The Crimson Petal and the White (29 page)

The socks and gloves are nowhere to be found, and she returns downstairs to butter another slice of bread – all she has in the house that’s ready to eat. Usually on a Monday, there’s a quantity of left-over Sunday roast, but yesterday Mrs Fox let Sarah eat as much as she liked, not expecting the girl to have the appetite of a labrador.

To those above me
, she thinks, as she chews her bread,
I am a pitiable widow
,
paddling in the shallows of penury; to those below, I am a pampered creature in
paradise. All of us are at once objects of repugnance and of envy. All of us except
the very poorest, those who have nothing below them but the sewage pit of Hell.

Freshly determined to find the socks and gloves, Emmeline searches in earnest. She even puts on her bonnet, to solemnise her intentions in case she’s tempted to give up. To her delight, however, she finds the bags almost immediately, stacked on top of one another in a wardrobe. But pulling them out disturbs dust, and before she can steel herself against it, she’s coughing, coughing, coughing. She coughs until she’s on her knees, tears running down her cheeks, her trembling hands pressing her handkerchief hard against her mouth. Then, when it’s over, she rests on the foot of the stairs, rocking herself for comfort, staring at the square of light beaming through the frosted glass in her front door.

Mrs Fox does not consider herself ill. In her estimation she is as healthy as any woman with a naturally weak chest can expect to be. Nor, while we’re on the subject of her disadvantages, does she consider herself ugly. God gave her a long face, but it’s a face she’s satisfied with. It reminds her of Disraeli, but softer. It didn’t stop her getting a husband, did it? And if she never has another, well, one husband is enough. And, returning to the subject of health, despite Bertie’s ruddy cheeks and ready grin, in the end it wasn’t
her
health that failed but
his
. Which just goes to prove that it’s not gossips who decide the span of human life, but God.

Breathing carefully, she rises to her feet and walks over to the bags. She grasps one in each hand and tests their weight. Equal. She carries them to the door, pausing only a moment to check her hair in the glass before leaving.

A world away to the east, Henry Rackham walks the streets too. (What a day this is for walking! You couldn’t have predicted how healthy you’d become, could you, following these people around?)

Henry is walking along a street where he has never walked before, a winding, shadowy street where he must watch his step lest his shoes slip in shit, where he must keep an eye on every alley and subterranean stairwell lest he be accosted. He walks stiffly, his determination only slightly stronger than his fear; he can only hope (for he has, in the circumstances, no right to
pray
) that no one of his acquaintance sees him entering this evil-smelling maze.

Henry knows which days Mrs Fox works for the Rescue Society and which days she’s at home; her schedule is engraved on his memory, and on Mondays she rests. That is why he has chosen today to be walking in St Giles, just the sort of place where she might minister. He suppresses a cough against the stench, and wades deeper.

Within minutes, all pretence of decency is gone; the solidity and straight lines of Oxford Street are invisible and already half-forgotten, erased from the mind by a nightmare vision of subsidence – subsidence of the roadway itself, of the ramshackle houses shored on either side, of the flesh and moral character of the squalid inhabitants.

Truly, thinks Henry, this quarter of the city is an outer rim of Hell, a virtual holding area for the charnel-house. The newspapers say it is much improved since the Fifties, but how can that be? Already he has seen a severed dog’s head rotting in the gutter, its protruding tongue swollen with lice; he has seen half-naked infants throwing cobble-stones at each other, their haggard faces distorted by rage and glee; he has seen a host of spectres staring out of broken windows, their eyes hollow, their sex indeterminate, their flesh scarcely less grey than the rags that clothe them. A disturbing number of them seem to be housed underground, in basements accessible only by obscure stairwells or, in some cases, rickety ladders. Wet washing hangs from window to window, speckled with soot; here and there a tattered bed-sheet flaps in the breeze, like a flag whose distinguishing marks are posies of faded bloodstain brown.

Henry Rackham has come here with one purpose in mind: to make a difference. Not the kind of difference Mrs Fox makes, but a difference nonetheless.

Mere minutes after his arrival, he is approached by an ugly woman of middle age, or perhaps younger, wearing a voluminous dress in the Regency style, but much darned and patched. She is bare-headed and bare-necked, and her smile as she greets him displays all her remaining teeth: is she therefore a prostitute?

‘Spare a few pennies, sir, for a poor nunfortunate.’

A beggar, then.

‘Is it food you need?’ says Henry, wary of being taken for a dupe. He aches to be generous, but fancies he detects a whiff of alcohol on her breath.

‘You said it, sir. Food is the fing I want.’ Ungry, I am. I’ve ’ad nuffink since yesty.’ Her eyes shine greedily; she wrings her swollen hands.

‘Shall I …’ He hesitates, resisting her predatory gaze, which tugs at his soul as if it were a juicy worm. ‘Shall I accompany you to a place where food is sold? I’ll buy you whatever you wish.’

‘Oh
no
, sir,’ she replies, apparently scandalised. ‘My reputation, sir, is precious to me. I’ve got children to fink of.’

‘Children?’ He hadn’t imagined she would have children; she looks too unlike the plump unwrinkled mothers he sees in church.

‘I’ve five children, sir,’ she assures him, her hands hovering in the air as if she might seize hold of his arm at any moment. ‘Five; and two of ’em’s babes, and they’s awful squally, and me ’usband can’t torrelate it, sir, on account of his sleep. So ’e whacks ’em, sir, whacks ’em in their cots, till they’s quiet. And I was finkin’, sir, if I could ’ave a few pennies from your kind self, sir, I could dose me babies wiv some Muvver’s Blessing from the pharmasiss, sir, and they’d sleep like angels.’

Henry’s hand is already in his pocket when the horror of it strikes him.

‘But … but you must dissuade your husband from striking your children!’ he declares. ‘He could do them terrible harm …’

‘Ah, yes, sir, but ’e’s sich a tired soul, what wiv workin’ all day,’ e needs ’is sleep at night, and the babes is awful squally, as I said; when one falls quiet the others set to screamin’, an’ it’s impostible, sir, wiv six of ’em.’

‘Six? You said you had five just now.’

‘Six, sir. But one’s so quiet, you ’ardly know she’s there.’

A strange impasse settles between them, there in the sordid public street. He has a coin enclosed in his palm, hesitating. She licks her lips, afraid to say more, in case she prejudices his generosity.

‘Children don’t weep for mischief ’s sake,’ says Henry, still wrestling with the vision of innocent babies battered in their cots. ‘Your husband must understand that. Children weep because they’re hungry, or sad.’

‘You said it, sir,’ she eagerly agrees, nodding her head, staring deep into his eyes. ‘You understand.’ Ungry, they are. And awful, awful sa-ad.’

Henry sighs, letting go of his suspicions. There can be no charity without trust, or at least the willingness to take a risk. All right, so this woman has recently touched strong drink and is, in her manner, crudely ingratiating: what of it? Kindness will not spoil her further; nor is her family, whatever their true number may be, to blame for her sins.

‘Here,’ he says, transferring the money into her trembling grasp. ‘Mind you use it for food.’

‘Fank you,
fank
you, sir,’ she crows. ‘Wiv dis small coin, as is nuffink to you, sir, you’ve jest put a fine meal on the table for a poor widder and her family – jest fink on that, sir!’

Henry thinks on it, frowning, as she scurries into a dark cleft between two buildings.

‘Widow?’ he mutters, but she is gone.

In a more ideal world, Henry should have had a few minutes’ grace in which to reflect upon this encounter and consider what to do next, for he is troubled by a jostle of conflicting emotions. However, the glint of his money has been observed by other citizens of the street, no less clearly than if it were a firework exploding in the sky above. From every nook and corner, ragged humans begin to converge upon him, their verminous eyes aglow with cunning. Henry strides forward, unnerved and yet at the same time queerly reckless. There’s a substance coursing through his bloodstream, transforming his fear into something else altogether: a feeling of exaggerated readiness, of unaccustomed one-ness with his body.

First to reach him is a weasel-like fellow with a grotesque limp. In one bony hand he clutches a tanning-knife, held aloft so that Henry can see it – but almost as if it’s an innocuous article the newcomer has carelessly forgotten, and he is merely returning it. The air, for Henry, is charged not with danger but with a hallucinatory whiff of farce. ‘Gi-hive me yer mu-huny,’ the little man wheezes, grimacing like a chimpanzee, brandishing the grimy blade an arm’s length from Henry’s chest.

Henry stares into his assailant’s eyes. The fellow is a head shorter then he, and half his weight.

‘God forgive you,’ growls Rackham, raising his fists, which compare favourably, in size, with the thief ’s stunted skull. ‘And God forgive me too, for if you step any closer I swear I’ll knock you down.’

Gurning fearsomely, the fellow backs off, almost stumbles on a loose cobble, turns and limps away. Several other denizens of St Giles halt their advance on Rackham and retreat likewise, deciding that he is not, in one way or another, the soft touch he appeared to be.

Only one person is not dissuaded; only one person continues to approach. It’s a scrawny young woman, dressed in what to Henry looks like a white night-dress, a man’s black overcoat, and a lace curtain for a shawl. Like the beggar-woman, she’s bare-headed, but her elfin face is fresher, and her hair is red. She steps boldly into Henry’s path, and unknots her shawl with a casual motion, revealing a freckled sternum.

‘My hand is yours for a shillin’, sir,’ she declares, ‘and any other part of me for two shillin’s.’

There, it’s said. She stands in his shadow and waits.

A feeling of wholly unexpected calm descends upon Henry Rackham, a disembodied serenity such as he’s never experienced before, even at the threshold of dreamless sleep. This is the moment he has long dreaded and desired, his own initiation into the sensual underworld that Mrs Fox negotiates with such dignity and aplomb. So often in his imaginings he has seen this girl (or a girl vaguely like her); now here she stands before him, in the flesh. And, to his relief, he finds her to be not a siren at all, but a mere child – a child with crusts on her eyelids and a graze on her chin.

How he feared, before summoning the courage to come here today, that his good intentions were nothing but a sham, a fragile delusion preserved only by an accident of geography. How haunted he was by the anxiety that, if God should ever bless him with a parish of his own, his first act in exploring its poorer streets would be to fall upon just such a defenceless wretch as stands before him now, and violate her. But here she is: a prostitute, a harlot, an abandoned creature who has just given him explicit permission to do with her exactly as he wishes. And what does he wish? She breathes shallowly, lips parted, looking up at him in his shadow, awaiting his approval, unaware that she has already passed on to him a gift of incalculable value – a reflection of his own nature. He knows now: Whatever he desires, whatever his sinful heart lusts after, it is not this small carcass of scuffed flesh and bone.

‘Your body parts aren’t yours to sell, miss,’ he says, gently. ‘They belong together, and the whole belongs to God.’

‘
My
’ole belongs to anyone that’s got two shillin’s, sir,’ she insists.

He winces and digs his hand into his pocket.

‘Here,’ he says, handing her two shillings. ‘And I’ll tell you what I want for it.’

She cocks her head, a flicker of apprehension disturbing the dead calm of her eyes.

‘I want you …’ He hesitates, knowing this world is too intractably wicked, and he too lacking in moral authority, for him to command her to ‘Go and sin no more’. Instead, he does his best to smile and appear less stern. ‘I want you to regard these two shillings as an act that’s no longer necessary …’ (Even as the words leave his mouth, her puzzled expression lets him know he is losing her.) ‘Ah … I mean,
in lieu
of whatever you might otherwise have done to earn it …’ (Still she frowns, uncomprehending, her bottom lip disappearing under her top teeth.) ‘What I mean is … For goodness’ sake, miss, whatever you were going to do, don’t do it!’

Instantly she grins from ear to ear.

‘Understood, sir!’ And she saunters away – with rather more of a swing to her undercarriage than he’s ever observed on a decent woman.

By now, Henry has had enough. He is tired, and longs for the safety and decorum of his own study in Gorham Place. The burst of adrenalin which enabled him to defend himself against the weasel man has ebbed now, and the foreign admixtures of emotion left in its wake are no longer exhilarating but merely befuddling.

With a heavy tread, he walks back towards the better part of town, where he’ll be able to hail an omnibus and begin the daunting task of disentangling what he has learned today. However, as he hurries through the labyrinthine streets, peering briefly into every alley and cul-de-sac in case it offers an early escape from St Giles, he happens to catch sight of … is it not? Yes, it’s the beggar-woman he gave money for food – the widow with the violent husband and five, or six, children.

She’s sitting in the open doorway of a slum, side-on to public view, her skirts puddling over the filthy summit of a half-dozen stone steps. Behind her, just inside the house, slouches a man with hair as black and coarse as the bristles on a chimney-brush. He wears a knitted waistcoat, a blue scarf and a military jacket, and loose trousers against which the woman casually leans her head. The two of them are sharing a brand-new bottle of spirits, handing it back and forth between them, guzzling with great satisfaction.