The Crimson Petal and the White (41 page)

‘Oh, William,’ she says, ‘will you bring me here again, for the great bonfire?’

‘Yes, of course I shall,’ he says, for he can recognise the glow of happiness when he sees it, and he knows he is the author of that glow.

‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes, you have my word.’

Content, she turns to look towards the north-east: there’s a swathe of rain far, far away, sprouting a rainbow. William stares at her from behind, his hand shielding his eyes against the sun. His mistress’s long skirts rustle gently in the breeze, her shoulder-blades poke through the tight fabric of her dress as she lifts her arm to shield her face. All at once he recalls how her breasts feel against his palms, the bruising sharpness of her hips on his own softer belly, the thrilling touch of her rough, cracked hands on his prick. He recalls the lushness of her hair when she’s naked, the tiger textures on her skin like diagrams for his own fingers, showing him where to hold her waist or her arse as he slides inside. He longs to embrace her, wishes he could have his lavender fields empty for half an hour while he lies with Sugar on a verge of grass. What’s kept him from going to see her every night? What man worthy of the name wouldn’t have that exquisite body next to his as often as possible? Yes, he will, he
must
, go to see her much oftener in future – but not today; he has a lot to do today.

Sugar turns, and there are tears in her eyes.

* * *

The journey back to London, in the chartered coach-and-four, is purgatorially long, and the rain, so far away when Sugar stood in Rackham’s fields, has met them half-way and now beats on the roof. The coach travels slower for the bad weather, and makes mysterious stops in villages and hamlets along the way, where the coachman dismounts and disappears for two, five, ten minutes at a time. Returning, he fiddles with the horses’ bridles, combs the excess water from their hair, checks that the old fellow’s wheelchair is still safe and snug under the tarpaulin on the roof, performs actions against the undercarriage that make the cabin shake. Haste is not his watchword.

Inside the cabin, Sugar shivers, and grits her teeth to stop them chattering. She’s still in her lavender dress and nothing more, not even a shawl. Knowing she’d be wheeling Colonel Leek about today, and keen to make an enchanting impression on William, she did without extra layers of clothing; now she’s suffering the lack. The last thing she wants to do is snuggle close to the old man for warmth; he smells vile and, deprived of the support of his wheelchair’s arm-rests, he’s liable to keel into her lap.

‘Collapse of bridge in heavy rain, Hawick, 1867,’ he growls into the chilly, darkening space between them. ‘Three dead, not including livestock.’

Sugar hugs herself and looks out of the mud-spattered, rain-swept window. The countryside, so colourful and miraculous when she walked at William’s side on the lavender farm, has turned grey and godforsaken, like a hundred square miles of Hyde Park gone to seed, without any lights or gay pedestrians. The coach jogs slowly onwards, towards a lost metropolis.

‘Urp,’ belches Colonel Leek. The unsubtle fragrance of whisky and fermented digestive juices spreads in the bitter air.

A train might have been mercifully swift, not to mention (although William did mention it) a great deal cheaper, but the old man’s infirmity would have caused no end of bother at various stations along the way, and he’d still have needed a coach to take him to Charing Cross and again at the Mitcham end, so engaging a coach for the whole journey seemed more sensible. Seemed.

‘I give it six months,’ Colonel Leek is saying, ‘and you’ll be out on yer arse.’

‘I didn’t ask your opinion,’ retorts Sugar. (Cunning old blackguard: he’s fired an arrow straight into the heart of her anxiety. William Rackham should be sitting here next to her just now, whiling the hours away with lively conversation, warming her hands inside his: why, oh why, didn’t he accompany her?)

The Colonel clears his glutinous windpipe for another recitation. ‘Fanny Gresham – in 1834, mistress of Anstey the shipping magnate, abode Mayfair; in 1835, discarded, abode Holloway Prison. Jane Hubble, known as Natasha – in 1852, mistress of Lord Finbar, abode Admiralty House; in 1853, corpse, abode Thames estuary …’

‘Spare me the details, Colonel.’

‘Noooobody spared nothing, never!’ he barks. ‘That’s what I’ve learned in a long life walking this earth.’

‘If you were still
walking
, old man, we’d be on a train and back in London by now.’

There is a pause while the insult sinks in.

‘Enjoy the scenery, trollop,’ he sneers, nodding his gargoyle head towards her streaming window. ‘Makes a nice change, eh?
Glo-o-orious
.’

Sugar turns away from him, and hugs herself tighter. William cares for her, yes he does. Said he loves her, even – said it while drunk, admittedly, but not
roaring
drunk. And he allowed her to come to his farm, even though he could easily, once sober, have declared the subject closed.
And
he’s promised to let her come again, at the end of October, which is … almost seven months in the future.

She tries to take heart from the sheer number of Rackham’s employees. He is reconciled to a large amount of money flowing out from his personal fortune every week; it’s not as if Sugar’s upkeep is an isolated and conspicuous drain on his resources. She must regard herself, not as living out of his pocket, but as part of a grand tapestry of profit and expenditure that’s been generations in the making. All she need do is spin out her own stitches in that tapestry, weave herself an inextricable figure in it. Already she’s made marvellous progress: just think: a month ago she was a common prostitute! In half a year, who knows …

‘He’s a wind-bag,’ snarls Colonel Leek from inside his mulch of scarves, ‘and a coward. A nasty piece of work.’

‘Who?’ says Sugar irritably, wishing she were as snugly wrapped as he, but without the added ingredients.

‘Your perfumer.’

‘He’s no worse than most,’ she retorts. ‘Kinder-hearted than
you
.’

‘Horse-piss,’ cackles the old salt. ‘The thought of his own fat self at the top of the tree, that’s what he loves. He’d kill for advancement, can’t you see? He’d fill a dirty puddle with you, to save his shoes.’

‘You don’t know a thing about him,’ she snaps. ‘What would someone like
you
understand of his world?’

Provoked to rage, the Colonel rears up so alarmingly that Sugar fears he’ll pitch head-first onto the cabin floor. ‘I weren’t always an old spoony-man, you little bed-rat,’ he wheezes. ‘I’ve lived more lives than you’ll ever dream of!’

‘All right, I’m sorry,’ she says hastily. ‘Here, drink some more of this.’ And she offers him the whisky bottle.

‘I’ve had enough,’ he groans, settling back into his mulch of knitwear.

Sugar looks down at the bottle, whose contents are trembling and twinkling in the vibrating gloom. ‘You’ve hardly drunk any.’

‘A little goes a long way,’ the old man mutters, subdued after his outburst. ‘Drink some yerself, it’ll stop yer shivering.’

Sugar calls to mind his method of sucking whisky from the neck of the bottle, his toothless mouth closed round the smooth glassy teat. ‘No, thank you.’

‘I’ve wiped the end.’

‘Ugh,’ shudders Sugar helplessly.

‘That’s right, trollop,’ he sneers. ‘Don’t let anything dirty pass yer lips!’

Sugar utters a sharp moan of annoyance, almost identical to the one she uses for ecstasy, and folds her arms hard against her bosom. Mouth clamped shut to muffle the sound of chattering teeth, she counts to twenty; then, still angry, she counts the months of the year. She met William Rackham in November; now, in April, she is his mistress, with her own rooms and money enough to buy whatever she wishes. April, May, June … Why isn’t he here with her in this coach? There’s nothing she wishes to buy except his enduring passion for her …

Colonel Leek begins to snore loudly, a gross embodiment of all the sounds and smells of St Giles. She must never go back there, never. But what if Rackham tires of her? Only a few days ago, he came to visit her (after
not
visiting her for three days) and their union was so hurried he didn’t even trouble to undress her. (‘I’m expected at my solicitor’s in an hour,’ he explained. ‘You
told
me that Grinling fellow sounded slippery and by God you were right.’) And what about the time before that? What a peculiar mood he was in! The way he asked her if she liked the ornaments he’d chosen for her and, having encouraged her to confess she didn’t care for the swan on the mantelpiece, jovially snapped its porcelain neck. She laughed along with him, but what the devil was he playing at? Was he granting her greater licence to be candid – or was he letting her know he’s a man who’ll happily break the neck of anything that has outlived its usefulness?

Her rooms in Marylebone, towards which this coach is ferrying her so painfully slowly,
ought
to glow in her anticipation like a fire-lit haven, but that’s not how she envisages them. They are dead rooms, waiting to be inspired by the vivacity of conversation, the heat of coupling. When she’s there alone, loitering in the silence, washing her hair over and over, forcing herself to study books without the remotest sensational appeal, she feels surrounded by a gas-lit halo of unease. She can say aloud, as often and as loudly as she pleases, ‘This is
mine
,’ but she’ll hear no reply.

The crates containing her belongings were finally delivered, but she’s already thrown most of their contents away – books she’ll never read again, pamphlets whose marginal scribbles would enrage William if he chanced upon them. What’s the use of keeping these things stowed in her cupboards and wardrobes, attracting silverfish (ugh!) when they might as well be gunpowder waiting to blow up in her face? She worries enough as it is, about William discovering her novel. Each time she leaves the house, she frets he’ll come and rummage through all her nooks and drawers. Only when she’s nearly sick with hunger does she hurry into the streets, conceding that if she waits any longer for him to visit, she’s liable to starve. In the hotels and restaurants where she takes her meals, the attendants serve her wordlessly, as if biding their time before they see her no more.

If only she could remember exactly how many glasses of brandy William had in him when he said he loved her!

‘Arghl-grrnugh,’ groans Colonel Leek, convulsing in dreams of long ago. ‘Come out with it, man! … What’s the story on my legs? I’ll have a limp, yes? … need a walking stick, is that it? Arghl … Speak, damn you … Unff … Unff … Speak …’

In the morning, the rain has passed away and church bells chime. Lying half-uncovered in a tangle of sunlit bed-sheets, bathed in creamy yellow brilliance streaming through the window, Henry Rackham wakes from nightmares of erotic disgrace. God has wrought a perfect new day regardless; the divine imperative for renewal is proof against whatever evils may have transpired during the hours of darkness. God never loses heart, despite the baseness of Man …

Henry disentwines himself from the sheets, which are wet with the same substance that pollutes his night-shirt. He strips naked, shocked as always by the bestiality of the body thus revealed, for he’s an exceptionally hairy specimen, and the hair on his body is darker and wirier than the soft blond fleece on his head. It’s sexual incontinence that makes all this coarse hair grow, Henry knows. Adam and Eve were hairless in Paradise, and so are the ideal physiques of antiquity and such nudes as Modern Art permits. Were he ever to find himself in a gathering of unclothed men, his own ape-like form would mark him out as a habitual self-abuser, a beast in the making. There is a grain of truth in Darwin’s heresy: for, though humankind did not evolve from animals, each human has the potential to devolve into a savage.

The church bells toll on as Henry shambles to his bathroom. Funeral service? Not a wedding, surely, at this early hour. One day, the bells will toll for him … Will he, by then, finally be ready?

He sponges himself clean with a cloth dipped in cold water: flesh like his doesn’t deserve pampering. His body hair has thickened, over the years, into patterns which, when moistened, lie plastered around his abdomen and thighs like Gothic designs. His penis hangs gross and distended, like a reptile head, and his testicles writhe irritably as he washes them; nothing could bear less resemblance to the compressed, seashell-smooth pudenda of classical statuary.

Bodley and Ashwell have assured him that lewd women can be hairy too – so perhaps it’s thanks to his old schoolchums that his dreams are so full of hirsute nymphs. Can he blame Bodley and Ashwell though, for the way Mrs Fox, in his sleeping fantasies, disports herself like a succubus, laughing as she seizes hold of his phallus and guides it between her legs, where it slips through warm wet fur … ?

Oh, if only I could grow up!
he laments, as, even now, his genitals stir in excitement.
What man of my age still behaves as if pubescence is newly upon
him? When, oh when, will First Corinthians 13:11 come true for me? My friends
advise me to take Orders without delay, lest I begin ‘too old’: Lord, if they only
knew! I am a little boy trapped inside a monstrous, degraded husk …

Half-dressed now, naked only from the waist up, Henry sits heavily in his chair before the hearth, tired before his day even starts. He longs for someone to bring him a cup of tea and a hot breakfast, but … no, he cannot employ a servant. He could easily afford one – his father is more generous than rumour gives him credit for – but no, a servant is out of the question. Think of it: a flesh-and-blood woman in his house, sleeping under the same roof, undressing for bed, bathing naked in a tub … ! As if things weren’t bad enough already.

‘Servants are a boon for every growing boy,’ Bodley once told him, in one of those encounters whose sole object was to send the adolescent Henry fleeing under a cloud of his peers’ laughter. ‘Especially when they come straight from the country. Sun-ripened, clean and fresh.’