by Michel Faber
‘It gives me great pleasure,’ he says, bringing to light the ten guineas which the sale of some of Agnes’s long-unused possessions has raised, ‘to solemnise our agreement.’
Mrs Castaway accepts the money, and her face appears, all of a sudden, ancient and weary.
‘I’m sure you can imagine greater pleasures than signing your name, Mr Hunt,’ she says. ‘Wake up, Sugar dear.’
Agnes stares at the small ivory knobs on the bedside cabinet, taking careful note of every tiny nick and scratch in each one. The shadow of the doctor’s head falls across her face; his fingers are not inside her anymore. ‘I’m afraid all is not as it should be.’
The words come to Agnes like overheard chatter from a railway platform opposite one’s own. She is beginning to dream, her eyes shutting and her face shiny with perspiration, a dream she has already dreamed many times in her sleep, but never before while awake. The dream of the journey …
But Doctor Curlew is speaking, trying to summon her back. Gently but firmly he prods a spot on Mrs Rackham’s naked abdomen.
‘You feel this spot here? where I touch? That is where your womb has moved, much higher up than it ought to be, which is more … here.’ His finger slides down towards the motte of blonde hair at which Agnes has glanced perhaps twenty times in her whole life, each time with shame. This time, however, there is no shame to feel, for the doctor’s finger is sliding (as she perceives it in her dream) not on her body, but on a surface somewhere beyond it: a windowpane perhaps. She’s in a train, and as it moves away from the station, someone on the platform outside is putting his finger against the window of her compartment. Agnes closes her eyes.
Up in Sugar’s room, William unpins his collars while Sugar kneels at his feet. She nuzzles the flies of his trousers with her face.
‘R-r-r-r-r,’ she purrs.
The buttons of William’s shirt are stiff; he has worn his best to impress Mrs Castaway. While struggling to undo them, he glances at the escritoire, which is covered in papers as before. Masculine-looking papers, not leaves of tinted rice-paper and floral-patterned envelopes, not a bound volume of recipes and homilies illustrated with prissy watercolours, not puzzles or brain-teasers from the popular press. No, these papers lie on Sugar’s desk in untidy stacks, scrawled and blotted on, crumpled, in amongst candle-stubs. And, on top of them all, a printed pamphlet, dense with text, scored in the margins with India-ink annotations.
‘Whatever you’re working on there, I can see it’s no easy labour,’ he remarks.
‘Nothing to interest a man,’ she murmurs, clawing gently at his buttocks with both hands. ‘Come, take me.’
The bed’s drapes are already tied back, like theatre curtains. In the bedhead mirror, William watches his reflection being led, stumbling, towards the rumpled sheets that still smell of him and Sugar.
‘My little cunt is dripping for you, Mr Hunt,’ she whispers.
‘No, call me William, really,’ he says. ‘And please let me reassure you: you don’t have to work at anything anymore, except … ‘
‘Mmm, yes,’ she says, pulling him onto the bed next to her. She gathers up the soft, loose fabric of her dressing-gown and tosses it over his head; he squirms, but she sheaths him snugly inside, trapping him against her midriff. His breath is hot and humid on her flesh; she feels him burrowing upwards, heading for the light at her neck.
‘Oooh, not yet,’ she croons, holding him back through the fabric. ‘My breasts are burning for you.’
He begins to lick — gently, thank God. She’s had men go after her nipples as if ducking for apples in a barrel. This one’s lips are soft, his tongue is smooth, his teeth are barely noticeable. Harmless as any man can be, and with plenty of ready money. If he wants her name on a contract, well, why not?
But Holy Jesus, she’ll have to keep him from seeing what’s on her writing-desk. Her mother caught her by surprise, that’s for sure, by pulling on the cord so early. Dead to the world she was, in a dream buried deep inside her pillow. How could she be expected, in her sleepy state, to think of clearing her desk? Getting herself downstairs without breaking her neck was as much as she could manage. And what for? No one could blame her, surely, for failing to guess it was to pledge eternal fidelity to a man …
Still, she’ll have to be more careful in future: her papers can’t be in the open like this, for him to sniff at. What’s uppermost on her desk just now? She tries to picture it as she lifts her gown, to give her man some air … Could it be that horrid little pamphlet concerning …oh Lord, yes! She blenches at the thought of what, if she hadn’t led him away, he might have stuck his nose into.
Open on her escritoire lies a medical tract, stolen from the public library’s reading room in Trevor Square. The text itself would be no surprise to him; he’s likely to have seen it all before:
No woman can be a serious thinker, without injury to her function as the conceiver and mother of children. Too often, the female ‘intellectual’ is a youthful invalid or virtual hermaphrodite, who might otherwise have been a healthy wife.
Let us close our ears, then, to siren voices offering us a quantity of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled and sickly race. Healthy serviceable wombs are of more use to the Future than any amount of feminine scribbling.
No, it’s not the text, but Sugar’s handwritten comments in the mar-gins that her new benefactor must at all costs not see: Pompous oaf! here; Tyranny! there; Wrong, wrong, wrong! over there and, scrawled under the conclusion in angry blotted ink: We’ll see about that, you poxy old fool! There’s a new century coming soon, and you and your kind will be DEAD!
As Doctor Curlew rummages in the compartments of his satchel for the leech box, he spies, under his patient’s bed, the cover of a journal not sanctioned by him. (It’s the London Periodical Review, which Agnes is reading for the perfectly innocent reason that she wishes to know what she’s supposed to think of the new paintings she’s not been able to see, the new poetry she hasn’t read, and the recent history she hasn’t witnessed, in case, next Season, she is put on the spot for an opinion.)
‘Pardon me, Mrs Rackham,’ he says, still unaware that she no longer hears him. He has the offending item in his hand, and holds it up for her unseeing eyes to recognise. ‘Is this your journal?’
He doesn’t wait for a reply; his admonition is impervious to excuses. Nor would it have made any difference if the item had not been the London Periodical Review but Mrs Henry Wood’s The Shadow of Ashlydyat or some such rubbish. Excessively thrilling reading, excessively taxing reading, excessively pathetic reading, too much washing, too much sun, tight corsets, ice-cream, asparagus, foot-warmers: these and many more are causes of the womb’s distress. But no matter, he has a remedy.
Doctor Curlew appraises for a moment the patch of white skin behind one of Agnes’s ears, then places, with precision, the first of the leeches there. Agnes chooses this inopportune moment to venture out of her dream, in case the real world should, in the interim, have become safe again. She observes the leech being conveyed through the air towards her, clamped in the tongs. Before she can retreat into unconsciousness she has felt the cold touch of the instrument behind her ear, and though she cannot feel the leech begin to suck, she nevertheless imagines a watery spiral of blood swimming up through her innards towards her head, like a crimson worm in a viscous medium. But then she’s back in her dream and, by the time Doctor Curlew applies the second leech, the passenger train is again in motion.
Gently, the doctor’s hands turn her head one hundred and eighty degrees on the pillow, for the process must be repeated on the other side.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Rackham.’
Agnes doesn’t stir: her journey has vaulted forward to its end. Two old men are carrying her stretcher from the railway terminus, deep in the heart of the countryside, to the gates of the Convent of Health. A nun rushes to open the gates, giant iron gates that rustle with ivy and hollyhock. The old men gently put the stretcher down on
the sunlit grass and doff their caps. The nun kneels beside Agnes and lays a cool palm on her brow.
‘Dear, dear child,’ she chides in loving exasperation. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
Passion spent, William is able to examine his prize more closely, studying her in loving detail. She lies cradled in his arm, apparently asleep, her eyelashes still. He combs his fingers through her hair, admiring all the unexpected colours to be found in it, hidden inside the red: streaks of pure gold, wisps of blond, single strands of dark auburn. Her skin is like nothing he’s ever seen: on every limb, and on her hips and belly, there are … what can he call them? Tiger stripes. Swirling geometric patterns of peeling dryness alternating with reddened flesh. They are symmetrical, as if scored on her skin by a painstaking aesthete, or an African savage. (Doctor Curlew, if he were here, could have told William, and Sugar for that matter, that she suffers from an unusually generalised psoriasis which, in places, crosses the diagnostic line into a rarer and more spectacular condition called ichthyosis. He might prescribe expensive ointments which would have no more effect on the cracks in Sugar’s hands or the flaky stripes on her thighs than the cheap oil she’s already using.) To William, the patterns are beguiling, a fitting mark of her animal nature. She smells like an animal too: or what he imagines animals smell like, for he’s no animal lover. Her sex is luxuriantly aromatic, her shame-hair twinkles with sweat and semen.
He lifts his head slightly to get a better view of her breasts. Supine, she’s almost flat-chested, but her nipples are full and unmistakably female. (And, when she’s the other way around, there’s enough for him to hold onto.) In truth, he’s delighted with every inch of her; she might almost be a thing designed for no purpose but to bring him to orgasm.
He squeezes her shoulders, to rouse her enough for a question he has been wanting to ask her for the best part of an hour.
‘Sugar?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Do you …Do you like me?’
She laughs throatily, turns her head against his, nuzzles his cheek.
‘Oh William, yessss,’ she says. ‘You’re my rescuer, aren’t you? My champion …’ She cups his genitals in her rough palm. ‘I can scarcely believe my good fortune.’
He stretches, closes his eyes in languor. She chews surreptitiously at her peeling lips, worrying at a wedge-shaped flake of skin that’s almost, but not quite, ready to come off. She must leave it alone, or it’ll bleed. How much money will she ask for this time? His big soft hand is on her breast, his heart is beating against her sharp shoulder-blade. On his face, an expression of happiness. It occurs to her — well, no, she suspected it from the moment she first looked in his eyes — that for all his transgressive posturing he is an infant searching for a warm bed to sleep in. If she will but smooth his greasy golden curls off his sweaty brow, he’ll give her anything she asks for in return.
He’s breathing deeply now, almost unconscious, when there’s a soft, hesitant knock at the door.
‘What the devil?’ he mutters.
But Sugar knows that knock.
‘Christopher!’ she calls, sotto voce. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ comes the child’s voice through the key-hole. ‘But I’ve a message from Mrs Castaway. For the gentleman. To remind ‘im — in case it’s slipped ‘is mind, like — of ‘is appointment. With a Mister Wilkie Collins.’
William turns to Sugar and smiles sheepishly.
‘Duty calls,’ he says.
* * *
Several hours later, Agnes Rackham feels the small feminine hands of Clara stroking her mechanically through the bedclothes, but she’s too deeply inside her dream to recognise them.
The dream, having reached its heavenly conclusion, has started again from the very beginning. She’s on her way to the Convent of Health: a train compartment has been specially prepared for her, to look as much like her own room as possible; she lies in a berth by the window, and on the walls there is proper wallpaper, and framed portraits of her mother and father.
She raises herself up from her pillow to look out onto the platform, which is bustling with activity, with passengers rushing to and fro, luggage-boys tottering under suitcases, pigeons fluttering up to the domed ceiling high above and, on the far platform nearest the street, the cab-horses stamping impatiently. The unsavoury man who had tapped on her window with his finger is gone, and in his place, a smiling old stationmaster strolls up and calls to her through the glass,
‘Are you all right, Miss?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, settling back into her pillow. Outside, a whistle is blown, and with nary a jolt the train rolls into motion.
An hour or so later still, William Rackham, ensconced in his study, rummages in the drawers of his desk and realises, with a slight shock, that there are no more Rackham papers he hasn’t read. He has finally ploughed through them all; he has extracted their essence. A large, leather-bound notebook lies open, and in it, in his own squarish handwriting, a number of unanswered questions. He’ll have answers to those questions soon enough.
Light-headed with Madeira and achievement, he tears the brown wrapper off a virgin parcel of Rackham Perfumeries letterhead, extracts a sheet, positions it carefully on the desk, secures it with his elbow, dips pen in ink, and writes under the company’s rose insignia:
Dear Father,
NINE
Some with me now, away from the filthy city streets, away from rooms that stink of fear and deceit, away from contracts forged in mucky cynicism. Love exists. Come with me to church.
It’s a cold but sunny Sunday morning, four months later. The air is pure, with nothing added to it but a subtle scent of rain and, here and there, a sparrow in flight. All along the path to the church, the dark wet grass is dotted with tiny white buds that will soon be daffodils. Maturer blossoms are to be found–
(What? Sugar? Why are you thinking about Sugar? Don’t worry about her anymore; she’s spoken for! And try also to put William from your mind. Everything is in hand, I assure you. A series of increasingly cordial letters have been exchanged between father and son; the transfer of power was smooth. Oh, to begin with, the old man was a doubting Thomas, and mistrusted William’s detailed description of the Rackham company, the duties of its director, and the exact manner in which William meant to discharge these duties, as nothing more than a ploy to wheedle the wherewithal for an extravagant Christmas. Soon enough, however, the old man was convinced that a birth scarcely less miraculous than the Saviour’s had occurred: the advent of William Rackham, captain of industry. Now everything has been made sweet, and William’s humiliations are a thing of the past, so let’s not dwell on them any longer.)
As I was saying, maturer blossoms are to be found inside the church: in translucent grey vases, and on the bonnets of some of the congregation. Not only flowers, but also stuffed birds and butterflies on the headgear of the more fashionable ladies here. They file out of the pews, eyeing each other’s dresses and bonnets, and only that peculiar soul Emmeline Fox is unadorned. She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong. Walking at her side, as always, is Henry Rackham, the man who should by rights have been the Rackham of Rackham Perfumeries, but who (as everybody knows by now) has lost that claim for good.
Henry is a handsome man, taller than average — well, taller than his brother, anyway — bluer of eye and firmer of chin. Also, unlike his brother, his hair — no less gold — sits on his head most decorously, and his midriff is trim. In earlier years, before it became obvious he had no intention of claiming his birthright, he was sought out by a succession of eligible young ladies, each of whom found him to be a decent if over-serious man, each of whom hinted that the inheritor of a large concern would need a devoted wife, and each of whom melted away from him as soon as he spoke disparagingly of money. One of these ladies (present in church today, newly married to Arthur Gillow, the Ice Chest manufacturer) even kissed him on the brow, to see if
it cured his shyness.
This is not the love I spoke of. The love I spoke of is real. It is the love of two friends for their God, and for each other.
Henry approaches the vestibule of his church — well, not a church of his own, sadly, but the church he attends — and sniffs the fresh air wafting in from outside. He has no interest in perfume, except to note that each week there seems to be more of it within these walls. Today it emanates as strongly from those ladies (within earshot of the rector) who are speaking of Scriptural matters, as from those, farther away, discussing the coming London Season.
He and Mrs Fox are loath to linger now that the service is over, scorning the opportunity to gossip with Notting Hill’s other churchgoers. They shake the rector’s hand, Henry commends him on his refutation of Darwinism, and they are on their way. The gossips stare after them but, having been thus snubbed every Sunday for months, don’t bother passing comment. So much has already been said about Henry Rackham and Mrs Fox, that if neither of them will rise to the bait, despite everyone’s best efforts to whisper as clearly as possible, well, what’s the use?
Henry and Mrs Fox walk gingerly down the steep gravel path that leads to the churchyard, each using a furled umbrella as a walking stick, rather than taking each other by the arm. At the bottom of the slope the path curves sharply, running along the churchyard for a while before becoming part of the main road; that’s the way they walk, with butter-yellow tombstones to the right of them, and black-trunked evergreens to the left.
‘How beautiful this morning is,’ says Emmeline Fox. (No, she means it! No, she is not making conversation! Your time in the streets and in houses of ill repute has made you cynical; it’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and here is someone expressing her delight.) She is full of the love of God’s creation, full to overflowing. The glories of God are copious, endless; they enter her from all directions … (What are you thinking? You’ve definitely been too long in the wrong company!)