The Crimson Petal and the White (47 page)

Novelties like the black-and-white dinner party are the hallmark of Agnes’s growing fame. Her head is crowded with innovations; the only problem is vetting them to cram the very best into the limited number of scheduled opportunities. The cinnamon-scented candles? The idea for the blindfolds and the parcels? They’ll have to wait until the 24th and the 29th respectively …

In all things she is the modernest of the modern. The backs of her dresses are perfect curving slopes, their line unbroken by bows and flounces. She’s heard a rumour that the days of the cuirass bodice are numbered and that the polonaise is about to return: if and when it does, she’s ready! As for hats, she’s given all her old ones to Miss Jordan, to do something charitable with. Her new chapeaux are festooned with humming-birds, sparrows and canaries; the grey velvet one (earmarked for an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall on June 12th) features a turtle-dove, which is sure to elicit gasps. (What the gaspers won’t realise is that these large fowl actually weigh quite lightly on the head! Something happens to the creatures when they’re stuffed, Agnes doesn’t know what, but the result of it is that one could easily support half a dozen stuffed doves on one’s head, though of course that would be vulgar – a single dove is sufficient.) As for the Prussian blue hat with the pigeon, well … her instinctive good taste has caused her to have second thoughts. After much deliberation she’s decided to have the pigeon removed and replaced with a blue tit, because … well, there’s something
common
about pigeons, however expensively they are stuffed.

Ah! Decisions, decisions! But it’s not her intrepid judgement alone that’s making her shine so brightly this Season: luck is with her also. In no respect is this more obvious than the hair colour that’s currently in fashion: her own! She already possesses the blonde tresses that everyone so desperately desires, as well as an excellent store of hair-pieces, allowing her to construct the elaborate styles that are
de rigueur
in the Best People. All her rivals are having terrible trouble obtaining blonde, since most of what’s sold to wig factories is dark stuff from French peasant girls.

As for her figure: another stroke of luck! The near-skeletal arms and waist given her by her illness are exactly what the times require; in fact, she’s a good few ounces ahead. While other ladies are torturing themselves with starvation diets, she has inherited
la ligne
effortlessly. Is it any wonder, then, that she still doesn’t eat much, even now that she’s well enough? Gorging herself when she has the thinnest waist she’s ever had would be criminal, and the Queen, God bless her, is a chastening example of what happens to a lady of small stature who overindulges. A segment of fruit and a slice or two of cold meat are quite filling, she’s found, especially in conjunction with a dose of that sweet blue tincture recommended by Mrs Gooch. Alone in bed at night, Agnes takes especial pleasure in counting her ribs.

Last week she tried on a dress that she and Clara made on the sewing-machine in December – and its waist and arms were wrinkled and baggy! So, rather than trying to fix it, she’s given it up for dead, and started afresh with a proper dressmaker. What extravagance! But there’s no longer any question of economy: William is a rich man now, and his allowance to her seems limitless. The disapproving stares and cautioning words of previous years are gone without a trace; he even
suggests
expenditures to her, and smiles benignly whenever she ushers a procession of parcels up the stairs.

He’s doing his best, is William, to make amends – Agnes has to admit that. Nothing can ever atone for the pain she’s suffered, but … Well, there’s no doubt he’s providing for her now. And he looks really quite presentable with his new beard, and he’s dressing smartly.

She’s noticed too that he’s perfected the knack, essential in the right circles, of behaving as if he made his fortune long ago, rather than being in the midst of making it. Puffing serenely on a cigar, leaning his head back as if contemplating an enquiry from the ether, he radiates the power his wealth confers upon him, but speaks not a word about Rackham Perfumeries, rather about books and paintings and the wars in Europe. (Not that Agnes cares a feather for wars in Europe: let them burn Paris to the ground, and she’ll design her
own
dresses!) All sorts of well-connected people, at recent gatherings, seem drawn to William’s corner of the room. Imagine that! William Rackham, the overgrown university student, the idler: a success!

As for her own performance in public, she’s doing splendidly, better than she could have hoped. She hasn’t collapsed once, and there have been no incidents such as occurred in past Seasons, when a perfectly normal remark or action was spitefully misconstrued by others, and she was in disgrace. She’s learned a lot from that: she’s learned to keep an eye on herself at all times.

Agnes peers into her wardrobe mirror, her favourite because it can be swivelled to any angle and, if she kneels and looks up into it, she can see herself as though from above. Since almost everyone in the world is taller than she, this is invaluable. She kneels now, and looks up, and there she beholds what God or the folk in the Royal Albert Hall’s balconies might look upon: a most fetching specimen, a credit to her sex. She opens wide her china-blue eyes, to banish a frown line from her forehead.
Pass
, says a voice from behind the looking-glass.

Prostrated so close to the carpet’s complicated Turkish pattern she feels faint again, and staggers to her feet. A few breaths of cool air at the windowsill are all she needs to keep the head-spin at bay.

Which reminds her: how ideal is the itinerary of this year’s Season! Why, it might have been devised solely for her! Very few of her assignations are spent cooped up in crowded rooms; instead she’s almost always out of doors, in gardens and courtyards and streets and pavilions. The fresh air alone is a tonic, and whenever she feels faint she can seize hold of something solid and pretend to be admiring the view. And when all eyes are raised to watch a fireworks display, no one notices one small pill disappearing between her lips!

She doesn’t mind having to attend operas and concerts, for although these confine her indoors they leave her mind free to wander, except during the Intervals. Propped up in her seat next to her husband, she leaves her body unattended, her spirit floating up above, looking down at herself from the chandeliers.

(It’s a remarkable view, for others no less than for Agnes. Lately, she’s using a novelty fabric in her dresses and gloves that glows in dim light. Thus, when the theatre or the opera house turns dark in anticipation of the tragedy on stage, Agnes Rackham remains visible. The patrons in the balconies observe her white hand raising tiny binoculars to her face, and Mrs Rackham is seen to shed a sympathetic tear, for the binoculars are in fact disguised smelling-salts, and quite pungent when held near the eyes.)

In this fashion, Agnes has sat through Wagner’s
Lohengrin
at the Royal Italian Opera, Meyerbeer’s
The Huguenots
, and Verdi’s
Requiem
, conducted by the alarmingly foreign Signor Verdi himself, at the Royal Albert Hall. She was present and accounted for, too, at Mr Henry Irving’s
Hamlet
at the Lyceum, but enjoyed the appetiser, Mrs Compton’s
Fish out of Water
, rather more, though she knew better than to mention this to anyone. For variety’s sake, and so that she could bring it up in conversation, Agnes also went to see Signor Salvani’s
Hamlet
, all in Italian, at the Theatre Royal, and found this to be an altogether superior experience, particularly the sword-play which was conspicuously more vigorous, and the Ophelia who was rather vulgar, and therefore deserved to die more than the English one. (Agnes still shudders at the memory of being confronted, on a visit to an art gallery years ago, with that terrifying painting by Millais: the shock of seeing an innocent young lady of her own age and complexion – though thankfully not blonde – drowned, dead, open-eyed, with a crowd of men standing before her, admiring how well she was ‘done’.)

Alone in her bedroom, Agnes crosses herself, then looks around nervously, in case anyone has seen her do it.

‘Clara?’ she says, experimentally, but Clara is still away, gossiping with Mrs Maxwell’s girl Sinead no doubt, or whatever else she can find to occupy her afternoon off.

I must think about getting a maidservant who’s closer to me in wit,
thinks Agnes, all of a sudden.
Honestly, when I tried to explain the significance of Psycho
,
she hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about
.

(For the benefit of those unlucky souls who missed it: Agnes is recalling here the premier exhibition, at the Lyceum, of ‘Psycho’, a child-sized mechanical figure which, in the words of the programme, danced and performed tricks ‘without the aid of wires or confederates’.)

For Agnes, seeing Psycho has been the highlight of her Season’s theatre-going so far. Indeed, so deeply moved was she by the demonstration that she hardly heard the muttered complaints of Bodley and Ashwell from somewhere to the left of her husband. She was utterly convinced that Psycho was independent of the gentleman who stood by him on the stage, and that his life came from an unseen Elsewhere. The conjuring tricks he performed with his noiselessly revolving limbs meant nothing to her in themselves; rather, she was electrified by the realisation that this little mechanical man was
immortal
. Whereas her own soul must be consigned to Limbo should her body happen to be destroyed (in a fire, for instance, such as might break out in this very theatre!) Psycho would endure. Even if he were crushed flat, he could simply be melted down and re-cast, and his animating soul would simply slip back inside. Oh, lucky creature!

Agnes stands at her window now, a handkerchief clasped inside her fist as she scans the grounds’ perimeter for signs of her guardian angel. Shears waves to her from the hydrangea beds. Agnes smiles, then casts her eyes down at her fist. She opens it, and the handkerchief blossoms out of her palm, unharmed. Oh, to be like that handkerchief!

Agnes has been thinking a great deal about Death and Resurrection lately. Queer topics to be pondering amidst the hurly-burly of the Season, but she can’t help it: it’s her philosophical turn of mind. She can be cheerful, and sing enchantingly for guests, but really, is there anything in Life as important as what happens to one’s body after Death?

Whisper it not, but Agnes is suspicious of Heaven as conventional religion describes it; she has no wish for any posthumous paradise of wraiths. What she wants is to wake up, corporeal, in the Convent of Health, ready to begin a better life. Almost every night she dreams the same dream, in which she walks through the ivy-laden portcullis of the convent, no longer Agnes Rackham of Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, but not a ghost either.

How nice it would be to speak of these things with her brother-in-law, Henry. In several of the spiritualist books hidden under her bed, there is mention of a Heaven
on Earth.
Biblical scriptures promise (or so the authors claim) that the virtuous will one day claim their resurrected bodies … Surely Henry could tell her more, knowing so much about the Bible and other mystical works! (And besides, she likes him. He’s not like most Anglicans she knows; he has an indefinably Catholic sort of air about him. He reminds her, just a little, of the Saints and the Martyrs. William told her once that the reason Henry isn’t a clergyman yet is that he doesn’t consider himself sufficiently pure and high-minded for it, but she suspects that that’s all nonsense, and the real problem is that Anglicanism isn’t pure and high-minded enough for Henry.)

‘Is Henry invited to this?’ she keeps asking William, each time they attend a party.

‘No,’ William keeps replying, or, ‘Damned if I know,’ or, ‘If he was, I doubt he’ll have come.’ And sure enough, Henry Rackham is never there.

‘What about
here
?’ Agnes persists, at public events that are open to all. ‘Absolutely
any
one can come to this.’

‘Henry detests opera,’ William will mutter, grumpy to have yet more of his valuable time wasted by social obligations. Or, ‘Henry disapproves of histrionics. Can’t say I blame him, either.’

‘Chin up, William dear: there’s Mrs Abernethy.’

And, determined to make the best of things, Agnes draws a deep breath, clutches her binocular smelling-salts to her bosom, and files in through the glittering vestibule to take her place among … well, if not the Upper Ten Thousand, then certainly the Upper Twenty.

Much as Agnes might wish to turn her head, by chance, at one of the Season’s events and see Henry Rackham making his way towards her, her wish is never granted. Yet she does have
one
faithful fellow-traveller, if only she knew it: one person who presses through crowds to get close to her, who braves blustery weather to attend the same theatres as she, who pays high prices to sit near her and watch her glow gently under subdued lighting.

Sugar is having her first Season.

Not legitimately, of course; not in the sense that the Best People are having one. But, to the limit of her capabilities, to the fullest extent that money can buy, she is participating. Some doors and thresholds are only for the select few, the haloed gentlefolk with invitations from Mrs So-and-So and Baroness What-Have-You. Whenever the Rackhams pass through one of these, Sugar cannot follow. But when they attend anything less exclusive, particularly in the open air or a large venue that admits a chattering throng, Sugar is sure to be dawdling in the Rackhams’ wake, soaking up the atmosphere, revolving slowly in the crowd like flotsam in the slipstream of a barge.

Anxious to attract as little attention as possible, Sugar has adopted a strict policy of sober dress. Her wardrobe, once so sumptuous in its greens, blues and bronzes, has faded to shades of grey and brown; she walks on the stylish side of mourning. Against such dusky hues, the redness of her hair is a curse rather than a blessing, and her skin appears pale and sickly. Everyone calls her ‘madam’, and cabbies help her dismount as if she might snap her ankles on the unaccustomed hardness of the street. Only a few days ago, an urchin boy in Piccadilly Circus offered to wipe her wet umbrella dry on his grubby shirt for a ha’penny, and she was so taken aback she gave him sixpence.