by Michel Faber
‘Children don’t weep for mischief’s sake,’ says Henry, still wrestling with the vision of innocent babies battered in their cots. ‘Your husband must understand that. Children weep because they’re hungry, or sad.’
‘You said it, sir,’ she eagerly agrees, nodding her head, staring deep into his eyes. ‘You understand. ‘Ungry, they are. And awful, awful sa-ad.’
Henry sighs, letting go of his suspicions. There can be no charity without trust, or at least the willingness to take a risk. All right, so this woman has recently touched strong drink and is, in her manner, crudely ingratiating: what of it? Kindness will not spoil her further; nor is her family, whatever their true number may be, to blame for her sins.
‘Here,’ he says, transferring the money into her trembling grasp. ‘Mind you use it for food.’
‘Fank you, fank you, sir,’ she crows. ‘Wiv dis small coin, as is nuffink to you, sir, you’ve jest put a fine meal on the table for a poor widder and her family — jest fink on that, sir!’
Henry thinks on it, frowning, as she scurries into a dark cleft between two buildings.
‘Widow?’ he mutters, but she is gone.
In a more ideal world, Henry should have had a few minutes’ grace in which to reflect upon this encounter and consider what to do next, for he is troubled by a jostle of conflicting emotions. However, the glint of his money has been observed by other citizens of the street, no less clearly than if it were a firework exploding in the sky above. From every nook and corner, ragged humans begin to converge upon him, their verminous eyes aglow with cunning. Henry strides forward, unnerved and yet at the same time queerly reckless. There’s a substance coursing through his bloodstream, transforming his fear into something else altogether: a feeling of exaggerated readiness, of unaccustomed one-ness with his body.
First to reach him is a weasel-like fellow with a grotesque limp. In one bony hand he clutches a tanning-knife, held aloft so that Henry can see it — but almost as if it’s an innocuous article the newcomer has carelessly forgotten, and he is merely returning it. The air, for Henry, is charged not with danger but with a hallucinatory whiff of farce.
‘Gi-hive me yer mu-huny,’ the little man wheezes, grimacing like a chimpanzee, brandishing the grimy blade an arm’s length from Henry’s chest.
Henry stares into his assailant’s eyes. The fellow is a head shorter then he, and half his weight.
‘God forgive you,’ growls Rackham, raising his fists, which compare favourably, in size, with the thief’s stunted skull. ‘And God forgive me too, for if you step any closer I swear I’ll knock you down.’
Gurning fearsomely, the fellow backs off, almost stumbles on a loose cobble, turns and limps away. Several other denizens of St Giles halt their advance on Rackham and retreat likewise, deciding that he is not, in one way or another, the soft touch he appeared to be.
Only one person is not dissuaded; only one person continues to approach. It’s a scrawny young woman, dressed in what to Henry looks like a white night-dress, a man’s black overcoat, and a lace curtain for a shawl. Like the beggar-woman, she’s bare-headed, but her elfin face is fresher, and her hair is red. She steps boldly into Henry’s path, and unknots her shawl with a casual motion, revealing a freckled sternum.
‘My hand is yours for a shillin’, sir,’ she declares, ‘and any other part of me for two shillin’s.’
There, it’s said. She stands in his shadow and waits.
A feeling of wholly unexpected calm descends upon Henry Rackham, a disembodied serenity such as he’s never experienced before, even at the threshold of dreamless sleep. This is the moment he has long dreaded and desired, his own initiation into the sensual underworld that Mrs Fox negotiates with such dignity and aplomb. So often in his imaginings he has seen this girl (or a girl vaguely like her); now here she stands before him, in the flesh. And, to his relief, he finds her to be not a siren at all, but a mere child –a child with crusts on her eyelids and a graze on her chin.
How he feared, before summoning the courage to come here today, that his good intentions were nothing but a sham, a fragile delusion preserved only by an accident of geography. How haunted he was by the anxiety that, if God should ever bless him with a parish of his own, his first act in exploring its poorer streets would be to fall upon just such a defenceless wretch as stands before him now, and violate her. But here she is: a prostitute, a harlot, an abandoned creature who has just given him explicit permission to do with her exactly as he wishes. And what does he wish? She breathes shallowly, lips parted, looking up at him in his shadow, awaiting his approval, unaware that she has already passed on to him a gift of incalculable value — a reflection of his own nature. He knows now: Whatever he desires, whatever his sinful heart lusts after, it is not this small carcass of scuffed flesh and bone.
‘Your body parts aren’t yours to sell, miss,’ he says, gently. ‘They belong together, and the whole belongs to God.’
‘My ‘ole belongs to anyone that’s got two shillin’s, sir,’ she insists.
He winces and digs his hand into his pocket.
‘Here,’ he says, handing her two shillings. ‘And I’ll tell you what I want for it.’
She cocks her head, a flicker of apprehension disturbing the dead calm of her eyes.
‘I want you …’ He hesitates, knowing this world is too intractably wicked, and he too lacking in moral authority, for him to command her to ‘Go and sin no more’. Instead, he does his best to smile and appear less stern. ‘I want you to regard these two shillings as an act that’s no longer necessary …’ (Even as the words leave his mouth, her puzzled expression lets him know he is losing her.) ‘Ah …I mean, in lieu of whatever you might otherwise have done to earn it…’ (Still she frowns, uncomprehending, her bottom lip disappearing under her top teeth.) ‘What I mean is … For goodness’ sake, miss, whatever you were going to do, don’t do it!’
Instantly she grins from ear to ear.
‘Understood, sir!’ And she saunters away — with rather more of a swing to her undercarriage than he’s ever observed on a decent woman.
By now, Henry has had enough. He is tired, and longs for the safety and decorum of his own study in Gorham Place. The burst of adrenalin which enabled him to defend himself against the weasel man has ebbed now, and the foreign admixtures of emotion left in its wake are no longer exhilarating but merely befuddling.
With a heavy tread, he walks back towards the better part of town, where he’ll be able to hail an omnibus and begin the daunting task of disentangling what he has learned today. However, as he hurries through the labyrinthine streets, peering briefly into every alley and cul-de-sac in case it offers an early escape from St Giles, he happens to catch sight of …is it not? Yes, it’s the beggar-woman he gave money for food — the widow with the violent husband and five, or six, children.
She’s sitting in the open doorway of a slum, side-on to public view, her skirts puddling over the filthy summit of a half-dozen stone steps. Behind her, just inside the house, slouches a man with hair as black and coarse as the bristles on a chimney-brush. He wears a knitted waistcoat, a blue scarf and a military jacket, and loose trousers against which the woman casually leans her head. The two of them are sharing a brand-new bottle of spirits, handing it back and forth between them, guzzling with great satisfaction.
Henry stops in his tracks and gapes at the scene, played out not twenty feet from his nose. Too dismayed to approach the couple, too outraged to flee, he stands his ground, fists clenched. The woman, in between gulps, notices his arrival and, recognising him at once, exclaims, ‘Look, Dug! It’s our saviour!’ The pair of them convulse with laughter, wheezing and spluttering, their lips agleam with alcohol.
Speechless, Henry stands, cheeks burning, the nails of his fingers piercing the flesh of his palms, so hard does he clench his fists.
‘Make ‘im go away, Dug,’ says the woman, evidently finding her enjoyment of the spirits hampered by this scowling booby. ‘Make �
�im go away.’
Clumsily, the bristly man climbs over her skirts, almost pitching forward onto the steps, and positions himself in front of his companion. ‘Yaarr!!’ he shouts. When this has no immediate effect on the intruder, he turns and yanks his trousers down, baring his bony pale buttocks to Henry’s astounded gaze. He turns again, trousers slumped around his ankles, and assesses the effect upon the interloper. What next? Not suspecting that Henry is transfixed less by fear than by the sight of a stranger’s penis, he snatches this flaccid organ from its thatch of black hair and begins to spray urine into the air.
Henry Rackham, several yards out of reach, leaps backwards nevertheless, with a cry of disgust. The woman cries out too, her hilarity souring abruptly into fury as the steaming liquid spatters back onto her skirts.
‘Yer splashin’ me, yer bloody fool!’
In moments the pair of them are fighting, he slapping her fiercely around the ears, she jabbing and kicking his legs. He attempts to control her struggles by stamping one boot down on her skirts while he hauls up his trousers; without hesitation, she clubs him with the gin bottle, a vigorous overarm blow against his bony forehead that sends him sprawling down the steps.
‘Christ!’ she cries, as a long silvery arc of spilled alcohol hits the ground. The (miraculously unbroken) flask is hastily turned upright, and, while the man writhes at her feet clutching his bloody forehead, she shoves the bottle’s glistening neck deep into her mouth and sucks hard on what’s left.
For Henry, the ghastly spell is broken, and he is finally able to turn his back on these, the first poor people he has ever been intimate with, and lurch towards home.
Sitting in the Lumley Music Hall that evening, surrounded by men in cloth caps and women with teeth missing, William Rackham savours the fact that he can once more show himself in a place like this without fearing to be mistaken for a lesser being than he is. Now that the foundations of his wealth have solidified, and his ascension to directorship has become common knowledge (at least among those who make it their business to know ‘who’s who’), he can scarcely go anywhere without someone whispering, ‘That’s William Rackham.’ And, now that every stitch of his clothing is of the finest quality and the latest style, he can rest assured that even those humble souls who are ignorant of his identity must recognise him as a well-to-do gentleman — a gentleman who is sampling, for diversion’s sake, the entertainments of the not-so-well-to-do.
Of course, he’s not the only one here tonight who’s slumming. The Lumley’s audience is a curate’s omelette of mostly plain folk seasoned with a speckling of well-to-do gentlemen. But William likes to think he stands out by virtue of his beaver-skin frock-coat, his doe-skin trousers and especially his new top hat, the shortest one in the place. (No, no, not his old new hat, his new new hat — can’t you see it’s shorter? And it’s not a Billington & Joy job, either: Staniforth’s, ‘Hatters of Distinction since 1732’, if you please.)
The Lumley isn’t the kind of place where hats and cloaks are taken at the door, which makes it a sticky proposition for the overdressed, but at least it allows comparison of finery. Even so, it’s difficult to estimate how many persons of William’s own class are here tonight, as the hall is full, and any overview of the crowd is obscured by a froth of dowdy bonnets. The evening’s proceedings are by now well advanced and, in the warmth generated by the audience and hundreds of gas-lights, common men are removing jackets to reveal bare shirts, while the females fan themselves with cheap paper and plywood.
The row immediately in front of William holds no such females — regrettably enough, for Rackham wouldn’t mind catching a surplus breeze from a fluttering fan. He is, after all, not immune to what the ruder folk are feeling; his forehead is subject to the same sweat, and inside his layers of clothing he’s beginning to simmer. Perspiration prickles in his new beard, giving rise to itches he must resist the urge to scratch. Too many bodies crammed into one establishment! Couldn’t some have been turned away?
His new ulster hangs from the back of his seat, and his new cane lies across his knees, for he can imagine how desirable its silver knob might be to a thief. He also prefers to hold on to his triple-striped dog-skin gloves, even while applauding, unaware that this makes him look as if he’s beating a helpless rodent to death.
To the left of him sit Bodley and Ashwell. They, too, are overdressed, though less so than Rackham, for they know the Lumley better. They, too, are secure in their distinction from the common herd; slightly bored, they were, on Mount Parnassus, and so they thought, well, why not saunter down and see what’s on at the Lumley? And, having studied the bill, they really are looking forward to the Great Flatelli – ‘The Sensation of Sensations: The Magician of Emissions: Hear Him and Swoon!! All Italy Scandalised! France at his Feet! A One-Man Wind Ensemble!!!’
Already they’ve sat through a pretty but unfashionably plump girl singing humorous ballads, followed by the ‘London debut’ of Mr Epiderm, an old man with the curious ability to pull his skin out from his naked torso in elastic handfuls, and suspend heavy objects from it by means of metal pegs. It’s now a quarter past eight and the Great Flatelli has still not appeared. William and his two friends add their voices to the mutterings that accompany the efforts of a dapper little man on the faraway stage to reproduce the sounds of a bird being stalked, pursued and devoured by a variety of animals.
‘Bring on Flatelli!’ a brutish voice shouts, prompting William to reflect on how handy common people can be, when one wants something impolite said. Other hecklers join the cause, and the animal impressionist flails on under a thick cloud of ill-will.
Finally, at twenty-five to nine, the trumpeted Italian is brought on, to unanimous approval.
‘Buona sera, London!’ he bellows, scooping applause out of the air with his open hands and pressing it to his chest like invisible bouquets. Despite his oiled black moustache and black frock-coat, he’s suspiciously tall for an Italian, and his continental accent, when the clapping has faded and he begins his preamble, rings false in the ears of such sophisticates as Ashwell. (‘Jew. Wager anything you like: Jew,’ he mutters to William.)
‘My hunusual eenstrument,’ the great Flatelli is explaining, ‘ees ‘ere be’ind me. I tike eet wiz me airvrywhere I go.’ (Titters from the audience as he casts a pantomime glance over his shoulder.) ‘Eet rhequires no blowing, touching, squeezing …’ (Alto guffaws from a coterie of homosexuals at the back of the hall.) ‘But eet is a vairy dellicayte sound. I ask-a you to leesten vairy vairy carefooly. My first-a piece is a be-ootifool old-a Eenglish … air. Eetsacalled “Greensleeves”.’
Index finger pressed to his lips to enforce absolute hush, Flatelli bends at the waist. A solemn-faced associate wheels a large brass amplification funnel, mounted on a trolley, across the stage until its burnished mouth is almost touching the great man’s backside. One final flourish (a ceremonial flipping up of the frock-coat’s tails) and the farting begins.
For several seconds, the unmistakable tune of ‘Greensleeves’ vibrates in the air, as accurate, in its reedy way, as anything played on comb-and-paper or even (stretching it a bit) bassoon. Then the laughter starts, swelling from a suppressed murmur to a raucous rumble, and William and his companions, seated far from the front, must lean forward, concentrating intently.
At the chime of ten, in a house otherwise deathly quiet, Agnes Rackham is lying in bed. She knows, even without consulting the servants, that her husband has not yet returned from the city; she’s abnormally sensitive to the shutting of any door in the house, feeling the vibration, she fancies, through the floor or the legs of her bed. She lies in darkness and silence, thinking, merely thinking.
In Agnes’s head, inside her skull, an inch or two behind her left eye, nestles a tumour the size of a quail’s egg. She has no inkling it’s there. It nestles innocently; her hospitable head makes room for it without demur, as if such a diminutive guest could not possibly cause any trouble. It sleeps, soft and perfectly oval. No one will
ever find it. Roentgen photography is twenty years in the future, and Doctor Curlew, whatever parts of Agnes Rackham he may examine, is not about to go digging in her eye-socket with a scalpel. Only you and I know of this tumour’s existence. It is our little secret.
Agnes Rackham has a little secret of her own. She is lonely. In the closed-curtained, airless chamber of her room, in the thick invisible fog of perfume and her own exhaled breath, she is suffocating with loneliness. Looking back over her day, she can recall nothing that nourished her forlorn heart, only her greedy stomach which gets quite enough as it is — more than is good for it. At supper she ate (over-ate) alone, at dinner she ate (much too much) alone, tea and breakfast she couldn’t face for biliousness, luncheon she shared with William, but felt even lonelier than when he wasn’t there – and she ate too much, again.
Nor has this been a lonelier day than most: every day of her life is much the same. All through the long hours of sewing and staring out the window at what the gardener is up to, of making up her mind whether she’ll comb her own hair or have Clara comb it for her, she is longing for true companionship and suffering the lack of it. Doctor Curlew has never diagnosed this secret disease of hers, though she’s sure it makes her a great deal sicker than anything he claims to have found. What would he do, if he knew? What could he prescribe for her, to ease the pain of lying awake at night in an unkind world with not a soul to love her?
Oh, granted: her dreams, when they finally take her in, welcome her with open arms, but in the insomniac hours before sleep she lies marooned in her queen-sized bed, like the Lady of Shalott launched upon a dark lake in a vessel twice the size it need be.
What Agnes craves is not a man, nor even a female lover. She knows nothing of her body’s interior, nothing; and there is nothing she wants to know. Her loneliness, though it aches, is not particularly physical; it hangs in the air, weighs on the furniture, permeates the bed-linen. If only there could be someone next to her in this great raft of a bed, someone who liked and trusted her, and whom she liked and trusted in turn! There is no such person in the world. Dear Clara is paid to be agreeable; when her day’s work is done, she hurries upstairs for a well-earned rest from Mrs Rackham. The other servants have little to do with her; they fear her and, unbeknownst to them, she is a little afraid of them, too. A dog is out of the question; maybe she’ll get a kitten, if there’s a variety without claws? William’s brother Henry is terribly nice (she’s thinking of possible friends now, not of someone to share her bed) but altogether too serious; Agnes likes to keep her mind on pleasant things, not on all the problems of the world. As for William, he’s lost her trust forever. Whatever he does now, however wealthy he makes her, however courteously he addresses her over luncheon, however much freedom he offers her to accumulate more dresses, bonnets and shoes, however hard he tries to win her forgiveness, she can never forgive. One who sups with the Devil must use a long spoon; Agnes Rackham’s spoon, in supping with her husband, is the length of an oar.