageddon.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ she says, a smile tempting her lips. ‘I think we’re moving towards
such
a strange time. A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress.’ She looks up into the sky, as if checking her facts with God. ‘I can see the world descending into chaos, and us just watching, not sure what we should, or could, have done about it.’

‘And yet you work for the Rescue Society!’

‘Because I must do
something
while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.’

Henry strives to recall how they reached this point. While he agrees wholeheartedly that each soul is precious, just now he can’t help noticing that the stiles against which he and Mrs Fox have been leaning are cold and damp, and that Mrs Fox is protected from feeling this by her bustle whereas he is not. Politely he suggests they walk on.

‘Forgive me, Henry,’ she says, jerking stiffly into motion. ‘Have I made us late again? My mind wanders while my body takes root.’

‘Not at all! And I was a little tired myself!’