The Crimson Petal and the White (70 page)

‘God bless Papa and Mama,’ says Sophie, kneeling at the side of her bed, her tiny hands arranged in a steeple on the coverlet. ‘God bless Nurse.’ So incantatory is her tone that it hardly seems to matter that of this triumvirate, two have scant involvement in Sophie’s life and the third has abandoned her to suckle a new baby called Barrett. Father, Mother and Nurse are folkloric fixtures like Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or Great Huge Bear, Middle Bear and Little Small Wee Bear.

‘… and I am grateful that I am a little girl in England with a home and a bed, and God bless the little black children in Africa, who have no beds, and God bless all the little yellow children in China, who are made to eat rats …’

Sugar’s eyes, focused on Sophie’s pale bare feet poking out from the hem of her night-dress, slowly cross. Whatever qualms she may have about embellishing, with sentimental and unhistorical anecdotes, the decision by Constantine the Great to stop the persecution of the Christians, she’s clearly doing no more than following in Beatrice Cleave’s footsteps. A great deal of rubbish has already been deposited in Sophie’s skull, and there’s more to follow.

‘Shall I … shall I read you a bedtime story?’ says Sugar, as she’s tucking Sophie in, pulling the sheets up to the child’s chin.

‘Thank you, Miss.’

But by the time Sugar has fetched a book, it’s too late.

In her own bed that night, after she’s finally given up waiting for William, Sugar lays out a selection of Agnes’s diaries before her on the blanket, one nestled in her lap, several others within easy reach. If she should hear William at her door, she’s decided what she’ll do: blow out the bedside candle and, under cover of darkness, toss the diaries back under the bed. Then, if he’s in the state she expects he’ll be in, he’s scarcely likely to notice, even by the light of a rekindled candle, that her hands are grubby. She’ll wipe them at her leisure, when his face is safely nuzzled between her breasts.

Agnes’s next attempt at keeping her memoirs after the tirade against her step-father and his fiendish plan to have her schooled, is dated 2 September 1861, on the maiden page of a fresh volume grandly inscribed
Abbots Langley School for Girls
. The misery she’d expected to suffer if she were sent to such a place is nowhere in evidence; for, not only does she render the name of the school with a proud flourish, but she also decorates the page margins with elaborate watercolour reproductions of the school’s hollyhock laurel emblem and its motto,
Comme Il Faut
.

Addressing herself once more to ‘Dear Diary’ rather than ‘Saint Teresa’ or some other supernatural correspondent, the ten-year-old Agnes thus commences an unbroken record of her six years at school.

Well, here am I in Abbots Langley (near Hampstead). Miss Warkworth & Miss
Barr (the headmistresses) say that no girl is permited to leave here until ‘finished’,
but do not be alarmed, dear Diary, for by this they mean Clever & Beautiful. I
have been thinking deeply on this and have decided that it would be a good thing if
I was Clever & Beautiful because then I should marry well, to an Officer of the
True Faith. I should describe my Papa to him and he would say, “Why, I have seen
the very man fighting in distant lands!” and directly after we were married he would
go on a Quest to find him. Mama & I should live together in his house, waiting
for him and Papa to return
.

I do not know how Miss Warkworth & Miss Barr & the other mistresses
mean to ‘finish’ me, but I have seen some of the older girls who have been at Abbots
Langley for years, & they look most pleased with themselves & are some of them
very Tall & Graceful. In evening dress I am sure they would look just like Ladies
in paintings with a fine Officer by their side
.

I have been instaled in my room, which I must share with two other girls.
(There are, I think, thirty all-together. I was very worried about this before I came,
for I knew I should have to live with strange girls who might be cruel & was
almost sick with dread at the thought of being at their mercy. But the two girls in
my room are not so bad after all. One is named Letitia (I
think that is how it is
spelt) and though she is a little older than me & says she comes of better family,
she has been made so teribly ugly by a Disease that she lacks the spirit to put on
airs. The other girl has wept & snifled since her arrival but said nothing
.

At Dinner some other girls (whom I first took for school-mistresses, they
looked so old – I suppose they are almost finished) tried to make me reveal who my
Father was & I would not tell them, because I feared they would make fun of
Papa. But then another spoke up, “I know who her father is – He is Lord Unwin”,
& that struck them all very quiet! Perhaps I betrayed Papa a little by not speaking
up for him as my
True
father, but dont you think I should be glad of what small
benifit I recieve from being now the step-daughter of Lord Unwin? Whether it is
wrong or not, I am greatful for whatever helps me suffer less, for I hate to suffer.
Every scratch and gash upon my heart is there yet, not the
slightest
bit healed, making
me fear that the next injury will be my last. If only I could be spared any more
wounds, I should arrive safe into Marriage, and after that I should be free of all
care. Wish me luck!

(I can speak freely to
you, dear Diary, for it is only the letters I send by the
Post that I must give up unsealed to Miss Barr.)

I have more to tell, but Miss Wick (of whom more to-morrow) has just called
by, warning us that we must put out the lights. And so, dear Diary, I must put you
under lock and key, & ask you not to worry over me
yet,
for it seems I may survive
my education after all!

Your loving Friend,

Agnes.

Sugar reads another twenty or thirty pages before succumbing to exhaustion – and, to be honest, the odourless, deadly gas of boredom. Agnes’s promise that there should be ‘more to-morrow’ of Miss Wick is faithfully kept, and indeed Miss Wick, and all the other Misses whom Agnes lacks the literary talent to bring to life, rear their featureless heads not just tomorrow, but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In her final minutes of wakefulness, Sugar wishes she could float through the Rackham house like a ghost and see its inhabitants
now
, as they really are. She wishes she could pass through the heavy wooden door of William’s study and see what he’s up to; wishes she could peer into his very brain and winkle out his reasons for avoiding her. She wishes she could see Agnes, the real flesh-and-blood Agnes whom she has touched and smelled, doing whatever it is that Agnes does in her room at night … Even the sight of Mrs Rackham sleeping would, Sugar’s sure, reveal more than these ancient soil-stained reminiscences!

Lastly, she imagines floating into Sophie’s room, and murmuring in the child’s ear the gentle suggestion that she hop out of bed and use the pot one more time. No supernatural fantasy, this: she could, if she
chose
, make it come true. How happy Sophie would be, waking next morning in a dry bed! Sugar breathes deeply, gathering her nerve to throw the warm bedclothes aside and hurry barefoot through the dark to Sophie’s room. A minute or two of discomfort is all she’ll have to endure to complete this mission of mercy – yes! She’s up, she’s tiptoeing along the landing, candle in hand!

But, like those childhood dreams she can still recall, when she’d be convinced she was leaving her bed to use the pot, only to discover, as soon as she let go, that she was wetting herself inside a humid cocoon of bedding, the mission of mercy occurs in her sleep only, and its happy ending is trapped like a moth in her snoring head.

Next morning, in the cold light of dawn, while the wind whoops and fleers and a chatter of sleet harasses the eastern windows of the Rackham house, Sugar tiptoes up to Sophie’s bed, pulls back the covers, and finds the child steeped in urine as usual.

‘I’m sorry, Miss.’

What to reply? ‘Well, we’ve no other sheets, and it’s raining outside, and I’ll soon be entertaining visitors who won’t appreciate your dirty smell in their noses – so what do
you
suggest we do, hmm, my little sorry poppet?’ The words echo in Sugar’s memory, tempting her to speak them aloud, with that same teasing, affectionately bitter tone Mrs Castaway used fifteen years ago. How quickly they spring to the tip of Sugar’s tongue! She bites them back in horror.

‘Nothing to be sorry about, Sophie. Let’s get you clean.’

Sophie wrestles with her night-dress, whose sodden fabric sucks at her flesh inch by inch, plastered to the contours of her ribs. Sugar comes to the rescue, tugging the horrid thing free of Sophie’s arms and rolling it into a wad, disguising with a cough her sharp intake of breath as the acid urine stings the cracks in her palms and fingers. She can’t help noticing, when the naked child steps from her sour-smelling bed into the tub, that Sophie’s vulva is an angry red.

‘Wash well, Sophie,’ she advises airily, looking away into the shadows, but there’s no escape from the memory of her own inflamed genitals, examined in a cracked mirror in Church Lane, the moment the fat old man with the hairy hands finally left her alone.
I have a clever middle finger, yes I have!
was what he’d told her, as he poked and prodded between her legs.
A most
frolicsome little fellow! He loves to play with little girls, and make them happier than
they’ve ever been!

‘Finished, Miss,’ says Sophie, her legs trembling with cold, her lamp-lit shoulders smouldering with steam.

Sugar wraps the towel around Sophie ‘s shoulders, half-lifts her out of the tub, and helps her dry everywhere, dabbing at the clefts. Then, just before the pantalettes go on, she sprinkles some Rackham’s Snow Dust between Sophie’s legs, and pats the talc gently onto the sore flesh. The smell of lavender flavours the air between them; the child’s sex has been powdered pale as a whore’s face, with a thin red mouth, only to disappear inside white cotton in a faint puff of talcum.

After Sugar has buttoned Sophie into an ill-fitting blue dress and straightened her white pinafore, she pulls the bed-sheet from the mattress (lined with a waxed undersheet, just like her own bed at Mrs Castaway’s!) and pushes it into the bathwater to soak. Is there a reason, she wonders, why the bed-sheet must be washed immediately and hung to dry in that nasty little room downstairs, while Sophie’s night-dress and indeed all the other laundry in the house is taken care of in the normal way by the servants? Was there perhaps, once upon a time, a complaint from the laundry-maid that a daily load of soiled linen was an intolerable imposition? Or was this ritual Beatrice Cleave’s idea, with no purpose but to remind Sophie how much bother she caused her long-suffering nurse?

‘I wonder what would happen,’ muses Sugar as she sploshes up to her elbows in the tepid yellowish water, ‘if we put this sheet with the other things to be washed.’ She scoops the tangle of heavy linen up and begins to wring it, waiting for Sophie’s response.

‘It’s too full of dirtiness, Miss,’ says the child, solemn in her rôle of introducing a newcomer to the unchallengeable realities of the Rackham domain. ‘My bad smell would be spread into the good parts of the house, onto the nice clean beds, ev’ywhere.’

‘Did your Nurse tell you that?’

Sophie hesitates; the day’s interrogations have evidently begun, and she must be careful to answer correctly.

‘No, Miss. It’s … common knowledge.’

Sugar lets the matter drop, wrings the sheet as dry as she can. She leaves Sophie to comb her hair, and carries the wad of damp linen out of the room, to follow in Beatrice Cleave’s footsteps one more time.

The landing is still quite gloomy, but the receiving-hall below is thinly covered with milky daylight, and the sun’s overspill extends half-way up the stairs, making the second part of Sugar’s descent more confident than the first. What would William think, if he met her hurrying through his house like this, carrying a wad of wet whiffy linen before her? A vain conjecture, since she meets no one. Although she knows the nether regions of the Rackham house must be a hive of industry at this hour, none of it is audible, and she feels like the only soul haunting its luxurious passageways. The silence is such that she hears the carpet underfoot, the barely perceptible squirm of its dense-woven pile as she walks upon it.

The odd little store-room with the copper pipe spanned between its walls is warm as an oven half an hour after a cake has been removed. All trace of mud and mucky water has been scrupulously cleaned from the corner where Agnes’s diaries lay in those few hours before Sugar snatched them; and, contrary to her fears, there is, in the diaries’ place, no stern notice to the effect that theft will be punished with instant dismissal.

Sugar hangs the bed-sheet over the copper pipe. Only now does she notice that the talcum powder trapped in the cracks of her palms has mingled with bathwater, delineating the freakish convolutions of her skin with a network of creamy lines. Clots and smears of this perfumed slime also cling to the bed-sheet, resembling thick male seed.

William, where are you?
she thinks.

The morning is spent on the Roman Empire and dictation, with two fairy stories as a treat. Sugar recites them from a slim cloth-covered book whose spine is frayed and whose pages are much-thumbed.
Illustrated and with
Revised Morals,
proclaims the title page, along with a hand-written inscription: