The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Sugar is starting to steam, a faint halo of vapour rising from her bonnet and outermost ringlets. She cocks her head slightly to one side, as if to ask, Well, what now? Her neck, William notices, is longer than the high collar of her bodice can hold. She has an Adam’s apple, like a man. Yes, he has decided now: she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

  To his bemusement, he’s made shy by her demeanour; she appears so much the lady that it’s difficult to imagine how he could possibly soil that status. Her long, lithe body, beguiling though it is, only complicates matters, as she wears her attire like a second skin, seamless and, by implication, irremovable.

  The way he phrases his dilemma is this: ‘I don’t know that I deserve this honour.’

  Sugar leans forward slightly and, in a low tone, as if making a comment about a mutual acquaintance who has just walked in, says, ‘Don’t worry, sir. You have made the right choice. I’ll do anything you ask of me.’

  A simple exchange, murmured above the babble of a crowded drinking-house, but was there ever a marriage vow more explicit?

  A serving-maid comes to deliver the drink Sugar ordered at the bar. Colourless, transparent and with scarcely any bubbles, it can’t be beer. And if it’s gin, the perennial favourite of whores, William can’t smell it. Could it possibly be … water?

  ‘What am I to call you?’ wonders William, resting his chin on his locked hands the way he used to do as a student. ‘There must be more to your name than … ‘

  She smiles. Her lips are extraordinarily dry, like white tree-bark. Why does this strike him as beautiful rather than ugly? It’s beyond him.

  ‘Sugar is all there is to my name, Mr Hunt. Unless there’s another name you particularly wish to know me by?’

  ‘No, no,’ William assures her. ‘Sugar it is.’

  ‘What’s in a name, after all?’ she remarks, and raises one furry eyebrow. Can it be that she’s quoting Shakespeare? Coincidence, surely, but how sweet she smells!

  The Fireside’s tenor has resumed warbling. William feels the place becoming warmer and friendlier; the lights seem to burn more golden, the shadows turn a rich dark brown, and everyone in the great room seems to be smiling bright-eyed at a companion. The door swings open frequently now, admitting smarter and smarter folk. The noise of their arrivals, the chatter, and the singing which strains to soar above it, grows into such a din that William and Sugar must lean close to one another’s faces in order to converse.

  Gazing into her eyes, which are so large and shiny that he sees his face reflected, William Rackham rediscovers the elusive joy of being William Rackham. There is a will-o’-the-wisp of behaviours, alcohol-fuelled and fragile, that he singles out as being his true self, quite distinct from the thickening physical lump he sees in the looking-glass every morning. The mirror cannot lie, and yet it does, it does! It cannot reflect the flame-like destinies trapped inside the frustrated soul. For William ought to have been a Keats, a Bulwer Lytton, or even a Chatterton, but instead is transmogrifying, outwardly at least, into a gross copy of his own father. Rare indeed are the moments when he can illuminate a captivated audience with the glow of his youthful promise.

  He and Sugar speak, and Rackham comes to life. He has been dead these past few years, dead! Only now can he admit that he has been underground, hiding in fear from anyone worth knowing, deliberately avoiding bright company. Any company, in fact, in which he might be tempted or called upon to … well, let’s put it this way: what is audacious promise in a golden-haired youth can be mocked, in a man with greying sideboards and an incipient triple chin, as mere gasbagging. For a long time now, William has made do with his internal monologues, his fantasies on park benches and the lavatory, immune from the risk of sniggers and yawns.

  In Sugar’s company, however, it’s different: he listens to himself talk, and is relieved to find that his own voice can still weave magic. Wreathed in the subtle haze of steam rising from her, Rackham holds forth: fluent, charming and intelligent, witty and full of sensibility. He imagines his face shining with youth, his hair smoothing itself out and flowing like Swinburne’s.

  Sugar, for her part, has not a fault; she is scrupulously respectful, gently good-humoured, thoughtful and flattering. It’s even possible, thinks William, that she likes him. Surely her laughter is not the sort that can be faked, and surely the sparkle in her eyes — that same sparkle he inspired in Agnes long ago — cannot be counterfeited.

  And, to William’s surprise and deep satisfaction, he and Sugar do converse about books after all, just as the whores mischievously predicted. Why, the girl’s a prodigy! She has an amazing knowledge of literature, lacking only Latin, Greek and the male’s instinctive grasp of what is major and minor. In terms of sum total of pages she seems to have read almost as much as he (although some of it, inevitably, is the sort of piffle written for and by her own sex — novels about timid governesses and so forth). Yet she’s well-versed in many of the authors he holds in high esteem — and she adores Swift! Swift, his favourite! To most women — Agnes among them, unfortunately — Swift is the name of a cough lozenge, or a bird to be worn stuffed on their bonnets. But Sugar … Sugar can even pronounce ‘Houyhnhnms’ — and God, doesn’t her mouth make a pretty shape when she does! And Smollett! She’s read Peregrine Pickle, and not only that, she can discuss it intelligently — certainly as intelligently as he could have done, at her age. (What is her age? No, he dares not ask.)

  ‘But that’s not possible!’ she protests demurely, when he confesses that he hasn’t yet read James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, even now, a full year after its publication. ‘How terribly busy you must be, Mr Hunt, to be kept from such a pleasure so long!’

  Rackham strains to recall the literary reviews.

  ‘Son of a sailor, wasn’t he?’ he ventures.

  ‘Orphan, orphan,’ she enthuses, as if it were the grandest thing in the world. ‘Became a teacher in a military asylum. But the poem is a miracle, Mr Hunt, a miracle!’

  ‘I’ll certainly endeavour to find time … no, I shall make time, to read it,’ he says, but she leans close to his ear and saves him the bother:

  ‘Eyes of fire,’ she recites in a throaty whisper, loud enough nonetheless to surmount the singing and the chatter all around them.

  ‘Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;

  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath

  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;

  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold

  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:

  But I strode on austere;

  No hope could have no fear.’

  Breathless with emotion, she lowers her eyes.

  ‘Grim poetry,’ comments William, ‘for such a beautiful young woman to have as a special favourite.’ Sugar smiles sadly.

  ‘Life can be grim,’ she says. ‘Especially when fit companions — like yourself, sir — are difficult to find.’

  William is tempted to assure her that, in his opinion, More Sprees in London has not praised her accomplishments anywhere near highly enough, but he can’t bring himself to say it. Instead, they talk on and on, about Truth and Beauty, and the works of Shakespeare, and whether there is any meaningful distinction to be made nowadays between a small hat and a bonnet.

  ‘Watch,’ says Sugar, and, with both her hands, pushes her bonnet well forward on her head. ‘Now it’s a hat! And watch again. — she pushes it well back – ‘Now it’s a bonnet!’

  ‘Magic,’ grins William. And indeed it is.

  Sugar’s little demonstration of fashion’s absurdity has left her hair even more disordered than before. Her thick fringe, quite dry by now, has tumbled loose, obscuring her vision. William stares, half in disgust, half in adoration, as she pouts her lower lip as far as it will go and blows a puff of air upwards. Golden-red curls flutter off her forehead, and her eyes are unveiled once more, mildly shocking in how far apart they are, perfect in how far apart they are.
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  ‘I feel as though we’re courting,’ he tells her, thinking that it may make her laugh.

  Instead she says very solemnly, ‘Oh, Mr Hunt, it so flatters me that I should inspire such treatment.’

  This last word hangs in the smoky air a moment, reminding William why he came here tonight, and why he sought out Sugar specially. He imagines afresh the treatment he was raring — still is raring, damn it — to mete out to a woman. Can he still ask that of her? He recalls the way she said she would do anything, anything he asked of her; resavours the exquisite gravity of her assurance …

  ‘Perhaps,’ he ventures, ‘it’s time you took me home and … introduced me to your family.’

  Sugar nods once, slowly, her eyes half-closing as she does so. She knows when simple, mute assent is called for.

  It is, in any case, almost closing time. Rackham could have guessed this even without consulting his watch, for, on The Fireside’s stage, the singer is sharing a heaving chest full of sentiment with the last tipsy patrons. The patrons bray in approximate unison with his warble, a beery confraternity, as serving-maids remove empty glasses from slackening grasps. It’s an old song, a rousing bit of doggerel almost universally (if the universe is considered to extend no further than England) sung at pub closing time:

  ‘Hearts of oak are our ships,

  Jolly tars are our men:

  We are always ready,

  Steady, boys, steady,

  We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again’.’

  ‘Last drinks, ladies and gentlemen, please!’

  William and Sugar winch themselves out of their seats; their limbs are stiff from too much conversation. Rackham finds that his genitals have gone to sleep, though a faint galvanic tingling between his legs reassures him that the anaesthesia will pass away soon enough. In any case, he’s no longer in a mad hurry to perform feats of lascivious heroics: he still hasn’t asked her if she’s read Flaubert …

  Sugar turns to leave. The burden of rainwater having wholly evaporated, during the course of the evening, from her dress, she looks lighter in colour, all in green and pale grey. But sitting so long on her wet skirts has pressed anarchic pleats into them, crude triangles pointing up towards her hidden rump, and Rackham feels strangely protective towards her for her ignorance of this, wishing he could get Letty to iron Sugar’s skirts for her and make them neat, before he removes them once and for all. Made awkward by these feelings of tenderness, he follows her through The Fireside, stumbling past empty tables and unpeopled chairs. When did all these people leave? He didn’t notice their departures. How much has he drunk? Sugar is erect as a lance, walking straight towards the exit without a word. He hurries to catch up, breathing deeply of the air she lets in as she opens the door.

  Outside in the streets, it’s no longer raining. The gas-lights glow, the footpaths shine, and most of the hawkers have retired for the night. Here and there, women less beautiful than Sugar loiter under yellowish lamps, sour-faced, commonplace, and surplus to requirements.

  ‘Is it far?’ enquires Rackham as they turn the corner into Silver Street together.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Sugar, gliding two steps ahead of him, her hand trailing behind almost maternally, the gloved fingers wiggling in empty air as if expecting him to seize hold like a child. ‘Close, very close.’

  SIX

  Just three words, if spoken by the right person at the moment, are enough to make infatuation flower with marvellous speed, popping up like a nub of bright pink from unfurling foreskin. Nor need those three magic words be ‘I love you’. In the case of Miss Sugar and George W. Hunt, venturing out into dark wet streets after heavy rain, walking side by side under gas-lamps and a drained empty sky, the three magic words are these: ‘Watch your step.’

  It’s Sugar who utters them; she’s taken hold of her companion’s hand and, for a moment, steers him closer to her, away from a puddle of creamy vomit quivering on the cobbles. (It’s probably brown, but the gas-light adds a yellowish tinge.) William registers everything at once: the vomit, barely visible inside his own sprawling shadow; his feet, stumbling, almost tripping on the hems of Sugar’s skirts; the gentle tug on his hand; the faint hubbub of strangers’ voices nearby; the sobering chill of the air after the boozy warmth of The Fireside; and those three words: ‘Watch your step.’

  Spoken by anyone other than Sugar, they would be words of warning, or even threat. But, issuing from her slender throat, modulated by her mouth and tongue and lips, they are neither. They are an invitation to be safe, a murmured welcome into a charmed embrace that wards off all misfortune, an affectionate entreaty to keep firm hold of the woman who knows the way. William disengages his hand from hers, worried that a respectable person of his acquaintance might, even at this late and unlikely hour, chance upon him here. Yet his freed hand tingles, through the leather of his gloves, at the after-feel of her grip — strong as a cocky young man’s handshake.

  Watch your step. The words are still resounding in his head. Her voice … husky, yes … but such a musical tone, an ascending trio of notes, do re fa, an imperfect but delightful arpeggio of feminine breath, an air played on the flute d’arnour. What must a voice like that sound like in the crescendo of passion?

  Sugar is moving faster now, gliding over the dark cobbles at a speed he would reserve for daytime. Beneath her skirts, she must be taking deplorably unfeminine steps, to move at the same pace as him: all right, granted, he may not be the tallest of men, but his legs are surely no shorter than normal — indeed, if the stunted lower classes were admitted into the equation, might his legs not be longer than average? And what’s that sound? He’s not … panting, is he? Christ Almighty, he mustn’t pant. It’s all the beer he’s drunk, yes, and the exhaustion he’s been suffering lately, mounting up. Even as Sugar beckons him, with an almost imperceptible gesture, to follow her into a dark, narrow close, he turns his head back into the fresher air and sniffs deeply, trying to snatch a second wind.

  Maybe the girl is hurrying because she fears he’ll grow impatient, or that he’ll baulk at following her into a dark passage of uncertain length harbouring God knows what. But William has entered many pleasure houses from alleys as dark and narrow as this one; he has, in his time, descended stone stairwells so deep that he began to wonder if his paramour’s boudoir was burrowed straight into one of Bazalgette’s great sewers. No, he is not unreasonably fastidious, and not the claustrophobic sort, although naturally he has a preference for bright, airy brothels (who wouldn’t?). However, he’s so smitten with Sugar that, to be honest, he’d willingly follow her into the rankest cloaca.

  Or would he? Has he lost all reason? This girl is nothing more than a …

  ‘This way.’

  He hastens after her, following the words like a scent trail. Oh my, her voice is like an angel’s! An exquisite whisper leading him through the dark. He would follow that whisper even if there was nothing attached to it. But she is more than a whisper — she is a woman with a brain in her head! He has never met anyone remotely like her, except himself. Like him, she thinks Tennyson isn’t up to much lately and, like him, she believes trans-Atlantic cables and dynamite will change the world far more than Schliemann’s rediscovery of Troy, despite all the fuss. And what a mouth and throat she has! ‘Anything you ask of me’: that’s what she promised him. ‘We’re here,’ she says now.

  But where is ‘here’? He looks all about him, trying to get his bearings. Where is Silver Street? Is Mrs Castaway’s address yet another of More Sprees’ falsifications? But no: aren’t those the lights of Silver Street shining on the far side of this modest Georgian house? This is just a back entrance, yes? It’s not a bad-looking place, solid and without any evidence of decay, although it’s hard to tell in the dark. But the contours of the house look straight and symmetrical, defined by the lights of Silver Street beyond, a haze of gaseous radiance around the gables and rooftop like a … what’s the word he’s looking for? an aurora? an aura? — one is spiritualist
nonsense, the other a scientific phenomenon, but which? … aur-aur-aur … The Fireside’s deceptively frothy ale has numbed his brain’s voice and given his thoughts a stutter.

  ‘Home,’ he hears Sugar say.

  A complicated knock — the tattoo of secrecy — admits Sugar and her companion into Mrs Castaway’s dimly lit hallway. William expects to see a spoony-man holding the inner doorknob, a leering stubbly-faced ape such as ushered him out the back door in Drury Lane, but he is wrong. Standing there, a good eighteen inches lower than his first gaze, is a small boy, blue-eyed and as innocent looking as a shepherd’s lad from a Nativity scene. ‘Hello, Christopher,’ says Sugar.

  ‘Please come into the front room, sir,’ says the boy, reciting his line primly, casting a glance of infant collusion at Sugar. Intrigued, William allows himself to be led into the sombre but sumptuously papered vestibule, towards a door that stands ajar, emitting warmth and light. The child runs ahead, disappearing into the glow.

  ‘Not yours, is he?’ William asks Sugar.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replies, her eyebrows raised, mock-scandalised, her lips curving into a grin. ‘I’m a spinster.’

  In the dimness of the vestibule, the glow of the door they’re approaching illuminates Sugar’s mouth strangely, outlining the rough, peeling texture of her lips in pure white. William wants to feel those feathery lips closing around the shaft of his prick. More urgently, though, he wants to empty his bladder — no, not into her mouth, anywhere — and then lay himself down to sleep.

  As he enters the parlour, it’s as if he is already dreaming. An obscure female figure sits in a far corner, face turned away from him, smoke rising from her hair. A tentative violoncello is playing, invisible and plaintive, then stops with an asthmatic scrape of catgut. The upper parts of the walls, seamed with a dado rail, are painted lurid peach, and crowded with framed miniatures; the lower parts are papered with a dense design of strawberries, thorns and red roses. And, in the centre of the parlour, directly under a bombastic bronze chandelier, sits Mrs Castaway.