The Crimson Petal and the White (66 page)

Several minutes pass before the voice of Clara, indistinct in word but unmistakably humiliated in tone, is added to the medley. Her muffled account becomes more quavery the more she’s interrupted. ‘“Clean slate”?’ William challenges her. ‘What d’you mean, “clean slate”?’ The girl’s reply, whatever it is, fails to impress him, and he blasphemes. Eventually, the voice of Shears is heard again, just as Clara begins to weep, or sneeze, or both. ‘No, no, no,’ groans William, irritably dismissing the gardener’s suggestion. ‘She’ll want them back soon enough. Put them somewhere safe and dry …’ (More murmurs ensue.) ‘I don’t know, anywhere out of the way of visitors! Must I make
every
damn decision in this world?’ Whereupon he leaves the matter in their hands and, with an emphatic tread that Sugar can feel through the floorboards, returns to the parlour.

‘Trouble, my love?’ she yearns to say when he steps back into the room, but he looks so unlike the man whose lips have kissed her belly that she doesn’t dare, and merely looks up at him questioningly.

‘Agnes’s diaries …’ William explains, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘A dozen or more. Agnes …
buried
them in the garden. Or obliged Clara to bury them for her …’ His eyes glaze over as he pictures the act – the servant in her mourning dress, huffing and puffing with a spade; the hole; the wet black earth closing over the cloth-bound journals. ‘Can you imagine?’

Sugar frowns sympathetically, hoping that’s what’s wanted. ‘Why would she do such a thing?’

William collapses into his armchair, staring at his knees.

‘She told Clara she’s … “finished with the past”! “Starting afresh”! “Clean slate”!’ Before Sugar’s eyes, his incredulity is turning to distress; he shakes his head again, and on the lines of his brow is written, for anyone to read:
Is there another husband in England who endures what I endure?

If they were in Priory Close now, she would take him in her arms and stroke the back of his head; she’d pull him to her breast and remind him that there can be such a thing as a woman who does only what her man requires: nothing less, nothing else. But here in the Rackham parlour, with the loudly ticking clock and the framed horticultural prints and the embroidered doilies and the Persian carpet in which a raisin is lost …

‘I believe there was something you wanted to tell me?’ she says. ‘Before we were interrupted?’

He passes a hand across his mouth and composes himself, without the benefit of her comforting arms.

‘Yes,’ he says, leaning as close to her as decorum will permit. ‘What I wanted to say to you is this: It would be best if … for the next little while … indeed, until I tell you different …’ He’s squeezing one hand inside the other, praying for inspiration to reveal a truth without having to strip it naked. ‘It would be best if Sophie were taken care of in such a way that Agnes was … ah … troubled as little as possible. In fact, if you can ensure that whenever Agnes is up and about … that is,
in …’
(he gestures vaguely at the house in general) ‘she … that is, Agnes … is … ah … free to go about her business without …’

Sugar can stand it no longer. ‘You mean,’ she clarifies, ‘that Agnes is not to set eyes on Sophie.’

‘Precisely.’ His relief is patent, but almost immediately marred by fresh embarrassment; he’d like to redeem his wife, it seems, from the stigma of unreason. ‘I’m not saying that if Agnes catches a
glimpse
of you and Sophie walking down the stairs it’s the end of the world, or that you’re expected to keep my daughter prisoner in the nursery, but …’

‘Discretion,’ she sums up, groping her way back into his confidence, willing him to draw comfort from her decisive tone and her mild-eyed, dispassionate gaze.

‘Precisely.’ He leans back against the chair and breathes like a man whose tooth has been pulled with less pain and bloodshed than he’d feared.

‘Now, it’s time,’ he says, when the clock’s ticking becomes intrusive once more, ‘that the reins of power were handed over, don’t you think?’

In the bedroom of Sophie Rackham, an atmosphere of austere severity prevails. Except for the child-sized bed tucked in one dim corner, it might be a cell within a nunnery – a nunnery founded by an order that long ago forswore all pastimes but prayer and silent contemplation. No picture hangs on the wall, no ornament or plaything is anywhere in evidence; in fact, not a speck of dust – much less a toy – mars the perfection of the darkly polished surfaces. A dozen or so books stand stock-straight in a bookcase the height and breadth of a coffin, each tome looking uncompromisingly difficult.

‘I am Sophie’s nurse,’ says Beatrice Cleave, in a tone that demands congratulation – or commiseration. ‘Six years I’ve been here.’

Hysteria tickles Sugar’s brain, tempting her to reply:
‘Enchantée!
I am William Rackham’s mistress, and I’ve been here forty-five minutes.’ But she swallows hard, and says, ‘Miss Sugar.’

‘I have been both a wet- and a dry-nurse to this child,’ says the amply bosomed but otherwise starchy-looking Beatrice, ‘and I’ve seen the fortunes of this family rise and fall and rise again.’

Sugar can’t think what to reply to this, other than to reassure Beatrice that if her milk has dried up for good, she can always get a job at Mrs Gill’s house in Jermyn Street, which specialises in large-breasted whores.

‘Time flies,’ she says, looking around a little more.

This bedroom is, despite first impressions, exactly the same dimensions as her own bedroom next door; it only appears bigger, because there’s so little in it. Sophie sits perched on a large, straight-backed chair, a miserable waxen poppet dressed up in the sombre-est, tightest, Sundayest clothes Sugar has ever seen, like a figure in a Temperance Society diorama. She has not been introduced. She is merely the subject under discussion. She gazes at the floor or, for variety, at her shoes.

‘You will find,’ says Beatrice, ‘that in the main Sophie is a well-meaning child. There’s no malice in her, although she’d rather stand gaping at the window than do most anything else. You will also find, I hope, that she isn’t stupid, although her mind is very easily jolted off its rails.’

Sugar casts a glance at Sophie to see how she takes these criticisms, but the little girl is still studying the wax on the floorboards.

‘There’s times,’ Beatrice continues, ‘when she behaves like a baby, and her reason deserts her. Not a pretty sight. At such times, she requires firm handling, if she’s not to become just like …’ Beatrice stops short, even though she’s about to flit the Rackham household forever. ‘Just like a Bedlamite.’

Sugar nods politely, hoping her face isn’t betraying her growing dislike of the woman with the hard black bosom, thin lips and unexpectedly well-educated speech. The Beatrice she’d imagined, when William first mentioned his daughter’s nurse, was a different breed altogether – a stouter version of Caroline perhaps, all smiles and provincial heritage, or else a doting, cuddly Cockney, much given to sentimental excess. Sugar even feared a last-minute orgy of weeping and embraces, with a frantic Sophie clutching the skirts of her roly-poly protectress amid lamentations of ‘My babe!’ and so forth.

Instead, here are three figures dressed in mourning keeping resolutely to their places in a chilly room, and the closest Beatrice gets to holding Sophie Rackham is with her sidelong glance, like a ventriloquist willing a relinquished doll to stay put and not keel over. Rosy-cheeked nurses voluptuous with natural love? Another romantic preconception it seems, got from reading too many novels, doomed to wither in the face of harsh reality.

‘She wets the bed, you know,’ says Beatrice. ‘Every night.’ And she raises one eyebrow, a stoical invitation for Sugar to appreciate the sheer scale of bother this must have caused during these six years past.

‘How … unfortunate,’ says Sugar, again glancing at Sophie. The child seems lost beyond recall in the enchanted world of her shoe-buckles.

‘In summer it’s not so hard to deal with,’ says Beatrice. ‘In winter, it’s a nightmare. If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you the best place for drying bed-sheets indoors.’

‘Mm, yes, I’d be grateful,’ says Sugar, suddenly gripped by the strangest desire to slap Beatrice Cleave across the face, over and over, with a pisssoaked slipper.

‘It’s a small mercy,’ Beatrice carries on, ‘but at least Sophie is not one of those children who hate water. If anything, she’s overly fond of being washed. Which puts me in mind …’ Her eyes gleam inquisitively as she examines Sugar’s skinny build. ‘I expect you and Mr Rackham have discussed exactly which tasks you’ll be answerable for? I have been nurse and teacher and goodness knows what else, these past six years, and thought nothing of it, but I can understand that you, being a governess, may not be willing to do … certain things.’

Sugar opens her mouth, but finds her tongue momentarily useless; she hadn’t imagined, nor did William warn her, that Sophie would have any needs whatsoever beyond tutelage.

‘I … we agreed … W— Mr Rackham and I,’ she stammers, ‘that I’ll care for Sophie in all respects.’

Beatrice raises her eyebrow again, her gaze steady despite the rain of invisible blows she’s receiving from the urine-soaked slipper.

‘You can always insist on a nursery-maid being hired,’ she says, in a tone that suggests this would be a most excellent idea, and that Mr Rackham is deplorably remiss not to have arranged it already. ‘There’s money pouring into this house, Miss Sugar –
pouring
in. A new front door was installed only last week, did you know?’

Sugar shakes her head and, as Beatrice launches into a nuisance-by-nuisance, screw-by-screw account of the door’s investiture, she begins seriously to consider how to raise the subject of trains without appearing daft.

‘I’m sure Sophie won’t be any trouble,’ she says, in Beatrice’s pause for breath after a pair of ‘swindling’ carpenters have (according to the nurse’s reckoning) been paid for one oblong of carved wood much the same sum as would employ a nursery-maid for a year. ‘I’m sure you’ve reared her so well that nothing remains but for me to … ah … carry on your good work.’

Beatrice frowns, momentarily dumbstruck, praise having succeeded where the invisible slipper failed. But, before Sugar can follow through with a pointed allusion to long journeys and precious time, the nurse recovers.

‘Come and I’ll show you where Sophie’s wet bedding can be hung,’ she says. Whereupon, as she and Sugar move towards the door, she addresses her first words directly to the child: ‘Stay here, Sophie.’ The black-shrouded manikin, still perched motionless on the high-backed chair, merely blinks her big blue Agnes eyes, and doesn’t even dare turn her head to watch them go.

All the way downstairs, Beatrice speaks of Sophie – or rather, of Sophie’s clumsiness, Sophie’s deficiencies in posture, Sophie’s forgetfulness, the unreasoning prejudice Sophie has against certain perfectly suitable items of clothing, and the great importance of not weakening in one’s stand on Sophie and broccoli. As they walk through the sumptuously decorated corridors below stairs, Beatrice shares with the new governess an inventory of what Sophie can be granted if she’s good, and what she can be denied if she’s ‘not so good’. This inventory is so exhaustive that it isn’t finished – only interrupted – by their arrival in a claustrophobic storeroom adjacent to the kitchen.

‘It was built as a wine cellar,’ explains Beatrice, as they’re enveloped in warmth and the pleasant smell of evaporated linen-soap, ‘but then Mr Rackham ran out of wine, and hadn’t the means to replace it.’ She casts Sugar a meaningful glance. ‘This was a few years ago, of course – before
the change
came over him.’

Sugar nods, oddly perturbed by the knowledge that
she
was that change. Beatrice is removing a cotton bed-sheet from a long copper pipe which, for no divinable purpose, connects one wall with the other.

‘Then he got a craze for photo-graphy,’ she goes on, folding the rectangle of linen against her breast, ‘and for a while it was what you call a “darkroom”. But then he had an accident with some poison, and the smell never went no matter how much the floors were sluiced out, and then a man came and said it was the fault of damp, and so this boiler pipe was passed through …’ She halts in mid-explication, her eyes narrowing. ‘Hello, what’s this?’

On the floor, in one shadowy corner, lies a heap of what appears to be garbage. It proves, on closer inspection, to be wet and muddy papers, in the form of notebooks or diaries.

‘I must have a word with whoever’s responsible,’ she sniffs. ‘This room is not a cesspit.’

‘Ah, but you have a train to catch,’ blurts Sugar. ‘Don’t you? Please, leave the matter in my hands.’ And, like an answered prayer, a nearby grandfather clock goes
bong, bong, bong
and
bong
again.

When Beatrice Cleave is finally gone, and her belongings have been removed from the hallway, and the servants are no longer standing at the windows watching the carriage dwindle out of sight, Sugar returns, alone, to the bedroom where Sophie was told to ‘stay’. What else can she do?

She’d expected William to seek her out after the nurse’s departure and give her a more fulsome welcome, but he’s melted away, and she can hardly go poking her nose into all the rooms of the house in search of him, can she? No. With every carpeted stair she mounts, she appreciates ever more sharply that her brief hour of grace is over. She’s not a visitor here anymore, but … a governess.

Even as she opens the bedroom door, she’s preparing for a dismal sight, a sight to sink her heart and send a shiver down her spine: the sight of Sophie Rackham sitting bolt upright on that stiff-backed chair, like an eerie museum specimen not quite killed by taxidermy, rigid with fear and mistrust, her huge eyes staring straight into Sugar’s soul, and expecting … what?

But this, when Sugar enters, is not the sight that greets her. Little Sophie, although she most assuredly did stay where she was told, has found the long wait far
too
long, and fallen asleep in her seat. Her posture, so maligned by Beatrice, is indisputably poor just now, as she lies slumped and skew-whiff, her head lolling against one shoulder, her skirts rucked and wrinkled, one arm lying limp in her lap and the other dangling in space. A wisp of her blonde hair flutters as she breathes and, clearly evident on the black material of her tightly-buttoned bodice, there’s a patch that’s blacker than the rest, from drool.