by Michel Faber
However, in amongst the filth nestles this haven, a little castle of ingenious industry disguised in an unassuming outer mantle of blackened red brick. When Rackham the Elder recently took Rackham the Younger on a tour of all three of the Rackham factories, it was this bottling factory that interested William most. Its deceptive exterior, once entered, revealed a magical interior: a miniature Crystal Palace of glass and metal, in constant movement like a carousel. It had a superhuman allure which, to his surprise, was not incompatible with the highest aesthetic principles. Ever since that first visit, William has been wondering what the place looks like when it’s empty of workers and its machinery is still.
Standing at last before the massive iron gate of the factory, he feels a thrill as he slides the key in. Another few steps, and he slides a second key into the great double doors.
His factory is as spacious and dark and quiet as a church. Seeing it without his father by his side, and without the distraction of the workers and the steam, he understands for the first time the sheer scale of what he has inherited. He treads reverently across the plaza-sized, sawdust-covered floor, staring up at the great balconies, the sloping chutes and jar-slides, the columnar pipes from furnace to ceiling, the dark grilles and gleaming tables; all the giant sculptures in perfume’s honour. What beauty there is in the evenly spaced patterns of rivets, the precise geometry of pylon and cross-piece, the thousands of tiny glass bottles standing at the ready. What a playground this would have been for him when he was a boy! But his father only ever brought Henry here as a child, never William. And what did the infant Henry think of this palace, the crown of the empire laid out for him? William can’t recall his brother ever mentioning the visit. No doubt Henry, even then, was aspiring to shrines of a different kind.
‘Ach, I had high hopes for that boy.’ (Thus William’s father confessed when he and William were walking here together.) ‘He had brains and brawn in plentiful supply, and I thought he might mature into … well, something better than a parson, anyway.’
A distillation of Henry’s pious spirit into a more useful essence, eh? William thought of saying, but, knowing his father to be impervious to metaphor, he let it pass. Instead, he plumped for platitudinous diplomacy.
‘Never mind, Father. We all mature in different ways. All for the best, eh? Here’s to the future!’ And he laid a hand on his father’s back, a gesture of intimacy so rare and so bold that neither of them quite knew what to do with it. Fortunately the guilt of having allowed his son to suffer a miserable Christmas when he ought by rights to have rescued him was still fresh in the old man’s mind, and he patted William’s shoulder in return.
Now, alone, William wanders out into the yard behind his factory and surveys the mounds of coal, the massive carts with their reins and bridles lying in tangled heaps. He reaches out a gloved hand and touches, as one might touch a monument in a public park, a stack of crates ready for filling. What a pity it must all lie idle on a Sunday! Oh, not that William doubts that the workers need some rest and religion one day a week, but what a pity all the same. A short story is born in his brain then, called ‘The Impious Automata’, in which an inventor devises mechanical men to perform factory work on a Sunday. In the end, mechanical parsons roll into the factory and persuade the mechanical workers to observe the Sabbath. Ha!
Suddenly William is startled by a loud clatter behind him. He turns at once, only to find (once he’s lowered his eyes to the ground) a small dog emerging from behind an unsoundly-stacked pile of firewood. It looks very like the dog that loiters around the Rackham house, except that it’s a bitch.
The animal is nothing to William, but he’s concerned it might cause mischief to his property. So he picks up one of the numerous charred pokers littering the grounds, and brandishes it threateningly. The dog flees in a cloud of sawdust and dirt. William’s satisfaction at this result turns to chagrin when he realises that his own scrupulous locking of all doors and gates behind him has left the trespassing creature no escape.
Consulting his watch, William decides he’s hungry, and makes his way back to the main gate. He half hopes to find the dog waiting there, meekly resigned to expulsion, but it’s nowhere to be seen, and with some regret he shuts it inside with a clank of the key.
In her upstairs room at Mrs Castaway’s, Sugar is writing her novel. In the room adjacent, Amy Howlett is inserting the handle of a Chinese fan into the anus of a schoolmaster who comes every Sunday for just this purpose. Downstairs, Christopher is playing rummy with Katy Lester, the cards laid out on a soft stack of ironed bed-sheets. Mrs Castaway is dozing, slumped at her desk, the sheen of viscous glue on her scrapbook slowly drying to a matt glaze. The noise from Silver Street is so muted that Sugar can hear the schoolmaster’s frenzied babbling. She strains to hear the words, but their sense doesn’t survive the passage through the wall.
Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour out implies that the man has some control over the matter, which he most emphatically doesn’t; leak is too feeble for the savagery of the injury she has inflicted upon him. Sugar closes her eyes and watches, in the lurid theatre of her mind, the blood issue from the slit neck. When Mrs Castaway’s warning bell sounds, she jerks in surprise.
Hastily, she scrutinises her bedroom. Everything is neat and tidy. All her papers are hidden away, except for this single sheet on her writing-desk.
Spew, she writes, having finally been given, by tardy Providence, the needful word. The nib of the pen has dried out and the scrawl passes from inkless invisibility to clotted stain, but she’ll make it more legible later. Into the wardrobe with it just now! Time enough left over for a quick piss, which she can immediately hurl out the window: her Mr Hunt is sensitive to bad smells, she’s noticed.
* * *
Hours later, many hours later, William Rackham wakes from dreamless sleep in a warm and aromatic bed. He’s sluggish and content, though rather confused about where he is and what time it might be. There is gas-light overhead, but suffused through gauzy fabric, and through the window he sees only darkness. A rustling of paper alerts him to the fact that he’s not alone. ‘What the Devil?’ he mumbles.
Next to him in the bed, a body. He lifts his head, finds Sugar propped up on the pillows, apparently reading The London Journal. She has a camisole on, and there are ink stains on her fingers, but otherwise she is exactly as she was when he last saw her.
‘What time is it?’
She leans right out of the bed, exposing the whole of her rump. Her flaky ichthyosis patterns radiate across the flesh of each buttock like scars from a thousand flagellations, but in perfect symmetry, as though inflicted by a deranged aesthete.
Rolling back to him, she hands him his waistcoat, from whose flaccid fob-pocket his watch-chain dangles.
‘God almighty,’ he says when he consults the time-piece. ‘It’s ten o’clock. At night!’
She pouts, strokes his cheek with one peeling, inky hand.
‘You work too hard,’ she croons. ‘That’s what it is. You don’t get enough rest.’
Rackham blinks dazedly and rakes through his hair, startled (before he remembers) how little remains of it. ‘I — I must go home,’ he says.
Sugar lifts one long naked leg and rests it on the knee of the other, displaying her cunt to him.
‘I hope,’ she smiles, ‘this is your home away from home.’
In the Rackham house, several clocks chime eleven. Everyone is in bed, except here and there a servant, still toiling to clean away the last fragments of dirt, wood-shavings, and other evidence of men’s labour. It has been a noisy Sunday, but quiet reigns at last.
Agnes Rackham, sitting up in her bed, in darkness except for a window-square of moonlight draped across her knees like a luminous coverlet, wonders if God is angry. If so, she hopes He’s angry with William, not with her. Had she known sooner that it was Sunday, she would have tried harder to do nothing, or as close to nothing as possible.
The salmon she ate for supper lies heavy on her stomach. It was intended for William, really, but he didn’t come home for supper so Letty was going to take the shiny little creature back to the kitchen, where Cook would’ve mashed it all up and made it into something else for breakfast — pasties or suchlike. It seemed a shame to waste the flawless fish body, so Agnes ate it. Smallish salmon though it was, it proved too big for her, yet she couldn’t stop. She wanted to see the backbone clean against the plate. Now here she lies, with stomach-ache. Gluttony. On a Sunday.
Where is William? In the early days of their marriage, he hardly went out at all. Then he took to going out and coming back drunk. More recently he’s been going out and coming back sober. But where does he go? What is there to do out there in the cold, after the shops are shut? The Season hasn’t even started yet …
There must be complicated engines that keep English civilisation humming, which men must minister to. Nothing happens of itself; even a simple grandfather clock, if left to carry on untended, runs down. Society as a whole would run down, she suspects, if men weren’t oiling it constantly, winding it up, tinkering with it.
The doorbell sounds. He’s come! Agnes pictures Letty hurrying, lamp-first, down the newly polished stairs and across the new hallway carpets to open the door for her master. It’s so quiet she can hear her husband’s voice in the hall: not the words, but the tone and the spirit. He sounds cheery and authoritative, as sober as a clergyman. Now he and Letty are on the stairs, and William is saying, ‘Back to bed with you, you poor girl!’ Plainly, he’s not wanting supper; a lucky thing, since his gluttonous wife has eaten the salmon.
Agnes cannot understand the change that has come over him. Only a few months ago, his late arrival home might have meant the sound of stumbling and cursing on the stairs. And what about the rages he used to get into whenever she mentioned money or his father? Gone entirely, as if they were nothing but a bad dream. Rackham the Elder and Rackham the Younger are suddenly thick as thieves, and she, Agnes, is well-off again, and wants for nothing except health.
She hears his footsteps — feels them, almost — passing her door. This is not unusual; they haven’t slept together for years. Indeed, the fear that tonight he might break their unspoken agreement and enter her bedroom is, momentarily, as sharp as ever. And yet, she must admit he has been good lately — almost as charming as he ever was. He consults her in all things, hardly ever says anything cruel, and only yesterday he declared that she doesn’t have to make her own dresses if the sewing-machine has ceased to amuse her: she can have them made for her, as before.
But it’s good for her to make them, she knows that. It’s discipline for the mind, and keeps her fingers nimble, and is less wearisome than tapestry work. Although, speaking of tapestry work: if there’s more money now, could she enlist some help with her embroidered copy of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen? It would look frightfully impressive finished, but it’s been on her conscience so long now that she can’t think of it without being reminded of the worst months of her illness. The greater part of the stag is done, as well as the more interesting features of the landscape; it’s only the thought of all that sky and all those mountains that makes her heart sink. Couldn’t someone else do it for her? One of those seamstresses who advertise in the ladies’ journals (ELSPETH, finishes woolwork, etc, at moderate prices. Address with editor) perhaps? Yes, she’ll raise the subject with William tomorrow.
Agnes’s eyes are sore from lack of sleep. She looks at the pattern of the window on her eiderdown. The shadows of the window-frames, dividing the rectangle of light into four squares, suddenly appear to her like a Christian cross. Is it a sign? Is God cross with her for giving those workmen, those paperers, instructions? She only spoke; she didn’t lift a finger herself! And if she’d kept silent, they would’ve put the dado rail back at quite the wrong height! And anyway, she didn’t know it was Sunday, then!
Unnerved, she slips out of bed and draws the curtain, shutting out the cross, plunging the room into profound darkness. She leaps back under the eiderdown, pulls it up to her neck, and tries to pretend she’s back in her old house, back in her innocent childhood. In the absence of visible evidence to the contrary, it should be easy to imagine nothing has changed in the years since she slept soundly in the bosom of her family.
But even in total darkness her memory of the old home is spoiled by reality. Try as she might, she cannot transport herself into her childhood as it ought to have been; she cannot purge Lord Unwin from her recollections and replace him with her real father. Every time she strives to envision her father’s face, the familiar photograph refuses to come to life, and instead her step-father looms before her, sneering in gloomy silence.
Stifling a sob of fear, she seizes hold of a pillow from William’s side of the bed and gathers it to her breast. She hugs it tightly, burying her face into its subtly perfumed linen.
All the lights in the house are now extinguished, except for one in William’s study. All of the household, except for William, is under the sheets, like dolls in a doll’s house. Ifthe Rackham house were such a toy, and you could lift off its roof to peek inside, you would see William in shirt-sleeves at his desk, working on correspondence: nothing to interest you, I promise. In another compartment, at the far end of the landing, you would see a child’s body huddled in a cot slightly too small for it: Sophie Rackham, who isn’t yet of any consequence. In another compartment still, you would see Agnes swaddled in white bedding, with only her blonde head showing, like a cake-crumb half-submerged in cream. And inside the upended roof held in your hand, the servants would be upside-down in their attic honeycombs, thrown along with their meagre belongings against the rafters.
William burns the midnight candle for a little while longer, before closing his ledger and stretching his short limbs. He is satisfied: another tedious Sunday has been endured with as much recreation and as little religion as possible. He discards his day clothes, puts on his night-shirt, extinguishes the light, and inserts himself between the sheets. Within minutes he is snoring gently.
Agnes, too, has drifted off. One tiny, upturned hand slips off the pillow and glides towards the edge of the bed. Then, one of William’s hands, in sleep, begins to move towards the edge of his bed, in Agnes’s direction. Soon their hands are in perfect alignment, so that, if this really were a doll’s house, we could imagine removing not only the roof, but some of the internal walls as well, and sliding the two bedrooms into each other, joining the couple’s hands like the clasp of a necklace.
But then William Rackham begins to dream, and flips over onto his other side.
TEN
Agnes Rackham’s bedroom, whose windows are never opened and whose door is always closed, fills up every night with her breath. One by one, her exhalations trickle off her pillow onto the floor; then, breath by breath, they rise, piling on top of each other like invisible feathers, until they’re nestling against the ceiling, growing denser by the hour.
It’s morning now, and you can scarcely believe you are in a bedroom: it feels more like the world’s smallest factory, which has been working all night for no purpose but to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. You turn instinctively to the curtains; they’re drawn, and as motionless as sculpture. A skewer-thin shaft ofsunlight penetrates the dimness, through a slit in the velvet. It falls on Agnes’s diary, open at yesterday’s page, and illuminates a single line of her handwriting.
Really must get out more, she exhorts herself, in tiny indigo letters you must squint to read.
You glance over to the bed, where you expect to see her body still huddled under the eiderdown. She is gone.
Agnes Rackham has a
new routine. Every morning, if she can possibly manage it, she takes a walk in the street outside her house, alone. She is going to get well if it kills her.
The Season is drawing nigh, and there’s frighteningly little time left to regain certain essential skills — like being able to walk, unsupported, further distances than are found inside her own home. Participating in Society is not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it. Half a dozen circuits of a ballroom, if added end to end, could stretch to a mile.
So, Agnes is taking walks. And, surprisingly, Doctor Curlew has judged her decision a good one, as he says she’s deficient in corpuscles. Unopposed, then, several mornings a week, she is escorted to the front gate by Clara, whereafter, parasol in hand, she totters out onto the footpath all by herself, listening anxiously for hoof-beats on the deserted cobbled street.
The mongrel dog which has made its camp at the Rackham front gate is there to meet her almost every time, but Agnes doesn’t fear him. He’s never given her any cause to, never once barked at her. Whenever she shuffles by, braced against the ferocious breezes that flap her skirts and pull her parasol askew, the dog reassures her, with lashings of his tail or a benevolent yawn, that he’s friendly. He reminds her of an outsized Sunday roast, so roly-poly in his dark brown flesh, and his eyes are more benign than those of anyone she knows. Admittedly, she once almost soiled her boots on his droppings; she was disgusted with him then, but didn’t let her disdain show, in case it hurt his feelings — or provoked him to viciousness. Another time, she saw him licking at a part of him that was red as a flayed finger, but she didn’t recognise the organ, taking it to be an appendage peculiar to dogs, a sort of fin or spine, which in this dog’s case had become painfully inflamed. She swept by him with an awkward smile of pity.