The Crimson Petal and the White (93 page)

‘What is the root, then? Is it
men
’s wickedness?’

Mrs Fox’s grey complexion is growing rosier by the second; she’s warming to her topic. ‘Only insofar as men make the laws that determine what a woman may and may not do. And laws are not merely a matter of what’s in the statute books! The sermon of a clergyman who has no love in his heart,
that
is law; the way our sex is demeaned and made trivial in newspapers, in novels, even on the labels of the tiniest items of household produce,
that
is law. And, most of all,
poverty
is law. If a man falls on hard times, a five-pound note and a new suit of clothes can restore him to respectability, but if a woman falls … !’ She puffs with exasperation, cheeks flushed, quite worked up now. Her bosom swells and subsides in rapid respiration, nipples showing with every breath. ‘A woman is expected to remain in the gutter. You know, Miss Sugar, I’ve never yet met a prostitute who would not have preferred to be something else. If only she
could
.’

‘But how,’ says Sugar, quailing once more under that stare, and blushing from her hairline to her collar, ‘does your Society go about … uh … rescuing a prostitute?’

‘We visit the brothels, the houses of ill repute, the streets … the parks … wherever prostitutes are found, and we warn them – if we’re given the chance – of the fate that awaits them.’

Sugar nods attentively, rather glad, in retrospect, that she never stirred from her bed on those mornings when the Rescue Society used to call on Mrs Castaway’s.

‘We offer them refuge, though sadly we’ve precious few houses available for this purpose,’ continues Mrs Fox. ‘If only this country’s half-empty churches could be used more sensibly! But no matter, we do what we can with the beds available… And what do we do then? Well, if the girls have a trade, we do our utmost to restore them to it, with letters of recommendation. I’ve written many such. If they have no trade, we see to it they’re taught a useful skill, like needlework or cooking. There are servants in some of the best households who got there by way of the Rescue Society.’

‘Goodness.’

Mrs Fox sighs. ‘Of course, it says very little for our society – English society, I mean – that the best we can offer a young woman is respectable servitude. But we can only address one evil at a time. And the urgency is great. Each day, prostitutes are dying.’

‘But what
of
?’ enquires Sugar, provoked to curiosity, even though she knows the answers already.

‘Disease, childbirth, murder, suicide,’ Mrs Fox replies, enunciating each with due care. ‘“Too late”: that’s the wretched phrase that haunts our efforts. I visited a house of prostitution only yesterday, a place known as Mrs Castaway’s, looking for a particular girl I’d read about in a vile publication called
More Sprees In London.
I found that the girl was long gone, and that Mrs Castaway had died.’

Sugar’s guts turn to stone; only the cast-iron seat of the bench stops her body emptying its heavy innards onto the ground beneath.

‘Died?’ she whispers.

‘Died,’ confirms Mrs Fox, her big grey eyes sensitive to every tiny flicker of reaction in her quarry.

‘Died … of what?’

‘The new madam didn’t tell me. Our conversation was cut short by the door slamming in my face.’

Sugar cannot endure Mrs Fox’s gaze anymore. She lowers her head, giddy and sick, and stares into the crumpled blackness of her own lap. What to do? What to say? If life were one of Rose’s tuppenny Gem Pocket books, she could stab Mrs Fox through the heart with a dagger, and enlist Sophie’s help in burying the corpse; or she could fall at Mrs Fox’s feet and beg her not to divulge her secret. Instead, she continues to stare into her lap, breathing shallowly, until she becomes aware of something bubbling in her nostrils, and, wiping her nose, finds her glove slicked with bright-red blood.

A white handkerchief appears in front of her eyes, held in Mrs Fox’s own rather dingy and wrinkled glove. Bewildered, Sugar takes it, and blows her nose. At once she feels deliriously giddy, and sways where she sits, and the handkerchief is transformed, with miraculously suddenness, from a soft warm square of white cotton to a sopping-wet rag of chilly crimson.

‘No, lean back,’ comes Mrs Fox’s voice, as Sugar slumps forward. ‘It’s better when you lean back.’ And she lays a firm, gentle hand on Sugar’s breast and pushes, until Sugar’s head is tilted as far back as it will go, dangling in space, her shoulder-blades pressed painfully hard against the iron bench, her face blinking up into the blue of the sky. Blood is filling her head, trickling into her gullet, tickling her windpipe.

‘Try to breathe normally, or you’ll faint,’ says Mrs Fox, when Sugar begins to pant and gasp. ‘Trust me; I know.’

Sugar does as she’s told, and continues to stare up into the sky, her left hand pressed, with the handkerchief, to her nose, her right – incredibly – enfolded inside Mrs Fox’s. Hard, bony fingers give her a reassuring squeeze through the two layers of goatskin that separate their naked flesh.

‘Miss Sugar, forgive me,’ says the voice at her side. ‘I see now that you must have been very fond of your old madam. In my arrogance, I failed to imagine that possibility. In fact, I failed to imagine all sorts of things.’

Sugar’s head is tilted so far back now that she sees pedestrians walking along Pembridge Square past the park, upside down. A topsy-turvy mother suspended from the ceiling of the world pulls a topsy-turvy little boy along, scolding him for staring at the lady with the blood on her face.

‘Sophie,’ murmurs Sugar anxiously. ‘I don’t hear Sophie anymore.’

‘She’s all right,’ Mrs Fox assures her. ‘She’s fallen asleep against the fountain.’

Sugar blinks. Tears tickle her ears and dampen the hair at her temples. She licks her bloodied lips, working up the courage to ask her fate.

‘Miss Sugar, please forgive me,’ says Mrs Fox. ‘I’m a coward. If I’d been brave enough, I would have spared you this game of cat-and-mouse, and told you at once what person I took you to be. And if by chance I was mistaken, you’d have discounted me as a madwoman, and that would have been the end of it.’

Sugar lifts her head, cautiously, still clutching the blood-soaked handkerchief to her nose. ‘So … what is the end of it? And who do you take me to be?’

Mrs Fox is facing away, peering across the park at the sleeping form of Sophie. Her profile is strong-jawed and quite attractive, although Sugar can’t help noticing that there’s a bright cinnamon smear of earwax stuck in a curlicue of her ear. ‘I take you to be,’ says Mrs Fox, ‘a young woman who has found her calling, and means to be true to it, whatever her former means of livelihood may have been. That’s as much as the Rescue Society can hope for the girls it puts into good homes, and many of them, sadly, return to the streets. You won’t return to the streets, will you, Miss Sugar?’

‘I would sooner die.’

‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ says Mrs Fox, looking, all of a sudden, profoundly tired. ‘God is not as bloodthirsty as all that.’

‘Oh! Your handkerchief …’ cries Sugar, reminded of the ruined scrap of gory cloth dangling from her fist.

‘I have a big box of them at home,’ sighs Mrs Fox, rising to her feet. ‘The legacy of my failing to die of consumption. Goodbye, Miss Sugar. No doubt we’ll meet again.’ She has already begun to walk away.

‘I … I hope so,’ responds Sugar, at a loss for what else to say.

‘Of course we shall,’ says Mrs Fox, turning once to wave, much more decorously than she did before. ‘It’s a small world.’

When Mrs Fox has gone, Sugar wipes her face, conscious that there’s dried blood on her cheeks and lips and chin. She tries to sponge up some wetness from the grass, with little success, as the sun has evaporated the melted frost. The blood-stained handkerchief reminds her of something she’s done her best not to think about these last few weeks: the fact that not a drop of menstrual blood has issued from her for several months now.

She gets to her feet, and sways, still dizzy.
She’s dead,
she thinks.
Damn
her; she’s dead.

She tries to picture Mrs Castaway dead, but it’s impossible. Her mother always looked like a corpse, reanimated and painted luridly for some obscene or sacrilegious purpose. How could death alter her? The best Sugar can do is to tip the picture sideways, changing Mrs Castaway’s orientation from vertical to horizontal. Her pink eyes are open; her hand is extended, palm-up, for coins. ‘
Come, sir,
’ she says, ready to usher another gentleman to the girl of his dreams.

‘Sophie,’ she whispers, having crossed over to the fountain. ‘Sophie, wake up.’

The child, slumped like a rag-doll, head lolling on one shoulder, jerks awake at once, eyes rolling in astonishment that she could have been caught napping. Sugar gets her own apology in first:

‘Forgive me, Sophie, I was talking to that lady for much too long.’ It must be nearly midday, Sugar reckons; they’d better hurry back to the house, or William may be angry to be deprived of his secretary, or his lover, or his nursemaid, or whatever combination of the three he needs today. ‘Now tell me, little one, how far did you get with your kings of England?’

Sophie opens her mouth to answer, then her eyes grow wide.

‘Did someone hit you, Miss?’

Sugar’s hands flutter nervously to her face. ‘N-no, Sophie. My nose started bleeding, that’s all.’

Sophie is quite excited by this revelation. ‘That’s happened to me too, Miss!’ she says, in a tone suggesting that such an occurrence is a thrilling, ghoulish adventure.

‘Really, dear?’ says Sugar, straining to recall, through the fog of her own anxious preoccupations, the incident Sophie’s referring to. ‘When?’

‘It was before,’ says the child, after a moment’s reflection.

‘Before what?’

Sophie accepts her governess’s hand to help her to her feet; the arseend of her bulky black dress is damp, creased, and plastered with fragments of soil, twig and grass.

‘Before my Papa bought you for me, Miss,’ she says, and Sugar’s hand, poised to slap the dirt off Sophie’ backside, freezes in mid-air.

THIRTY-ONE

T
here are too many people! Millions too many! And they will not keep still! Lord, make them stop pushing and jostling for just one minute, freeze them like a
tableau vivant,
so that she

can get by!

Sugar cowers in the doorway of Lamplough’s Pharmacy in Regent Street, waiting for a parting in the sea of humanity that doesn’t come. The relentless grinding din of traffic, the shouts of street vendors, the swirling babble of pedestrians, snorting horses, barking dogs: these are sounds that were familiar once upon a time, but no longer. A few months of seclusion have made her a stranger.

How is it possible that for years she walked these streets lost in thought, daydreaming her novel, and was never once knocked down and trampled underfoot? How is it possible that there exist so many human beings squashed together in the same place, so many lives running concurrently with her own? These chattering women in dresses of licorice-stripe and purple, these swaggering swells, these Jews and Orientals, these tottering sandwichboard-men, these winking shop-keepers, these jaunty sailors and dour office workers, these beggars and prostitutes – every one of them lays claim to a share of Destiny every bit as generous as hers. There’s only so much juice to be extracted from the world, and a ravenous multitude is brawling and scuffling to get it.

And the smells! Her habituation to the Rackham house and the tidy streets of Notting Hill has made her lily-livered: now her breath catches, her eyes water, from being forced to take in the overbearing stench of perfume and horse dung, freshly-baked cakes and old meat, burnt mutton-fat and chocolate, roast chestnuts and dog piss. The Rackham house, despite belonging to a perfumer, smells of nothing much, except cigar-smoke in the study and porridge in the school-room. Even its flower vases – enormous, pretentious copies of classical urns – stand empty now that the memorial bouquets from Agnes’s well-wishers have gone the way of all flesh.

Misreading Sugar’s mind, a pretty young flower-seller fetches a bouquet of shabby pink roses out of her rickety cart and waves the offering in Sugar’s direction. The fact that she owns a trolley, and is bothering to make overtures to a female, probably means she really
is
a flower-seller and not a whore, but Sugar is unnerved all the same, and pricked into action. One deep gulp of breath, and she steps into the human stream, joining the rush of advancing bodies.

She purposely avoids seeing anyone’s face and hopes the crowd will return the favour. (If she weren’t so afraid of being knocked sprawling, she’d lower her black veil.) Every shop she passes, every narrow lane, may at any moment spew out someone who once knew her, someone who may point the finger and raucously hail the return of Sugar to her old stamping grounds.

Already she can’t help noticing the regulars: there, outside Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms, stands Hugh Banton the organ grinder – has
he
seen
her
? Yes he has, the old dog! But he gives no sign of recognising his ‘Little Toothsome’ as she passes him by. And there!: shambling straight towards her: it’s Nadir, the sandwichboard-man – but he passes her by without a second glance, clearly judging that a lady in crape is not about to attend the exhibition, ‘for the first time in England!’, of a live Gorilla-ape.

Loitering in shop doorways and cab ranks are prostitutes Sugar knows only by sight, not by name. They regard her with listless indifference: she is a creature as alien to them as the monster advertised on Nadir’s sandwich-board, but not nearly as interesting. The only thing about the black-clad newcomer that holds their attention for longer than an eye’s-blink is her stilted gait.

Ah, if only they knew why Sugar is limping today! She’s limping because, last night before going to bed, she lay on her back, lifted her legs as though preparing to be arse-fucked, and poured a tea-cupful of tepid water, sulphate of zinc and borax directly into her vagina. Then she swaddled herself in an improvised nappy and went to sleep, hoping that the chemicals, despite being rather stale after sitting unused in her suitcase for so long, still had some vim left in them. This morning, unrewarded by a miscarriage, she woke to find her vulva and inner thighs flame red, and so sore she could barely dress herself, let alone Sophie. At nine, clenching her jaw with the effort of appearing normal, she presented herself at William’s study and asked his permission, as nonchalantly as she could manage, for her first day off.

‘What for?’ he asked her – not in suspicion; more as if he couldn’t imagine what desires she could have that were not met within the confines of his house.

‘I need a new pair of boots, a world globe for Sophie, several other things …’

‘Who’ll take care of the child while you’re gone?’

‘She’s quite self-reliant and trustworthy, I’ve found. And Rose will look in on her. And I’ll be back by five.’

William looked rather put out, pointedly shuffling the letters on his desk, which he’d opened and read, but to which his bandaged fingers still didn’t permit him to reply. ‘That Brinsmead fellow has written back to me about the ambergris; he wants my answer by the third post.’

‘You gain nothing by jumping to his will,’ she said, feigning umbrage on his behalf. ‘Who does he think he is, William? Which of you has the greater standing? A few days’ wait will remind him you’re doing
him
a favour, not he you.’

To her relief, this did the trick, and within minutes she was walking out the front door, white-faced with determination not to limp until she was safely in the omnibus.

The pain is not quite so bad now; perhaps the Rackham’s Crème de Jeunesse she slathered on her groin is helping. What it fails to do for faces (despite the label’s immoderate claims), perhaps it does, uncelebrated, for unmentionable parts. At all costs she must heal soon, or she’ll have to refuse William when he wants her for a more carnal purpose than writing his correspondence.

Sugar limps into Silver Street, praying no one calls her name. The prostitutes here are a cruder sort than the ones on Regent Street, scavengers of men who can’t afford the more expensive fare in The Stretch. Their face-paint is lurid, a mask of deathly white and blood red; they could be pantomime witches dolled up to scare children. How long has it been since her own face was dusted so? She distinctly remembers the powder’s floury taste, the way it would permeate the air each time she dabbed the puff into the pot … but nowadays she’s clean-scrubbed, with skin the texture of a well-peeled orange. Her daily observances in front of the looking-glass no longer include preening her eyelashes, painting her cheeks, plucking wayward hairs from her eyebrows, inspecting her tongue, and removing flakes of imperfection from her pouting lips; nowadays, she cursorily confirms that she looks tired and worried, then pins up her hair and starts work.

Mrs Castaway’s house is in sight now, but Sugar hangs back, waiting for the coast to be clear. Stationed only a few yards from the doorstep is a man who witnessed her returning from The Fireside many times with her customers. He’s a sheet-music seller, and at this moment he’s performing a clumsy, lurching dance while playing his accordion, grimacing like a lunatic as he stamps on the cobble-stones.

‘
Gorilla Quadrille!
’ he rasps by way of explanation when he’s finished, and snatches aloft a copy of the music. (From where Sugar stands, the illustration on the front remarkably resembles the Rackham figurehead.) Three young swells amble up to the music seller, applaud, and encourage him to repeat his performance, but he shrugs evasively; he doesn’t dance for the fun of it.

‘Any ladies of your hacquaintance play the piano, guvnors?’ he whines. ‘My music costs next to nuffing.’

‘Here’s a shilling,’ laughs the swellest of the swells, shoving the coin into the music seller’s coat pocket with a jab of his slender fingers. ‘And you may keep your grubby sheets of paper – Just do your dance for us again.’

The music seller cringes over his instrument, and acts the gorilla one more time, his teeth bared in an obsequious grin. Sugar watches until the swells have had their fun and swan off in search of other titillations; when they do, the music seller dashes in the opposite direction to spend his shilling, and Sugar is free to approach her former home.

Heart in her throat, she steps up to Mrs Castaway’s door, and raises her hand to grasp the old iron door-knocker and tap out the code:
Sugar
here, unaccompanied.
But the familiar cast-iron Cerberus has been removed, and its screw-holes neatly filled with sawdust and shellac. There’s no bell, either, so Sugar is obliged to knock her gloved knuckles against the hard lacquered wood.

The waiting is awful, and the scrape of the latch is worse. She keeps her eyes low, expecting to see Christopher, but when the door swings open, the space where the boy’s pink face ought to be is occupied by the crotch of a man’s smartly-tailored trousers. Hastily looking up, past the stylish waistcoat and the silken cravat, Sugar opens her mouth to explain herself, only to be struck speechless by the realisation that this man’s face is in fact a woman’s. Oh, granted, the hair is cut short, oiled, and combed close to the scalp, but there’s no mistaking the physiognomy.

Amelia Crozier – for it is she – appraises her visitor’s confusion with a feline smirk. ‘I think,’ she suggests, ‘you have mistaken your way.’ With every word she speaks, a furling haze of cigarette smoke leaks out through her lips and nostrils.

‘No … no … I …’ Sugar falters. ‘I was wondering what became of the little boy who used to answer the door.’

Miss Crozier raises one dark, fastidiously plucked eyebrow. ‘No little boys ever come here,’ she says. ‘Only big boys.’

From inside – presumably the parlour – Jennifer Pearce’s voice rings out. ‘Little boys is it he wants? Give him Mrs Talbot’s address!’

Miss Crozier turns her back on Sugar, serenely rude. The fine-clipped hair in the nape of her neck resembles greased duck’s-down.

‘It’s not a man here, my dear!’ she calls. ‘It’s a lady in black.’

‘Oh, it’s
not
the Rescue Society, I trust,’ exclaims Miss Pearce, mock-exasperated, from within. ‘Please,
spare
us.’

Sensing that the two Sapphists can, and will, keep up this sport as long as it amuses them, Sugar decides it’s time to identify herself, loath as she is to lose the halo of virtue they’ve so unhesitatingly ascribed to her.

‘My name is Sugar,’ she announces loudly, reclaiming Miss Crozier’s attention. ‘I lived here once. My m—’

‘Why, Sugar!’ exclaims Amelia, her face lighting up with a wholly feminine animation. ‘I would
never
have guessed! You look nothing like you did when I saw you last!’

‘Nor do you,’ counters Sugar with a strained smile.

‘Ah, yes,’ grins Miss Crozier, running her hands over the tailored contours of her suit. ‘Clothes
do
make the man – or woman – don’t they? But come in, dear, come
in
. Someone was asking for you only a couple of days ago. You see, your fame endures!’

Stiffly, Sugar steps over the threshold and is escorted into Mrs Castaway’s parlour, or rather, the parlour that once was Mrs Castaway’s. Jennifer Pearce has transformed it from an old woman’s cluttered grotesquerie into a showpiece of fashionable bareness, worthy of an expensive ladies’ journal from across the English Channel.

‘Welcome, welcome!’

With Mrs Castaway’s desk gone, and the old woman’s jumbled display of Magdalen pictures removed from the freshly-papered pale pink walls, the room appears much bigger. In place of the pictures, there’s nothing, except for two rice-paper fans painted with oriental designs. A spiky green houseplant has pride of place next to the sofa on which Jennifer Pearce reclines, and a delicate
chiffonier
of honey-coloured wood presumably serves (in the absence of any other suitable receptacle) as the repository of money. Amelia Crozier’s interrupted cigarette lies on a silver cigar stand with a waist-high stem, emitting a slender cord of smoke that shivers when the door is slammed shut.

‘Do sit down, dear,’ sings Jennifer Pearce, swinging her legs off the sofa in a flurry of satiny skirts. She scrutinises Sugar from tip to toe, and pats the couch. ‘See? I’ve cleared a nice warm spot for you.’

‘I’ll stand, thank you,’ says Sugar. The ribald mockery to which these women would subject her if she let on that she’s too sore to sit doesn’t bear thinking about.

‘The better to see all the changes we’ve made, hmm?’ says Jennifer Pearce, leaning back on the sofa again.

It’s obvious to Sugar by now that Jennifer has promoted herself from being the luminary whore of the Castaway house to being its procuress. Everything about her suggests the status of madam, from her elaborate dress that looks as if it couldn’t be removed without at least an hour’s notice, to her languidly supercilious expression. Perhaps the most telling proof is her hands: the fingers are thorny with jewel-encrusted rings. Pornography may describe the penis as a sword, staff or truncheon, but there’s nothing like a fistful of spiky jewellery to make a man’s fragile flesh shrink in fear.

‘May I have a word with Amy?’ says Sugar.

Miss Pearce locks her fingers together, with a soft clicking of rings. ‘Alas: like Mrs Castaway, no longer with us.’ Then, when she observes the look of shock on Sugar’s face, she smiles, and unhurriedly corrects the misunderstanding. ‘Oh no, my dear, I don’t mean in the same
way
that Mrs Castaway is no longer with us. I mean, she’s gone to a better place.’

Amelia laughs – a horrid nasal whinny. ‘However you put it, Jen, it still sounds like death.’

Jennifer Pearce pouts gentle censure at her companion, and continues: ‘Amy came to feel that our house had become rather too …
specialised
for her talents. So, she took those talents elsewhere. The name of the place escapes me …’ (she sighs) ‘There are so many houses nowadays, it’s a job keeping up with them all.’

Suddenly her expression sharpens, and she leans forward on the sofa, with a whispering of many-layered skirts. ‘To be frank with you, Sugar, Amy’s departure, and the fact that I am no longer working on what one might call the factory floor, leaves us two girls down. Girls who enjoy giving men the punishment they deserve. I don’t suppose
you
are looking for a new home?’