The Crimson Petal and the White (64 page)

In a flash, she reviews all the males she’s known in her life: a dark void where her father ought to be; a couple of giant, angry-faced landlords who made her mother cry (in the very early days before her mother expunged tears from her repertoire); the ‘kind gentleman’ who came to keep her warm on the night of her deflowering; and all the men since, an indistinct procession of half-naked flesh, like a carnival freak composed not of two conjoined bodies, but hundreds. She recalls a one-legged customer, for the way his stump banged against her knee; she recalls the thin lips of a man who almost strangled her, before Amy came to the rescue; she recalls a slope-headed idiot with breasts bigger than hers; she recalls shoulders thick with hair and eyes opaque with cataracts; she recalls pricks the size of beans and pricks the size of cucumbers, pricks with purple heads, pricks bent in the middle, pricks distinguished by birthmarks and welts and tattoos and the scars of attempted self-castration. In
The Fall and Rise of
Sugar,
there are pieces of many men she’s known, all butchered with the knife of revenge. Dear Heaven, hasn’t she known any male she doesn’t loathe?

‘I–I must admit,’ she says, as she dismisses a fantasy of herself arm-in-arm with little Christopher, ‘I’m having trouble thinking of a suitable companion.’

‘Don’t bother to bring
any
, my dear,’ Rackham mutters, returning his attention to the paper trimmings at his feet.

‘Oh but William,’ she protests, scarcely able to believe her ears. ‘Mightn’t that cause a scandal?’

He grunts irritably, his mind once more preoccupied with gold-and-olive versus blue-and-emerald.

‘I won’t be held to ransom by petty minds, damn it. Let a few farmhands whisper, if they want to! They’ll be out on their ear if they dare do more than whisper … God almighty, I’m the head of a great concern and I’ve just buried my brother: I’ve more serious matters to lose sleep over than the gossip of inferiors.’ And, with a decisive forward lurch, he snatches up the olive-and-gold. ‘Hang the expense,’ he declares. ‘I like it, and what I like my customers will like too.’

Dizzy-headed with delight, Sugar embraces him, and he kisses her brow indulgently.

‘The letter, we must write the letter,’ he reminds her, before she gets too frolicsome.

She fetches paper and pen for him, and he dashes off the letter to the printer. Then, with ten minutes to spare before the last post, he stands in the vestibule and allows her to help him into his coat.

‘You’re a treasure,’ he says, the words clear despite the envelope clenched between his teeth. ‘Indispensable, that’s the only word for you.’

And, hastily buttoned up and dusted down, he’s gone.

Scarcely has the door shut behind him than Sugar springs into motion, released from her shackles of demure behaviour. Squealing in triumph, she dances from room to room, pirouetting till her skirts twirl and her hair lifts from her shoulders. Yes! At last: she can walk at his side, and damn what the world thinks! That’s what he said, isn’t it? Their liaison can’t be held to ransom by petty minds – he won’t stand for it! Joyous, joyous day!

Her exhilaration is marred only by the thought that she must pay another visit to Church Lane, to inform the Leeks of the change of plan. Or must she? Inspired, she fetches a fresh sheet of writing-paper, sits at the escritoire and, trembling with nerves, dips her pen in the inkwell.

Dear Mrs Leek

My outing this Friday has been cancelled, so I shan’t be coming for the Colonel
.

(That’s all she can think of for a long while. Then:)

There is no need to return the Money I gave you
.

Yours faithfully
,

Sugar
.

For a further ten or fifteen minutes, well beyond the deadline for the next post, Sugar deliberates about a P.S., along the lines of
Give Caroline my
love,
but not quite so effusive. There are, in English, only so many alternatives to ‘love’. Sugar considers them all, but in the end, the chances of Mrs Leek being willing to convey an affectionate emotion to anyone, let alone one of her lodgers, seem remote. So, as the sun sets, and squally weather besieges Priory Close, Sugar resolves to save her love until she next sees Caroline in person, and seals the letter in its envelope, to be posted when the skies have cleared.

‘At the ready!’ shouts William Rackham to the fidgeting torch-bearers. ‘Very well: start the bonfire!’

All around the towering pyre, batons tipped with flaming tallow are lowered onto the gnarled branches and grey leaves, and within half a minute the smell of lavender is mingling with that of burning wood. The men are all smiles, waving smoke away from their eyes: the privilege of wielding the power to start this destruction flatters their meagre pride and, just for the afternoon, lends a shine to their miserable existence working in these fields for ninepence a day plus free lemonade.

‘This lot’ll need a damn sight more torchin’, I reckon,’ says one, wielding his flaming baton like a sword, and indeed the fire shows signs that, unassisted, it might die out rather than engulf the mountain of uprooted plants. A haze of smoke begins to rise into the heavens, adding obscurity to the lowering clouds.

‘A hallmark of Rackham’s high standards,’ announces William to Sugar. ‘The bushes are slow to catch fire because they’re not quite exhausted: they’ve life in them yet. But Rackham’s doesn’t try to wrangle a sixth harvest out of plants that aren’t robust any longer.’

Sugar looks at him, unsure how to respond. He’s addressing her as if she might yet be the daughter or granddaughter of an elderly investor, wheeling an invisible Colonel Leek around the fields. There’s a distance between them, not the arm-in-arm intimacy she’d imagined.

‘I once witnessed,’ declares William loudly, over the babble of voices and crackle of burning wood, ‘a bonfire of plants which had been allowed to stand six seasons: it went up, whoosh!, like a pile of dry bracken. The oil distilled from that last harvest would have been third-class, I assure you.’

Sugar nods, keeps silent, stares at the growing flames. Shivering from the cold wind that blows on her back, and wincing at the heat thrown into her face, she wonders if she’s as well-suited to country life as she once fancied she might be. All around the perimeter of the fire, men are reapplying their torches, discussing the progress of the flames. Their accents are opaque to her; she wonders if she’s grown too refined lately to understand them, or if they really are as thick as all that.

They are aliens to her, these workers; dressed in their uniform of rudely-cobbled shoes, rough brown trousers and collarless cotton shirts, they are like a common breed of creature, a hardy herd of bipeds troubled neither by the chill wind nor the hot flames.

Sugar is grateful they’re so engrossed in their bonfire, as it means they’re taking less notice of her, and she yearns to be excused scrutiny today. Her own choice of clothes is dark and sober, unlike the lavender plumage that drew all eyes to her on her first visit here. If she can’t be hanging on William’s arm, then anonymity is what she craves.

Waves of smoke, teeming with the livid tadpoles of sparks and cinders, are billowing up into the darkening sky; the men are cheering and laughing at the incandescent fruit of their labours. But, as the fumes of lavender grow more powerful, there grows in Sugar a fear that she might be overcome – a very reasonable fear, given her physical state, which is under-slept, underfed, and in the grip of a chill she blames on the visit to Caroline’s unheated bedroom. Is it better to breathe deeply, getting as much fresh air as possible along with the fumes, or is it better to hold one’s breath? She tries both, and decides to breathe as normally as she can manage. If only she’d eaten something before coming here! But she was too giddy, even then, with anticipation.

‘I’m not likely,’ says William to her suddenly, very near to her flushed face, ‘to call on you for some time.’ His voice is no longer that of the master of ceremonies, but of the man who lies against her naked body in the afterglow of love-making.

Sugar’s beclouded mind strains to interpret his words. ‘I suppose,’ she says, ‘it’s a busy time of year.’

William waves at the men to step back from the bonfire, as it has no further need for their encouragement. The fumes evidently aren’t having anything like the effect on him that they’re having on her.

‘Yes, but it’s not that,’ he says, speaking out of the corner of his mouth, as he surveys the men’s retreat. ‘There are affairs at home … Nothing is ever resolved satisfactorily … It’s a hornets’ nest, I tell you … God, what a household … !’

Sugar concentrates with effort, thick-headed with perfume.

‘Sophie’s nurse?’ she guesses, aiming for a sympathetic tone, but sounding (she feels) merely bilious.

‘You deduce rightly – as always,’ he says, daring to stand closer to her now. ‘Yes, Beatrice Cleave has handed in her notice, bless her fat heart. She’s still convinced Sophie needs a governess, she’s champing at the bit to move to Mrs Barrett’s, and I’m sure she’s not at all pleased to be in a house that’s in mourning, either.’

‘And is a governess so very difficult to find?’ says Sugar, her heart beginning to beat heavily.

‘Well-nigh impossible,’ he scowls. ‘I have my work cut out for me, you can be sure, for the foreseeable future. Bad governesses are legion, and there’s no way of weeding them out. Offer a pitiful wage, and only the most wretched specimens apply; offer a handsome reward, and every member of the female sex is galvanised by greed. Tuesday evening my advertisement was in
The Times,
and I’ve had forty letters already.’

‘But can’t Agnes be the one who chooses a governess?’ ventures Sugar.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Sugar sways dizzily on her feet, her heart pounding so much that she feels her rib-cage shudder, and hears herself say in a weak voice:

‘William?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you
truly
regret we can’t live together?’

‘With all my heart,’ he replies at once, in a tone not so much sentimental as wearily annoyed, as though the impediments to their perfect union were irksome trade restrictions or senseless laws. ‘If I could wave a magic wand … !’

‘William?’ Her breath wheezes, her tongue feels swollen with lavender, the earth on which she stands is slowly beginning to revolve, like a giant piece of flotsam on an ocean too vast and dark to see. ‘I–I believe I have your solution, and … and
our
solution. Let
me
be your daughter’s governess. I’ve all the necessary skills, I think, except music, wh-which I could learn from books, I’m sure. Sophie could do worse, couldn’t she, than learning reading, writing, arithmetic a-and manners from me?’

William’s face is distorted in the firelight, his eyes reddened by the conflagration; his flame-yellow teeth are bared, in amazement – or outrage. Desperately, Sugar pleads on:

‘I–I could live in whatever quarters Sophie’s nurse has now … No matter if they’re plain; I should be happy, m-merely to be near to you …’

Her voice gives out on the final word, a feeble bleat, and she stands swaying, gasping in expectancy. Slowly, oh how slowly! he turns to answer her. Dear Heaven, his lips are curled in disgust … !

‘You cannot possibly be—’ he begins to say, only to be interrupted by a gruff rustic voice:

‘Mr Rarck’m, sir! May Oi speak wi’ye?’

William turns to deal with the intrusion, and Sugar can stand no longer. A sickly hot flush shoots up through her whole body and, as the inside of her skull is flooded in darkness, she faints to the ground. She doesn’t even feel the blow of impact; only – strangely enough – the cool blades of grass pricking the flesh of her face.

Then, after a measureless lapse, she has the distant sensation of being lifted up and carried, but to where, or by whom, she cannot tell.

PART 4

The Bosom of the Family

TWENTY-TWO

A
ll through the long night, a thousand gallons of rain distilled indiscriminately from the effluvia of London’s streets and the sweet exhalations of faraway lakes are tossed down upon the house in Chepstow Villas. One bedroom window glimmers in the darkness like a ship’s beacon, and whenever the torrent intensifies, this lonely light wavers, as though the house is floating off its foundations. At dawn, however, the Rackham residence is unmoved, the dark clouds are exhausted, and a pale new sky is allowed to venture through. The storm, for now, is over.

Still the house and its grounds are steeped in the glimmering residue of the deluge. The carriage-way streams, its fine black gravel floating, grain by grain, towards the gates. Around the house proper, bright water spouts from drainpipes and leaks down the outer walls, washing over windows already as immaculate as they can be. In the garden, every leaf glistens in the glow of sunrise, and every branch hangs low; a spade which was driven securely into the earth the day before leans to one side and topples.

In the subterranean kitchen, a bleary-eyed Janey mops at the puddles which, during the night, have trickled in through the grimy steam-vents, the scullery window and the stairwell. She stokes up the coppers with fresh coal, so the floors will dry and her fingers will thaw by the time she has to do anything complicated with them. Though she can’t see the daylight yet, she hears, by and by, the birds begin to sing.

If Sugar were standing in the lane just off Pembridge Crescent, in that bowered spot where she waved to Mrs Rackham months ago, she would see Agnes standing at the bedroom window already, gazing out at the world through the sparkling glass. For Agnes slept most of yesterday’s daylight hours away, and has been wakeful through the hours of darkness since, waiting for the sun to follow her example. At the North Pole (if she’s to trust what books tell her) it’s day all the time, never night, which certainly would be agreeable. But what she can’t quite understand is: does that mean that Time itself stands still there? And if it doesn’t, does one’s numerical age, at least, never increase? She wonders which would be preferable: never changing because
nothing
ever changes, or growing hoary while remaining twenty-three forever. A conundrum to exercise the brain.

Wary of risking a headache at the very start of the day, Agnes lays the North Pole aside and instead moves through her dim and silent house, descending the stairs and padding through the passage-ways, until she reaches the warmth and brightness of the already industrious kitchen. The servants there are not surprised to see her, for she pays a visit every morning lately; they know she hasn’t come to complain, so they carry on with their work. Amid a haze of delicious steam, the new kitchenmaid, What’s-her-name, is removing a fresh batch of Vienna bread from the oven; Cook is forking sheep’s tongues out of their bowl of marinade, selecting only those whose shape and size are likely to meet with the master’s approval.

Agnes passes straight through to the scullery, where Janey is scrubbing out the wooden sink, having already finished with the stone one. The girl stands on tiptoe, her rump gyrating with effort; in her endeavour to keep the noise of her grunts and umphhs as soft as she can, she doesn’t notice Mrs Rackham’s approach.

‘Where’s Puss?’

Janey jerks as if something has poked her, but recovers quickly.

‘ ’E’s be’ind the copper, ma’am,’ she says, pointing her swollen red hand. Why, you wonder, does she refer to Henry’s cat as ‘he’? Because Henry’s cat, despite the reputation that went before him, is male. On the morning of his arrival in the Rackham kitchen, Cook lifted him up by the tail to check his sex – something that poor Henry Rackham evidently never did.

Agnes kneels on the spotless stone floor in front of the largest of the boilers.

‘I can’t see him,’ she says, peering into the shadows.

Janey is prepared for this: she fetches a dish into which the kitchen-maid has doled a few rabbit and chicken hearts, necks and kidneys, and sets it down near the copper. Puss emerges at once, blinking sleepily.

‘Darling Puss,’ says Agnes, stroking his back, smooth as a muff and as hot as bread from the oven.

‘Don’t eat that,’ she advises him, when he sniffs at the dark clammy meat. ‘It’s dirty. Janey, fetch some cream.’

The girl obeys, and Agnes continues to stroke the cat’s back, pushing him down on his belly, inches short of the bowl, in a slow rhythm of teasing restraint.

‘Your new mistress is coming today,’ she says. ‘Yes she is. You’re a heart-breaker, aren’t you? But I’ll give you up, yes I will. I’ll be brave, and content myself with memories of you. You little charmer, you.’ And she strokes him away from his offal one more time.

‘Ah!’ she sings in delight, as Janey returns with a china bowl. ‘Here’s your lovely, clean, white cream. Show me what you do with
that
.’

On her last morning in Priory Close, Sugar sits shivering at her writing-desk, staring through the rain-specked French windows at her little garden. The imminence of leaving it behind renders it, all of a sudden, inexpressibly precious, even though she’s done nothing to take care of it while living here: the soil has been scattered out of its orderly bed by weeks of heavy rain, the azaleas hang brown and rotten on their stalks, and a slimy heap of fallen leaves is banked up against the window-glass. Ah, but it’s
my
garden, she thinks, knowing she’s being ridiculous.

Indeed there’s scarcely an inch of these rooms of hers that doesn’t inspire some nostalgia, some pang of loss, in spite of all the dissatisfaction and anxiety she’s endured here. All those lonely hours pacing the floor, and now she’s sorry to leave! Madness.

Sugar shivers continually. She doused the fires too long ago, for the sake of not delaying William when he comes, and her rooms have grown cold. They seem colder still for being stripped of ornaments and decorations, and the pallid autumn light, mingling uneasily with the gas-lamps, worsens the denuded look of the walls. Sugar’s hands are chilled white, her bloodless wrists poking out of inky sleeves; she blows on her knuckles, and her breath is lukewarm and damp. All in black she sits, her mourning bonnet already fastened, her gloves ready in her lap. Everything she wishes to take along with her is already, at William’s request, gathered in the front room for easy portage; the rest he’ll no doubt dispose of somehow. Anything even slightly soiled – sheets, towels, clothing, no matter how expensive – she has already thrown out into the streets, for deserving scavengers to find. (The rain will have soaked everything, but with a bit of patience, some poor devil can surely redeem them.)

In the discussion she and William had about the removal, no mention was made of the bed, though Sugar imagines her new quarters will be very small indeed. Will there be enough leg-room, she wonders, for her and William to do all they’re accustomed to doing? At the thought of her naked feet bursting out through the windows of a tiny steepled attic,
Alice in
Wonderland
-style, she sniggers in suppressed hysteria.

What in God’s name has she volunteered for? In a few hours, she’ll be solely responsible for Sophie Rackham –
What on earth is she going to do with
her?
She’s an imposter, a fraud so outrageously transparent that … that even a child could see through it! Axioms, dictums and golden rules are what’s wanted in a teacher, but when Sugar racks her brains for some, what does she find?

An occasion, five years ago perhaps, when her mother was called to her bedside shortly after the departure of a customer endowed like a horse. Having inspected the damage, Mrs Castaway decided that her daughter’s torn flesh would heal without stitches and, even as she was shutting up the medicine chest, gave this excellent advice for avoiding ‘bloodshed down below’:

‘Just remember: everything hurts more if you resist.’

‘They say,’ says Mrs Agnes Rackham to Mrs Emmeline Fox, ‘that your recovery is nothing short of miraculous.’

Mrs Fox murmurs thanks as she accepts cocoa and a slice of cake from Rose. ‘Miracles are rare,’ she gently but firmly reminds her host, ‘and God tends to save them for when nothing else will do. I prefer to think I was simply nursed back to health.’

But Agnes is having none of it. Here before her sits a woman whom she last saw limping painfully through the grounds of the church like a grotesque
memento mori,
causing an illicit susurrus of disgust and pity. Now, Mrs Fox looks in remarkable fettle, especially around the face; the skull that was so ghoulishly intent on disclosing itself is snugly clothed in flesh, the eye-sockets are no longer hollow. Indeed she looks almost pretty! And, let’s not forget, she walked in without the aid of a stick, carrying herself with that confidence (as unmistakable as it is mysterious) that there is at one’s disposal enough breath and strength to last the whole day.

‘You’ve been in the Convent of Health, haven’t you?’ whispers Agnes.

‘No, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital,’ Mrs Fox replies. ‘You wrote to me there, as I’m sure you recall … ?’ But Emmeline isn’t sure at all, because to be frank she’s finding Mrs Rackham’s wits a little on the scattered side today. For example, there are suitcases in the hall, and a mound of hatboxes and furled umbrellas and so forth, clearly indicating that a member of the household is about to leave, but when tactfully questioned about this, Mrs Rackham appeared not to hear.

‘Perhaps I came at an inconvenient time?’ Emmeline fishes again. ‘Those suitcases in the hall …’

‘Not at all,’ says Agnes. ‘We have hours yet.’

‘Hours before what?’

But Mrs Rackham has the same response to crude explicitness as she has to more delicate probing.

‘Hours before we might be interrupted,’ she assures her guest, ‘by anything that doesn’t concern us.’

Rose offers the silver plate, and Mrs Rackham picks a slice of cake from the extreme left-hand side where, according to prior arrangement, the thinnest specimens are always laid. The slice in her fingers, a survivor of many abortive hot-knifings in the kitchen below, is so slender that the parlour lamp-light shines right through the fruit.

‘Come now, Mrs Fox,’ she simpers, nibbling her moist little rasher. ‘Are you saying you were snatched from the jaws of … You-Know-What, by nothing more extraordinary than good nursing?’

Emmeline is beginning to wonder if, during the long months of her indisposition, the rules of casual intercourse have radically changed: what a strange little
tête-à-tête
this is! Still, she’ll give as good as she gets.

‘I never went about declaring I had consumption. Other people said I had it, and I didn’t contradict them. There are more important things to lock horns over, don’t you think?’

‘Henry told us he most definitely saw you on your deathbed,’ says Mrs Rackham, undaunted.

Mrs Fox blinks incredulously, and for a moment seems in danger of some sort of outburst. Then she leans her head back against her chair and lets her big grey eyes grow moist.

‘Henry saw me at my worst, it’s true,’ she sighs. ‘Perhaps it would have been better for him if I’d disappeared for a while, and come back when it was all over.’ Staring over the railing of tragedy into that misty valley of the recent past where Henry can still be spied, Emmeline fails to notice Agnes nodding childishly, electrified by this apparent admission of supernatural powers. ‘I
did
tell him, though, that I’d get better. I remember telling him about what I call the calendar of my days, that God has put inside me. I don’t know exactly how many pages it has, but I can feel there are many more left than people thought.’

By this point, Agnes is nearly squirming with excitement. Oh, to have such a magic calendar inside herself, and be able to verify (contrary to the estimate of that horrid newspaper article she simply can’t erase from her mind) that she has more than 21,917 days on the earth! Does she dare demand the secret, here and now, in her parlour on a chilly mid-morning at the beginning of November? No, she must tread softly, she can tell: Mrs Fox has that cryptic look about her, that Agnes recognises from portraits of mystics and death-survivors throughout the ages. Why, in a book hidden under her embroidery,
The Illustrated Proofs of Spiritualism
, there’s an engraving, done directly from a photograph, of an American Redskin gentleman sporting a ‘necklace’ of poisonous snakes, and his face bears an uncanny resemblance to Mrs Fox’s!

‘But do tell me,’ says Agnes, ‘what have you brought in your parcel?’

With an effort, Mrs Fox retrieves herself from her reverie, and fetches up the heavy paper package that’s been leaning against the leg of her chair.

‘Books,’ she says, removing a pristine-looking volume and handing it over to Mrs Rackham. One by one she proffers them: slim treatises with such titles as
Christian Piety in Daily Intercourse, The Bone Men’s Folly, and
Carlylism
and Christian Doctrine: Friends or Foes?

‘My goodness,’ says Agnes, trying to sound grateful despite her disappointment, for these books don’t appear to promise anything she wants to know. ‘This is awfully generous of you …’

‘If you turn to the fly-leaves,’ explains Mrs Fox, ‘you’ll see that generosity has nothing to do with it. These books belong to your husband – or at least, they’re
inscribed
to him, as gifts from Henry. I can’t imagine how they came to be back among Henry’s things, but I thought I should return them.’

An awkward moment ensues, and Agnes decides she’s learned as much as she’s likely to learn during this particular visit.

‘Well,’ she says brightly, ‘shall we go down to the kitchen now, and see what we may find waiting for you there?’

More than two hours after Sugar first considers the possibility that William has thought better of the whole idea, and an hour after she’s wept copious tears of dread and self-pity, convinced she’ll never see him again, the Rackham carriage jingles to a stop in front of the building, and William knocks for her.