The Crimson Petal and the White (71 page)

Dear Sophie, A good friend of mine has scolded me for giving you the Bible last
Christmas, saying you are too young for it yet. I hope you will enjoy this little book
almost
as much. Fond wishes from your tiresome Uncle Henry
.

‘Do you remember your Uncle Henry?’ enquires Sugar lightly, in between exotic enchantments and supernatural rescues.

‘They put him in the ground,’ says Sophie, after a few moments’ wrinkle-browed thought.

Sugar reads on. Fairy stories are a novelty for her; Mrs Castaway didn’t approve of them, because they encourage the belief that everything turns out exactly as it should, whereas ‘You’ll find out soon enough, child, that nothing ever does.’ Mrs Castaway preferred to nurture the infant Sugar on folk tales (the nastier the better), selected episodes from the Old Testament (Sugar can still list each of Job’s trials), and true-life accounts: indeed, anything with a full complement of undeserved suffering and apparently motiveless deeds.

At midday, when Rose brings Sugar and Sophie their share of luncheon, she brings a message too. Mrs Rackham is entertaining visitors downstairs, and wishes to show them – the visitors, that is – the house. Mr Rackham therefore requests that Mrs Rackham be left wholly undisturbed in this objective.
Wholly
undisturbed, you understand. ‘And if you fancy, there’s more galantine, and I’ll bring up the cake shortly,’ adds Rose, to sweeten the bitterness of their imprisonment.

Silence settles over governess and pupil when the servant has left. True to the pattern of this November, the morning sun fades away and the room dims, its windows rattling in the wind. The slap of raindrops sharpens into the clatter of hailstones.

‘Well, these visitors are much the poorer,’ says Sugar at last, ‘for not seeing your lovely nursery – your lovely school-room, I should say. It’s the cheerfulest room in the house, and your toys are very interesting.’

There is another pause.

‘Mother hasn’t seen me since my birthday,’ says Sophie, staring at the pistachio kernel on her plate, wondering if, under this strange new post-Beatrice regime, she may go unpunished for refusing to eat this bit of her galantine.

‘When was your birthday?’ enquires the governess.

‘I don’t know, Miss. Nurse knows.’

‘I’ll ask your father.’

Sophie looks at Sugar wide-eyed, impressed at the easy familiarity the governess seems to have with the exalted and shadowy figures of the adult world.

Sugar picks up the Mangnall and opens it at random. ‘… commonly called the “Complutensian Polyglot”, from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcala,’ is what her eyes light upon. Instantly she resolves to tell Sophie a story from The Bible instead, embellished with her own character glosses and evocations of Galilean fashions of dress, followed perhaps by a little more Aesop.

‘What happened on your birthday?’ she asks Sophie, in an even tone, as she leafs backwards and forwards through the Bible. ‘Did you do something wicked?’

Sophie gives the question some thought, her frowning, slightly pudgy face flickering with silvery-grey light from the hail-spattered window. ‘I don’t ’member, Miss,’ she says at last.

Sugar hums amiably, as if to say, ‘No matter’. She’s decided against
Job
, considers doing
Esther
until she sees how thick it is with murder and the purification of virgins, and then gets ensnarled in
Nehemiah
, whose endless lists are even more boring than Agnes Unwin’s. She looks around the room for inspiration, and spots the painted wooden animals jostled in a corner.

‘The story,’ she declares, closing the book, ‘of Noah’s flood.’

That evening, after Sophie has been laid to rest, Sugar returns to her own room for the long night. William is in the house, she knows, and Agnes has gone out visiting: ideal conditions for him to pay a visit on his paramour. Secreted here in a dingy, box-like little chamber with ugly wallpaper disfigured by pictureless picture-hooks, she disports herself on the bed, her breasts perfumed under the quilted fabric of her burgundy dressing-gown.

An hour passes, boredom begins to set in, and Sugar pulls Agnes’s diaries out from under the bed. The rain batters against the window. Perhaps it’s just as well that Shears has not yet climbed up and broken the paint-seal, for that wind-swept water looks as though it would love to get in.

Back in Abbots Langley, in a revamped cloister stocked to the ceiling with adolescent girls, Agnes Unwin’s education goes on and on. As far as Sugar can tell (reading between the lines of Agnes’s breathless but soporific account) hard study is no longer much on the menu, supplanted by an increasing stress on ladylike ‘accomplishments’. On such subjects as Geography or English Agnes has nothing to say, but she records her elation at receiving praise for her needlepoint, or the misery of going for walks in the school grounds accompanied by a teacher of German or French and having to do conjugations on demand. As the years pass, Agnes never achieves more than mediocrity in any academic pursuit, earning many a ‘P’ (for ‘Pretty well’) in her copybook, but Music and Dancing are an almost effortless joy to her. One of the few vividly evoked pictures in Agnes’s narrative is of being seated at one of the music room’s pianos with her best friend Laetitia two octaves to the left of her, playing at the tap of a baton the same tune that four other girls at two other pianos are playing likewise. Her poor spelling never attracts anything harsher than a tut-tut of reproof, while in Arithmetic, she’s often spared penalty for mistakes, as long as the calligraphy of the sums is perfectly formed.

Although Agnes misses not a single day of her journal, Sugar is unable to show the same diligence, and skips pages here and there. Where’s her reward for risking being caught red-handed – grubby-handed – by William, should he burst in and find her reading his wife’s stolen diaries? And dear God, how much of this school-room froth can she swallow? Where is the real Agnes in all this? Where is the flesh and blood woman who lives farther down the landing, that strange and troubled creature who is William’s wife and Sophie’s mother? The Agnes in these diaries is a mere fairytale contrivance, as far-fetched as Snow White.

A knock at her door makes her jerk violently, sending the diary flying off her lap. In a couple of frenzied seconds she’s retrieved it and shoved it under her bed, wiped her hands on the rug, and licked her lips three times to give them a glisten.

‘Yes?’ she says.

Her door swings open, and there stands William, fully dressed, immaculately groomed, much as a business associate might expect to see him standing in the doorway of an office. On his face, nothing readable.

‘Come in, sir,’ she bids him, doing her best to modulate her tone halfway between solemn deference and seductive purr.

He walks inside, and shuts the door behind him.

‘I’ve been fearsomely busy,’ he says. ‘Christmas is almost upon us.’

The absurdity of this statement, combined with her own tightly-screwed nerves, brings her to the edge of hilarity.

‘I’m at your service …’ she says, squeezing one sharp-nailed fist behind her back, using the pain to remind her that whatever she may be about to do with William – discuss the finer points of Rackham merchandising, pull him to her breast – it won’t be improved by shrieks of hysterical laughter.

‘I think I have it under control,’ he says. ‘The orders for bottled perfumes are even worse than I feared, but the toiletries are thriving.’

Sugar squeezes her fist so hard that her vision blurs with tears.

‘How are you getting on?’ William enquires, his tone simultaneously breezy and glum. ‘Tell the truth, now: you rue the day you came, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Not at all,’ she protests, blinking. ‘Sophie is a well-behaved little thing, and a willing pupil.’

His face darkens subtly; this is not a topic he relishes.

‘You have a weary look – especially under your eyes,’ he says.

With effort, she shows him a fresher and livelier face, but it’s not necessary: he wasn’t complaining, only expressing concern. And what a relief, that he remembers what her eyes
ought
to look like!

‘Shall I hire a nursery-maid for you?’ he offers. His voice is a queer mixture, as subtle a blend of elements as any perfume: there’s disappointment, as though he too had cherished a dream that as soon as she crossed the threshold into his house they’d embark on a life of uninterrupted carnal bliss; there’s sheepishness, as if he knows he’s to blame for what’s happened instead; there’s contrition, for any nuisance she’s endured in his daughter’s company; there’s dread, at the prospect of finding an additional servant when he has a thousand other things to do; there’s pity, at the sight of her lying in Beatrice Cleave’s utilitarian little bed; there’s affection, as if he wishes he could restore the sparkle to her eyes with a single caress; and, yes, there’s desire. A sentence of seven words only, and it’s suffused with all these nuances, evaporating like the notes that make up the octave of a well-crafted bouquet.

‘No, thank you,’ says Sugar. ‘There’s no need, really there isn’t. I haven’t slept very well yet, it’s true, but I’m sure it’s the new bed. I do miss our old one in Priory Close: it was such a pleasure to sleep in, wasn’t it?’

He inclines his head – not quite a nod; a gesture of concession. It’s all Sugar requires; at once, she steps forward and embraces him, clasping her palms well down his back, lifting one thigh to nuzzle between his trouser-legs.

‘I’ve missed
you
, too,’ she says, laying her cheek against his shoulder. The odour of masculine desire is faintly perceptible, escaping from the almost hermetic seal of his shirtcollar. His prick hardens against the soft pressure of her thigh.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he says hoarsely, ‘about the dimensions of this room.’

‘Of course not, my love, I wasn’t complaining,’ she coos in his ear. ‘I’ll get used to this little bed soon enough. It wants only to be …’ (she shifts one hand to his groin, and traces the shape of his erection with her fingertips) ‘christened.’

She walks him a few steps backward, sits down on the edge of the bed, and frees his cock from his trousers, taking it immediately in her mouth. For a few moments he stands silent as a statue, then begins to groan and – thank God – stroke her hair with clumsy but unmistakable tenderness.
I have him still
, she thinks.

When he begins to thrust, she lies back on the mattress and pulls her dressing-gown up over her bosom. With a muffled cry he falls inside her; and, contrary to her fears, her cunt gives him a welcome more lubricious than she could have organised with half an hour of preparation.

‘Yes, my love, spend, spend,’ she whispers, as he pushes to a climax. She wraps her legs and arms tightly around him, peppering his neck with kisses, some of which are artfully calculated, some heartfelt, but how many of each, she has no way of knowing. ‘You are my man,’ she assures him, as the cleft between her buttocks runs warm and wet.

A few minutes later, lacking a source of washing water, she is cleaning his groin with a handtowel dipped in a drinking glass.

‘Remember the first time?’ she murmurs mischievously.

He tries to grin, but it turns into a mortified wince. ‘What a disgrace I was then,’ he sighs, staring up at the ceiling.

‘Oh, I knew you were a great man in the making,’ she soothes him, as the rain finally stops and silence settles around the Rackham house. Dried and dressed, William lies in her arms, though there’s barely room for the two of them on the bed.

‘This business of mine …’ he muses regretfully. ‘Rackham Perfumeries, I mean … I lose hours, days, entire weeks of my life to it.’

‘It’s your father’s fault,’ says Sugar, echoing an old complaint of his as though it were an impetuous outburst of her own. ‘If he’d built the company on more well-reasoned foundations …’

‘Exactly so. But it means I spend an eternity unearthing his mistakes and shoring up his … his …’

‘Flimsy architecture.’

‘Exactly. And all the while neglecting’ (he reaches up to stroke her face, and one of his legs falls off the side of the narrow mattress) ‘the pleasures of life.’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ she says. ‘To remind you.’ She wonders if this is the moment to ask him if she’s permitted to knock at the door of
his
room, rather than waiting for him to knock at hers, but the crunching of gravel on the carriage-way outside, under wheels and hoofs, alerts them both to Agnes’s return.

‘She’s better lately, isn’t she?’ asks Sugar, as William rises to his feet.

‘Lord knows. Yes, conceivably.’ He smooths his hair back over his scalp, preparing to leave.

‘When is Sophie’s birthday?’ asks Sugar, loath to let him go without learning one small thing about this strange household she has come to, this warren of secret rooms whose inhabitants so rarely seem to recognise each other’s existence.

He frowns, consulting a mental inventory already over-full with burdensome particulars. ‘August the … August the something.’

‘Oh, that’s not so bad, then,’ says Sugar.

‘How so?’

‘Sophie told me Agnes has kept away from her since her birthday.’

William regards her with the oddest look, a mixture of annoyance, shame, and a sadness deeper than she’d ever imagined could reside in him.

‘By “birthday”,’ he says, ‘Sophie means the day of her birth. The day she was born.’ He opens Sugar’s door, impatient lest his wife should, on this night of all nights, be quicker than usual in dismounting from the carriage. ‘In this house,’ he sums up wearily, ‘Agnes is childless.’

And with that, he steps out onto the landing, makes a stern hand gesture as if to say ‘Stay!’ and shuts her in.

Many hours later, when Sugar has been lying awake, in the dark, for as long as she can bear, and the Rackham house has grown so still she’s sure everyone in it is shut into one room or other, she gets up out of bed and lights a candle. Barefoot, carrying the waxy flame in her hand, she pads out onto the landing. So tiny she feels, tiptoeing through the gloom of this grand and cryptic residence, but her shadow, as she passes the doors forbidden to her, is huge.