by Michel Faber
‘Not a very happy tale,’ says Ashwell. ‘One of Lucy’s admirers took to her, apparently.’
‘Took to her?’ echoes William, his own feelings for Sugar causing him to construe the phrase benignly.
‘Yes,’ says Bodley. ‘With her own riding crop.’
‘Beat her very severely.’
‘Particularly about the face and mouth.’
‘I understand all the fight’s gone out of her now.’
Bodley, noticing his cigar has gone out, removes it from his lips and examines its potential momentarily before tossing it into the fire.
‘Well, as you can imagine,’ he says. ‘Madam Georgina doesn’t have high hopes. Even if she’s willing to wait, there will be scars.’
Ashwell, eyes downcast, is picking at the lint on his trousers. ‘Poor girl,’ he laments.
‘Yes,’ smirks Bodley. ‘How are the fighty maulen!’
At this, Ashwell and Rackham both wince. ‘Bodley!’ one of them cries. ‘That’s appalling!’
Bodley grins and blushes at the chastisement like a schoolboy.
Just then the door of the smoking-room flies open and Janey bursts across the threshold, panting and distressed.
‘I — I’m sorry,’ she says, tottering on tiptoes, as if a great filthy flood were surging against her back, threatening to spill past her into this smoky masculine domain.
‘What is it, Janey!’ (The girl’s looking at Bodley, damn it: doesn’t she even know which man is her master?)
‘Sir — if you please — I mean–’ Janey bobs up and down in a nervous dance, less a curtsey than a pantomime of needing to pee. ‘Oh, sir — your daughter — she’s — she’s all bloody, Mr Rackham!’
‘My daughter? All bloody? Good Lord, what? All bloody where?’
Janey cringes in an ecstasy of anxiety.
‘All over, sir!’ she wails.
‘Well …uh …’ flusters William, astounded that this emergency has landed in his lap rather than someone else’s. ‘Why isn’t …uh … what’s-her-name … ‘
Janey, feeling herself accused, is almost in a frenzy. ‘Nurse ain’t ‘ere, sir, she went to fetch Doctor Curlew. And I can’t find Miss Playfair, she must ‘ave gone out too, and Miss Tillotson, she won’t–’
‘Yes, yes, I see now.’ Social humiliation burns on Rackham’s shoulders like Hercules’ fatal shirt of Nessus. Inescapably, there are too few servants in his house just now, and those that are left are the wrong kind for this emergency, and — more embarrassing even than this — he has a wife who, alas, does not function. Therefore — guests or no guests — he must step down and see to this matter himself.
‘My friends, I am sorry …’ he begins, but Ashwell, sensitive to William’s plight, takes the mood of the moment in hand and commands the sobbing Janey thus:
‘Well, don’t just stand there, Janey — bring the child down here?
‘Yes!’ Bodley chips in. ‘This is just what’s needed on a rainy morning: drama, bloodshed — and feminine charm.’
At a nod from William the servant runs off, and yes, now they hear it: the animal wail of a child. Muted at first, then (presumably when the door of the nursery is opened) distinctly audible, even above the rain. Louder and louder it grows, heralding the child’s progress down the stairs, until finally it is very loud indeed, and accompanied by a descant of anxious whisperings and shushings.
‘Please, Miss Sophie,’ whines Janey as she escorts into the smoking-room William and Agnes’s only begotten infant. ‘Please? But Miss Sophie Rackham cannot be persuaded to scream any softer.
Despite all the din, you are intrigued: fancy William being a father! All this time you’ve spent with him, in the most intimate of circumstances, and you’d no idea! What does this daughter of his look like? How old is she? Three? Six? But you can’t tell. Her features are distorted and obscured by blood and weeping. There’s a bulge under her bloodstained pinafore, which Sophie cradles through the cloth with one bloody hand, to keep it all in, but two flaccid rag-doll legs have slipped out already, dangling their crudely stitched feet. Sophie clutches and clutches, trying to gather the legs up, shrieking all the while. Blood bubbles out of her face, dripping off her tangled mop of blonde hair, spattering the Persian carpet and her pale, bare toes.
‘What on Earth,’ gasps William, but Bodley has already sprung up from his chair, waved Janey away, and knelt before the gory child, cupping the back of her skull in his hands.
‘Wh-what’s wrong with her, Bodley?’
There is a terrible pause, then Bodley gravely announces: ‘I’m afraid it’s … epistaxis! A proboscidiferous haemorrhage! Quickly, child: who is to have custody of the doll?’
William collapses back into his chair, struck by relief and anger. ‘Bodley!’ he yells over Sophie’s ceaseless wailing. ‘This is no laughing matter. A child’s life is a fragile thing!”
‘Nonsense,’ tushes Bodley, still on his knees before the child. ‘A biff on the nose, is it then? How did you get that, hmm? Sophie?’ She screams on, so he tugs the legs of her doll to get her attention. Encouraged by her reaction, he lifts her pinafore, exposing her toy.
‘Now, Sophie,’ he cautions, ‘you must put your little friend down. You’re frightening him to death!’ Instantly the pitch of Sophie’s wailing drops considerably, and Bodley pushes through. ‘From the way you’re weeping he must think he’s about to be orphaned — left all alone! Come now, put him down — or no, give him to me for a moment. Look, his eyes are wide with fright!’ The doll, a Hindoo boy with ‘Twinings’ embroidered on his chest, is indeed wide-eyed, his chocolate-brown bisque head disturbingly lifelike in comparison with his limp rag body, a soft hemp skeleton swathed in cotton clout suggestive of smock and pantalettes. Sophie looks her coolie in the face, sees the fear there — and hands him over to the gentleman.
‘Now,’ Bodley goes on, ‘you must prove to him that you’re really all right, which you can’t do with all that blood on your face.’ (Sophie’s wailing has been reduced to a snivel, though her nose is still bubbling crimson.) ‘Ashwell, give me your handkerchief.’
‘My handkerchief?’
‘Be reasonable, Ashwell; mine is still fashionable.’ Never taking his eyes off Sophie, and holding her doll in one arm, he extends his other arm behind him, wiggling the fingers impatiently until the handkerchief is surrendered. Then he sets to, mopping and dabbing at Sophie’s face, so vigorously that she sways on her feet. As he wipes, he catches sight of Janey out of the corner of his eye, and instructs her, in a sing-song schoolmasterly tone:
‘Come now, Janey. I shall need a wet cloth presently, shan’t I?’
The servant gapes, too dazed to move.
‘Wet cloth,’ simplifies Bodley patiently. ‘Two parts cloth, one part water.’
A nod from William frees Janey to run off on this errand, even as the handkerchief begins to unmask the features of his only child. She is merely sniffling now, lifting her head in rhythm with the stranger’s strokes against her face, trusting him instinctively.
‘Look!’ says Bodley, directing her attention to the Hindoo boy. ‘He feels much better, don’t you see?’
Sophie nods, the last tears rolling out of her enormous red-rimmed eyes, and stretches out her arms for her doll.
‘All right,’ judges Bodley. ‘But mind! You mustn’t get him all bloody.’ He takes a fold of her pinafore between two fingers and holds it up so she can see how wet it is. Without demur, she allows him to lift the offending garment over her head; he has it off with a swift one-handed motion.
‘There now,’ he says, tenderly.
Janey returns with the wet flannel, and makes as if to wipe Sophie’s face with it, but Bodley takes the cloth from her and performs the task himself. Sophie Rackham, her features now uncamouflaged and her cheeks less swollen, is revealed a plain, serious-looking child, certainly no candidate for a Pears’ Soap advertisement — or a Rackhams’ one, at that. Her large eyes are china blue, but protruding and cheerle
ss, and her curly blonde hair hangs limp. More than anything else she has the air of a domestic pet bought for a child who has since died; an obsolete pet that is given food, lodging, and even the occasional pat of affection, but no reason for living at all.
‘Your little friend has a stain on him; we must wash it off,’ Bodley is saying to her. ‘Every second counts.’
She lays her tiny hand on his, and together they sponge at the blood on the Hindoo’s back; she would do anything for this sympathetic stranger, anything.
‘I once knew of a doll who got cranberry sauce all over her hair,’ he tells her, ‘and no one saw to it until much too late. By then, it was hard as tar — with the consequence that her hair had to be shaved off, and she caught pneumonia.’
Sophie looks at him anxiously, too shy to ask the question.
‘No, she didn’t die,’ says Bodley. ‘But she has remained, from that day onward, entirely bald.’ And he raises his eyebrows as far as they will go, pouting in mock disappointment at the idea of one’s eyebrows being the only hairs left on one’s head. Sophie chuckles.
This chuckle, and the screams she came in with, are the only sounds you are going to hear her utter, here in her father’s smoking-room. Nurse is always telling her she knows nothing, but she knows that well-behaved children are neither seen nor heard. Already she has caused a fuss for which she will no doubt be punished; she must become silent and invisible as soon as possible, to placate what’s coming to her.
Yet, even as Sophie stands mute, hunching her shoulders to take up less room, William is amazed at how big she’s grown. It seems like only last week that Sophie was a newborn babe, sleeping invisibly in her cot, while elsewhere in the house, a feverish Agnes lay sobbing in hers. Why, she’s not even a toddler anymore, she’s a … what would one call it? a girl! But how is it possible that he hasn’t noticed the transformation? It’s not as if he doesn’t see her often enough to note her progress — he glimpses her, oh … several times a week! But somehow, she never impressed him as being quite so … old. God almighty: he remembers now the day when his father gave that hideous doll to the baby Sophie — something he picked up on a trade visit to India, a Twinings mascot originally meant to sit astride a tin elephant filled with tea. Wasn’t it on that same day that his father loudly declared, in front of the servants, that William had better start ‘boning up’ on the perfume trade? Yes! And this child, this plain-faced girl with blood on her feet, this overgrown infant whose back is turned to him as she and his old chum Philip Bodley indulge in foolishness together … she is the living embodiment of the years since; years of veiled threats and enforced economies. How he would like to be the sort of father depicted in ladies’ journals, lifting his smiling tot like a trophy in the air while his adoring wife looks on! But he hasn’t an adoring wife anymore, and his daughter is tainted by misery.
He clears his throat. ‘Janey,’ he says, ‘don’t you think Mr Bodley has done quite enough?’
* * *
Who to follow now? Janey, I suggest. Mr Bodley and Mr Ashwell are about to leave anyway, and William Rackham will then immediately resume his study of the Rackham papers. He’ll barely move for hours, so unless you are madly curious about the cost of unwoven Dundee jute as a cheap substitute for cotton wool, or the secrets of making potpourri-scented migraine sachets, you are likely to have a more interesting time with Janey and Sophie as they sit in the nursery, waiting for Beatrice to return.
Janey squats beside Sophie on the floor, clutching her abdomen, suffering the wickedest stomach pains she’s ever had in her life. It must be the stolen morsels of the Rackhams’ breakfast she ate … her punishment from God, a skewer going right through her guts. She rocks to and fro, arms wrapped around her knees, Sophie’s blood-soaked pinafore folded in her lap. What on Earth is she supposed to do with it? Will she be punished by Cook for leaving the kitchen? Will she be punished by Nurse for allowing the Rackhams’ child to come to harm? Punished by Miss Playfair, for rushing to investigate Sophie’s screams instead of finishing the cleaning of the dining-room? Punished by Miss Tillotson for … whatever Miss Tillotson feels like punishing her for today? How did this happen to her, these bloody mishaps and tasks undone, and she to blame, and a thousand girls jostling to take her place? Oh please, let Mr Rackham not dismiss her! Where could she go? Home is too far away, and it’s raining so hard! She’ll end up on the streets, she will! Her honour is all she has to her name, but she knows she’s not brave enough to starve for it! But no, please no: she’ll work harder for the Rackhams, yes she will, harder than she’s ever worked before; she just needs a little more time to learn what her new duties actually are.
‘Who was that man?’
Janey turns towards the unfamiliar sound of Sophie Rackham’s voice. She squints, trying not to look at Sophie’s Bristol top spinning on the floor in front of the little girl’s skirts, for fear it might make her feel more bilious.
‘Beg pardon, Miss Sophie?’
‘Who was that man?’ the child repeats, as the top spins drunkenly on to its side.
‘What man, Miss Sophie?’ Janey’s voice is squeezed thin with pain.
‘The nice one.’
Janey struggles to remember a nice man.
‘I din’t know nobody there, I never seen them before,’ she pleads. ‘Except Mr Rackham.’
Sophie spins her top again. ‘He’s my father, did you know?’ she says, frowning. She’s keen to teach Janey the facts of life: servants deserve to learn things too, in her opinion. ‘And his father, my father’s father, is a very ‘portnant man. He has a long beard, and he goes to India, Liv’pool, everywhere. He’s the same Rackham that you see on the soap and the perfume.’
Janey’s soap is made of leftover slivers from the kitchen, doled out by Cook on a weekly basis, and she has never in her life seen a bottle of perfume. She smiles and nods, in agony, pretending to understand.
‘The nice man,’ Sophie tries again. ‘Has he never come to the house before?’
‘I don’t know, Miss Rackham.’ ‘Why not?’
used to work all the time only in the scullery. Now I work in the kitchen too — and I bring out the food sometimes, and … and other rings. But I ain’t …I ain’t been out in the ‘ouse much yet.’
‘Me neither.’ It’s a shy pleasure, this illicit comradeship with the lowliest of servants. Little Sophie peers directly into Janey’s face, wondering if anything unusual is going to happen, now that they’ve shared such intimacy. This could be a special day, the beginning of a new life; why, this is the way friendships start in storybooks! Sophie opens her eyes as wide as she can and smiles, giving the servant permission to speak her heart, to propose (perhaps) a secret rendezvous after bedtime.
Janey smiles back, whey-faced, rocking on her heels. She opens her lips to speak, then suddenly pitches forward on her knees and spews a pale shawl of vomit onto the nursery floor. Two open-mouthed, silent-scream retches, and she spews again. Bile, stewed tea, Cook’s morning gruel and glimmering bits of bacon puddle out onto the polished boards.
Seconds later, the nursery door swings open: it’s Beatrice, returning at last. In the rest of the Rackham house, as by a wave of a magic wand, everything is back to normal: Doctor Curlew is climbing the stairs to Mrs Rackham’s bedroom, Mr Rackham’s old schoolfriends have left, Letty is back from the stationers, the rain is waning. Only here in the nursery –where, by rights, everything should always be perfectly under control — is anything amiss: a revolting stench; Sophie dishevelled, tangle-haired, barefoot; the scullery maid on her hands and knees, with no bucket or mop in sight, stupidly staring down at a pool of sick in the middle of the room, and … what’s this? Sophie’s pinafore, covered in blood!
Growing erect with fury, Beatrice Cleave brings the full power of her basilisk stare to bear on the Rackham child, the bane of her life, the sinful creature who cannot be trusted for five minutes, the useless daughter of an undeserving heir to an unworthy fortune. Under the weight of that stare
, little Sophie cowers, points a trembling, grubby finger at Janey.
‘She done it.’
Beatrice winces, but resolves to resume the war on the child’s grammar later, after a few other mysteries have been solved.
‘Now,’ she says, hands on hips, even as the first rays of sunshine flicker in through the nursery window, turning the pool of vomit silver and gold. ‘From the beginning …!’
EIGHT
Before we go on, though … Forgive me if I misjudge you, but I get the impression, from the way you’re looking at the Rackhams’ house — at its burnished staircases and its servant-infested passageways and its gaslit, ornately decorated rooms — that you think it’s very old. On the contrary, it’s quite new. So new that if, for example, William decides it really will not do to have a trickle of rain stealing through the French windows in the parlour, he only has to ferret out the business card of the carpenter who guaranteed the seal.
In the boyhood of Henry Calder Rackham, when Notting Hill was a still a rural hamlet in the parish of Kensington, cows grazed on the spot where you have seen, fifty years later, William and Agnes making their own less successful attempt to breakfast together. Porto Bello was a farm, as was Notting Barn. Wormwood Scrubs was scrub, and Shepherds Bush was a place where one might find shepherds. The raw materials of the Rackhams’ dining-room were, in those days, still untouched in quarries and forests, and William’s bachelor father was far too busy with his factories and his farms to give serious thought to housing, or even siring, an heir.
All the years leading up to his marriage, Henry Calder Rackham lived in a rather grand house in Westbourne, but liked to joke (especially when talking to intractable snobs whose friendship he couldn’t win) that his true home was Paddington Station, for ‘a man’s business is liable to go to the dogs every day that he don’t go and see how his workers are getting on.’ Work has never been a dirty word to Henry Calder Rackham, although — bafflingly — this has never yet earned him the devotion of his own employees. To those that toil in his factories, the sight of him pacing the iron ramps above their heads in his black suit and top hat falls short of inspiring solidarity. But then, perhaps he’s a simple country man at heart … although the workers in his lavender fields don’t seem to have warmed to him much either. Could it be they labour under the misapprehension that the sturdy rustic clothes he wears whenever he visits them are an affectation, rather than his preferred garb?