The Crimson Petal and the White (45 page)

‘I prefer to let Nature take its course.’

‘Quite right,’ says Mrs Fox, closing her eyes to quell a surge of giddiness. ‘Who knows? Tonight you may sleep like a baby.’

Henry nods, hands clasped between his knees. ‘God grant.’

They sit for a while longer. Water burbles unseen below them and, in time, another pair of church-goers cross the bridge, gesturing almost imperceptibly in greeting.

‘You know, Henry,’ says Mrs Fox, when the passers-by have gone. ‘My sisters at the Rescue Society have urged me … to work less during the Season … to enjoy some recreation … to take advantage of the coming delights …’ She squints eastwards, as if she might catch a glimpse of London’s squalid rookeries from here. ‘And yet, away from the streets, I achieve nothing … And every day, one more woman comes to that pass where there’s no longer any hope for a good life – only a good death.’ She looks to her friend, but his eyes are downcast.

Henry is staring into the chiaroscuro pictures of his imagination. An anonymous woman, unscathed from a thousand carnal acts, has finally reached ‘that pass’ to which Mrs Fox refers – the fateful copulation when the worm of Death enters her. From that moment on, she is doomed. Hair grows on her body as she degenerates from human to bestial form. On her deathbed, still unrepentant, she is monstrously hirsute, sporting hair not just on her pudendum but also her armpits, arms, legs and chest. Henry imagines a sort of curvaceous ape, raving in agonised delirium on a filthy mattress, witnessed by surgeons aghast under the lanterns they hold in their raised and trembling fists. Those ‘wild women’ brought back from Borneo – those are probably nothing less than the moribund victims of sexual excess! After all, aren’t these island races notorious for their—

‘Ah well,’ sighs Mrs Fox, pushing herself erect once more and dusting off her bustle with a tiny clothes-brush from her reticule. ‘We must have our own private little Season, Henry, just you and I. Its highlights will be conversation, walks, and health-giving sunshine.’

‘Nothing could give me more pleasure,’ Henry affirms, glad that she’s not quite so breathless. But, although the sun is shining strongly on them both, Mrs Fox’s face remains most terribly pale, and her mouth is still most indecorously open, as if a physical imperative, in defiance of decorum, has parted her lips.

Sugar looks over her shoulder at her reflection in the mirror, guiding her hands as she buttons up her dress. She wields a pair of ‘whore’s hooks’ – curved, long-handled instruments so nicknamed because they enable a woman to don a lady’s dress without the aid of a maidservant.

When the last button, at the very nape of her neck, is fastened, Sugar runs two fingers around the silken lining of the tight collar, freeing the stray hairs trapped there. She has chosen this outmoded slate-grey dress because William has never seen her wear it, and so if he catches a glimpse at a distance, he shan’t recognise her. Her hair she has parted, uncharacteristically, down the middle and knotted back in a severe chignon, so that scarcely a wisp of it can be seen under her bonnet.

‘This will do,’ she decides.

She’s tired of waiting for William. Days go by without a visit; then, when he does call on her, he has a mind full of concerns from his secret life – secret from her, that is. All his friends and family know him better than she, and they haven’t any use for the knowledge; it’s so unfair!

Well, she refuses to remain in the dark. Her destiny advances not one whit while she languishes in her rooms, drying her hair in front of the fire, reading newspapers, reading about excise duty to prepare for conversations that never come, telling herself she isn’t hungry, resisting the temptation to fill the bathtub. The more William does without her, out there in a world in which she plays no part, the less inclined he’ll be to confide in her. From his cast-off perfume books she can learn about spirituous extract of tuberose, and oil of cassia as a cheap substitute for cinnamon, but she needs to understand so much more about William Rackham than that! More than he’s ready to divulge!

So, she has made up her mind: she’ll spy on him. Everywhere he goes, she will follow. Whatever he sees, she will see also. Whoever he meets, she’ll meet too – if necessarily at a distance. His world will become hers; she’ll lap up every drop of knowledge. Then, when at last William finds the time to visit her, and she has his wrinkled brow against her breast, she can astound him with how instinctively she understands his troubles, how unerring is her intuition of his needs. By sharing his life illicitly, she’ll earn the privilege of sharing it legitimately.

She pauses, for one last glance in the mirror before leaving the house. She’s scarcely recognisable, even to herself.

‘Perfect,’ she says, and unhooks a parasol from the hideous but sturdy coat-stand. What became of the flimsy one William kicked so angrily? He put it out in the street, and the next day it wasn’t there anymore. Did scavengers pounce on it, perhaps? Do such things happen in the decorous streets of Marylebone?

She steps out into the fresh air and casts an eye over her surroundings. Not a soul in sight.

For the next three days and a half – or, as she calculates, fifty-five whole hours of waking existence – Sugar attempts to become William Rackham’s shadow.

An unconscionable amount of that time is wasted loitering near his house in Chepstow Villas, waiting for him to emerge. She paces up and down the street and mews on three sides of the Rackham grounds, to keep her toes from going numb and her mind from going off its hinges, and twirls her parasol impatiently. What can William be
doing
in there? He’s certainly not playing parlour games with his wife and daughter! Is he writing Rackham correspondence, perhaps? If so, how long can a few letters possibly take, now that the Hopsom affair is out of the way? Rackham Perfumeries is a large concern with a hierarchy of employees; aren’t there what-d’you-call-’ems – subordinates, underlings – taking care of more mundane matters? Or is it breakfast that occupies William so long? No wonder he’s getting tubby, if he spends half the morning eating. Sugar, by contrast, begins each spying day with a bun or an apple bought from a street-seller on her way here.

Fortunately the weather is mild, on these first few mornings of her surveillance of the Rackham house. The gardener is constantly poking around in the grounds, satisfying himself that the new growth is only in the designated places – another reason why Sugar can’t loiter too long in the same spot. She’d hoped that the mild weather would permit William’s daughter to come out to play, but the child’s nurse keeps her well under wraps. Sugar’s not even sure of the child’s name; one morning, the gardener yelled ‘Hello, Miss Sophie!’ while peering up at a window on the first floor – and was shortly afterwards accosted by a matronly-looking servant, who had a word in his ear, causing him to cringe in apology. Sophie, then – unless Shears’s greeting was addressed to the nurse. How humiliating to be acquainted with every vein of William’s prick, but not know the name of his daughter! All Sugar’s attempts to extract it without appearing to be pumping him have failed; nor can she risk uttering it herself, in case he’s withholding it on purpose. So, until the nurse decides that the weather is finally good enough for little girls to be brought forth, Sophie Rackham must remain a rumour.

On the second day, Mrs Rackham herself emerges from the front door and, accompanied by her maid, walks purposefully forth. Sugar is tempted to follow, for Agnes is plainly on her way to town, and her enchanting voice, too far away to be intelligible, sings like Pied Piper flutings on the breeze. But Sugar resolves to stay hidden in her shady bower of trees; it’s William she ought to be tailing, and besides, there have been too many moments already when the curtains at one of the Rackhams’ windows suddenly parted and Agnes was standing there, staring out at the world – or, more often than not, staring straight at the spot where Sugar happened to be dawdling. It’s a good thing Sugar is veiled, and under a parasol for good measure, or Mrs Rackham would surely have committed her face to memory by now.

No, it’s William she’s waiting for. It’s William whose movements and habits she needs to know intimately. And what Sugar learns in these first fifty-five hours of stalking him is that, for all his talk of being an individualist and keeping his duller business rivals guessing, he is a man of habit.

Two p.m. is his hour for catching the city-bound omnibus. On each of the three days, he makes his rendezvous with the great lumbering vehicle and climbs into the cabin, taking his seat facing the sunnier side of the road. Sugar, hurrying on to the steely lip of the omnibus at the last possible instant, climbs up to the roof and takes a seat over William’s head. At this quiet time of day, she’s spared the indignity of rubbing shoulders with a jostle of bowler-hatted clerks; instead, she shares the hard benches and nippy air with other misfit souls who have reason not to ride below. On the first day, a gaggle of fat mothers with toddling children too restless to risk within the cabin; on the second, an old man with a six-foot-long parcel bound in twine; on the third, another mother and child, four stiffly-dressed sightseers conversing excitedly in a foreign tongue, and one pale young man clutching a dark book in his knobble-wristed hands.

On this third journey, Sugar makes the mistake of folding up her parasol and relaxing against the back of her seat, confident that William will get out at the usual stop, the nearest to his Air Street office. Indeed William does, but not before the pale young man has been captivated by the beauty of the grey-clad woman in the veil and, taking her relaxed pose for a Pre-Raphaelite slump of lassitude, he leaps up gallantly to assist her when she rises to go.

‘Allow me,’ he begs, his slightly frayed arms offering themselves, his eyes glowing with every kind of yearning imaginable.

Sugar, anxious lest the disembarking William Rackham should turn and look up at them, hesitates on the stair.

‘No need, no need,’ she whispers, aware that her soft croak will only compound the misunderstanding. ‘Thank you.’ And the omnibus moves off with her still on it.

Not that it makes much difference. She alights at the next stop, and walks back to the Rackham office, a dreary grey building with an ornamental ‘R’ on a brass plaque.

William spends the same amount of time there every day, about two hours, doing God knows what. She longs to be a fly on the wall of that inner sanctum, but instead must hang about on the streets, counting hansoms to ease the boredom.

At five o’clock, after consuming the same cake from the same cake-shop and waiting for the worst of the traffic to abate, William heads for home. She wishes he’d decide to go to Priory Close instead (in which event she would follow on behind and contrive to meet him on the footpath, pretending to have been taking a constitutional). But William does not alight prematurely; he stays on the omnibus all the way to Chepstow Villas.

Yet, after William’s return to the Rackham house, small rewards do come Sugar’s way.

On the first evening, William and Agnes go out for dinner to Lady Bridgelow’s and, because the residences are only a dozen houses apart, they set off on foot – with Sugar following at a discreet distance. She notes that the Rackhams, although they advance side by side, are unconnected; not merely disdaining to walk arm-in-arm, but scarcely acknowledging each other’s existence. William proceeds with loosely clenched fists, his shoulders squared, as if steeling himself for a formidable challenge.

Hours later, when he and his wife are walking home in the lamp-lit dark, the disjunction between them is even worse; Sugar, grateful for the drizzle that allows her to hide under her parasol, follows close behind.

‘Well, that was awfully pleasant,’ declares William, awkwardly, ‘as always.’

Agnes doesn’t reply, but trots mechanically on, her right hand pressed against her temple.

‘Do you have a headache, dear?’ says William.

‘It’s nothing,’ she replies.

For a minute they walk in silence, then William laughs.

‘That Bunce fellow – he’s quite a character, isn’t he? Constance really does have an extraordinary circle of friends.’

‘Yes,’ Agnes agrees, as the two of them reach the Rackham gates, and Sugar rustles past them in the gloom. ‘It’s a pity I detest her so much. Isn’t it odd that someone with a title can be so very smarmy and common?’

To this, Sugar is fairly sure, William has no reply.

The following night, the Rackhams stay indoors. Sugar walks the peripheries for as long as she can bear, growing colder and colder, then hails a cab back to Priory Close. The time, she discovers when she gets there, is only half-past eight; she’d imagined it was near midnight. Maybe William will still come and visit her! She haunts her rooms like a disconsolate animal, pacing the soft carpets just as restlessly as she paced the streets, until she surrenders to the comforting embrace of a warm misty bath.

On the third night, however, her decision to sacrifice her idle hours to spying is, at last, richly rewarded. William leaves the house well after dark, alone, and hails a cab. The gods are on Sugar’s side, for a second cab trundles close behind, so she suffers not even a moment’s anxiety that William may escape her.

‘Follow the cab in front,’ she instructs her driver, and he tips his hat with a smirk.

The journey ends in Soho, outside a small theatre called The Tewkesbury Palace. William alights, unaware of Sugar alighting twenty feet away from him, and pays his driver, while she pays hers. Then he steps forward into the lamp-lit hurly-burly, glancing quickly around his person for pickpockets, but failing to spot the veiled woman at his rear.

What, thinks Sugar, can William be seeking here? The Tewkesbury is a notorious meeting-place for homosexuals, and here are two well-dressed gentlemen advancing on him with outstretched arms. For a moment her lips curl in bemused disgust: have these florid fellows, now slapping William affectionately on the back, managed to lure him away from her bed? Impossible! No one plays the silent flute better than she does!

Within seconds, however, her misunderstanding is dispelled. These men are Bodley and Ashwell, and the three friends have come here tonight especially to see the Tewkesbury’s featured attraction – Unthan, the Pedal Paganini, billed as ‘The Only Violinist in the World Without Arms!’