The Crimson Petal and the White (42 page)

Henry’s cat comes padding in now, making exotic attempts at conversation as she butts her head against his calves. He has nothing for her, the last of the meat having spoiled.

‘Can you not wait?’ he mutters, but the innocent animal looks at him as though he’s feather-brained.

His own stomach churns noisily. Perhaps a very
old
servant would be safe? But how old would she have to
be
? Fifty? Mightn’t the butcher’s wife – the one who saves the best scraps for Henry’s puss and always has a smile for him – be fifty? And yet he’s been known to wonder what she might look like naked. Seventy, then?

He looks down at the fire, at his overzealously-darned socks sheathing his big feet like tubers caked with earth. He gazes at his own bare arms, folded across his chest. His own nipples, framed thus, are of no sensual interest to him –yet identical knobbles of flesh, imagined on a female chest, have the power to drive him to self-pollution. Were his own breasts enlarged with milk he would recoil in disgust – yet, imagined on a woman, those same bladders of flesh become fantastically attractive. And what about the paintings at the Royal Academy exhibitions – the Magdalens and the classical heroines and the martyred saints – he doesn’t care who they’re supposed to be, as long as their flesh is on show! The way he stares at them, the other gallery visitors must take him for a connoisseur – or perhaps they perceive perfectly well that he’s ogling rose-nippled breasts and pearly thighs. And yet, what is he
really
staring at? A layer of pink paint! A layer of dried oil covered with varnish – and he’ll stand before it, for minutes at a time, willing a silvery wisp of drapery to slip from between a woman’s legs, wishing he could grasp hold of it and tear it out of the way, revealing … revealing what? A triangle of canvas? For a triangle of inanimate canvas he is willing to risk his immortal soul! All the so-called-mysteries of the Christian faith, the enigmas beyond human reason, are not so very difficult to understand if one applies oneself, but
this
… !

Henry’s cat is not to be denied, and begins to cry, having learned that this is the best way to rouse him from concerns not relevant to the feline world. Within fifteen minutes, Henry has been driven from his house, fully dressed, combed and shaved, in search of meat.

On his return, he feels more his own master. The brisk walk and the fresh air have done him good; his clothes have warmed on his body and become part of him, a decorous second skin rather than an ill-fitting disguise. The streets and buildings of Notting Hill were familiar and immutable, reminding him that the real world bears little resemblance to the fluid, shape-shifting locales of his dreams. The bracing impact of stone under his walking feet: that’s the truth, not his insubstantial phantasms. Most heartening of all, he has seen the butcher’s wife and, thank God, not coveted her. She smiled at him, handed him the cat scraps and some ox tongue for himself, and he didn’t imagine her wantonly disrobing to reveal the body of a goddess. She was the butcher’s wife: nothing less, nothing more.

‘Here, puss,’ he says, throwing the animal its breakfast on the kitchen floor. ‘Let me think, now.’

Henry ponders while he prepares an omelette, almost from memory, with the merest glance at the ancient copy of Mrs Rundell’s
New System of
Domestic Cookery
(a gift from Mrs Fox, with the name
Emmeline Fox
inscribed in faded schoolgirl copperplate on the flyleaf and, added in dark indigo ink above the name, in a plainer and more confident hand,
To my valued Friend
Henry Rackham, Christmas 1874, from
… ). He sprinkles the required herbs over the sizzling puddle of whisked egg before it cooks too much, then becomes so absorbed in the curlicued signature of Mrs Fox’s younger self that he burns, slightly, the bottom of the omelette before he can fold it. It is still perfectly good. London’s destitute would be grateful for far worse.

‘It’s quite simple, puss,’ he explains to his saucer-eyed familiar as he eats. ‘The marriage of man and woman produces offspring. It’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s like plants and flowers growing when the rain falls. A necessary, God-given process; nothing whatsoever to do with fevers, lusts and lubricious dreams.’

Henry’s cat looks up at him, unconvinced.

‘To a man with a mission, the propagation of humankind shouldn’t occupy more than a passing thought.’ He forks a wedge of egg into his mouth and chews. ‘In any case,’ he adds when the mouthful has gone down, ‘the one woman I might wish to marry has no wish to marry again.’

Henry’s cat cocks its head. ‘Miaow?’

With a sigh, he throws a morsel of omelette at her furry feet.

‘Hoi! Parson!’

The words, though shouted, are barely audible, sucked in and swallowed up by the dark orifices of the street – the gaping windows, decrepit alleys, broken trapdoors and bottomless pits. A grizzled man of indeterminate age, who has been watching Henry’s progress for some time, rises up from a smoky subterranean stairwell like Lazarus from the grave. His filthy gnarled hands grip the rope that hangs in place of the missing handrail; his bloodshot, wolf-browed eyes are narrowed with suspicion. ‘Lookin’ for anybody in pertickler?’

‘Perhaps for you, sir,’ answers Henry, summoning all his nerve as he walks closer, for this man is heavily muscled, and already in his shirtsleeves, so there’s little to inhibit fisticuffs. ‘But why do you call me “Parson”?’

‘You look like one.’ The grizzled man draws abreast with Henry, hands on the hips of his mud-coloured trousers. In the darkness of the stairwell behind him, a dog mutters in frustration, claws scrabbling at stone and rotten wood, unable to follow its master up the vertiginous steps to the surface world.

‘Well, I’m not a parson,’ says Henry, regretfully. ‘Forgive my boldness, sir, but
you
have the look of a man who has suffered much. Indeed, of a man who is suffering still. If it’s not too much of an imposition, will you tell me your story?’

The man’s eyes narrow even tighter, radically rearranging the whiskers of his eyebrows. With one massive, calloused hand he smooths down his hair, which is being blown across his forehead by a foul breeze.

‘You ain’t a norfer, are ye?’ he says.

Henry repeats the strange word to himself silently, straining to divine its meaning.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he’s obliged to ask.

‘
Orfer
,’ repeats the man. ‘A fellow as writes books about poor men that poor men can’t read.’

‘No, no, nothing of the kind,’ Henry hastens to reassure him, and this seems to earn him better favour, for the man steps back. ‘What I am is … I am a person who knows too little about the poor, as do all of us who aren’t poor ourselves. Perhaps you could teach me what, in your opinion, I need to know.’

The man grins, leans his head to one side, and scratches his chin.

‘Will you give me money?’ he enquires.

Henry sets his jaw, knowing he must be firm on this question if he’s ever to be a clergyman, for he’ll no doubt be asked it many times.

‘Not without first knowing your situation.’

The grizzled man throws back his head and laughs.

‘Well, well!’ he declares. ‘
There
you ’ave the plight of the poor man in a nutshell. The likes of
you
gets money gived to you no matter how lazy and wicked you are, and the likes of
us
must press our old trousers, and ’ang curtains on our broken winders, and sing ’ymns while we shines yer shoes, before you’ll give us a penny!’ And he laughs again, opening his mouth so wide that Henry catches a glimpse of blackened molars within.

‘But,’ protests Henry, ‘haven’t you any work?’

The man grows serious at this, and once again his eyes narrow.

‘I might ’ave,’ he shrugs. ‘’Ave you?’

This is a challenge Henry has been expecting, and he’s determined not to be so easily shamed. ‘You take me for someone who’s never done a day’s hard labour,’ he says, ‘and you are right. But I can’t help the class I was born into, any more than you can. May we not, even so, speak man to man?’

This sets the other scratching his chin again, until it begins to grow quite red.

‘You’re a queer fish, ain’t you?’ he mutters.

‘Perhaps I am,’ says Henry, smiling for the first time since he opened his mouth. ‘Now, will you tell me what you think I should know?’

Thus begins Henry’s initiation – the surrender of his religious virginity. Thus begins, in earnest, his response to the Call.

For an hour or more the two men stand there, in the squalor of St Giles, while a faint miasma rises towards the sun, and the gutters release their aroma like soup coming to the boil. Other men, women and dogs pass by from time to time; several of these make overtures to join the conversation, but are coarsely rebuffed by the grizzled man.

‘You’ve got me well and truly cranked up now,’ he confesses to Henry under his breath, then bawls once more at loitering ‘busybodies’ to wait their ‘own bloody turn’ with ‘the Parson’.

‘But I’m not a parson,’ protests Henry each time another gawker is dispatched.

‘Listen to me, I’m just gettin’ to the guts of it now,’ growls the grizzled man, and lectures on. He has a very great deal to say on a large number of topics, but Henry knows that it’s not the particulars but the root principles that are important. Much of what this man says can be found, in
précis
, in books and pamphlets, but solutions that appear obvious under Henry’s study-lamp at home don’t seem to apply here. To a man like Henry, for whom righteousness is a high ideal, it comes as a shock to learn that to men such as this poor wretch, righteousness is worthless, while vice appears not merely attractive but essential to survival. Clearly, anyone who means to fight for the souls of these people won’t get far without first understanding this, and Henry is grateful to learn the lesson so early.

‘We shall speak again, sir,’ he promises, after the man finally runs out of things to say. ‘I am indebted to you, for all you’ve told me. Thank you, sir.’ And, tipping his hat, he steps back and takes his leave of his bemused informant.

Walking on, farther down Church Lane, Henry spies a quartet of small boys, huddled conspiratorially near the side door of a drinking-house. Emboldened by his success with the grizzled man, he hails them with the cheery greeting, ‘Hello boys! What are you doing?’ but their response is disappointing: they disappear like rats.

Next he sees a woman turning into the street from the better parts beyond – a respectable-looking woman in Henry’s estimation, wearing a terracotta dress. She negotiates the cobbles carefully, eyes downcast. Gingerly she steps, avoiding the dog filth, but when she spots Henry, she lifts the hems of her skirts higher than he’s ever seen hems lifted – revealing not just the toes, but the whole buttoned shank of her boots, and a glimpse of frilly calf as well. She smiles at him, as if to say, ‘In a street full of ordure, what’s a body to do?’

Henry’s first thought is to walk past her as quickly as possible, but then he reminds himself that if he’s ever to realise his destiny, he must not ignore opportunities like this one. Filling his chest with breath and squaring his shoulders, he steps forward.

No sooner has he uttered his first words of greeting than Rackham finds himself smothered with kisses.

‘Ho!’ he laughs, as his ears and cheeks and eyes and throat are grazed, with exuberant speed, by Sugar’s moistened lips. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

‘You know very well,’ she says, pressing her hands tight against his back, straining to make an impression through the layers of his clothing. ‘You’ve changed everything.’

William shakes off his ulster and hangs it on the massive cast-iron coat-stand that was delivered here yesterday. ‘You mean,
this
?’ he teases, nudging the unyielding framework to remind her how flimsy its discarded predecessor was.

‘You know what I mean,’ she says, stepping backwards towards the bedroom. She is wearing her green dress, the one she wore when she met him, its mildew painstakingly cleaned off with matchsticks, cotton wool and Rackham’s Universal Solvent. ‘I’ll never forget my day at your lavender farm.’

‘Nor shall I,’ he says, following her. ‘Your Colonel Leek would linger in anyone’s memory.’

She flinches in embarrassment. ‘Oh William, I’m so sorry: I thought he’d be better behaved – he
did
promise me.’ She sits on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, head slightly downcast, so that her abundant fringe falls over her eyes. ‘Can you forgive me? I know so few men, that’s the problem.’

William sits beside her, laying one of his big hands over hers.

‘Ach, he’s no worse than some of the hopeless drunkards I have to deal with in my business affairs. The world is full of repugnant old blackguards.’

‘He’s the nearest thing to a grandfather I ever had,’ she reflects ruefully, ‘when I was a little girl.’ Is this the right moment for winning his sympathy? She glances sideways, to judge if her arrow was wide of the mark, but there’s compassion in his face, and the redoubled pressure of his hand on hers lets her know she has reached his heart.

‘Your childhood years,’ he says, ‘must have been Hell on earth.’

She nods and, without having to will it, real tears fall from her eyes. But what if William is one of those men who cannot abide a woman weeping? What does she think she’s up to? Something has gone awry inside her breast, where such decisions are made; a valve of self-control has failed, and she feels herself borne on a spillage of unfiltered feeling.

‘St Giles has a terrible reputation,’ offers William.

‘It used to be a lot worse,’ she says, ‘before they cut it in half with New Oxford Street.’ For some reason this strikes her as unbearably funny, and she snorts with laughter, wetting the tip of her nose with snot. What’s
wrong
with her? She’ll disgust him … but no, he’s handing her his handkerchief, an eminently pickpocketable square of white silk, monogrammed, for her to blow her nose in.