The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

‘Beautiful, yes,’ agrees Henry Rackham. He looks around, inviting the glory of Nature to flood into him, but Nature is reluctant to comply. He squints into the green-tinted light, yearning to feel the same as his enraptured companion.

  The problem is, although the sun is beaming through the trees just like in Dyce’s painting of George Herbert in Bemerton, it fails to impress him half as much as the quilting on Mrs Fox’s bodice. And, although lively new sparrows are rustling through the leaves and hopping across the cobblestones, they cannot compete with Mrs Fox’s grace as she walks. And as for the falling of light, that phenomenon is most admirable on her face.

  How handsome she is! She dresses like an angel — an angel in grey serge. Try as he might to ‘consider the lilies of the field’, they are too common and gaudy for him; he cannot prefer them to Mrs Fox’s sober finery. Her voice, too, is low and musical, like … like a softly-played bassoon; so much more soothing than the twitterings of sparrows or other women.

  ‘Have I lost you, Henry?’ she says suddenly.

  He blushes. ‘Do go on, Mrs Fox. I was merely admiring … the miracle of God’s creation.’

  Mrs Fox hooks the handle of her umbrella on her belt so she can lift both her gloved hands up to her forehead. The steep slope of the path has made her perspire; she dabs her skin under the thick frizz of her hair.

  ‘I was merely saying,’ she says, ‘that I wish all this fighting over our origins would come to an end – any sort of end.’

  ‘Pardon me, Mrs Fox, but what do you mean, “any sort of end”?’ Henry’s questions to her are always gently posed, for fear of offending her.

  ‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘If only it could be resolved once and for all where we come from: from Adam, or from Mr Darwin’s apes.’

  Henry stops in his tracks, amazed. Each time they meet, just when he least expects it, she unveils something like this.

  ‘But my dear Mrs Fox — you cannot be serious!’

  She looks aside at him, licks her lips, but says nothing to soothe his alarm.

  ‘My dear Mrs Fox,’ he begins again, blinking at the sun-dappled road ahead of them. ‘The difference between belief in the one descent rather than the other is the difference … why, between Faith and Atheism!’

  ‘Oh Henry, it isn’t, really it isn’t.’ Her voice is impatient now, passionate, alerting him to the fact that she’s about to talk of her work with the Rescue Society. ‘If only you could know the wretches I work among! You’d see that the debate that rages in our churches and town halls means nothing to them. It’s seen as a spat between one set of stuffed shirts and another. “I know all about it, miss,” they say. “We’re to choose who was our grandparents: two monkeys or two naked innocents in a garden.” And they laugh, for both strike them as equally ridiculous.’

  ‘In their eyes, perhaps, but not in the eyes of God.’

  ‘Yes but Henry, can’t you see that they will not be brought to God by seeing us quarrelling. We must accept that they don’t care where life comes from. What is far more important to address is that they despise our faith. They, Henry, who were once the backbone of the Church, in the days when the world was not yet blighted with cities and factories. How it saddens me to think of them as they were then, tilling the land, simple and devout … Look there!’

  She points to a meadow some distance away which, on closer scrutiny, is a site of swarming industry. There are tiny workmen, cartloads of timber and earth, and a giant machine of mysterious function.

  ‘Another house, I suppose,’ sighs Mrs Fox, turning her back on it and leaning her bustle against a stile. ‘First come the houses, then the shops, then finally …’ (she rolls her eyes at the impiety of Commerce) ‘the Universal Provider.’ She rubs her gloved hands along her thin arms, shivering. ‘Still, I suppose your father will be pleased.’

  ‘My … father?’ Henry is slow to catch her drift; the only father to whom he gives regular thought is in Heaven.

  ‘Yes,’ prompts Mrs Fox. ‘More houses, more people — more business, yes?’

  Henry leans gingerly against the nearest stile to hers. Discomfited though he is by his connection with the arch-profiteer who gave him his name, he feels constrained to defend him.

  ‘My father likes Nature as much as anyone,’ he points out. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t want any more of it despoiled. Anyway, perhaps you haven’t heard? He’s stepped down from the directorship of Rackham’s, and William has taken charge.’

  ‘Oh? Is he ill?’

  Henry, unsure which Rackham she has in mind, replies: ‘My father’s fit as a whale. As for William, I don’t know what’s come over him.’

  Mrs Fox smiles. The essential and irreconcilable differences between Henry and his brother are a source of secret pleasure to her. ‘How very unexpected,’ she declares. ‘I always took your brother to be a man full of plans, but not much fruition.’

  Henry blushes again, aware he’s the sibling of a profligate, a ne’er-do-well. What has he, Henry, achieved in life? Does Mrs Fox look down her nose at him, too, for his failure to grasp his destiny? (And why are people always remarking that her nose is long? It’s the perfect length for her face!)

  She’s still leaning against the stile, head back, eyes shut, so near to him that he can hear her breathing and see the breath coming out of her parted lips. He indulges a fantasy, despising himself for it, but indulging all the same. He imagines himself a vicar, digging in the rich dark earth of a vicarage garden, with Emmeline at his side, golden in the sunlight, holding a seedling tree ready for planting. ‘Tell me when,’ she says to him.

  With effort, he leaves this blissful day-dream, and focuses on reality. Mrs Fox’s demeanour has changed. She looks less spirited than before — almost dejected. A simple sequence of expressions, this, incalculably common in human history, yet they wrench at his heart.

  ‘You look sad,’ he finally succeeds in saying.

  ‘Oh Henry,’ she sighs, ‘There’s no stopping what has been begun; you know that, don’t you?’ ‘B-begun?’

  ‘The march of progress. The triumph of the machine. We are on a fast train to the twentieth century. The past cannot be restored.’

  Henry ponders this for a moment, but finds he cares little for the past or the future as abstracts. Only two things glow clear in his brain: the fantasy of digging the vicarage garden with Mrs Fox, and the urgent desire to remove her unhappiness from her.

  ‘The past is more than pasture,’ he suggests, wincing at his own unintended wit. ‘It’s standards of conduct, too. Don’t you think we can keep those if we wish?’

  ‘Oh, it would be nice to think so. But the modern world seduces righteousness, Henry — in every conceivable way.’

  He blushes, thinking of her flock of prostitutes, but she means more than that.

  ‘Last week,’ she says, ‘I was in the city, on my way to visit a wretched family I’d visited before, to plead with them once more to listen to the words of their Saviour. I was tired, I felt disinclined to walk far. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the Underground Railway, pulled by an engine, mesmerised by the alternation of darkness and light, speeding through the earth at the cost of a sixpence. I spoke to no one; I might as well have been a ghost. I enjoyed it so much, I missed my stop, and never saw the family.’ confess I don’t quite divine the point you are making.’

  ‘This is how our world will end, Henry! We’re foolish to imagine the Last Days will be ushered in by a giant Antichrist brandishing a bloody battle-axe. The Antichrist is our own desires, Henry. With my sixpence, I absolved myself utterly of responsibility — for the welfare of the poor filthy wretches who slaved to dig out that railway, for the grotesque sum of money spent on it, for the violation of the earth that ought to be solid beneath my feet. I sat in my carriage, admiring the dark tunnels flashing by me, not having the foggiest notion where I was, mindless of everything except my pleasure. I ceased to be, in any meaningful sense, God’s creature.’

  ‘You are being hard on yourself. A
single ride in the Underground isn’t going to hasten Armageddon.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ she says, a smile tempting her lips. ‘I think we’re moving towards such a strange time. A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress.’ She looks up into the sky, as if checking her facts with God. ‘I can see the world descending into chaos, and us just watching, not sure what we should, or could, have done about it.’

  ‘And yet you work for the Rescue Society!’

  ‘Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.’

  Henry strives to recall how they reached this point. While he agrees wholeheartedly that each soul is precious, just now he can’t help noticing that the stiles against which he and Mrs Fox have been leaning are cold and damp, and that Mrs Fox is protected from feeling this by her bustle whereas he is not. Politely he suggests they walk on.

  ‘Forgive me, Henry,’ she says, jerking stiffly into motion. ‘Have I made us late again? My mind wanders while my body takes root.’

  ‘Not at all! And I was a little tired myself!’

  ‘That’s sweet of you, Henry,’ she says, gaining her stride once more. ‘And you know, I really meant what I said about Darwin. The Church has been wrong before, after all — on details of science, I mean. Didn’t it once maintain that the Sun revolved around the Earth? — and put people to death for suggesting otherwise? Now every school-book tells us that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Does it really matter? I shouldn’t be surprised if the women I work with still believe it’s the other way around. It’s not my business to set them straight on cosmology, or the origin of man. I’m fighting to save them from the death of their bodies and souls!’ Even as she walks, she clenches one delicate fist to her breast. ‘Oh, if you could only know the state of moral anarchy in which they exist …!’

  To his shame, Henry longs to know the state of moral anarchy in which Mrs Fox’s prostitutes exist. Ah, the depravity she must be witness to! It’s all he can do to refrain from asking her questions which, under the guise of an interest in urban sanitation, goggle for a glimpse of something else entirely. Sometimes he must clench the muscles in his jaw, to bite back a demand that she reveal more.

  The strange thing is: even when he has himself firmly under control, and is communing with Mrs Fox on an unsullied plane, she herself moves the conversation — innocently, no doubt — into more sensual regions.

  Not so long ago, for example, he and Mrs Fox were dawdling by the Serpentine, discussing the Afterlife.

  ‘You know, Henry,’ she was saying, ‘I often doubt there is a Hell. Death itself is so cruel. Oh, I don’t mean the sort of death you and I are likely to suffer, but the sort of death so often suffered by those wretches I work among. Our doctrine would have us believe they’re bound for Hell, but what is Hell for such as they? When I see a woman dying of a vile disease, bitterly regretting every minute she’s spent on this earth, I wonder if she hasn’t already endured the worst.’

  ‘But surely the righteous must have their reward!’ he protested, alarmed at her heresy, not because he feared God would be angry with her (God couldn’t fail to appreciate her good intentions) but in case the wrath of the Church should fall upon her exquisite head.

  ‘Isn’t Heaven reward enough,’ she protested in turn, ‘without needing to see the damned punished?’

  ‘Of course, of course it is,’ he said hastily. ‘I didn’t mean that I wish to see sinners suffer. But there are righteous folk who do; and surely in Heaven, we can’t have any of the souls feeling resentful …’

  Emmeline was leaning forward over the edge of the Serpentine’s bank, waving at a fat, grey duck, which disappeared underwater.

  ‘I don’t know that our resurrected souls will have the capacity to feel resentment,’ she said.

  ‘A sense of … unfairness, then.’

  She smiled, her face lit up by reflections off the rippling lake.

  ‘Those seem awfully queer things for resurrected souls to be feeling.’ And she extended one silky arm over the water, wiggling her fingers to attract whatever might be underneath.

  ‘But … they must be capable of feeling something …’ Henry persisted. ‘We aren’t Orientalists, expecting to disappear into our deity like a puff of smoke.’ She seemed however to be no longer listening, staring at the brilliant water, waiting for the duck to resurface. He cleared his throat. ‘What doyou think, Mrs Fox? What will souls in Heaven feel?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Emmeline, eyes mysterious in the sun-dappled shade under her hat-brim, and mouth licked brilliant as the leaves on the water, ‘I should think … Love. The most wonderful … endless … perfect … Love.’

  That’s how she always did it! With just a few words and a certain quality of voice, she artlessly penetrated his Platonic armour, and he was helpless with impure thoughts. All sorts of lurid scenarios would flash into his mind like tableaux vivants: Mrs Fox’s skirts catching on the branches of a tree, and being torn right off; Mrs Fox being attacked by a degenerate ruffian, who might succeed in baring her bosom before Henry smote him down; Mrs Fox’s clothing catching fire, necessitating his prompt action; Mrs Fox sleepwalking to his house, in the night, for him to restore to dignity with his own dressing-gown.

  Once he was roused like this, prurience would start to whisper in his ear. He would press Mrs Fox to describe her work with fallen women, knowing perfectly well that while there were some things he wished to know, there were others he wished only to imagine.

  ‘What … what do these poor creatures wear?’ he asked her on one such occasion, when they were walking in St James’s Park.

  ‘The latest fashions, more or less,’ she replied, suspecting nothing. ‘Some affect a more old-fashioned appearance. I’ve seen several with their hair still parted down the middle, without a fringe. In general I should guess their colours are a few months behind, though I’m hardly the best judge of such things. Why do you ask?”

  ‘Their attire …It isn’t … loose?’

  ‘Loose?’

  ‘They don’t … flaunt their bodies?’

  She became pensive, giving the question serious thought. Eventually she replied, ‘I suppose they do. But it isn’t with their attire so much as with the way they wear it. A dress which on me might appear perfectly decent, might be a Jezebel’s costume on them. The way they stand, and sit, and move, and walk, can be indecent in the extreme.’

  Henry wondered how a whore might sit, that was so shamefully different from the method employed by a decent woman. How might she stand, and how might she move? Fortunately, on that particular occasion, he was saved from himself (however dubious the rescue) by Bodley and Ashwell, running across the park towards them.

  Now, on this sunny Sunday morning, with the God-given miracle of Spring in evidence all around them, Henry Rackham is once more in turmoil under his stiff clothes. Mrs Fox has cried, ‘Oh, if you could only know the state of moral anarchy in which they exist …!’ and he is desperate to know. So, he asks her to elaborate, and she does.

  As they stroll on, she recounts one of her Rescue Society stories. (There are never any unclothed bodies in these stories, never any embraces, but still he listens with ears aflame.) She speaks of a time not long ago, when she and her sisters in the Society were admitted into a bawdy-house, and found there a girl who quite plainly was not long for this world. When Mrs Fox expressed concern over the girl’s health, the madam retorted that the girl was in good hands — better than any doctor’s — and that, if truth be told, Mrs Fox didn’t look so well herself, and would she like to lie down in one of the spare rooms?

  ‘I was shocked, I must admit, at her perversity.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ mutters Henry. ‘A most sly and licentious suggestion.’ ‘No, no, it wasn’t that that shocked me. It was her rejection of Medicine!

  What a topsy-turvy state these people are in: God and doctors bad; prostitution good!’

  Henry grunts symp
athetically. In his head, a vision of topsy-turviness is made flesh: a squirming heap of pink women flipping over and over, like frogs in a pond.

  ‘Do I look ill to you?’ Mrs Fox asks suddenly.

  ‘Not at all!’ he exclaims.

  ‘Well, at any rate,’ she says, ‘it makes me ill in here (palm on her breast) ‘to think of the poor girls in that evil woman’s clutches, and to imagine how cruelly they must be treated.’

  Henry, doing his very best not to imagine how those poor girls might be treated, is relieved to observe a distraction coming up Union Street towards them.

  ‘Look there, Mrs Fox,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that someone we know?’

  A short, plump lady sumptuously dressed in purple with black trimmings — the last tokens of mourning — is trotting towards them. Almost a whole bird’s-worth of dyed feathers jigs up and down on her bonnet, and her parasol is of Continental proportions.

  ‘You know her, perhaps,’ says Mrs Fox. ‘I’m sure I’ve never met her.’

  (In point of fact, there are two women walking towards them, but the servant is of no consequence and doesn’t warrant a name.)

  ‘Good morning, Lady Bridgelow,’ says Henry, as soon as she’s within hailing distance. By way of response, she removes one purple-gloved hand from her black muff and motions it demurely.

  ‘Good morning to you, Mr Rackham.’ With eyes slightly narrowed she regards Mrs Fox. ‘I do not believe I am acquainted with your companion.’

  ‘Allow me to introduce Mrs Emmeline Fox.’

  ‘Enchantee? The lady nods, smiles, and without hesitation she and her lady’s-maid pass, their black boots ticking on the cobblestones.

  Henry waits until they are out of earshot, then turns to Mrs Fox and says, ‘You have been slighted.’ His voice is choked with vexation.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll survive, Henry. Remember I’m accustomed to having doors slammed in my face, and foul language thrown at me. And look! Here we are at William Street. Is it a message from Providence, d’you think, to turn right and visit your brother?’

  Henry frowns, uneasy as always to hear her flirting with what more judgemental souls might consider blasphemy.