The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  With so little hope of friendship in her waking life, is it any wonder that Agnes prefers the company of the nuns at the Convent of Health? They welcome her and care for her, without any reward but to see her smile. One nun in particular has such a sweet, kind face … Yet Agnes’s visits to the Convent of Health are always over so soon: restricted, by an ungenerous God, to her short hours of sleep. The journey to the Convent, by train through an eternity of countryside, sometimes takes most of the night, so that the time left for the nuns to nurse her is pitifully brief — a few minutes only, before waking. On other nights, the journey there seems to take hardly any time at all — an express locomotive pulls her through a green blur — and she’s enveloped in the Holy Sisters’ care before her tears have even sunk into the pillow. But on those nights, the return journey must be long indeed, for by the time she reaches morning, she has forgotten everything.

  Agnes doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a dream. In her philosophy, there are events that happen when one is awake, and others that happen when one is sleeping. She is aware that some people — men, in particular — take a dim view of what happens when the eyes are closed and the sheets are still, but she has no such doubts. To dismiss the night’s events as unreal would be to credit herself with the power of invention, and she knows instinctively that she is powerless to create. Creation out of nothing: only God can do that. How like men, in their monstrous conceit and their shameless blasphemy, to disagree! How like them to disown halftheir lives, saying none of it exists, it’s all phantasmagoria!

  The difference between men and women is nowhere plainer, thinks Agnes, than in the novels they write. The men always pretend they are making everything up, that all the persons in the story are mere puppets of their imagination, when Agnes knows that the novelist has invented nothing. He has merely patchworked many truths together, collecting accounts from newspapers, consulting real soldiers or fruit-sellers or convicts or dying little girls — whatever his story may require. The lady novelists are far more honest: Dear Reader, they say, This is what happened to me.

  For this reason, Agnes much prefers novels written by ladies. She gets The London Journal and The Leisure Hour every week, bringing her all the latest instalments from the pens of Clementine Montagu, Mrs Oliphant, Pierce Egan (not a man, surely?), Mrs Harriet Lewis, and all the rest. As a special treat, Mudie’s Circulating Library brings her bound volumes of Mrs Riddell and Eliza Lynn Linton, so she can read a whole story without delay.

  Even when Agnes is not bedridden, novels are such a boon, for they bring a steady supply of noble and attractive human beings into her life which, it must be said, the world at large is not generous with. A sympathetic heroine, she finds, is almost as good as a friend of flesh and blood. (What a repulsive expression ‘flesh and blood’ is, though, when one thinks about it!)

  Lately, Agnes Rackham hasn’t much time for reading. All her waking hours are spent preparing for the Season. Chiefly she’s in thrall to her sewing-machine, constructing dress after dress, or else leafing through magazines in search of patterns. Acres of material have passed under the needle already; acres more are still to be done. Nine complete dresses hang on frames in her dressing-room; a tenth stands in the darkness of her bedroom, still half-finished on the dummy.

  Ten won’t be nearly enough, of course. How sincere is William really when he says she has his blessing to have ‘any number of dresses’ made for her by a dressmaker? What number does he have in mind? Is he aware how much she would cost him if she took him at his word? She dreads a return to the kind of intercourse they were having not so long ago, with him irritable and intolerant of the needs of her sex, barely able to control his exasperation and his disapproval, while she is perpetually close to tears.

  It’s a pity she can’t do what many other ladies with sewing-machines are doing just now — altering beyond recognition gowns they wore in previous Seasons. In an afternoon of madness on New Year’s Day, inspired by a novelty sewing pattern she chanced to find in a magazine, she ruined all her best dresses. She remembers clearly (how odd the things one remembers, and the things one forgets!) the fatal text: ‘Fabric remnants and outmoded curtains need not lie idle. Turn them into an Effortless Amusement for you and a Delight for your Children.’ Neat diagrams and simple instructions imparted the knack of fashioning, ‘with only a quarter-hour’s stitching apiece’, life-like, three-dimensional humming-birds.

  An irresistible mania, whose intensity she’s even now chilled to recall, gripped her then. She had no remnants in the house, yet the desire to turn remnants into humming-birds raged in her like a fever. Despite Clara’s pleas that if Madam could only wait until morning, she could have a pile of remnants from Whiteley’s in Bayswater, the torture of waiting even a single minute was unbearable. So, she fell upon her ‘old’ dresses – ‘I shan’t be wearing these again,’ she insisted — and sliced into them with her dressmaking shears. By nightfall, the floor was a chaos of cannibalised ball-gowns and bodices, and dozens of humming-birds had been made: soft satin birds, drooping like sick things; hard spry birds made of stiff petticoat; white silken birds trembling in the breeze from Agnes’s furious pedalling of the sewing-machine; dark velvet birds sitting quite still. Odd, how some of her dresses were ruined instantly, as if the scissors had punctured them like a bladder, while others more or less kept their shape and were merely … disfigured. To these she returned again and again with her scissors, to make more birds.

  ‘I must,’ sighs Agnes into her pillow now, ‘have been mad.’

  Her eyelids flutter shut in the darkness. Somewhere nearby, a train whistle blows. The sun rises — not slowly, according to its usual custom, but in a few seconds, as if fuelled by gas. The big wide world glows green and blue, the colours of travel, and everything disagreeable disappears.

  Outside Agnes’s bedroom, in what men and historians like to call ‘the real world’, the night is not yet over. In the poorer streets, the grocer, the cheese-monger and the chop-house man haven’t shut up shop; their customers are match-sellers and cress-sellers and street-walkers, come to claim their reward for long hours of standing in the cold. Beggar children come too, pestering the merchants for unsaleable fragments of ham or Dutch cheese to take back home for Father’s supper. And for Father, there are countless drinking-houses open all night.

  It is through the streets of this ‘real’ world — not far from the Lumley Music Hall — that three well-to-do, slightly drunk gentlemen, Messrs Bodley, Ashwell and Rackham, stroll, march and stagger. They scarcely notice the dark, the cold and the drizzle, except to note that their half-shouted altercation doesn’t echo as it should.

  ‘Caput mortuum!’ cries Bodley, resorting to the old school insults.

  ‘Bathybiut!’ retorts Ashwell.

  ‘Stone-deaf cretin!’ bawls Bodley.

  ‘Unswabbed haven of earwax!’ hisses Ashwell. ‘It was “The Collier’s Daughter”, and nothing will convince me otherwise.’

  ‘It was “Weep Not, My Pretty Bride”, or I’m a Christ-killer. Shall I sing the chorus for you, idiot?’

  ‘What difference would that make, fool? You’d have to fart it to convince me!’

  William Rackham has not contributed a word to the debate, content merely to watch.

  ‘What is your opinion, Bill?’ says Bodley.

  Rackham scowls in annoyance: he was so keen to show off his new cane tonight that he left his umbrella at home, and now the rain is setting in. ‘God only knows,’ he shrugs. ‘The whole thing was a damn fiasco. I could barely hear a thing. The Lumley was quite the wrong place for such a performance. It should’ve been somewhere small and intimate. And with an audience well-bred enough to behave themselves.’

  Bodley strikes himself on the forehead with his palm, and reels back.

  ‘Lord Rackham has spoken!’ he proclaims. ‘Tremble, impresarios!’

  ‘A church,’ says Ashwell. ‘That’s the place for the Great Flatelli, eh, Bill? Smallish crowd, everyone on the
ir best behaviour, superb acoustics …’

  William spits into the gutter, whose sodden contents are just beginning to move. ‘I’m glad you two are so easy to please. In my view, we’ve been shamefully short-changed tonight. Think of the poorer folk, who can ill afford to waste their wages on such a … such a puffed-up swindle!’

  ‘D’you hear that, Ashwell? Think of the poorer folk!’

  ‘Toiling all week to hear a good fart, and what do they get?’

  ‘Fuck-all!’

  ‘I’m going home,’ says Rackham, peering through the gas-lit drizzle for a cab.

  ‘Aww, no, Bill, don’t leave us all alo-o-one.’ ‘No, damn it, I’m going home. It’s cold and it’s raining.’ ‘There are plenty of warm dry places for a man to crawl into, aren’t there, Ashwell?’

  ‘Warm and wet, heh-heh-heh.’

  Inspired, Bodley unbuttons his overcoat and begins to rummage in the pockets within. ‘I just so happen to have on my person … Bear with me, friends, while I fumble …’ — he whips out a crumpled tract the size of a cheap New Testament and waves it in the lamp-light – ‘A brand, spanking new edition of More Sprees in London. A year in the making, no expense spared, all lies guaranteed true, all virgins guaranteed intact. I’ve been studying it ass … assiduously. Some of the houses have moved up a few rungs since the last edition. There was one in particular …’ (he flips the already dog-eared pages) ‘Ah! yes, this one here: Mrs Castaway’s. Silver Street.’

  ‘A hop, skip and a jump away!’ says Ashwell.

  ‘Sugar,’ declares Bodley. ‘That’s the girl: Sugar. Words can’t do her justice, it says here. Luxury for the price of mediocrity. A treasure. On and on in that vein. And the house is awarded four stars.’

  ‘Four stars! Let’s go this minute!’ Ashwell wheels round and waves his cane in the air. ‘Cab! Cab! Where’s a cab!’

  For a moment William’s blood runs cold, as he imagines Sugar has betrayed him and is conducting business as usual. Then he reminds himself what a catalogue of fictions More Sprees is. The Sugar who exists in its pages is not the real one he knows.

  While Bodley and Ashwell lurch backwards and forwards in the rain, singing ‘Cab!’ and ‘Sugar!’ in silly voices, William thinks of her as she was when he last saw her — only three days ago. He remembers the look on her face when he disabused her of her ignorance. ‘I am William Rackham,’ he told her. ‘The head of Rackham Perfumeries.’ Why shouldn’t she know?

  Once he’d let the cat out of the bag, however, and lapped up Sugar’s surprise and admiration, he wished he had more cats to let out, to receive more of the same. Guessing that her good fortune must seem to her like a dream, he made it more real by telling her that anything she might desire (in the way of perfumes, cosmetics and soaps) was hers for the asking. To which she responded, naturally enough, with a request for a Rackham’s brochure.

  ‘Cab! Cab!’ Ashwell is yelling still. ‘Come, stout companions, let’s try around the corner!’

  ‘Steady on, Ashwell,’ cautions William, ‘Have you considered the possibility this girl you want may not be available?’

  ‘Damn it, Bill; where’s your sense of adventure? Let’s take our chances!’

  ‘Our chances?’

  ‘Three men; three holes — the arithmetic of it is perfect!’ William smiles and shakes his head.

  ‘My friends,’ he says, bowing mock-solemnly. ‘I wish you the best of luck finding this … what’s her name?… this Sugar. I regret I’m too tired to go with you. You can tell me all about it when next we meet!’

  ‘Agreed!’ cries Bodley. ‘Au revoir!’ And he reels off on Ashwell’s arm, singing ‘Off to Mrs Castaway’s! Off to Mrs Castaway’s!’ all the way to the corner.

  ‘Au revoir!’ William calls out after them, but they’re already gone.

  The drizzle is drizzle no longer; heavy raindrops splash against his ulster, threatening to turn it into a water-logged burden, and there’s still no cab in sight. Yet, oddly, his irritable mood is passing from him now that he’s alone; Bodley and Ashwell, always such a tonic for him in the past, were tonight more like a dose of cod liver oil. What a tiresome thing it is to be a sober man among soused companions! Perhaps he should’ve drunk more, but damn it, he didn’t wish to … Why drink half a dozen glasses when two are enough to warm the stomach? And why reel from woman to woman when one is enough to satisfy the loins? Or is he merely getting old?

  ‘Are you needin’ a numbrella, good sir?’

  A female voice at his side. He whirls to face her; she is young and shabbily dressed, with comely brown eyes, well-shaped eyebrows, too spade-like a jaw — quite fuckable, really, all things considered. She shelters under an umbrella that’s ragged and skeletal, but holds in her free hand a much more substantial looking one, furled.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ says Rackham. ‘Show me what you have there.’

  ‘Jus’ one left, good sir,’ she replies apologetically, rolling her eyes at the weather as if to say, ‘I had dozens to begin with, but they’ve all been bought.’

  William examines the parapluie, weighing it in his hands, running one gloved finger along its ivory handle, peeking into its waxy black folds. ‘Very handsome,’ he murmurs. ‘And belonging, if I read this label correctly, to a Mr Giles Gordon. How peculiar that he should have discarded it! You know, miss, his address is so nearby, we could even ask him how well this umbrella served him, couldn’t we?’

  The girl bites her lip, her pretty eyebrows contorted in agitation.

  ‘Please, sir,’ she whines. ‘Me ol’ man give me that umbrella. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t usually do this sort o’ fing, it’s just the umbrella came me way, and …’ She gestures helplessly, as if trusting him to understand the economics of it: a high-class umbrella is worth more than a low-class woman.

  For a moment she and he are locked in an impasse. Her free hand squirms against her bosom: protective, suggestive.

  Then, ‘Here,’ he says gruffly, handing her a few coins — less than the umbrella is worth, but more than she would have dared ask him for her body. ‘You’re too sweet a girl to go to gaol on my account.’

  ‘Oh, fank you sir,’ she cries, and runs off into the nearest alley.

  William frowns, wondering if he’s done the right thing. With gloriously perverse timing, a cab rolls jingling round the corner, rendering his purchase futile; nor does he want another man’s parapluie lying about his house. With a pang of regret, he tosses the thing away: perhaps the girl will find it again, or if she doesn’t, well … nothing goes to waste in these streets.

  ‘What’s yer pleasure, guv?’ yells the cabman.

  Home, Rackham is thinking, as he seizes hold of the hand-grip and pulls himself up out of the muck.

  ELEVEN

  Sugar’s forehead lands with a soft thud on the papers she has been toiling over. Half past midnight, Mrs Castaway’s. Musty quiet and the smell of embers and candle-fat. The cobwebby mass of her own hair threatens to stifle her as she comes back to life with a gasp.

  Raising herself from her writing-desk, Sugar blinks, scarcely able to believe she could have fallen asleep when, only an instant before, she was so seriously pondering what word should come next. The page on which her face landed is smudged, still glistening; she stumbles over to the bed and examines her face in the mirror. The pale flesh of her forehead is branded with tiny, incomprehensible letters in purple ink. ‘Damn,’ she says.

  A few minutes later she’s in bed, looking over what she has written. A new character has entered her story, and is suffering the same fate as all the others.

  ‘Please,’ he begged, tugging ineffectually at the silken bonds holding him fast to the bedposts. ‘Let me go! I am an important man’.’ — and many more such pleas. I paid no heed to him, busying myself with my whet-stone and my dagger.

  ‘But tell me, exalted Sir,’ I said at last. ‘Where is it your pleasure to have the blade enter you?’

  To this, the man gave no reply, but his fa
ce turned gastly grey.

  ‘The embarassment of choices has taken your tongue,’ I suggested. ‘But never fear: I shall explain them all to you, and their exquisite effects …’

  Sugar frowns, wrinkling the blur of backwards text on her forehead. There’s something lacking here, she feels. But what? A long succession of other men, earlier on in her manuscript, have inspired her to flights of Gothic cruelty; dispatching them to their grisly fate has always been sheer pleasure. Tonight, with this latest victim, she can’t summon what’s needed — that vicious spark — to set her prose alight. Faced with the challenge of spilling his blood, she hears an alien voice of temptation inside her: Oh, for God’s sake, let the poor fool live.

  You’re going soft, she chides herself. Come on, shove it in, deep into his throat, into his arse, into his guts, up to the hilt.

  She yawns, stretches under the warm, clean covers. She has slept here alone for days now; it smells of no body but hers. As always, there are half a dozen clean sheets on the bed, interleaved with waxed canvas, so that each time a sheet is soiled she can whip it off, revealing a fresh layer of bedding. Before William Rackham came into her life, these layers were stripped off with monotonous regularity; now, they stay in place, all half-dozen of them, for days at a time. Christopher climbs the stairs every morning to collect soiled bedding, and finds nothing outside her door.