Sugar chews her lips miserably as the seconds pass and Christopher shows no sign of moving.
‘Good boxes, them,’ he comments, as if in his young life he’s had to master carpentry along with everything else. ‘Good wood.’
Turning her back to him to hide her distress, Sugar begins to pack. Her novel, she finds, is safe and sound, apparently untouched during her absence. She fetches it to her breast, transfers it as quickly as she can to the bottom of the nearest crate. Still the boy’s eyes grow large at the sight of all that scribbled paper.
‘Didn’t you never send them letters?’ he asks.
‘Plenty of time yet,’ sighs Sugar.
Next she loads her books in — the proper, printed books written by other people. Richardson, Balzac, Hugo, Eugene Sue, Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Pratt. A Manila folder containing cuttings from newspapers. Handfuls of penny dreadfuls with lurid covers: swooning or dead women, furtive-looking men, roof-tops and sewers. Pamphlets on venereal disease, on the shapes and measures of the criminal brain, on the feminine virtues, on preventing skin discoloration and other marks of age. Pornography, in verse and prose. A volume of Poe clearly stamped on the flyleaf, Property of W. H. Smith’s Subscription Library, with a stern warning that all books containing maps or pictures will be carefully checked to be sure they are ‘perfect in number and condition’. A New Testament given to Katy Lester by the Rescue Society. A slim volume, Modern Irish Poets, 1873 (unread, the gift of a customer from Cork). And on and on, half a crate full.
‘ ’Ave you read all them?’
Sugar begins to toss shoes and boots on top. ‘No, Christopher.’
‘Got more time for readin’ in the new place?’
‘I hope so.’
The ingredients for her douche she wraps in a towel and tucks under the slate-grey boots that need new soles and eyelets. There’s no point taking the douche bowl now that she has her own bath-tub.
‘Good bowl, that.’
‘I don’t need it, Christopher.’
He watches as she fills the second crate, a long oblong one that looks like an unvarnished coffin. It’s ideal for Sugar’s dresses — as Rackham no doubt anticipated. One by one, she lays the long garments into it, arranging the layers so that the shapely bodices and bulbous bustles pile up in equal measure. The dark green dress, the one she was wearing on the rainy night she met William, has, she notes, subtle dustings of mildew on the pleats.
The dresses fill two and a half crates; the hats and bonnets account for most of the remaining space. Bending down to cram the hat-boxes closer together, Sugar senses another presence in the doorway.
‘So, what’s he like, this Mr Hunt of yours?’
Amy has stepped across the threshold, obscuring Christopher behind her skirts. She’s only half-dressed, indifferent to her shock of uncombed hair and the dark-areola’d breasts hanging loose inside her chemise. As always, that maternal bosom serves only to emphasise how completely she ignores her son, the unwanted product of her womb.
‘No worse than most,’ Sugar replies, but the crates lean heavy against the claim. ‘Very generous, as you see,’ she’s forced to add.
‘As I see,’ says Amy, unsmiling.
Sugar tries to think of a topic of conversation that might interest a prostitute whose specialties are foul language and dripping molten candle-fat onto the genitals of respectable men, but her brains are crammed with what she’s learned in bed with William. The analogy of odours as keys of an instrument? The difference between simple and compound perfumes? Did you know, Amy, that from the odours available to us, we may produce, if we combine them correctly, the smell of almost any flower, except jasmine?
‘So how has everyone been?’ sighs Sugar.
‘Just as usual,’ Amy replies. ‘Katy’s hangin’ on, not dead yet. Me, I keep scum off the streets.’
‘Any plans?’
‘Plans?’
‘For this room.’
‘Her Downstairs is after Jennifer Pearce.’
‘Jennifer Pearce? From Mrs Wallace’s house?’
‘What I said.’
Sugar breathes deeply, longing for rescue. Conversations with Amy have never been easy, but this one is exceptional. Sweat is breaking out under her fringe, and she’s tempted to plead a dizzy turn and flee downstairs.
‘Well,’ says Amy suddenly, ‘I’d better tart myself up for my own admirers. Today could be the day I meet my Prince, eh?’ And she slouches out, knocking Christopher off-balance like a skittle.
Sugar sags where she stands, leaning her palms on the rim of a crate in fatigue.
‘You know, Christopher,’ she confesses to the boy, ‘this isn’t easy for me.’
‘I’ll do it for yer, then,’ he says, and walks to her side, immediately laying hold of a spiky wooden lid. ‘The man left ‘is ‘ammer, and the nails is all in.’ Keen, he hefts the lid onto its matching crate, almost impaling Sugar’s knuckles in the process.
‘Yes … yes, you do that … thank you,’ she says, stepping back, sick with inability to touch him, to kiss him, to ruffle his hair or stroke his cheek; sick with shame at the way she backs out towards the door and steps out on the landing — that same spot where, so many times, he has set down the pail of hot water for her. ‘Mind your fingers, now …!’
And, to the sound of his happy hammering, she retreats below.
Hesitating at the back door of the house of ill repute known as Mrs Castaway’s, Sugar gives herself permission to leave forever without saying any more goodbyes. Nothing happens; the hesitation is unbroken. Next, she tries to force herself to leave. Again, failure. Force is a language she understands, but only when it comes from without. She turns towards the parlour.
Her mother is ensconced in the usual spot, busy at her usual pursuit: the pasting of paper saints into scrapbooks. Sugar is unsurprised, yet disheartened, to find her at it again, scissors snickering in her bony claws, pot of paste at the ready. Her back is curved, the spine wilting over the table, the crimson bosom sagging, almost touching the low mound of images, a jumble of haloed maidens in shades of engraved grey, or pink and blue.
‘No end to my labours,’ she sighs to herself, or perhaps as a way of acknowledging Sugar’s approach.
Sugar feels her brow spasm in annoyance. She knows only too well the lengths her mother goes to in order to ensure the endlessness of her labours; a small fortune per month is spent on books, journals, prints and holy cards, dispatched from all corners of the globe. Religious publishers from Pennsylvania to Rome are no doubt positive that the world’s devoutest Christian is to be found right here in Silver Street, London.
‘We-e-ell now,’ croons Mrs Castaway, focusing her bloodshot eyes on a fresh Magdalen from the Bible Society of Madrid. ‘Your cup rather runneth over, wouldn’t you say?’
Sugar ignores the barb. The old woman can’t help it, this harping on the soft fortune of the young, contrasted with her own lamentable fate. God himself could fall down on one knee before Mrs Castaway and propose, and she would dismiss it as a pitiful compensation for what she’s suffered; Sugar could be burnt to death in a house fire, and Mrs Castaway would probably call her lucky, to have so much valuable property sacrificed just for her.
Sugar takes a long breath, glances at Katy Lester’s ‘cello case leaning against the empty armchair by the hearth.
‘Katy never seems to get up anymore,’ she remarks, her voice raised slightly to compete with Christopher’s ceaseless banging upstairs.
‘She was up yesterday, dear,’ murmurs Mrs Castaway, deftly wielding her scissors to create another human-shaped snipsel. ‘Played most attractively, I thought.’
‘Is she still … working …?’
Mrs Castaway lays the snipsel on an already crowded page of her scrap-book, experimenting with where it should go. She has complicated principles determining where the saints can be pasted; overlaps are permissible, but only to disguise incomplete bodies … This new weeping beauty could be glued so as to cov
er another’s missing right hand, and then the narrow wedge of space remaining could be filled with … where’s that tiny wee one, from the French calendar …?
‘Mother, is Katy still working?’ repeats Sugar, louder this time.
‘Oh … Forgive me, dear. Yes, yes, of course she is.’ Mrs Castaway stirs the glue-pot pensively. ‘You know, the closer to death she comes, the more popular she is. I’ve had to turn callers away, can you imagine? Even extortionate fees don’t seem to deter them.’ Her eyes go misty, reflecting the perversity of an imperfect world, and her own regret that she’s too old to take full advantage of it. ‘Sanatoriums could make a fortune, if only they knew.’
The hammering from upstairs suddenly ceases, and silence falls. Nineteen years have passed since Mrs Castaway and Sugar embarked on their life together in the creaking warren of Church Lane; six years have passed since the howling night Mrs Castaway (then in much shabbier garb in the candle-flickering gloom of the old house) tiptoed up to Sugar’s bed and told her she needn’t shiver anymore: a kind gentleman had come to keep her warm. Ever since then, there has been something of the nightmare about Mrs Castaway, and her humanity has grown obscure. Sugar strains to recall a Mrs Castaway much farther removed in time, a mother less vinegary and more nourishing, a historical figure called simply ‘Mother’ who tucked her in at night and never mentioned where money came from. And all the while, the Mrs Castaway of here and now stirs her glue-pot, every so often removing the brush and anointing her scrapbook with a gob of adhesive gruel.
‘I hear …’ says Sugar, almost choking, ‘I hear from Amy you’re considering Jennifer Pearce as my replacement.’
‘Nobody could replace you, dear,’ the old woman smiles, her teeth flecked with scarlet.
Sugar winces; tries to disguise the wince with a twitch of her nose.
‘I didn’t think men were to Miss Pearce’s taste.’
Mrs Castaway shrugs. ‘Men are not to anyone’s taste, dear. Still, they rule the world and we must all fall on our knees before them, hmm?’
Sugar’s arms have begun to itch, her forearms and wrists especially. Suppressing the temptation to pounce on them and scratch them raw, she tries to steer the conversation back to Jennifer Pearce. ‘She’s well known in flagellating circles, Mother. It makes me wonder if …if you’re planning to change the character of the place.’
Mrs Castaway hunches over her handiwork, pushing the shoulder of the latest Magdalen a little closer to the hip of the adjacent saint while the glue is still viscid enough.
‘Nothing stays the same forever, dear,’ she mutters. ‘Old ducks like me and Mrs Wallace, we’re …’ she looks up, eyes wide and theatrical, ‘we are hawkers in the marketplace of passion, and we must find whatever niche is not already filled.’
Sugar seizes herself by the forearms, squeezes tight. Why did you do it? she thinks. To your own daughter? Why? It’s a question she’s never dared ask. She opens her mouth to speak.
‘Wh–what was the arrangement?’ she says. ‘Between you and M-Mr Hunt, I mean?’
‘Come now, Sugar,’ chides Mrs Castaway. ‘You’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. You don’t want to bother your pretty head with business. Leave that to the men. And to shrivelled old relics like me.’
Is that a glint of supplication in the old woman’s shiny pink eyes? A glimmer of fear? Sugar is too despondent, and maddened by the itch, to pursue her further.
‘I must go, Mother,’ she says.
‘Of course, dear, of course. Nothing to hold you here, is there? Onward and upward with Mr Hunt!’ And again she bares her crimson-flecked teeth in a mirthless crescent of farewell.
A few minutes later, outside in Regent Street, Sugar tears off her gloves, pushes her tight sleeves up to the elbows and scratches furiously at her forearms until her skin is the texture of grated ginger-root. Only the fear of William Rackham’s displeasure inhibits her from drawing blood.
‘God damn God,’ she whimpers, while smartly-dressed passers-by edge uneasily away from her, ‘and all His horrible filthy Creation.’
Back in her rooms, her very own rooms in Marylebone, Sugar lies in the bath, almost wholly submerged in a coverlet of aromatic suds. The humid cubicle of air around her is vague with steam, the mustard colour of the walls softened to egg yellow. Dozens of little ‘R’s, on the bottles and jars and pots all about, twinkle through the lavender-scented mist.
Thirteen, she thinks. I was thirteen.
Below the water, her arms sting and prickle, a much preferable sensation to the itching. In one hand she clutches a sponge, bringing it up to her cheeks every time the tears tickle too much.
You understand, Mrs Castaway told her long ago, that if we are to have a happy and harmonious house here, I can’t treat you any differently from my other girls. We are in this together. In what, Mother?
Sugar shuts her eyes tight and squeezes the sponge against them. Once upon a time this little sponge was alive and swam in the sea. Was it softer then, or hard and fleshy? She knows nothing about sponges, has never been to the sea, has never been outside London. What’s to become of her? Will William tire of her and flush her back onto the streets?
He hasn’t been to visit her since he installed her in these rooms, days and days ago. Frightfully busy, he said he would be … But how busy can he be, not to find time for his Sugar? Maybe he’s tired of her already. If so, how long can she cling to this little nest? The rooms are paid for and her allowance is set to come directly from the bank, so there’s nothing to fear except William himself. Maybe he’ll lack the stomach to evict her? Maybe she can stay here for years provided she keeps very, very quiet … Maybe he’ll pay a murderer to slit her throat …
Sugar laughs despite herself. What time of month is it? Likely as not she’s brewing the curse, to be thinking thoughts as daft as these.
How much foam one little bottle of Rackham’s Lait de Lavage makes! She must compliment William on it the next time he comes. Will he believe her, though, if she’s sincere? How is she to tell him she admires something of his, if she really does admire it? What tone of voice could she use?
‘Your bath lotion is a wonderful thing, William,’ she says, in the privacy of her misty bower. Her words ring false, false as whores’ kisses.
‘Your bath lotion is superb.’ She frowns, scoops a handful of froth from the surface of the water. She attempts to toss the trembling bubbles into the air, but they cling to her palm.
‘I love your bath lotion,’ she croons. But the word love rings falser than all the others put together.
* * *
For days, Sugar waits for William to come. He doesn’t come. Why doesn’t he come? How many of a man’s waking hours can possibly be swallowed up by an already established, successful concern? Surely it’s a simple matter of writing the occasional letter? Surely William doesn’t have to oversee every tiny flower and approve its rate of growth?
On the night when she was first given these rooms, she felt as if she’d been allotted a little corner of Paradise. The slate was wiped clean, and she was determined to savour everything in her new life — the solitude, the silence, the freedom from filth, the fresh air, her little garden, walks in leafy Priory Close, meals in the best hotels. She would write her novel to a thrilling conclusion while birds sang in the trees.
But, almost at once, the halo began to fade from her luxurious sanctum, and by the fifth day, it’s pale indeed. The quiet of this place unnerves her: each morning she wakes, much earlier than she ever did in Silver Street, to the sepulchral stillness of suburbia, invisibly surrounded by neighbours who might as well be dead. Her little garden, by daylight, is a shady, half-subterranean aflair, fenced all around by iron spikes. Peeping above the rose-bushes, she has a mole’s-eye view of the stony rim of a footpath along which nobody ever seems to walk, whatever the time of day. Oh, one morning she did hear voices, deep male voices, and she dashed to the window to listen, but the speakers were from a foreign country.
&
nbsp; Every dawn she washes and dresses, then has nothing to do: the books with which William has furnished the bookcases — technical tomes about maceration and enfleurage and distillation, merely to fill up the shelves — mean nothing to her … She’ll write her novel, of course, when the crates arrive. When will they arrive? When William Rackham gives the word. In the meantime, she spends a remarkable amount of her time in the bath.
The opportunity to take her meals in the hotels of Marylebone, so precious to her at first, has fallen far short of Sugar’s expectations. For one thing, every time she leaves the house, she fears that William will come visiting at the very moment she sits down to breakfast or luncheon. Besides, the food in the Warwick and the Aldsworth is really nothing special, and they don’t have the cakes she likes, only oatcakes, which are no damn use at all. Also, she’s convinced the attendants in the Warwick look at her queerly, and whisper amongst themselves when she pretends to be engrossed in her omelette or her kippers. As for the Aldsworth, oh God, the expression on that waiter’s face when she asked for extra cream! How was she to know only a whore would ask for extra cream! She can’t go back there, no she can’t — not unless William himself escorts her …
What in God’s name is keeping him? Perhaps he tried to visit on the day she went to Mrs Castaway’s — an excursion she put off as long as she could, for fear of just that thing. Perhaps, what with meals and going out to the local shops to buy chocolates, spa water, and new bed-sheets, she has missed him half a dozen times already!
Finally, mercifully, on the morning of the sixth day … no, William doesn’t come, but something else does: the curse. And, damned nuisance though the bleeding is, Sugar feels much better in her spirits: a dark cloud lifts from her prospects and she can see her way forward at last.