by Michel Faber
William is staring sightlessly ahead of him, deep in thought; suddenly he notices a prune-faced dowager staring back at him. What an ill-mannered creature you are! she seems to be thinking. Chastised, he lowers his head, and stays stoically seated, even as the omnibus rattles past Regent Circus. He’s had his extravagance for the day; he has made his stand. Now he sinks back, closes his eyes, and dozes for the remainder of the journey.
‘Chepstow Villas cor-nerrr!’ warbles the conductor. William jolts back to life. The world has turned greener; the buildings have thinned. It’s sleepy Notting Hill in the sunny glow ofafternoon. London is gone.
Blinking and groggy, William dismounts the omnibus right behind a lady he doesn’t know. Indeed, he almost blunders into her, trapped in the wake of her black and terracotta striped skirts. In better circumstances, he might find her enticing, but she’s too close to home and he is still hankering after Sugar.
‘Forgive me, madam,’ he says as he circles free of her snail’s-pace.
She glares at him as if he has treated her shabbily, but William feels a second apology would be excessive. There ought to be a limit to how much allowance men make for the delicate speed of women.
Forging ahead, William hurries past the long ornate fence of the park to which he is one of the private key-holders. Where that key might be, he has forgotten; he’s in the habit nowadays of ignoring the pale flowers, evergreens and marble fountains that twinkle so fetchingly behind the wrought-iron bars. Oh, granted, in the beginning, when Agnes was still well, he did occasionally take the air with her in this park, to prove to her how nice a place Notting Hill could be despite everything, but now …
He slows his pace, for the handsome house directly up ahead is the Rackham house — his own house, so to speak — in which lie waiting for him his problematical wife, his ungrateful servants, and a stack of unreadable business papers on which (outrageously!) his entire future depends. He draws a deep breath and approaches.
But already there is an obstacle, before he’s even set foot on his own grounds. Just outside the front gate sits a dog — a fairly small dog, admittedly — at fully erect attention, as if volunteering its services as gatekeeper. It wags its tail and nods its head as William steps near. It’s a mongrel, of course. All the proper dogs are indoors.
‘Get away,’ growls William, but the dog doesn’t budge.
‘Get away, William growls again, but the animal is stubborn, or confused, or stupid. Who knows what goes on in a dog’s brain? (Well, actually, William did publish a monograph, during his time at Cambridge, called Canines and the Canaille: The Differences Explained. But Bodley wrote some of it.) William pulls the gate open and hastens through, in the process shoving the dog’s body aside with the great hinged grille.
Locked out, the animal takes offence at the rebuff. It rears up against the gate, paws scratching at the wrought-iron curlicues, and barks clamorously as William walks up the steep path towards his own front door.
These last few steps of his homeward journey tire him more than all the rest. The lawn on either side of the path hasn’t been cut for months. His private carriage-way leads to a coach-house with no coach and a stable with no horses, and serves only to remind him of the Sisyphean challenge ahead.
* * *
And all the while, the dog barks tirelessly on. It should never be necessary to ring a doorbell more than once — especially if it’s one’s own. Principles like that should damn well be tattooed on servants’ thumbs, to help them remember. Nevertheless, William’s arm is raised for his third tug on the bell-pull when Letty’s face finally appears in the doorway.
‘Good arfernoon Mr Rackham,’ she beams.
He brushes past her, resisting the urge to dress her down in case she protests it’s the heavy weight of her new duties that’s to blame. (Not that such a complaint could ever come from Letty, and William would do well to accept her ovine placidity for what it is, rather than mistaking it for Clara’s grudging acquiescence.)
As Rackham clumps towards the stairs, Letty’s smile falters; she has disappointed her master yet again. He was so full of praise for her when Tilly was dismissed, but ever since then … She bites her lip, and shuts the front door as gently as she can.
In truth, there’s nothing she can do to make William happy. Her new status has transformed her from a human being, albeit of a lower order, to a walking, breathing sore point. There’s simply no escaping the fact that before Tilly was dismissed, he had an upstairs and a downstairs housemaid, and now he has only one. This, Rackham knows, is basic social arithmetic that a child could understand — so what, then, must he make of Letty’s cheerful simper? She’s either stupider than a child, or else she’s faking it.
Every time William speaks to her, he recalls his words of encouragement when he first told her the way things would be from now on — his insistence that she was very privileged to be ‘promoted’ with a pound extra on her wage, because ‘that naughty Tilly’ did nothing Letty can’t do better alone. And, after all, isn’t the Rackham house much easier to maintain nowadays, with its master rarely at home and its mistress rarely leaving her bed? (What hogwash! But Letty seemed to lap it all up and, despite his relief, how William despised her for swallowing!)
So: that is why William now refrains from demanding an explanation for her tardiness in answering the door.
(Are you curious to know, though? No, she wasn’t snoozing, or gossiping, or stealing from the pantry. It’s just that when a housemaid is summoned by a bell in the middle of cleaning out a fireplace, she must wash her hands, roll down her sleeves, and descend two flights of stairs, all of which can’t be done in less than two minutes.)
However, our Rackham, given a moment to reflect, is not an unreasonable man. In his doleful heart, he knows very well that prompt service can only be expected in a house stuffed to the rafters with servants, each with very little to do. Letty’s bearing up well, under the circumstances, and at least she always has a smile for him.
He’ll probably keep her, when things improve.
In the meantime, he’s growing almost accustomed to slow service. Lately he has even taken it upon himself to perform such menial tasks as drawing a curtain, opening a window, or adding wood to a fire. In a tight spot, everyone must do his bit.
He’s adding more wood to the fire now, in his smoking-room. Clara has been summoned, but she too is taking some time to arrive, and he’s impatient to be warmer. So, he’s thrown a faggot on the flames. It’s not so difficult, really. In fact, it’s so easy he wonders why the damn servants don’t do it a damn sight more often.
When Clara finally turns up, she finds him installed in his favourite armchair, pushing his head wearily against the antimacassar, calming his nerves with a cigar. The girl’s hands are demurely folded in front of her new twenty-inch waist, and she looks very much as if she has something to hide.
‘Yes sir?’ Her tone is cool and a little defiant. She has already rehearsed an ingenious response to the challenge, ‘Where did you get that waist?’ — a rather far-fetched tale involving a non-existent niece.
Instead, William merely enquires, ‘How has Mrs Rackham been?’ and looks away.
Clara clasps her hands behind her back, like a schoolchild about to recite a poem.
‘Nothing out of the usual, sir. She has read a book. She has read a journal.
She has done some embroidery. She has asked once for a cup of cocoa. Otherwise she is in perfect health.’
‘Perfect health.’ William raises his eyebrows in the general direction of the not sufficiently dusted bookcases. No wonder Agnes claims she trusts Clara with her life. The two of them are in clammy female collusion, cooking up the notion that the decline of the Rackham house is not the fault of its mistress — for isn’t she a fine lady in perfect health? — but solely due to her husband’s want of will, his fear of his appointed destiny. Oh no, there was never anything wrong with the small, perfect woman upstairs, yet still her cruel and ineffectual husband
persists in demanding round-the-clock accounts of her behaviour. William can picture Agnes now, doing her bit to prop up this lie by sitting in her bed, her cameo face innocent, reading Great Thoughts Made Plain for Young Ladies or some such book, while he, the villain, slumps down here in his oily armchair.
‘Anything else?’ he enquires sourly.
‘She says she doesn’t wish to see the doctor today, sir.’
William clips the end off another cigar and flicks it into the fireplace.
‘Doctor Curlew will come today, as always.’
‘Very well, sir. But you are a spineless fool and that’s the only thing making your wife sick.’ Well, no, actually Clara doesn’t say that last sentence. Not aloud.
What time remains before dinner, William whiles away with a book. Why not? He can’t very well get started on the Rackham proprietary papers, can he, if he’s going to be called away shortly to the dining-room?
The book of his choice is Exploits of a Seasoned Traveller, or, Around the World in Eighty Maidenheads, and he makes no attempt to hide it or even obscure its title when Letty enters the room to stoke the fire. She can barely write her own name, so complicated words like ‘fleshy orbs’ and ‘rampant member’ are mysteries to her.
You see them there in the smoking-room together, William and Letty, and wonder if this is going to be a scene from a moralistic drama, a Samuel Richardson tale of seduction and ruin, for Letty is a servant with no means of defence or recourse to the law, alone in a room with her master as he reads inflammatory material. Nevertheless she finishes her tasks and leaves without being molested, for to the preoccupied William at that moment she’s merely the means by which his lamps are lit, no more alive than the wires and switches which light yours.
William carries on reading his book with the nonchalance that men like to affect when contemplating pornography. In his own mind, he is a picture of roguish sophistication sitting there in his armchair, but still there’s a fierce little fire raging inside him, converting the words that pass under his level gaze into a smouldering punk of fragmented anatomies.
‘Dinner is served, sir,’ a servant informs him, and he folds closed his book, pressing it down on his lap, half to caress and half to suppress his desire.
‘I’ll be there shortly.’
Seated at one end of the long mahogany dining-table, William samples his first mouthful of yet another of the cook’s excellent meals (ah, but how long will they remain so?) She really is a treasure — the only female in the house whose worth has never been in doubt, since the very first day he got her. Informing her that she can’t have quite so much sirloin in future is going to be difficult. Especially since, by rights, it should be the mistress of the house who passes on such news.
William stares down the length of the table, along the glowing white trail of table-cloth leading all the way to the empty other end. As always, cutlery, glassware and gleaming vacant plates are laid out for Mrs Rackham, should she feel up to attending. In the kitchen, there is still the bulk of a chicken’s warm and juicy carcass she could have if she wanted it. William has consumed one thigh and a leg, no more.
Not long after dinner, Doctor Curlew arrives at the Rackham house. William, ensconced once more in the smoking-room, consults his watch, to measure how much time elapses between the sound of the doorbell and the sound of the doctor being admitted.
Better, he thinks. Better.
There is a creak of banister as Dr Curlew climbs the stairs to Agnes’s room. Then a silent quarter-hour is scalpelled from the evening.
Afterwards, the doctor visits William in the smoking-room, as he does each and every week. He proceeds directly to a particular armchair which he knows to be the most firm and resilient. Flaccidity of all kinds is his bugbear.
Uncommonly tall without being bony, he cuts an impressive figure, as if his frame has expanded, over time, to make room for the growth of experience within. His long, strong-browed face, his dark eyes, his fastidiously sculpted beard, hair and moustache, and his austerely dashing dress sense, make him a more distinguished-looking specimen than Rackham.
He’s also highly skilled, with a long list of initials after his name. To give but one example, he can dissect a pregnant rabbit for the purposes of anatomical study in ten minutes and can, if required, pretty well sew it back together again. He enjoys the reputation, at least among general physicians, of being something of an expert on feminine illness.
Puffing thoughtfully on one of William’s cigars, he speaks for a few minutes on this subject as far as it applies to his host’s wife. The atmosphere is thick with smoke and alcohol, and you may be forgiven for losing the thread of the good doctor’s thesis, but do rouse yourself for his conclusion:
‘I’ll admit she’s tolerably lucid just now, and no great trouble. I suspect the improvement is due to the time of the month. I certainly don’t think we should be lulled into thinking there won’t be another relapse: in fact, I’m expecting one very soon. With every visit I observe more clearly how strenuously she must fight to compose herself. It’s like a quantity of vomit that will not be kept down. This is not a healthy state of affairs … Not for anyone’ Here Curlew pauses in order that William may be struck squarely by his point. ‘I must emphasise, my dear Rackham, that you continue to show the unmistakable signs of mental strain.’
William grins. ‘Perhaps I’m trying to maintain some consistency of mood in the family, doctor.’
Curlew frowns impatiently and uncrosses his legs. He knows William well enough to forgo decorum. ‘Don’t joke about it, man,’ he says, leaning closer. ‘You should know that mental illness in the male has nothing to do with nature. Every man has his breaking-point. Once the suffering is beyond endurance, madness strikes, and note that I say strikes, for often it comes suddenly, and it is not reversible. You and I have no womb that can be taken out if things get beyond a joke — for God’s sake remember that.’
William glances up at the ceiling, looking for a way to cut short the argument.
‘I don’t believe the continued presence of my wife in this house is likely to drive me mad just yet, Doctor Curlew. Perhaps the strain you detect is merely …tiredness.’
‘My dear Rackham,’ sighs the doctor, as if seeing through a brave falsehood to the fearful truth beneath. ‘I understand, of course I understand, that having Agnes committed to an asylum would cause you pain and shame. But you must trust me: I’ve seen other men wrestling with the same decision. And once they make it, they are relieved beyond words.’
‘Well, not quite beyond words, it seems,’ demurs William sardonically, ‘if they can give you their testimonial.’
Doctor Curlew narrows his eyes in disapproval. Too clever for their own good, these men with literary pretensions; they can split hairs, but fail to see what’s in front of their faces.
‘Think about what I’ve said,’ the doctor says, rising from his chair.
‘Oh, I shall, I shall,’ William assures him, rising likewise. The two of them shake hands, with nothing agreed, and William squeezing harder and harder to prove he’s not the weaker man.
But enough of this. There’s a limit to how long William can be a disappointment to all who observe him. He’s not so spineless as everyone supposes! True to his earlier resolve, he finally climbs the stairs to his study, where the Rackham Perfumeries documents lie in wait for him. It’s time to take the bull by the horns.
Seated at his desk, William grasps the Manila envelopes by the scruffs of their sealed ends and empties out their contents. His plan, when he sees the documents spread like this before him, is to pick them up one by one, in no particular order, and scan them as quickly as possible. All that’s needed is a vague sense of how the business holds together. An inkling is better than nothing. Getting bogged in the details is what’s fatal: better to read everything half-comprehendingly, to get the gist of the thing. He coped with far worse than this at school, didn’t he?
William takes the topmost paper from the neares
t pile and peruses it with an ill-humoured squint, impatient for it to make itself clear. There’s a fearsome density of words here … Who would have thought the old man had so many words in him? Many of them misspelled, too — how embarrassing! But that’s not the worst of it: how is it possible that so many nouns can conjure up so few pictures? How can so many verbs suggest so few actions worth attempting? It beggars belief. But he struggles on.
Ten lines down, half-way through the eleventh, William’s eye is caught by the interesting word ‘juices’. This gets him thinking about this woman in Silver Street, Sugar, and how she’ll gasp, perhaps, at his demand. Well, let her gasp, as long as she submits! What, after all, is she–
But he is straying from the task at hand. Breathing deeply, he returns to the beginning, this time reading each word aloud in his mind.
Utilisable cuttings down 15% from last year. Many would not div. at the root but crumbld. 4 gross ordered from Copley. Only 60 of the 80 acres prime.
?Buy more prime from Copley. ?Rackhams good name. First gallons will tell. Drying House needs new roof – ?Saturday afternoon if workers will stretch to it. Rumour of trade union infiltraitor. 2% rise in cost of manure.
At this, William lets the page flutter through his knees to the floor. This tabulation of mucky stratagems, this intimacy with manure — he cannot bear it — he must be free of it.
Yet there is no escape. His father has told him that if he doesn’t wish to be head of an empire he’s free to get a job elsewhere — either that, or surprise everyone with sudden success in one of those ‘gentlemanly’ pursuits he’s always talking about.
Stung by the memory, William girds himself for another assault on the Rackham papers. Perhaps the problem is not so much the content as his father’s cryptic shorthand. And if it must be this incoherent scrawl, could it please be in black ink, rather than faded blue or pale brown? Would proper ink cost the old skinflint ninepence more per gallon, perhaps?