The Crimson Petal and the White (25 page)

‘That’s sweet of you, Henry,’ she says, gaining her stride once more. ‘And you know, I really meant what I said about Darwin. The Church has been wrong before, after all – on details of science, I mean. Didn’t it once maintain that the Sun revolved around the Earth? – and put people to death for suggesting otherwise? Now every school-book tells us that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Does it really matter? I shouldn’t be surprised if the women I work with still believe it’s the other way around. It’s not my business to set them straight on cosmology, or the origin of man. I’m fighting to save them from the death of their bodies and souls!’ Even as she walks, she clenches one delicate fist to her breast. ‘Oh, if you could only know the state of moral anarchy in which they exist …!’

To his shame, Henry
longs
to know the state of moral anarchy in which Mrs Fox’s prostitutes exist. Ah, the depravity she must be witness to! It’s all he can do to refrain from asking her questions which, under the guise of an interest in urban sanitation, goggle for a glimpse of something else entirely. Sometimes he must clench the muscles in his jaw, to bite back a demand that she reveal more.

The strange thing is: even when he has himself firmly under control, and is communing with Mrs Fox on an unsullied plane, she
herself
moves the conversation – innocently, no doubt – into more sensual regions.

Not so long ago, for example, he and Mrs Fox were dawdling by the Serpentine, discussing the Afterlife.

‘You know, Henry,’ she was saying, ‘I often doubt there is a Hell. Death itself is so cruel. Oh, I don’t mean the sort of death you and I are likely to suffer, but the sort of death so often suffered by those wretches I work among. Our doctrine would have us believe they’re bound for Hell, but what
is
Hell for such as they? When I see a woman dying of a vile disease, bitterly regretting every minute she’s spent on this earth, I wonder if she hasn’t already endured the worst.’

‘But surely the righteous must have their reward!’ he protested, alarmed at her heresy, not because he feared God would be angry with her (God couldn’t fail to appreciate her good intentions) but in case the wrath of the Church should fall upon her exquisite head.

‘Isn’t Heaven reward enough,’ she protested in turn, ‘without needing to see the damned punished?’

‘Of course, of course it is,’ he said hastily. ‘I didn’t mean that I wish to see sinners suffer. But there are righteous folk who do; and surely in Heaven, we can’t have any of the souls feeling resentful …’

Emmeline was leaning forward over the edge of the Serpentine’s bank, waving at a fat, grey duck, which disappeared underwater.

‘I don’t know that our resurrected souls will have the capacity to feel resentment,’ she said.

‘A sense of … unfairness, then.’

She smiled, her face lit up by reflections off the rippling lake.

‘Those seem awfully queer things for resurrected souls to be feeling.’ And she extended one silky arm over the water, wiggling her fingers to attract whatever might be underneath.

‘But … they must be capable of feeling
something
…’ Henry persisted. ‘We aren’t Orientalists, expecting to disappear into our deity like a puff of smoke.’ She seemed however to be no longer listening, staring at the brilliant water, waiting for the duck to resurface. He cleared his throat. ‘What do
you
think, Mrs Fox? What will souls in Heaven feel?’

‘Oh,’ said Emmeline, eyes mysterious in the sun-dappled shade under her hat-brim, and mouth licked brilliant as the leaves on the water, ‘I should think … Love. The most wonderful … endless … perfect … Love.’

That’s how she always did it! With just a few words and a certain quality of voice, she artlessly penetrated his Platonic armour, and he was helpless with impure thoughts. All sorts of lurid scenarios would flash into his mind like
tableaux vivants
: Mrs Fox’s skirts catching on the branches of a tree, and being torn right off; Mrs Fox being attacked by a degenerate ruffian, who might succeed in baring her bosom before Henry smote him down; Mrs Fox’s clothing catching fire, necessitating his prompt action; Mrs Fox sleepwalking to his house, in the night, for him to restore to dignity with his own dressing-gown.

Once he was roused like this, prurience would start to whisper in his ear. He would press Mrs Fox to describe her work with fallen women, knowing perfectly well that while there were some things he wished to know, there were others he wished only to
imagine
.

‘What … what do these poor creatures wear?’ he asked her on one such occasion, when they were walking in St James’s Park.

‘The latest fashions, more or less,’ she replied, suspecting nothing. ‘Some affect a more old-fashioned appearance. I’ve seen several with their hair still parted down the middle, without a fringe. In general I should guess their colours are a few months behind, though I’m hardly the best judge of such things. Why do you ask?”

‘Their attire … It isn’t … loose?’

‘Loose?’

‘They don’t … flaunt their bodies?’

She became pensive, giving the question serious thought. Eventually she replied, ‘I suppose they do. But it isn’t with their attire so much as with the way they wear it. A dress which on me might appear perfectly decent, might be a Jezebel’s costume on them. The way they stand, and sit, and move, and walk, can be indecent in the extreme.’

Henry wondered how a whore might sit, that was so shamefully different from the method employed by a decent woman. How might she stand, and how might she move? Fortunately, on that particular occasion, he was saved from himself (however dubious the rescue) by Bodley and Ashwell, running across the park towards them.

Now, on this sunny Sunday morning, with the God-given miracle of Spring in evidence all around them, Henry Rackham is once more in turmoil under his stiff clothes. Mrs Fox has cried, ‘Oh, if you could only know the state of moral anarchy in which they exist …!’ and he is desperate to know. So, he asks her to elaborate, and she does.

As they stroll on, she recounts one of her Rescue Society stories. (There are never any unclothed bodies in these stories, never any embraces, but still he listens with ears aflame.) She speaks of a time not long ago, when she and her sisters in the Society were admitted into a bawdy-house, and found there a girl who quite plainly was not long for this world. When Mrs Fox expressed concern over the girl’s health, the madam retorted that the girl was in good hands – better than any doctor’s – and that, if truth be told, Mrs Fox didn’t look so well herself, and would she like to lie down in one of the spare rooms?

‘I was shocked, I must admit, at her perversity.’

‘Yes, quite,’ mutters Henry. ‘A most sly and licentious suggestion.’

‘No, no, it wasn’t
that
that shocked me. It was her rejection of Medicine! What a topsy-turvy state these people are in: God and doctors bad; prostitution good!’

Henry grunts sympathetically. In his head, a vision of topsy-turviness is made flesh: a squirming heap of pink women flipping over and over, like frogs in a pond.

‘Do I look ill to you?’ Mrs Fox asks suddenly.

‘Not at all!’ he exclaims.

‘Well, at any rate,’ she says, ‘it makes me ill in
here
’ (palm on her breast) ‘to think of the poor girls in that evil woman’s clutches, and to imagine how cruelly they must be treated.’

Henry, doing his very best
not
to imagine how those poor girls might be treated, is relieved to observe a distraction coming up Union Street towards them.

‘Look there, Mrs Fox,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that someone we know?’

A short, plump lady sumptuously dressed in purple with black trimmings – the last tokens of mourning – is trotting towards them. Almost a whole bird’s-worth of dyed feathers jigs up and down on her bonnet, and her parasol is of Continental proportions.

‘
You
know her, perhaps,’ says Mrs Fox. ‘I’m sure I’ve never met her.’

(In point of fact, there are
two
women walking towards them, but the servant is of no consequence and doesn’t warrant a name.)

‘Good morning, Lady Bridgelow,’ says Henry, as soon as she’s within hailing distance. By way of response, she removes one purple-gloved hand from her black muff and motions it demurely.

‘Good morning to
you
, Mr Rackham.’ With eyes slightly narrowed she regards Mrs Fox. ‘I do not believe I am acquainted with your companion.’

‘Allow me to introduce Mrs Emmeline Fox.’

‘
Enchantée
.’ The lady nods, smiles, and without hesitation she and her lady’s-maid pass, their black boots ticking on the cobblestones.

Henry waits until they are out of earshot, then turns to Mrs Fox and says, ‘You have been slighted.’ His voice is choked with vexation.

‘I’m sure I’ll survive, Henry. Remember I’m accustomed to having doors slammed in my face, and foul language thrown at me. And look! Here we are at William Street. Is it a message from Providence, d’you think, to turn right and visit your brother?’

Henry frowns, uneasy as always to hear her flirting with what more judgemental souls might consider blasphemy.

‘I imagine it was from William’s house that Lady Bridgelow came.’

‘Certainly not from church,’ remarks Mrs Fox. ‘But tell me, Henry: I didn’t know your brother was apt to receive visits from the aristocracy.’

‘Well, they are neighbours, after a fashion.’ (It’s all coming back to him now; William has told him a great deal about this person, as though he ought to be fearfully interested in her.)

‘Neighbours? There must be a dozen houses in between.’

‘Yes, but…’ Henry strains to recall the last conversation he had with his brother. Suicide was part of it, was it not? ‘Oh yes: William is the only one who doesn’t hold it against her that her husband did away with himself.’

‘Did away with himself?’

‘Yes, shot himself I believe.’

‘Poor man. Couldn’t he simply have divorced her instead?’

‘Mrs Fox!’

A small dog stationed just outside the gate to William Rackham’s property raises its mongrel head in hope, then begins to lick its genitals, unaware that this is not the way to earn respect.

‘Don’t look, Mrs Fox,’ urges Henry, as he ushers her through.

Emmeline turns, but sees only a dog appealing to her with soulful brown eyes as the gate shuts in its face.
Poor thing
, she thinks.

‘Could it be William’s?’ she says as they walk up the Rackham path together.

‘William has no pets I know of.’

‘He might have got one since we last visited.’

‘In which case I don’t imagine he’d settle for a mongrel.’

Henry stands at his brother’s front door (the door that could have been his own, garlanded with an ornate brass ‘R’), and pulls the bell. Even before the cord stops swinging, he is aware that much has changed in the Rackham house since he visited,
sans
Mrs Fox, several weeks ago. Maybe it’s the way the brass ‘R’ gleams, transmuted almost into gold by vigorous polishing. Maybe it’s the way the doorbell is answered in seconds rather than minutes, or the way Letty greets them so avidly, as though a fresh coat of obsequiousness has just been applied to her. Behind her, inside the receiving hall, everything is on show, sparkling and dust-free.

‘Come in, come in!’ exclaims William Rackham, half-way up the stairs, waving jovially. Henry scarcely recognises him: a dark curly fungus is sprouting from William’s upper lip and chin, while the hair on his head has been cut even shorter, plastered flat to his scalp. Far from wearing his Sunday best, he’s in a weekday suit minus the jacket, plus an ankle-length dressing-gown with quilted lapels. At his extremities, he brandishes a magnifying glass, a cigar, and the most peculiar two-tone shoes. Yet it’s his beaming smile that is the most conspicuous novelty.

Thus begins the great exhibition. Mind you don’t slip on the newly waxed floor!

‘Step this way, step this way.’

Guided by the master of the house, brother Henry and his companion are shown everything. The melancholy atmosphere of the Rackham home, which had become like a characteristic odour, has been banished. All the windows have been replaced; the old steps have been removed from the garden; new French windows have been screwed into the parlour door. The whole place smells of paint, wallpaper paste and fresh air. To Henry’s mortification, there are three workmen still at large in the hall, pasting up the last few strips of a new wallpaper, under the critical eye of Agnes, who has left her bed in order to supervise.

And did Henry not notice that the fence around the grounds is no longer rusty brown but fresh rose-pink? No? Ha! Ha! In a world of his own, this brother of mine, as always! And what about the grounds themselves? What a difference, eh? The gardener’s name is Shears – really! Isn’t that exquisite? Shears! Ha! Ha! A little mule of a man: just the fellow to bring the unruly wilds around the greenhouse back into Man’s dominion.

Nor are the house and its environs the only things subject to reform. William Rackham has a great many other fish to fry, or at least to be fried for him. The servants, for example.

Everything that was wrong has been set to rights. Janey has been relieved of her extra duties and is a simple scullery maid again, overjoyed no doubt to be responsible only for mops, rags and brushes. A new kitchen-maid has been hired, who’ll also assist Letty in some of her duties, so that Letty can be more prompt in her attention to the needs of visitors and the family. There’s another housemaid on the way too. William now has a pretty full complement of females; he can’t hire any more until he lives in a much grander house (the future, the future!) He could hire another male, but he’s undecided what kind. The gardener is an impressive acquisition, and moreover essential, but the idea of a manservant doesn’t particularly appeal. A coachman? Hmm … yes, but actually he’s holding off hiring one of those until he gets a coach. And who knows? He may not get a coach after all. He’s too busy nowadays to waste time riding around showing off. Though perhaps if Agnes has a need in the coming Season, he’ll buy her a coach then.