The Crimson Petal and the White (82 page)

Some distance from the Rackhams, in a modest house stacked to the ceilings with rubbish and surplus furniture, Emmeline Fox sits eating fruit mince while her cat purrs at her naked feet.

Before you jump to conclusions: it’s only her feet that are naked today; the rest of her is fully, unimpeachably dressed – indeed, she still wears her bonnet, for she’s been out and about. A visit to her father, to give him his Christmas present – a pointless exercise, since he celebrates nothing and desires nothing, but he’s her father, and she’s his daughter, so there it is. Every year they give each other a book, destined to remain unread, and wish each other a merry Christmas, though Doctor Curlew doesn’t believe in Christ, and Emmeline doesn’t believe that her Saviour was born on the 25th of December. Such are the silly compromises we make, to preserve peace with those of our own blood.

Since returning from her father’s house, she hasn’t bothered to take anything off except her boots, which were pinching her toes. Once upon a time it was a mystery to her, how the dirt-poor could go barefoot in all weathers and appear to mind so little – indeed, how the tireless efforts of Mrs Timperley to collect shoes from the more fortunate and distribute them among the unshod never seemed to reduce the number of bare feet in London by even a single pair. Now she knows: feet that have grown used to nakedness are no longer happy in shoes. One might as well press shoes upon a cat.

‘Do you fancy a pair of smart black boots, Puss?’ she asks her companion, tickling his furry cheek. ‘Just like in the story?’

They’re sitting together in the spot she likes best – half-way up the stairs. Christmas Day is half over, and her beloved Henry is three months dead. Three months by the calendar, three blinks of God’s eye, three eternities within the veiled confines of Emmeline’s house, where no one but she is permitted to enter anymore.
Three French hens, Four collie birds, Five
gold rings …
improbable proofs of true love, extolled in ebullient singing voices from the house next door. How is it she can hear these folk so clearly today? She’s never heard them before … A high-pitched female voice and, underpinning it perfectly, the sonorous baritone of a male …

Three months since Henry walked the earth, three months since he was buried inside it. The longer he’s gone, the more she thinks of him; and the more she thinks of him, the more those thoughts swell with feeling. Compared to him, all other men are selfish and sly; compared to Henry’s upright and muscular form, the shapes of other men appear cringing and grotesque. How it hurts her – like a claw squeezing her tender heart in a callous grip – to imagine him liquefying in the grave, his dear face mingling with the clay, his skull, once the home of so much passion and sincerity, an empty shell for worms to squirm in. She knows she’s a fool to indulge such gross phantasms, to torture herself so, when she ought to be anticipating the joyful day she and Henry are reunited… But will the Second Coming occur in her lifetime? She very much doubts it. A thousand years may pass before she sees his face again.

Last Christmas Day, they walked the streets, side by side, and discussed the Gospels while everyone else was indoors playing parlour games. Henry had just read… what had he just read? He was always in a state of just having read something, bursting to share it with her before it passed out of his mind… Oh yes, an essay by a scholar of Greek, settling once and for all (said Henry) the centuries-old dispute over the meaning of Matthew 1, verse 25. The Catholics were wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt; the new scholarship confirmed that when Saint Matthew said ‘till’ he
meant
‘till’; and Henry wished the newspapers would have the moral backbone to advertise these momentous findings, instead of filling their pages with lurid accounts of murders and endorsements for hair-dye.

And she? How did she respond to his earnest idealism? Why, the way she always did! By arguing with him, poor man. She said the dispute would never be settled, as no one who believed that a virgin could bear a child was going to take a blind bit of notice of a Greek scholar, and anyway, it didn’t matter to
her
, because when it came to the Gospels, she much preferred Mark and John, sensible men who had better things to do than discuss the fettle of Mary’s private parts.

‘But you do believe, though, don’t you,’ Henry said, with that adorable frown of worry on his forehead, ‘that our Saviour was conceived out of the Holy Ghost?’

In response to which, she’d brazenly changed the subject, as she so often did. ‘For me,’ she asserted, ‘the real story doesn’t begin until later, in the River Jordan.’

Lord! How Henry knit his brow at such moments! How earnestly he laboured to reassure himself she wasn’t a blasphemer against the faith that had brought them together. Did she enjoy teasing him? Yes, she must have enjoyed it. So many sunny afternoons she sent him on his way home perplexed, when she ought to have kissed him, thrown her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his, told him she worshipped him …

She wipes her face on her sleeve, and trusts that God will understand.

‘Now?’ enquires her cat, butting his furry head against her naked ankle. She hasn’t fed him since this morning, and the closed curtains downstairs are glowing amber from a sun poised to disappear in twilight.

‘Do you eat fruit mince, Puss?’ she asks, offering him a gooey spoonful from the big glass jar in her lap. He sniffs it, even touches it with his nose, but… no.

‘Pity,’ she murmurs. ‘There’s rather a lot of it.’

It’s Mrs Borlais’s surplus fruit mince; each member of the Rescue Society got a jar of it, on the understanding that it would fill Christmas tarts. No doubt her fellow Rescuers took up the challenge, either with their own hands or via their servants, but Emmeline’s pie-making days are lost in the mists of her marriage to Bertie. The raw mixture is very tasty, though. She spoons it from the jar into her mouth, dollop after dollop, knowing it will most likely make her sick or give her the runs, but relishing its spicy sweetness.

Her father will soon be sitting down to Christmas dinner with his doctor friends. For politeness’ sake, and perhaps because he has some inkling of her domestic circumstances of late, he did invite her repeatedly to join them, but she declined. And so she ought! The last time she attended a dinner with her father’s friends, she shamed him terribly by lecturing them on the reasons why prostitutes shun doctors, and then urging them to donate their services
gratis
to desperate women once a week. If she’d accompanied him today, she would no doubt have muttered ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance’ a couple of times, suffered small talk for ten minutes or so, then reverted to type. She knows herself too well.

The food would’ve been awfully convenient, though. Just think of it all, steaming and sizzling on silver dishes, course after course … Not that she condones the gluttony to which the privileged classes fall prey in this once-holy festival; not that she fails to appreciate the terrible chasm between those who stuff their bloated bellies with a mountain of meat and those who stand shivering in line for a dish of watery soup. Her appetites are modest: sit her down at a Christmas banquet, and she’d have a slice of chicken or turkey and some roast vegetables, then nothing else until the pudding. A gourmand she most certainly is not. It’s only that hot meals – especially roast ones – are such a colossal bother to prepare for oneself.

‘Poor Puss,’ she croons, stroking him from head to tail. ‘You’d be very happy with a couple of nice juicy turtle-doves, wouldn’t you? Or a partridge in a pear tree? Let’s see what I can find for you.’

She rummages in the kitchen, but there’s nothing. The unwashed chopping-board has a sheen of fish oil on it that keeps him occupied for two minutes, but the leftover portion of ham hash she can’t find anywhere is, she suddenly recalls, inside her own stomach. Henry once said: ‘It’s frightening to think how easily one can spend an entire lifetime gratifying animal appetites.’
She
, perhaps, will spend the rest of her life remembering all the things Henry said.

‘Now!’ her cat chastises her, and she’s forced to concede that good intentions are no substitute for action; so, she fetches her boots for another foray outdoors. Christmas or no Christmas, there will undoubtedly be meat for sale somewhere, if she’s willing to descend through the strata of society to find it. Decent folk may have shut their shops in honour of the infant Jesus, but the poor have hungry mouths to feed, and every day is the same to them. Emmeline buttons up her boots and slaps dust from the hem of her skirt, sending Puss skittering under a stockpile of chairs. She fetches her purse and checks how much money she has left. Plenty.

Mrs Rackham’s letter is still stowed in the bottom of her purse, getting rather mulched now amongst the coins and biscuit-crumbs. Will she reply, after what her father said this morning? She doubts it.

She wonders if she has betrayed Mrs Rackham, by discussing her case with the very man whom she so vehemently mistrusts. In her own defence, she can only plead that she did her best not to betray the wretched woman’s confidence, by soliciting her father’s professional opinion on the delusions of insane females generally.

Naturally he demanded at once, ‘Why do you want to know?’ Blunt and undiplomatic as ever! But she could hardly expect him to beat about the bush, when she wholly lacks that facility herself.

‘Oh, curiosity merely,’ she replied, aiming for, and probably missing by a mile, the insouciant manner of other women she’s met. ‘I don’t like to be ignorant.’

‘And what do you want to know in
particular
?’ Still she kept Mrs Rackham’s secret. ‘Well … for example: what is the best way to convince a madwoman that an opinion she holds is mad?’

‘You can’t convince her,’ he shot back.

‘Oh.’ In earlier times, that might have been the end of the conversation, but her father is less brusque these days, since he almost lost her. The stimulus of her illness has brought his love for her (which Emmeline has never doubted) closer to the surface of his skin, like a blush of infection, and he’s not quite managed to regain his chill composure since.

‘There’s nothing gained by it, my dear,’ he explained this morning. ‘What’s the use of a person with a diseased mind being induced to say, “Yes, I admit I suffer from delusions?” An hour later she’ll only insist the opposite. It’s her diseased brain
itself
that must be cured, so that she’s no longer
capable
of suffering delusions. Consider the man with a broken arm: whether he denies or admits it’s broken makes no difference to the treatment required.’

‘How good, then, are the chances of a cure?’

‘Pretty decent if the woman’s of mature age, and was tolerably levelheaded until – for example – the grief of a tragic loss attacked her senses. If she’s been entertaining delusions since early girlhood, slim, I’d say.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘I think my curiosity is satisfied. Thank you.’

Her disappointment with the efficacy of science must have pricked him, because he added, ‘One day, I expect pharmaceutics will offer a cure for even the severest mental illnesses. A vaccination, if you like. We’ll see all manner of wonders in the next century, I’m quite convinced.’

‘Small comfort to those now suffering.’

‘Ah,’ he smiled, ‘now that’s where you’re wrong, my girl. The intractably insane are intractable precisely because it suits them to be so. They don’t wish to be rescued! In which respect – if you’ll forgive me saying so – they’re very like your fallen women.’

‘Pax, father,’ she warned him. ‘I ought to be going. Thank you for the gift. Merry Christmas.’

But, worried that they would part on a sour note, he made a last gesture of appeasement.

‘Please tell me, Emmeline: why these questions? I might have something better to offer you if I knew a little more …’

She hesitated, and thought carefully before speaking – though as always, not carefully enough.

‘A lady has written to me, begging for the secret of eternal life. Eternal physical life, that is. She seems convinced that I know the location of a place where her … ah … immortal body is being kept waiting for her.’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ her father said then, in a low and confidential tone, ‘to be concerned for Mrs Rackham. I can only assure you that she will soon be in the very best of hands.’

‘Now!’ howls Puss, digging his claws into her skirts.

‘Yes, yes, I’m going,’ Emmeline responds.

Night has fallen on the Rackham house and, as far as William is concerned, Christmas is still ticking along as agreeably as possible, in the circumstances.

His father’s call for a game of musical chairs causes a moment of awkwardness when the aroused volunteers suddenly remember that no one can play the piano – at least, no one present in their midst. However, Sugar saves the day – God bless her – with her devilish clever suggestion to use a music box instead. Sighs of relief all round, and the machine works a treat! William selects Clara to raise and lower its lid, on the assumption that this activity will suit her better than jostling for seats with her fellow servants – and he’s right. Why, is that a
grin
he sees twitching on her lips, when Letty almost falls? She certainly has a knack, whenever she flips the box shut, for cutting a musical note clean in half, foiling the quickest listener. The one player who gets a seat every time, despite his stiff joints, is Henry Calder Rackham, for he doesn’t mind whose hips he brushes against, or how rudely.

The old man is also a dab hand at Snapdragon, the next game on the agenda. When the lights are extinguished and the bowl of brandy is lit, three generations of Rackhams stand ready to plunge their hands into the flames. Henry Calder Rackham is first, his short wrinkled fingers darting into the flickering spirit in the blink of an eye, and almost as quickly tossing the raisin into his mouth.

‘Don’t be frightened, little one,’ he urges his grand-daughter. ‘You won’t get hurt if you’re quick enough.’

But Sophie hesitates, staring in fascination at the big shallow dish of blue flame, and William, fearing the spirit might burn itself out while she dithers, plucks out a raisin of his own.