The Crimson Petal and the White

  Sugar looks down at the disintegrating little carcass, and is torn between the urge to snatch it up in her hands, and the urge to prod the horrid thing with a poker so it stops smouldering and burns properly. She turns back to Sophie and opens her mouth to speak, but she catches sight of the beautiful Frenchpoupee standing witness on the other side of the room, towering over Noah’s ark with its plumed hat, its smug impassive face oriented directly towards the fireplace, and the words die in her throat.

  ‘He came from a tea chest, Miss,’ Sophie continues. ‘And there was s’posed to be an elephant under him, Miss, that’s missing, and that’s why he won’t stand up, and anyway he’s black and proper dolls aren’t black, are they, Miss? And he was all dirty and stained, Miss, from the time he got blood spilt on him.’

  The room is growing hazy with smoke, and both child and governess are rubbing their eyes, irritable, near tears.

  ‘But Sophie, to throw him on the fire like this …’ Sugar begins, but she can’t go on; the word ‘wicked’ just won’t come. It burns in her mind, branded there by Mrs Castaway: Wicked is what we can’t help being, little one. The word was invented to describe us. Men love to wallow in sin; we are the sin they wallow in.

  ‘You ought to have asked me,’ she mutters, grasping the poker at last; they’ll start coughing soon, and if the smoke seeps out into the rest of the house there’ll be trouble.

  Sophie watches the familiar contours of her doll being stirred into fiery oblivion. ‘He was mine, though, wasn’t he, Miss?’ she says, her bottom lip trembling, her eyes blinking and shiny. ‘To do with as I pleased?’

  ‘Yes, Sophie,’ sighs Sugar, as the flames grow brighter and the grinning head slowly rolls over into the body’s ash. ‘He was.’ She knows she ought to put this incident behind her without delay, and return to the lesson, but a riposte comes to her in a belated flash, and she’s too weak to resist it.

  ‘A poor child might have wanted him,’ she says, poking the ashes with rough emphasis. ‘A wretched poor child that hasn’t any dolls to play with.’

  At once, Sophie erupts into a fit of weeping so loud it makes the hair on Sugar’s neck stand on end. The child jumps off her stool and collapses straight onto her rump, screaming and screaming, helpless in a puddle of petticoat. Her face, within moments, is a swollen lump of red meat, slimy with tears, snot and saliva.

  Sugar stands watching, buffeted by the ferocity of the little girl’s grief. She sways on her feet, wishing this were only a dream, and she could escape it simply by turning over in bed. She wishes she had the courage to embrace Sophie, now when she’s at her ugliest and most detestable, and that such an embrace could soothe all the hurt and the despicable notions from the child’s convulsing body. But she hasn’t the courage; that bawling red face is frightening as well as repulsive; and if there’s one thing that would shatter Sugar’s nerve today, it would be a shove of rebuff from Sophie. So, she stands silent, her ears ringing, her teeth clenched hard inside her jaw.

  After several minutes, the door of the school-room opens — presumably after an unheard knock — and Clara pokes her sharp snout in. ‘Can I be of assistance, Miss Sugar?’ she calls over the din.

  ‘I doubt it, Clara,’ says Sugar, even as Sophie’s wailing abruptly reduces in volume. ‘Too much excitement at Christmas, I think …’

  Sophie’s hullabaloo ebbs to a hacking sob, and Clara’s face hardens into a white mask of indignation and disapproval — how dare this beastly child, for the flimsiest of reasons, cause such a noise.

  ‘Tell Mama I’m sorry!’ snivels Sophie.

  Clara shoots Sugar a glance that seems to say Is it you who’s putting such stupid thoughts in her head?, then hurries back to her mistress. The door clicks shut, and the school-room is once more full of smoke-haze and sniffling.

  ‘Please get up now, Sophie,’ says Sugar, praying that the child will obey without further fuss. And she does.

  The long remainder of the second day of Christmas, the day of inexplicable turtle-doves and invisible preparations for journeys, passes like a dream that has, in its inscrutable wisdom, decided to stop short of being a nightmare, sinking instead into a state of benign confusion.

  Following her tantrum, Sophie becomes calm and tractable. She devotes her attention to New South Wales and the names of different breeds of sheep; she memorises the oceans between her house in England and the continent of Australia. She remarks that Australia looks like a brooch pinned onto the Indian and Pacific Oceans; Sugar suggests that it more closely resembles the head of a Scotch terrier, with a spiked collar. Sophie confesses she has never seen a terrier. A lesson for the future.

  Normal function returns to the Rackham house as its servants rise from their beds and resume their work. Lunch is delivered to the school-room — hot slices of roast beef, turnip and potato, served at one o’clock sharp — and although the dessert is Christmas pudding again, instead of something reassuringly normal like suet or rice, at least it’s hot this time, with custard and a neat sprinkle of cinnamon. Clearly, the universe is edging back from the brink of dissolution.

  Rose is back to normal, too, answering the doorbell, which rings persistently, as those oddly dressed men who were disappointed before return for another crack at their Christmas boxes. Each time, Sophie and Sugar go to the window to look, and each time the child says, ‘Who’s that, please, Miss?’ humbly trying to make amends for her earlier misdeeds.

  ‘I don’t know, Sophie,’ says Sugar about each man. The impression is forming, from these confessions of ignorance, that Miss Sugar may know a great deal about ancient history and the geography of far-flung lands, but when it comes to the affairs of the Rackham house, she’s almost completely in the dark.

  ‘Once my lessons are over, this evening,’ announces Sophie, during a lull in the afternoon when her governess’s head nods bosomwards with weariness. ‘I shall read my new book, Miss. I have looked at the pictures, and they have made me … very curious.’

  She looks up at her governess’s face, hoping to see approval radiating from it. She sees only a wan smile on dry, flaking lips, and eyes that have tiny red lines scratched across the whites. Will those lines heal themselves, or are they etched there forever? And is it wicked to look at a storybook’s illustrations before reading the tale? What else can she offer Miss Sugar, to make everything all right again?

  ‘Australia is a very interesting country, Miss.’

  Alone in bed that night, Sugar lies awake, plagued by an anxiety that she may, on top of everything else, be unable to sleep. That would be the finish of her, the absolute finish. With a muffled curse, she shuts her eyes tight, but they spring perversely open, staring up into the darkness. There’s a natural order to sleeping and waking, and she has sinned against it, and it’s having its revenge.

  And what if William should come to her, for one last debauch of reassurance before he leaves in the morning? Or perhaps he’ll ask her, with that beaten-cur expression on his face, if she wouldn’t mind forcing a dose of laudanum down Agnes’s throat? Or perhaps he’ll simply want to bury his face in his loving Sugar’s bosom? For the first time in many, many months, Sugar feels disgust at the thought of William Rackham’s touch.

  She lies awake for what feels like an hour or more, then lights a lamp and fetches a diary from under the bed. She reads a page, two pages, two and a half pages, but the Agnes Rackham revealed in them is an intolerable irritation, a vain and useless creature whom the world would not miss for an instant if she were removed.

  So what will you do when the good doctor comes with his four merry men? Sugar asks herself. Take Sophie for a stroll in the garden while Agnes is manhandled, screaming for rescue, into a black carriage?

  In the diary, Agnes is two years married, complaining about her husband. He does nothing all day, she alleges, except write articles for The Cornhill that The Cornhill doesn’t publish, and letters to The Times that The Times doesn’t print. He’s not nearly as interesting in his own house as he w
as in hers. And his chin is not nearly as firm as his brother’s, she’s noticed, nor his shoulders as broad — in fact, his brother Henry is the handsomer man altogether, and frightfully sincere with it, if only he wouldn’t dress like a provincial haberdasher …

  Sugar gives up. She stows the diary back under the bed, extinguishes the light, and tries once more to sleep. Her eyes ache and itch — what has she done to deserve …? Ah yes. Uneasy lies the head that conspires in the betrayal of a defenceless woman …

  And William? Is he sleeping now? He deserves to toss and sweat in torment, yet she hopes he’s snoring peacefully. Perhaps then, when he wakes fully rested in the morning, he’ll recant his plans for Agnes. Unlikely, unlikely. Sugar knows from experience the face and the embrace of a man who’s passed the point of no return.

  All will be well, I promise. Everything will turn out for the best.

  That’s what she promised Agnes. But mightn’t everything turn out for the best if Agnes goes to the asylum? Her wits are addled, without a doubt — couldn’t they be … un-addled, with expert care? This vision that’s haunting Sugar, of a woman in chains, wailing piteously in a dungeon lined with straw — sheer fantasy, from cheap novels! It’ll be a clean, friendly place, this Labaube, with doctors and nurses in constant attendance. And it’s in Wiltshire … And who’s to say the poor deluded Mrs Rackham won’t fancy she’s in the Convent of Health, and that the nurses are nuns?

  Soon I will help you get away from here. Soon, I promise.

  That’s what she said to Agnes, as she offered the terrified woman an arm to clutch. Ah, but what are promises in a whore’s mouth? Nothing more than saliva to lubricate compliance. Sugar rubs her eyes in the gloom, loathing herself. She’s a fraud, a failure, she invents facts about Australia … and dear Heaven, the ghastly smile of that nigger doll, as the flames licked around its head …!

  A new woman, she counsels herself. Agnes will come home a new woman. That’s what William said, and mightn’t it be true? Agnes will be cured in the sanatorium; she’ll kiss the cheeks of the nurses as she’s leaving, and shake the doctors’ hands with a tear in her eye. Then she’ll come home, and acknowledge Sophie as her own daughter …

  This thought, conceived as a reassurance, has quite the opposite effect –it sends a sick chill through her body. In the final waking moments before her soul lurches into sleep, Sugar knows, at last, what she must do.

  It is the evening of the twenty-seventh of December, and William Rackham sits nursing a glass of whisky in a public house in Frome, Somerset, wishing he could be transported into the day after tomorrow.

  He has travelled so far, and engaged in so many diversions (who’d have thought a tour of the town’s old wool mill would fail so utterly to fascinate him!), and yet there are still thirteen, fourteen hours left to fill, before Doctor Curlew is due to arrive at Chepstow Villas … Anything could happen in that time — not least his own nervous disintegration … And with Clara absent from the house, and only Rose and that idiot Letty to keep an eye on things, there’s an appalling risk of Agnes escaping … that is, of exposing herself to harm …

  If only he could make contact with his household here and now, to confirm Agnes’s safety. Only last week, he read an article in Hogg’s Review, about a device very soon to be produced in America, a contrivance of magnets and diaphragms, which converts the human voice into electrical vibrations, thus making possible the transmission of speech across vast distances. If only this mechanism were in general use already! Imagine: he could speak a few words into a wire, receive the answer, ‘Yes, she’s here and sleeping,’ and be spared this misery of uncertainty.

  On the other hand, perhaps it’s all tosh, this wonderful voice-telegraph, a tall story to fill space in a journal lacking worthier submissions. After all, think of what brought him here to Frome! The fellow with the new method of enfleurage was a fraud, of course, and not even an interesting fraud. William had expected at least to be entertained with bubbling gases, malodorous perfumes and hushed cries of ‘Behold!’, but was instead invited to study the scribbled notebooks of a mere university student angling for a benefactor to fund his researches. God preserve us from fuddle-headed young men who want money for building cloud-castles!

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ William told the fellow, barely able to keep his temper. ‘If the process works, why can’t you demonstrate it in action? On a smaller, cruder scale, with a few blossoms in a pie-dish?’

  To which the young man’s response was to gesture helplessly at the meanness of his lodgings — implying that in such pauperish circumstances, even the most modest miracles are impossible. Balderdash! But let the fellow stew in his self-pity; there’s no chance of disabusing him of it anyway. William promised to keep the fellow in mind, wished him well with his studies, and fled.

  After this dismal encounter, and a desultory tour of the town’s attractions, he returned to his lodging-house, and loitered for a while in his room. Reclining on a strange, too-soft bed, he tried to read a treatise on the subject of civets and the practical obstacles, from a perfumer’s point of view, to breeding them in northern climes, but he found it well-nigh impossible to take in, and wished he’d brought a novel with him instead.

  Moreover, the lodging-house has had a most demoralising effect upon him. Its proprietress required the name ‘Rackham’ to be spelled out for her when she was committing it to the register, and looked him square in the face without any notion that she might have seen that visage before. And sure enough, in the bathroom, all the soaps were Pears’. Not one of them bore the impression of the ornamental ‘R’. Perched on the edge of that ugly blue-veined bathtub, William could have wept.

  It’s all clear to him now. All these months since he took hold of the Rackham reins, he’s been pulled along by an engine of optimism; each month has seen his fortunes grow, and in those heady late-night conversations with Sugar in Priory Close, he was encouraged to believe that the future would fall open to him in submission, that the rise of Rackham’s to the pinnacle of fame was an historical inevitability. Only now does he glimpse the truth, winking at him from the mists of the future. He’ll build up his heirless empire, grow old and, in his senescence, watch it crumble. He will be Ozymandias, and the despair will be all his, as the edifice of his business turns into a colossal wreck — or (worse) is snaffled up by one of his rivals. Either way, in a century or two, the name Rackham will have ceased to mean anything. And the seed of that humiliation lies here, in a soap dish in Frome, Somerset.

  Unable to endure his own wretchedness, he fled his lodging-house and sought out a tavern – this tavern, The Jolly Shepherdess, in which he now sits nursing his glass of whisky. Far from being the convivial sanctuary he’d hoped for, it’s melancholy and dim, with a sickly caramel-coloured wooden floor and a bar reinforced in fake marble. There’s a blazing fire, but this is the beginning and end of its resemblance to The Fireside; an elderly, rheumy-eyed dog crouches near the hearth, whimpering and frowning in its half-sleep each time a cinder jumps. The human patrons are certainly not the lively provincials whose chatter he hoped would distract his mind; they drink quietly, alone or in huddles of three, occasionally lifting their torpid chins to ask for a refill. Two ugly matrons are busy with obscure chores behind the bar — too busy, evidently, to show the newcomer to a table. So, William chose his own, in a shadowy enclave near the lavatory door.

  The clock above the bar has stopped at midnight — God knows which midnight, how long ago — expired from the strain of chiming the maximum hour once too often. William pulls out his watch to measure how many hours he has to wait before he can go to bed with some chance of sleeping, and is promptly accosted by a disreputable-looking fellow offering to sell him a gold watch to replace his silver one. When William shows no interest, the fellow leers and says,

  ‘Missis fond of rings or necklaces, sir?’

  William balls his fists on either side of his whisky glass, and threatens the fellow with police. This has the desired e
ffect, though William finds his hands are trembling even after the man has scurried off. Frowning, he downs the rest of his drink and signals for another.

  In any event, only a few minutes elapse before he’s accosted afresh — not by a thief this time, but a bore. The fellow — a lugubrious, beetle-browed creature in a tweed overcoat — asks William if they haven’t met somewhere in the past — a horse auction, maybe, or a sale of old furniture — and hints heavily that if William should lack anything in those departments, it would be well worth his while to speak up. William is silent. In his mind, a seventeen-year-old Agnes is dashing across a sunlit expanse of lush green grass, in the grounds of her step-father’s estate, chasing a wobbling hoop, her white skirts swirling. ‘Oh dear, I must grow up now, mustn’t I?’ was what she panted afterwards, alluding to her impending entry into the ranks of married ladies. Ah God! The translucent flush on her face as she said it! And what did he reply?

  ‘What’syour line, then?’

  ‘Huh? What?’ he grunts, as the vision of his bride-to-be vanishes.

  The boring man is leaning across the table at him, revealing, at close quarters, a subtle dusting of scurf in his liberally oiled hair. ‘What line of business,’ he says, ‘are you in?’

  William opens his mouth to tell the truth, but suddenly fears that the man will take him for a liar; that the man will poke his greasy nose into one of Frome’s shops tomorrow and confirm that no such thing as Rackham produce exists.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ says William. ‘A critic, for the better monthly reviews.’

  ‘Is there good money in that, then?’

  William sighs. ‘It keeps the wolf from the door.’

  ‘What’s the name, then?’

  ‘Hunt. George W. Hunt.’

  The man nods, discarding the name into a bottomless pit without an instant’s hesitation. ‘Mine’s Wray. William Wray. Remember that name, if you ever need a horse.’ And he’s away.