The Crimson Petal and the White (40 page)

‘What a tragedy,’ breathes Sugar, venturing, hesitantly, to lay a condoling hand on his knee. It is accepted. ‘I imagine she’d love you still, if only she could.’

‘The maddening thing … I mean, the thing that puzzles me most, is that she changes from day to day. Some days she’s as normal as you or I, then suddenly she’ll do or say something wholly outrageous.’

‘Like … ?’ Sugar’s voice is small and unobtrusive.

‘She believes she travels to a Catholic convent in her sleep. She believes she’s being watched by angels. They wave to her, she says.’

Sugar lays her hot cheek against his waist, embracing him companionably, hoping the flush will fade before she has to show her face again. Caught spying outside the Rackham house, what else could she have done, when Mrs Rackham waved at her, but wave back?

‘Only last week she disgraced herself with a servant on the floor of our kitchen,’ William continues miserably. ‘The doctor had to come. He thinks
I’m
mad to keep her … He has no idea what a darling she used to be! Nowadays, Agnes spends half her life asleep – doped with potions, or simply lazy. I don’t know anymore, it’s beyond me …’

Sugar strokes his knee, regularly and unsensually, the way she might stroke the head of a pet. Inside her pantalettes she feels a trickle of blood, but it appears tonight will not be the night when William Rackham’s attitude to the bleeding of women is revealed.

‘How long has … Agnes been this bad?’ she asks.

‘Ach! Who knows what she’s been hiding in her head since before she knew me! But … I’d have to say that her madness was less …’ (he clenches and unclenches his injured fist, grasping for the right word) ‘… full-flowered, before the child.’

‘Oh?’ Again, Sugar’s voice is weightless, a mouse’s tread. ‘You have a child?’

‘Just one, yes,’ William sighs. ‘A daughter, unfortunately.’

A sharp twitch of indignation, too instantaneous for her to suppress, passes through Sugar’s cheek directly against William’s stomach; she hopes his clothing diffuses it. How strange, that she’s learnt to listen to all sorts of vile masculine harangues with perfect composure – diatribes against the female sex in general, her body as a cesspool of filth, her cunt as the mouth of Hell – but, every so often, a mild remark about the uselessness of a female child provokes her to fury. Teeth clenched, she holds her man tighter, to exorcise the anger in a vehement show of affection.

‘I suppose,’ she says, to break the silence that’s fallen, ‘your wife’s illness has lost her all her friends?’

He sinks lower in the armchair, relaxing into her embrace. ‘Well you know, that’s the odd thing … I’d have
thought
so, but apparently it hasn’t. The Season’s round the corner, and invitations have
poured
in. Amazing, considering what she got up to last time she took part …’

‘What did she get up to?’

‘Oh … All sorts of things. Laughed when there was nothing to laugh about, didn’t laugh when there was. Shouted nonsense, warned people against invisible dangers. Crawled under a dinner table once, complaining the meat had blood in it. Fainted more times than I can remember. Oh God, the number of times I had to have her carted off … !’ She feels him shake his head. ‘And yet, here she is, forgiven. That’s Society for you!’

She rubs her ear against his stomach. He has, by the sound of the gurglings within, eaten nothing: all the quicker will the drink loosen his tongue.

‘Have you considered,’ she says, ‘the possibility that the invitations have poured in on
your
account?’

‘
My
account?’ He heaves a sigh that lifts her head a full three inches. ‘I’ve never been one for balls and picnics and dinner parties. I’d rather make my own amusement. In any case, I’m monstrously busy this year, and can’t think where I’m going to find the time.’

‘Yes, but don’t you think there’ll be people who’ve been watching your … your extraordinary rise? You’ve become a very great man, William, very swiftly. Great men are wanted everywhere. These invitations … well, people can’t very well invite you and not your wife, can they?’

William lays his arm down the length of her back, his hand nestling on the swell of her bustle. She’s convinced him, she can tell.

‘What a simpleton I am …’ he muses, his voice rich with brandy and tranquillised anxiety. ‘Not to have appreciated how things have changed …’

‘You must be mindful of who your true friends are,’ Sugar advises him, as she begins once more to caress the lap of his trousers. ‘The richer you become, the more people will stop at nothing to curry favour with you.’

He groans, and guides her head towards his lap.

Afterwards, when his hard-won cockstand has shrivelled to a stub, Sugar presses on, in the hope of getting more out of him.

‘How I’ve yearned for that divine taste,’ she gloats, to prevent his bolstered spirits sagging likewise. ‘You were gone so long! Didn’t you have a thought to spare for your little concubine, stranded here without fresh clothes for days, starving for you?’

‘I’ve been up to my ears …’ But she laughs and butts in on his apology, kissing his ears with comical rapidity, a flurry of impish kisses to let him know he hasn’t hurt her feelings at all. He snortles, ticklish, his double chin visible through his beard as he cringes. ‘Being at the helm of a business is more time-consuming than I could have imagined. The Hopsom affair was only one of the things on my plate in the last few days. And the coming weeks are scarcely less busy. Soon I’ll have to go to my lavender fields in Mitcham, and sort out why there’s—’

‘Lavender fields?’ she interjects excitedly.

‘Yes …’

‘Where the lavender actually grows?’

‘Well, yes, of course …’

‘Oh, William! How I’d love to see such a sight! Do you know I’ve never seen anything growing except what’s in the parks of London?’ She drops onto her haunches, as low to the floor as possible, so he can gaze down on her enraptured face. ‘A field full of lavender! To you it may be the most ordinary thing in the world, but for your little Sugar it’s like a fairy story! Oh, William, couldn’t you take me?’

He squirms, smiling and frowning at the same time. Misgivings struggle to manifest in a brain soggy with alcohol and sensual satiation.

‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, sweet thing that you are …’ he slurs. ‘But think of the risk of scandal: you, an unknown young woman, walking alone with me in my fields, for all the workers to see …’

‘But isn’t this place on the other side of England?’

‘Mitcham? It’s down in Surrey, dear …’ He grins, to see the undiminished ignorance in her face. ‘Quite close enough for gossip.’

‘I needn’t be alone, then!’ she declares eagerly. ‘I could be escorted by another man. O-or rather—’ she notes the flicker of mistrust in his brow ‘—I could escort someone
else
: a-an
old
man. Yes, yes: I know just the person, a lame old man I could pass off as my grandfather. He’s deaf and blind – well, almost. He’d be no trouble. I could just …
wheel
him along with us, like a baby in a perambulator.’

Rackham blinks at her in a goggle of incredulity.

‘You’re not in earnest, surely?’

‘I’ve never been more serious!’ she cries. ‘Oh, William,
say
you will!’

He lurches to his feet, laughing at his own clumsiness, at the delirious absurdity of a brandy-tinted universe.

‘I mustn’t fall asleep here,’ he mumbles, fastening his trousers. ‘Hopsom is coming to see me in the morning …’

‘
Say
yes, William,’ pleads Sugar, helping him tuck his shirt in. ‘To me, I mean.’

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he says, swaying in front of the chair that holds his ulster, still faintly steaming. ‘When I’m not so drunk!’

And he hoists his coat by the collar, allowing her to help him wriggle his arms into its obstinate sleeves. The garment is heavy, searingly hot on the outside, humid on the inside, with a peculiar smell; William and Sugar giggle, foreheads together, at the sheer unpleasantness of it.

‘I love you!’ he laughs, and she embraces him tight, pressing her cheek against his bristly jaw.

Outside, the storm has passed. Night has composed itself over Priory Close, stilling the rain, snuffing the wind. The black sky glitters with stars, the slick streets shine like silver in the lamp-light. The full moon, siren to all lunatics from the rookeries of Shoreditch to the regal bed-chambers of Westminster, winks on the chimneyed horizon.

‘Watch your step, dear heart!’ calls Sugar from the glowing vestibule of this, his home away from home.

Chepstow Villas, once William’s cab has jingled off, is silent as a churchyard, and the Rackham house looms tall as a monument – a grand pretentious gravestone for an illustrious family that reached the end of its line. William shivers, with cold and with annoyance at the amplified creak of his front gate as he pushes through. He is half-sober now, in a most lugubrious mood, dispirited by the cheerless welcome of his own abode. Even the dog that likes to haunt the front gates has retired, and the path through the austerely shorn grounds glows eerie in the moonlight. A glimpse of the empty coach-house, half-hidden and sinister under the trees, reminds him of yet another item on his long list of things to be done.

He rings the doorbell once, but, conceding the lateness of the hour, he fumbles for his key. Feeble light filters through the ornamental window above the architrave – just enough to cast a shadow over his fingers as he bends his head closer to his damned elusive pockets. (Lord Almighty! If his company manufactured clothing instead of perfumes, there’d be some changes made!)

Just as he’s found the key and is on the point of inserting it successfully in the key-hole, the door swings open, and he’s greeted by a puffy-eyed Letty, woken no doubt from vertical slumber. Even in the light of the single candle she holds, he can see her left cheek is red and wrinkled from the sleeve of her uniform; no doubt she observes equally well his swollen red nose and sweaty brow.

‘Where’s Clara?’ he says, when she has helped him off with his coat. (Her hands are stronger than Sugar’s, yet less effective.)

‘Gone to bed, Mr Rackham.’

‘Good. You do the same, Letty.’ He has one more responsibility to discharge before he goes to bed, and it will be a damn sight easier with Clara out of the way.

‘Thank you, Mr Rackham.’

He watches her ascend the stairs, waits for her to be stowed in her attic hutch. Then he follows on behind, straight to Agnes’s bedroom.

The chamber, when he enters it, is airless and oppressive – like a sealed glass jar, he thinks. When he first courted Agnes, she ran girlishly across the green lawns of Regent’s Park, a flurry of bright skirts in the breeze; now her terrain is this thickly curtained sepulchre. He sniffs warily; were he not already so brandied, he might detect the scent of rubbing alcohol spilled on the carpet by a novice doctor attempting to saturate a cotton swab.

Walking towards the bed, candle held high, William sees his wife’s face half-buried in the over-sized, over-plumped pillows. Her lips convulse feebly as she registers his approach; her insubstantial eyelashes flutter.

‘Clara?’ she whimpers.

‘It’s me. William.’

Agnes’s eyes flip half-open, exposing sightless whites in which her revolving china-blue irises appear and disappear like fish. Plainly, she’s doped half-way to fairyland, levitating through the labyrinths of whatever convents or castles she likes to frequent.

‘Where’s Clara?’

‘She’s just outside the door,’ he lies. How she fears to be alone with him! How she loathes his touch! His pity for her is so strong he yearns to wave a magic wand over her and banish her frailties forever; his resentment is equally strong, so that if he indeed held a wand, he might just as likely bring it crashing down on her head, exploding her pathetic egg-shell skull.

‘How are you feeling now, dear?’

She turns her face in his direction; her eyes focus for a second, then close wearily.

‘Like a lost bonnet floating along a dark river,’ she murmurs. The old music is back in her voice: what a beautiful voice she has, even when it’s talking nonsense.

‘Do you remember what you said to me?’ he says, holding the candle closer, ‘before you fell into a faint?’

‘No, dear,’ she sighs, turning her face away, burrowing nose-first into a warm white depression already filled with her own hair. ‘Was it very bad?’

‘Yes, it was very bad.’

‘I’m sorry, William, so awfully sorry.’ Her voice is muffled by her cottony nest. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’

‘In sickness and in health, Aggie: that’s the vow I made.’

For another minute or two he stands there, her apology travelling slowly down his gullet like a shot of brandy, warming his insides by degrees. Then, accepting it as the best outcome he can hope for, he turns, at last, to leave.

‘William?’

‘Mmm?’

Her face has surfaced again, glistening with tears now, frightened in the candlelight.

‘Am I still your little girl?’

He grunts in pain from this wholly unexpected blow to his plexus of nostalgia. Droplets of scalding candle-fat patter onto an already blistered hand as his fists and eyes clench in unison.

‘Go to sleep, Precious,’ he advises her hoarsely, walking backwards out of the door. ‘Tomorrow is a brand-new day.’

FOURTEEN

O
ne sunny afternoon late in the April of 1875, in a vast rolling field of lavender, a scattered host of workers cease their toil for just a minute. Submerged knee-high in a lake of
Lavandula
, they stand idle with their hoes and slug-buckets, to stare at the beautiful young woman walking past them on the path dividing the acres.

‘’Oo’s that?’ they whisper to each other, eyes owlish with curiosity. ‘’Oo’s that?’ But no one knows.

The lady wears a lavender dress; her white-gloved hands and bonneted head are like blossoms sprouting from her wrists and neck. The dress is intricately pleated and ruched, like unravelling rope, giving her the appearance of a life-sized corn dolly.

‘An’ ’oo’s that wiv’ ’er?’

The woman does not walk alone or unencumbered. She’s pushing, with the utmost care along the maze of paths, an indistinct burden in a wheelchair. It’s an ancient, crippled man, well rugged up with blankets and shawls, his head muffled in a scarf, despite the mildness of the weather. And, next to the old man and the woman who wheels him, there walks a third visitor to the fields today: William Rackham, owner of all. He speaks frequently; the old man speaks from time to time; the woman says almost nothing; but the toilers in the field, row upon row, catch only a few words each before the procession moves on.

‘ ’Oo d’yer fink she is?’ asks a sun-dried wife of her sun-dried husband.

‘The old one’s daughter, I’d say. Or grand-daughter. Likely the old one’s rich. Likely our Curly Bill wants to do business wiv ’im.’

‘’E’ll ’ave to move fast, then. That old crock could cark it any minute.’

‘At least ’Opsom ’ad a pair o’ legs to walk on.’

And with that they return to work, drifting into separate currents of vegetation.

Yet, further on, more toilers stop and stare. Nothing like this – a lady visitor to the fields – was ever seen in William’s father’s time; Rackham Senior preferred to keep well-bred females out of the field, for fear their hearts might start bleeding. The last to visit was his own wife, twenty years ago, before the cuckolding.

‘Oh but she’s beautiful,’ sighs one swarthy toiler, squinting after the strange feminine silhouette.

‘So would
you
be,’ spits a fellow drudge, ‘if you never done hard labour.’

‘Yarrr!’ growls the old man in the wheelchair, his stench of stale clothing and haphazard hygiene much diluted by the fresh air and the acres of damp soil and lovingly tended lavender.

Sugar bows her head down as she continues to wheel him forward, her lips hovering near his scarf-shrouded skull, approximately where one of his ears must be.

‘Now, now, Colonel Leek,’ she says. ‘Remember you’re here to enjoy yourself.’

But Colonel Leek is not enjoying himself, or so he would have Sugar believe. Only his lust for the promised reward – six shillings and more whisky in a day than Mrs Leek will let him have in a month – keeps him from outright mutiny. He’s certainly not in the least interested in playing the part of anyone’s grandfather.

‘I need to pee.’

‘Do it in your pants,’ hisses Sugar sweetly. ‘Pretend you’re at home.’

‘Oh, so kind-hearted, you are.’ He twists his head, exposing one rheumy malevolent eye and half a mottled, gummy mouth. ‘Too good for St Giles, eh, trollop?’

‘Six shillings and whisky, remember –
Grandfather
.’

And so they trundle on, with the sun beaming down on them, there in the pampered heartland of Rackham Perfumeries.

William Rackham walks aloof, unimpeachably proper, dressed in his stiff Sunday best despite it being Wednesday. Not for him his father’s moleskin trousers and Wellington boots; a modern perfumery is ruled from the head, and kept in line with the pen. Everything that goes on in these fields, every stoop of a worker’s back or pruning of the tiniest twig, is set in motion by his own thoughts and written requirements. Or so he has attempted to convey to his visitors.

He’s aware, of course, that the liaison between Sugar and the old man is rather less amicable than she’d claimed, but he has forgiven her. Indeed, had she and Colonel Leek been sharing confidential affections, he might have felt a prick of jealousy. It’s better this way: the old man’s pneumonic mumbling is so gruff that the field-workers won’t understand much of what they chance to overhear, and the fact that Sugar is wheeling him speaks louder than any declarations of kinship.

‘Enjoy the sunshine, why don’t you,’ she admonishes the Colonel as the three of them make their way up the gentle slope of Beehive Hill.

The old man coughs, giving the phlegm in his chest a slight jiggle.

‘Sunlight is bad,’ he wheezes. ‘It’s the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers’ legs. And when there’s no war on, it fades wallpaper.’

Sugar presses forward, rolling this talking Sisyphus stone farther up the slope, flashing William a smile of reassurance.
Pay him no heed
, her smile says.
You and I know the value of this place
–
and the significance of this grand
day in our lives
.

‘It’s as I thought: they’ll feed on me like parasites, if I let them,’ mutters William. ‘They think I’ll swallow any story they tell me.’

Sugar cocks her head sympathetically, inviting him to explain.

‘They swear they’ve been pruning the older bushes for weeks,’ he scoffs. ‘Since yesterday afternoon, more likely! You can’t see how straggly they look?’

Sugar glances back. To her, the workers appear stragglier and less well cared for than the lavender.

‘It all looks magnificent to me,’ she says.

‘They ought to be putting a damn sight more cuttings in,’ he assures her. ‘Now’s the time when they’ll root freely.’

‘Hurgh-hurgh-
hurgh
!’ coughs the Colonel.

‘Your farm is much bigger than I dreamed it would be,’ remarks Sugar, to steer the conversation back to flattery. ‘There seems no end it.’

‘Ah, but,’ says Rackham, ‘it isn’t all mine.’ Taking advantage of their elevation, he points downhill, to a long line of white-washed stakes all along one of the paths. ‘
Those
mark the boundary of another farm. Lavender grows best the more of it there is. The bees don’t prefer one man’s bush to another’s. All in all, some half-dozen perfumeries own a portion of this land; my portion is forty acres.’

‘Forty acres!’ Sugar has only the vaguest idea how much this is, but appreciates it’s an enormous area compared to, say, Golden Square. Indeed, all the streets she’s ever lived in, if they were dug out of their polluted foundations by a giant spade, could be dumped in the pillowy centre of this lavender paradise, and discreetly buried in soft brown earth, never to be seen again.

And yet, as William has reminded her several times, this farm is only one tributary of his empire. There are other farms in other places, each devoted to a single bloom; there are even whaling boats on the Atlantic harvesting ambergris and spermaceti for Rackham Perfumeries. Sugar surveys the great lake of lavender before her, and measures it against a pomander of petals such as she might be able to hold in her hand. So much luxury, in such excess! An essence she might purchase in a tiny phial for a considerable sum is so abundant, here at its source, that it’s no doubt poured roughly into barrels and the overspills trampled into mud – or so she fancies. The concept is magical and indecent, like a vision of jewellers wading ankle-deep in gems, crunching them underfoot, shovelling them into sacks.

‘But really, Colonel,’ she implores the old man beneath her, half-teasing, half-impassioned. ‘This is all so … so
glorious
. Can’t you admit, at least, that it makes a nice change from Mrs Leek’s?’

‘
Ah
? A nice
change
?’ The old man fidgets furiously in his squeaking seat, straining to retrieve some salient facts from his encyclopaedic memory for disasters. ‘Granville’s Combined Orchards, burnt to a cinder, two and a half year ago!’ he proclaims in triumph. ‘Twelve dead! Lucifer factory in Goeteborg, Sweden, 27th of last month: forty-four burnt to death and nine mortally injured! Cotton plantation in Virginia last Christmas, down to ash in half a day, savages and all!’ He pauses, swivels his gaze around to William Rackham, and leers, ‘What a bonfire all
this’d
make, eh?’

‘Actually, sir,’ William replies with lofty condescension, ‘it does
indeed
make a splendid bonfire, every year. My fields are divided, you see, according to the age of the plants on them. Some are in their fifth year, exhausted, and will be burnt at the end of October. I can assure you the fire is big enough to make all Mitcham smell of lavender.’

‘Oh, how wonderful!’ cries Sugar. ‘How I should love to be here then!’

William blushes with pride, there on the hillock, his chin pushed out in the direction of his empire. What a miracle he has wrought – he, so recently an effete idler in straitened circumstances – now master of this vast farm with its quaint brown workers moving amongst the lavender like field mice. The sounds of industry belong to him too, plus the smells of a million flowers, plus even the sky immediately above, for if
he
doesn’t own these things, who does? Oh, granted, God is still supposed to own everything, but where’s the line to be drawn? Only a crackpot would insist on God’s ownership of Paddington Station or a mound of cow-dung – why quibble, then, with William Rackham’s ownership of this farm, and everything above and below it? William recalls the verses of Scripture his father was fond of quoting to the dubious young Henry: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue
it’ (Rackham Senior would lay emphasis on this word) ‘and have dominion over every thing that moveth upon the earth.’

So vividly does William recall this statement that he feels almost reinstated in the tiny body he occupied at seven years old, on the occasion of his own first visit to this farm, dawdling behind his older brother. Their father, dark-haired and big then, chose the lavender fields as that part of the empire which might appeal most to the boy who would one day inherit.

‘And are these ladies and gentlemen p’mitted to take home any of the lavender they harvest, Father?’ Clear as a bell across the years comes Henry’s childish voice – yes, Henry’s, for William would never, even at the age of seven, have asked such a stupid question.

‘They don’t need to take any home,’ Henry Calder Rackham enlightened his first-born indulgently. ‘They reek of it just by working in it.’

‘That is a very pleasant reward, I think.’ (What an ass Henry was, always!)

Their father guffawed. ‘They won’t work for that alone, boy. They must have wages as well.’ The expression of incredulity on Henry’s face ought to have alerted the old man that he had the wrong son earmarked for heir. But no matter, no matter … Time upraises all who are worthy.

‘Yaarr!’

Ignoring the bestial grousing of Colonel Leek, William surveys his fields once more before descending Beehive Hill. Everything is identical to how it was when he was a boy – although these workers cannot be the same workers who toiled in Henry Calder Rackham’s domain twenty-one years ago, for men and women, too, like enfeebled fifth-year plants, are uprooted and destroyed when they are exhausted.

A wrinkled, thick-set girl carrying on her back a sack of branches passes close by William and his guests, nodding in grim sycophancy.

‘You were telling us about the fifth-year plants, Mr Rackham,’ comes the voice of Sugar.

‘Yes,’ he loudly replies, as a second sack-bearer follows the first. ‘
Some
perfumeries harvest their lavender a sixth year. Not Rackham’s.’

‘And how soon after planting is the lavender ready to be used, sir?’

‘When the plants are in their second year – though they are not at their best until the third.’

‘And how much lavender water will be produced, sir?’

‘Oh, several thousand gallons.’

‘Isn’t that an astonishing thought, grandfather?’ Sugar asks the old man.

‘Eh? Grandfather?
You
don’t even know who your grandfather was!’

Sugar cranes her head to confirm that the sack-bearers are out of earshot. ‘You’re going to get us all into mischief,’ she chides Colonel Leek in a feral whisper, jerking the handles of his wheelchair warningly. ‘I’d’ve had less bother from a beggar off the street.’

The old man bares his teeth and shakes his hideous head free of its swaddlings. ‘What of it!’ he sneers. ‘That’s what comes of subterfuge. Charades! Fancy dress! Har! Did I ever tell you about Lieutenant Carp, who I served with in the last great war?’ (By this he doesn’t mean the war against the Ashantees, or even the Indian Mutiny, but the Crimean.) ‘
There
’s subterfuge for ye! Carp dressed up in a lady’s cloak and bonnet, and tried to cross over the enemy lines – the wind blew the cloak up over his head and there he was, hobbling around with his musket dangling between his legs. I’ve never seen a man shot so many times. Hur! Hur! Hur! Subterfuge!’

This outburst causes a few heads to pop up in the surrounding fields.

‘A most diverting anecdote, sir,’ says William frigidly.

‘Don’t mind him, William,’ says Sugar. ‘He’ll be asleep soon. He always sleeps in the afternoon.’

Colonel Leek churns his grizzled jaw in indignation. ‘That was years ago, trollop, when I weren’t well! I’m better now!’

Sugar bends low over him, one hand digging her thinly-gloved claws into his right shoulder, the other gently caressing his left.

‘Whisssky,’ she sings into his ear. ‘Whisssssky.’

Minutes later, when Colonel Leek is slumped in his chair, snoring, William Rackham and Sugar stand in the shade of an oak, watching the industry from a distance. Sugar is radiant, and not merely from the unaccustomed exercise of pushing the wheelchair; she’s deeply happy. All her life, she’s considered herself a city creature, and assumed that the countryside (imagined only through monochrome engravings and romantic poetry) had nothing to offer her. This conception she now casts off with joyful abandon. She must make sure this isn’t the last time she walks under these grand blue skies and on this soft, verdant earth. Here is air she means to breathe more often.