The Crimson Petal and the White (32 page)

‘No, nothing,’ he affirms. How odd that he never realised this before! His two oldest friends, and there’s a gulf between him and them – a gulf he could bridge only if he resumed being as idle as they, or if they found something purposeful to do. What an insight! And it comes out of the mouth of this entrancing young woman whom it has been his good fortune to win. Truly, these are strange and significant times in his personal history.

A little shyly, in exchange for the Bodley and Ashwell book she’s plainly losing patience with, he hands her the Winter 1874 catalogue of Rackham manufactures. (The Spring one isn’t ready.) Again Sugar surprises him, by looking him square in the eyes, and saying, ‘But tell me, William … how is business?’

No woman has ever asked him this question. It is a great deal more transgressive than talk of cocks and cunts.

‘Oh … splendid, splendid,’ he replies.

‘No, really,’ she says. ‘How is it? The competition must be frightful.’

He blinks, nonplussed; clears his throat. ‘Well, uh … Rackham’s is on the ascendant, I’d venture to say.’

‘And your rivals?’

‘Pears and Yardley are unassailable, Rimmel and Rowland are in good health. Nisbett had a bad Season last year, and may be in decline. Hinton is ailing, perhaps fatally …’

How queer this conversation is becoming! Is there no limit to what’s possible between him and Sugar? First literature, now this!

‘Good,’ she smirks. ‘Here’s to the decline of your rivals: may they expire one by one.’ And she opens the catalogue and begins browsing. William sits close beside her, one arm around her back, his knees pressing into the warmth of her skirts.

‘The end of Winter is always a good time for sales of soaps, bath oils and the like,’ he informs her, to fill the silence.

‘Oh?’ she says. ‘I suppose it’s because people aren’t so reluctant to wash.’

He chuckles. They’ve been together for fifteen minutes already, and are both still fully clothed, as proper a pair as any married couple.

‘Maybe so,’ he says. ‘Mainly it’s due to the London season. Ladies like to stock up early, so that when May comes and they have to brave the crowds, they’ve nothing left to buy but big things in showy parcels.’

Sugar reads on attentively. When Rackham strokes her cheek, she nudges her face against his hand affectionately and kisses his fingers, but her eyes don’t leave the pages of the catalogue. Even when William kneels at her feet and lifts her skirts, she reads on, shifting forward on the bed to allow him greater freedom, but otherwise pretending not to notice what’s happening to her. It is a game that Rackham finds arousing. Through the layers of soft fabric that shroud him in darkness, he hears, at once muffled and sharp, the sound of a page being turned; closer to his face, he smells the odour of female excitement.

When it’s over, and she’s belly-down on the bed, she is still reading. She reads aloud, reciting the entries, breathless from her exertions.

‘Rackham’s Lavender Milk. Rackham’s Lavender Puffs. Rackham’s Lavender Scented Moth Balls. Rackham’s Damask Rose Drops. Rackham’s Raven Oil …’ She squints at the fine print, rolling onto her side. ‘A high class and innocent Extract for giving instant and permanent Colour. Not a dye.’ She raises her eyebrows over the edge of the catalogue.

‘Of
course
it’s a dye,’ snorts William, at once embarrassed and slightly exhilarated by this frankness, this
intimacy
she’s drawing him into.

‘Rackham’s Snow Dust,’ Sugar continues. ‘Are malodorous feet your Achilles’ heel? Try Rackham’s Foot Balm. Not a soap. A Medicinal Preparation to Scientific Specifications. Rackham’s Aureoline. Produces the beautiful Golden Colour so much admired, ten shillings and sixpence, not a dye. Rackham’s Poudre Juvenile …’

William notes that her French accent is not at all bad: better than most. From the waist up, she’s as
soignée
as any lady he knows, reciting his company’s products like poetry; from the waist down …

‘Rackham’s Cough Remedy. Free of poisons of any kind. Rackham’s Bath Sweetener. One bottle lasts a year. Do your feet smell? To spare your blushes, use Rackham’s Sulphur Soap, does not contain lead, one shilling and sixpence …’

Suddenly he frets: is she mocking him? Her voice is a soft purr, without any audible trace of disrespect. Her legs are still open, displaying the white abundance of Rackham semen slowly leaking out. And yet …

‘Are you making fun of me?’ he asks.

She puts the catalogue down, leans over to stroke his head.

‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘All this is new to me. I want to learn.’

He sighs, flattered and shamed. ‘If you’re keen to fill gaps in your education, better you read Catullus than a Rackham catalogue.’

‘Oh, but
you
didn’t write this, did you, William?’ she says. ‘It was written in your father’s time, yes?’

‘By many hands, no doubt.’

‘None as elegant as yours, I’m sure.’ And she eyes him, a gentle challenge.

He reaches for his trousers. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘Oh, but I could help you. Make suggestions.’ She smiles lasciviously. ‘I’m awfully good at making suggestions.’ Fetching the catalogue up again, she lays her forefinger on one line of it. ‘Now, I happened to notice you flinching when I read the words “Do your feet smell?” A rather low phrase, I must agree.’

‘Ugh, yes,’ he groans, hearing the old man’s voice, picturing him writing those ugly words in that ridiculous green ink of his, tongue slightly protruding from his wrinkled mouth.

‘So let’s think of a phrase worthy of Rackham’s,’ says Sugar, tossing her skirts down to her ankles. ‘
William
Rackham’s, that is.’

Bemused, he opens his lips to protest. Swift as a bird, she swoops on him, laying one flaky finger on his mouth.

Shush
, she mimes.

Miles away, the woman whom William vowed before God to love, honour and cherish is examining her face in a mirror. A tight, throbbing blemish has appeared on her forehead, just below the wispy golden hairline. Unthinkable, given how often and how carefully she sponges her face, but there it is.

On impulse, Agnes squeezes the pimple between her thumb and forefinger. Pain spreads across her brow like a flame, but the pimple stays intact, only angrier. She should have been patient, and applied some Rackham’s Blemish Balm. Now the thing is rooted fast.

In her hand-held mirror, she sees the fear in her eyes. She’s had this pimple before, in exactly the same place, and it has proved a harbinger of something much, much worse. But surely God will spare her, on the eve of the Season? She imagines she can feel her poor brain pulsing against the pink seashell of her inner ear.

Why, oh why, is her health so bad? She has harmed no one, done nothing. What is she doing in this frail and treacherous body? Once upon a time, when she wasn’t born yet, she must have had a choice between a number of different bodies in a number of different places, each destined to have its own retinue of friends, relations and enemies. Maybe
this
place, this body, caught her fancy for the silliest of reasons, and now here she is, stuck! Or maybe a mischievous imp distracted her when she was choosing … She imagines herself looking down, from Heaven, from the spirit world, at all the nice new bodies available, trying to decide whether Agnes Pigott might be an agreeable thing to be, while all around her other spirits jostled for their own return to human life. (Pray God Doctor Curlew never finds her hidden cache of books about Spiritualism and the Beyond. It’ll be the death of her if he does!)

Ah, but all this sophisticated thought is no help at all. She must make peace with her body, however bad a choice it may have been, for if she’s to manage the coming Season, she needs unhindered use of her body’s faculties.

So, bravely, Agnes carries on with her day, forcing herself to perform small tasks – combing her hair, buffing her nails, writing her diary – doing her best to ignore clumsy mishaps. Small scratches and chafes appear on her skin without warning; bruises spread over her like measles; the muscles in her neck, arms and back are stretched to snapping-point, and on her forehead the shiny blemish throbs and throbs.

Please, no, please, no, please, no
, she recites constantly, as if from a rosary.
I don’t want to bleed again
.

To Agnes, bleeding from the belly is a terrifying and unnatural thing. No one has told her about menstruation; she has never heard the word nor seen it in print. Doctor Curlew, the only person who might have enlightened her, never has, because he assumes his patient can’t possibly have married, borne a child and lived to the age of twenty-three without becoming aware of certain basic facts. He assumes incorrectly.

But it’s not so very odd: when, at seventeen, Agnes married William, she’d only bled a few times, and ever since then she’s been ill. Everyone knows that ill people bleed: bleeding is the manifestation of serious illness. Her father (her
real
father, that is) bled on his deathbed, didn’t he, despite not being in any way injured, and she remembers also, as a small child, seeing a baa-lamb lying in a pool of blood, and her nurse telling her that the animal was ‘sickly’.

Well, now
she
, Agnes, is ‘sickly’. And, from time to time, she bleeds.

She hasn’t discerned any pattern. The affliction began when she was seventeen, was cured by prayer and fasting and, after her marriage, it stayed away for almost a year. Then it came at intervals of a month or two – or even three, if she starved herself. Always she hopes she’s seen the last of it, and now she prays she might be spared until August.

‘After the Season,’ she promises the demons who wish her ill. ‘After the Season, you can have me.’ But she feels her belly swelling already.

A few days later, with William away on business in Dundee (wherever on Earth that might be), Sugar decides to take a peep at his house. Why not? She’ll only sit idle in her little room at Mrs Castaway’s otherwise, her novel stalling upon the latest man, unable to decide on his fate.

Her collaboration with William on the wording of future Rackham catalogues proved very fruitful – for her as well as for him. In his enthusiasm to jot down her suggestions, he pulled an old envelope from his pocket that happened to have his address written on it. ‘How about … “Restore your hair to the luxuriance that is your birthright!”?’ she said, simultaneously committing the address to memory.

Now Sugar sits among old folk and respectable young women, riding the omnibus from the city to North Kensington, on a changeable Monday afternoon, on her way to find out where William Rackham, Esquire, lays his head at nights. She’s wearing her dowdiest dress – a loose-fitting woollen one in plain blue, so at odds with the latest fashions as to be pitiable on a woman under thirty. Indeed, Sugar has the impression she
is
pitied by one or two of the ladies, but at least no one suspects her of being a prostitute. That might have made things difficult, given that in the confines of the omnibus there’s no choice but to sit face-to-face with one’s fellow passengers.

‘High Street already,’ murmurs an old man to his wife very near Sugar. ‘We’ve made good time.’

Sugar looks past their wrinkled heads at the world outside. It’s sunny and green and spacious. The omnibus slows to a stop.

‘Chepstow Villas
Cor-nerrr
!’

Sugar alights right behind the elderly couple. They don’t hurry away from her, but accept her walking in their wake as if she’s respectable, just like them. Her disguise, evidently, is perfect.

‘Chilly, isn’t it?’ one old dear mutters to the other, while the sun beams down on Sugar’s perspiring back.

I am young
, she thinks.
It’s a different sun shining on me from the one that shines on them
.

Sugar walks slowly, allowing the old folk to forge ahead. The ground beneath her feet is extraordinarily smooth, as near as cobble-stones can get to parquetry; she imagines an army of paviours patiently completing it like a jigsaw puzzle while the placid citizens look on. She walks on, sniffing the air and goggling at the handsome new houses, trying hard to absorb the Notting Hillness of Notting Hill, trying to imagine what the choice of such a place for a man’s home reveals about him.
This, not the stench of
the city, is the air my William breathes
, she reminds herself.

What she knows about William Rackham so far would hardly fill a book. She knows his preferences in orifices (conventional, unless he’s in a bad mood) and how he feels about the size of his pego (it’s a respectable size, isn’t it, though some other men may be bigger?), and she’s inscribed on her memory all his opinions in literature, down to the last witticism at George Eliot’s expense. But William Rackham the family man and citizen? An elusive creature, not identifiable as the lover she embraces.

Now, she walks along his home street, determined to learn more. How quiet it is here! And how spacious! Moats of greenery everywhere, and trees! Pedestrians are few and far between; they have nothing to sell, they are pensive and unencumbered, they stroll. Carts roll into view very slowly, and take their own sweet time to amble away. There are no shrieks of laughter or distress, no vertiginous stacks of decaying housing, no din of industry or smell of faeces, only curtains in the windows and birds in the trees.

One large house, set well back from the street, is fenced all around in freshly painted cast-iron; as she walks past, Sugar runs her gloved hands along the knots and curls. It’s only after a minute that she realises the dominant motif in the iron design is the letter ‘R’, repeated hundreds and hundreds of times, hidden among the curlicues.

‘Eureka,’ she whispers.

Adjusting her bonnet, she peers through the eye of the largest ‘R’ she can find. Her lips part, her mouth dilates in awe as she takes stock of the house, its pillars and porticos, its carriage-way and gardens.

‘My God. You’ll keep me better than you do now, my dear Willy,’ she softly prophesies.

But then the Rackham house’s front door swings open, and Sugar instantly pulls her hands away from the gate and retreats. She hurries around the corner into a different crescent, looking neither right nor left, wishing herself invisible. It’s all she can do not to break into a run; her bustle bounces against her bottom as it is. A stiff wind springs up where there was no wind before (or was it at her back, gently pushing her on?), stinging her face, almost tearing her bonnet off, flapping the skirts of her dress. She shelters – hides – behind the first public monument she comes to: a marble column commemorating the fallen in the Crimean War.