The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Perversely, though, he’s too proud of his newly conceived metaphor of financial entrapment — the cage of wrought-iron sterling symbols — to let it go so easily. There’s something grand, ennobling even, about the hopelessness of his plight, the tragic unfairness of it. Bound and frustrated, he can be King Lear; granted a climax, he may find himself the Fool. And so William’s mind conjures up ever more fearsome pictures of his cage, l£rg£r and l£rg£r and l£rg£r. And, in response, his lust suggests ever more vivid fantasies of sexual conquest and revenge. By turns, he rapes the world into submission, and cowers under its boot in piteous despair — each time more ferocious, each time more fawning.

  At last he springs up from his seat, completely sure that to quell his turmoil nothing less will do – nothing less, do you hear? — than the utter subjugation of two very young whores simultaneously. What’s more, he has a damn good idea of where he might find two girls ideally suited to the purpose. He’ll go there at once, and the devil take the hindmost! (Only a manner of speaking, you understand.)

  Inconveniently, the strategic redistribution of blood among William’s bodily organs has no effect whatsoever on the rotation of the Earth, and he finds, when he returns to the centre of town, that it’s lunch-time in London, and the clerks are out in force. William and his manhood are rudely jostled by a hungry crowd, a dark sea of functionaries, scribes and other nobodies, threatening to carry him along if he tries to swim against them. So he stands close to a wall and watches, hoping the sea will part for him soon.

  Au contraire. The building against which he presses, distinguished only by the brass letters COMPTON, HESPERUS & DILL, suddenly throws open its doors and yet another efflux of clerks pushes him aside.

  This is the last straw: dismissing his last pang of conscience, William raises his hand above the crowd and hails a cab. What does it matter now that he denied himself cab travel earlier this morning? He’ll be a rich man soon enough, and all this fretting over petty expenses will be nothing more than a sordid memory.

  ‘Drury Lane,’ he commands, as he mounts the step of a swaying hansom. He slams the cabin door shut behind him, bumping his new hat on the low ceiling, and the abrupt jog of the horse throws him back in his seat.

  No matter. He’s on his way to Drury Lane, where (Bodley and Ashwell never cease reminding him) good cheap brothels abound. Well, cheap ones at least. Bodley and Ashwell enjoy ‘slumming’, not because they’re short of money, but because it amuses them to pass from the cheapest to the most expensive whores in quick succession.

  ‘Vintage wine and alehouse beer’ is how Bodley likes to put it. ‘In the pursuit of pleasure, both have their place.’

  On this excursion to Drury Lane, William is only interested in the ‘alehouse beer’ class of girl — which is just as well, as that’s all he can afford. The two particular girls he has in mind … well, to be honest he’s never actually met them, but he remembers reading about them in More Sprees in London –Hints for Men About Town, with advice for greenhorns. It seems an awfully long time since he consulted this handbook regularly (is he even sure of its current whereabouts? the bottom drawer of his study desk?) but he does have a distinct recollection of two very ‘new’ girls, included in the guide by virtue of their tender age.

  ‘You know, it boggles the mind,’ Ashwell has mused more than once. ‘All those thousands of bodies on offer, and still it’s a hellish job to find a truly succulent young one.’

  ‘All the really young ones are dirt poor, that’s the problem.’ (Bodley’s response.) ‘By the time they come to bud, they’ve already had scabies, their front teeth are missing, their hair’s got crusts in it … But if you want a little alabaster Aphrodite, you have to wait for her to become a fallen woman first.’

  ‘It’s a damn shame. Still, hope springs eternal. I’ve just read, in the latest More Sprees, about two girls in Drury Lane …’

  William strains to recall the girls’ names or that of their madam — tries to picture the page oftext in the handbook — but finds nothing. Only the number of the house — engraved on his brain by the simple mnemonic of it comprising the day and month of his birth.

  The brothel opens to William Rackham virtually as soon as he pulls the cord. Its receiving room is dim, and the madam old. She sits dwarf-like on a sofa, all in purple, her baroquely wrinkled hands clasped in her lap. William has not the faintest recollection of what she or any of her stable might be called, so he mentions More Sprees in London and asks for ‘the two girls — the pair’.

  The old woman’s red eyes, which seem to swim in a honeyish liquid too thick for tears, fix William in a stare of sympathetic befuddlement. She smiles, exposing string-of-pearl teeth, but her powdered brow is frowning. She forms her hands into a steeple, lightly tapping her nose with it. A fat grey cat ventures out from behind the sofa, sees William, retreats.

  Then suddenly the old woman unclasps her hands and holds her palms aloft excitedly, as if an answer is dropping, out of the heavens or at least through the ceiling, into each.

  ‘Ah! The two girls!’ she cries. ‘The twins!’

  William nods. He can’t recall them being twins at the time of their inclusion in More Sprees in London; no doubt the first bloom of their youth has passed and further enticement has become necessary. The madam shuts her eyes in satisfaction, and her raw bacon eyelids glisten as she smiles.

  ‘Claire and Alice, sir. I should have known — a man such as you, sir — you would want my best girls — my most very special.’ Her accent and phrasing are a bit on the foreign side, making it difficult to guess how well or ill bred she might be. ‘I will see that they are prepared to receive you.’

  She rises, hardly any taller for it, many yards of dark silk tumbling off the sofa with her, and makes as if to escort him directly to the stairs. She pauses theatrically, however, and casts her gaze at the floor, as if embarrassed to speak the words: ‘Perhaps, sir, to save troubling you afterwards …?” And she looks up at him once more, her eyes heavy with translucent fluid.

  ‘Of course,’ says William, and stares into her hideous smile for a full five seconds before prompting her. ‘And … what is the price, madam?’

  ‘Ah, yes, forgive me. Ten shillings, if you please.’

  She bows as William hands her the coins, then tugs at one of three slender ropes which dangle beside the banister.

  ‘A few moments, sir, is all they will need. Do make yourself easy in one of the chaises-longues — and be free to smoke.’

  So it’s that kind of brothel, thinks William Rackham, but it’s too late now to withdraw, and in any case he wants satisfaction.

  For no other reason than to rest his gaze on a cigar rather than on the madam’s ugly face, William sits on a chaise and smokes while he waits for his predecessor to finish. No doubt there’s another staircase at the back of the house, through which this fellow will leave, and then the dirty sheets will be changed, and then … William sucks sourly on his cigar, as if he has just bought a ticket for an inferior conjuring performance at which the magician’s sleeves sag with devices and there’s a stench of rabbits under the floorboards.

  But while William broods, let me tell you about Claire and Alice. They are brothel girls in the truest and lowest sense: that is, they arrived in London as innocents and were lured into their fallen state by a madam who, resorting to the old stratagem, met them at the railway station and offered them a night’s lodgings in the fearsome new metropolis, then robbed them of their money and clothing. Ruined and helpless, they were then installed in the house, along with several other girls similarly duped or else bought from parents or guardians. In return for snug new clothes and two meals a day, they’ve worked here ever since, guarded at the back-stair by a spoony-man and at the front by the madam, unable even to guess how much or little they are hired for.

  Finally the time arrives for William Rackham to be shown upstairs. Claire and Alice’s room, when he enters it, is small and square, draped all around with long red curta
ins puddling down onto dingy skirting boards. The lone window is shrouded by one of these drapes, so that the claustral little chamber is lit less by the sun than by candles, and is jaundice-tinged and overwarm. Flattened velvet cushions are strewn on the threadbare Persian carpet, and above the large rococo bed is displayed, in an ornate frame, a photograph of a naked woman dancing around an indoor maypole. Claire and Alice, dressed in plain white chemises, are sitting together on the bed, pretty little hands folded in their laps.

  ‘’Ow d’you do, sir,’ they welcome him in unison.

  But, unison or not, it’s obvious they aren’t twins. They aren’t even, pedantically speaking, girls — as William verifies when he removes Alice’s chemise. The undersides of her breasts no longer stand out from her midriff, but lie flat against it. The pink of her hairless vulva is tinged with tell-tale shadow, and her lips are no longer a rosebud, but a full-blown rose.

  Worse than this, she moves like any other mediocre whore. A bit of puppyish curiosity would be delightful, but this practised submission, like a tame Labrador rolling over, is merely dispiriting. God damn it! Is there never such a thing as exceptional value for money? Does it always have to be a king’s ransom that buys promise fulfilled? Is it the sole purpose of the modern world to disappoint ideals and breed cynicism?

  As Alice begins to wrap her body around him in the waxy heat, William wishes suddenly to flee the house, never mind the money wasted. For a moment he pulls back, squirming to be free, but he cannot persuade his erection to accompany him. So, making the best of things, he pulls Claire’s chemise off as well, and finds her to be younger than Alice, with cone-shaped breasts and subtle, welt-like nipples of hyacinth-pink.

  Encouraged by this, William throws himself into the business at hand with a passion, a passion to exorcise his griefs and frustrations. There is an answer to be found, a solution to his suffering, if he can only break through the obstacles of the flesh. With such furious vehemence does he fuck that he loses, at times, all awareness of what he’s doing, the way a frenzied fighter may become blind to his opponents. Yet these are, for him, the best moments.

  Aside from such transcendent lapses, however, he is not to be pleased. The girls are no good: they don’t move as he wishes, they are the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong consistency, they collapse under him when he requires them to bear his weight, they totter when he requires them to stand firm, they wince and flinch and all the while keep so damnably silent. Too much of the time, William feels himself to be alone in the room with his own breathing, alone with the faintly absurd sound of his foot sliding a cushion along a carpet, the dull musical twang of the bed-springs, the comical ugh-ugh of his own allergic cough.

  The blame he lays entirely on Claire and Alice. Hasn’t he had the most sublime, the most joyous times with prostitutes in the past? Especially in Paris. Ah, Paris! Now there was a breed of girl that knew how to please a man! As William presses down heavily on these glum English girls, themselves lying crushed breast to breast, he can’t help reminiscing. In particular, about one occasion when he ventured out on his own to the Rue St Aquine, leaving Bodley, Ashwell and the others still drinking at The Cul-de-Sac. By some strange chance, God knows how (he was squiffed to the gills) he ended up in a room full of exceptionally friendly whores. (Is there anything more delightful than the laughter of tipsy young women?) Anyway, inspired by their boisterous vulgarity, William invented a hilarious erotic game. The girls were to squat in a circle close around him, legs spread apart, and he would toss coins, gently and carefully aimed, at their slits. The rule was that if the coin lodged, the girl was allowed to keep it.

  The long years since that extraordinary night haven’t dimmed its sights and sounds: even now he can hear the ecstatic giggles and the cries all around him of ‘Ici, monsieur! Ici? Ah! to think that those girls are probably lying idle at the Rue St Aquine at this very moment, while he toils here, hundreds of miles away from them, straining to extract an ounce of enthusiasm from these dull English pretenders.

  ‘Do try to do your best for me,’ he urges Claire and Alice as he prises apart their squashed bodies, noticing that each of their clammy torsos bears the flushed imprints of the ribs of the other. He turns them over, over and over, as if hoping to find an orifice not yet detected by previous customers. His lust has become almost somnambulistic; he demands ever greater liberties, in a voice he hardly recognises as his own, and the girls obey like figments of his own sluggish dream.

  He hardly knows what he’s saying, then, when at last he takes Alice by the wrists and gives her the command which will transform many lives.

  The girl shakes her head.

  ‘I don’t do that, sir. I’m sorry.’

  William releases her wrists, one by one. With the first hand freed, Alice tucks a lock of her hair nervously behind one ear. William flips it back onto her cheek.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t do that?’ He looks from Alice to Claire who, sensing that the ordeal is over, is surreptitiously pulling her nightdress up over her shoulders.

  ‘Me neiver, sir.’

  William rests his hands on his naked knees, speechlessly outraged. His blood, redistributed from below, flushes his cheeks and neck.

  ‘We would if we could, sir,’ says Alice, taking up her position next to Claire on the edge of the bed once more. ‘But we can’t.’

  William reaches for his trousers, as if in a dream.

  ‘It seems odd,’ he says, ‘to draw the line at that rather than at … well, something else.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ replies the elder (for so she obviously is), ‘And so is Claire, I’m sure. You know it ain’t nuffink to do wif you, sir. Troof is, we wouldn’t do it for nobody, sir. Troof is, it would put us off, sir, put us off altogevver, and then we’d not be wurf a farvin’ to you, sir.’

  ‘Oh, but,’ pursues William, catching sight of a glimmer of hope, ‘I wouldn’t blame you for that, oh no. And it wouldn’t matter, you see. You’d not have to do anything more after that, just that one thing, and with your eyes closed if you liked.’

  The girls’ faces are by now ugly with embarrassment.

  ‘Please, sir,’ begs Alice, ‘don’t press on us; we can’t do it and there it is, and we are very sorry to ‘ave offended you. All I can do for you, sir, is give you a name — the name of a person as’d do what you ask.’

  William, huffily dressing, and preoccupied with locating a lost garter, is not sure he has heard correctly.

  ‘ What did you say?’

  ‘I can tell you ‘oo’ll do it for you, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ He sits taut, ready to vent his fury on yet more whore-bluff. ‘Some poxy hag in Bishopsgate?’ Alice seems genuinely abashed.

  ‘Oh no, sir! A very ‘igh-class girl in ever such a good ‘ouse — in Silver Street, sir, just off The Stretch. Mrs Castaway is the madam there — and it’s said this girl is the best girl in the ‘ouse. She’s the madam’s own daughter, sir, and ‘er name is Sugar.’

  William is by now fully dressed and self-possessed: he might be a charity worker or a parson come to inspire them to seek a better life.

  ‘If …If this girl is so high-class,’ he reasons, ‘why would she be prepared to …do such a thing?’

  ‘Ain’t nuffink Sugar won’t do, sir. Nuffink. It’s common knowledge, sir, that special tastes as can’t be satisfied by the ordinary girl, Sugar will satisfy.’

  William voices a grunt of sulky mistrust, but in truth he’s struck by the name.

  ‘Well,’ he smiles wearily. ‘I’m sure I’m most grateful for your advice.’ ‘Oh, I ‘ope you may be, sir,’ responds Alice.

  Standing alone in the stinking alley behind the brothel, William clenches his fists. It’s not Claire and Alice he’s angry with; they’re already forgiven and half-forgotten, shut away like unwanted lumber in a dark attic to which he will never return. But his frustration remains.

  I must not be denied, he says aloud — well, almost. The words are loud in his mind, and
on the tip of his tongue, withheld only for fear that to proclaim ‘I must not be denied!’ in an alleyway off Drury Lane might attract mockery from uncouth passers-by.

  It’s blindingly clear to William that he must proceed directly to Silver Street and ask for Sugar. Nothing could be simpler. He is in town; she is in town: now is the time. There isn’t even any need to squander money on a cab; he’ll take the omnibus along Oxford Street, and then another down Regent Street, and he’ll be almost there!

  Rackham strides forth, hurries to New Oxford Street and, as if the universe is impressed — no, cowed — by the sheer strength of his resolve, an omnibus turns up almost instantaneously, allowing him to board without breaking his pace.

  Mrs Castaway. Sugar. Give me Sugar and no excuses.

  Once William is actually seated in the omnibus, however, and the solid street outside the soot-speckled windows becomes a moving panorama, his resolve begins to weaken. For a start, paying the fare reminds him of how much money he has already spent on his new hat (not to mention the lesser expense of Alice and … whatever the other one’s name was). Who can say how much this girl Sugar will cost? The streets around Golden Square contain a mixed assortment of houses, some grand, some shabby. What if this girl demands more than he has on his person?

  William stares across at the passengers opposite him — dozing old fossils and overdressed matrons — and notes how vividly real they are compared to the blurry world beyond the window-glass. Has he really any choice but to stay in his seat, a passenger among other passengers, until the omnibus horses have pulled him all the way back to Notting Hill?

  And shouldn’t he be getting home, anyway? The responsibilities awaiting him there are most urgent — so much more deserving of his attention than this secret ember of lust glowing inside him. This Sugar, whoever or whatever she may be, can only make him poorer, whereas a few hours spent in duteous study could well rescue him from ruin.