by Michel Faber
Ah, but all this sophisticated thought is no help at all. She must make peace with her body, however bad a choice it may have been, for if she’s to manage the coming Season, she needs unhindered use of her body’s faculties.
So, bravely, Agnes carries on with her day, forcing herself to perform small tasks — combing her hair, buffing her nails, writing her diary — doing her best to ignore clumsy mishaps. Small scratches and chafes appear on her skin without warning; bruises spread over her like measles; the muscles in her neck, arms and back are stretched to snapping-point, and on her forehead the shiny blemish throbs and throbs.
Please, no, please, no, please, no, she recites constantly, as if from a rosary. I don’t want to bleed again.
To Agnes, bleeding from the belly is a terrifying and unnatural thing. No one has told her about menstruation; she has never heard the word nor seen it in print. Doctor Curlew, the only person who might have enlightened her, never has, because he assumes his patient can’t possibly have married, borne a child and lived to the age of twenty-three without becoming aware of certain basic facts. He assumes incorrectly.
But it’s not so very odd: when, at seventeen, Agnes married William, she’d only bled a few times, and ever since then she’s been ill. Everyone knows that ill people bleed: bleeding is the manifestation of serious illness. Her father (her real father, that is) bled on his deathbed, didn’t he, despite not being in any way injured, and she remembers also, as a small child, seeing a baa-lamb lying in a pool of blood, and her nurse telling her that the animal was ‘sickly’.
Well, now she, Agnes, is ‘sickly’. And, from time to time, she bleeds.
She hasn’t discerned any pattern. The affliction began when she was seventeen, was cured by prayer and fasting and, after her marriage, it stayed away for almost a year. Then it came at intervals of a month or two — or even three, if she starved herself. Always she hopes she’s seen the last of it, and now she prays she might be spared until August.
‘After the Season,’ she promises the demons who wish her ill. ‘After the Season, you can have me.’ But she feels her belly swelling already.
A few days later, with William away on business in Dundee (wherever on Earth that might be), Sugar decides to take a peep at his house. Why not? She’ll only sit idle in her little room at Mrs Castaway’s otherwise, her novel stalling upon the latest man, unable to decide on his fate.
Her collaboration with William on the wording of future Rackham catalogues proved very fruitful — for her as well as for him. In his enthusiasm to jot down her suggestions, he pulled an old envelope from his pocket that happened to have his address written on it. ‘How about … “Restore your hair to the luxuriance that is your birthright!”?’ she said, simultaneously committing the address to memory.
Now Sugar sits among old folk and respectable young women, riding the omnibus from the city to North Kensington, on a changeable Monday afternoon, on her way to find out where William Rackham, Esquire, lays his head at nights. She’s wearing her dowdiest dress — a loose-fitting woollen one in plain blue, so at odds with the latest fashions as to be pitiable on a woman under thirty. Indeed, Sugar has the impression she is pitied by one or two of the ladies, but at least no one suspects her of being a prostitute. That might have made things difficult, given that in the confines of the omnibus there’s no choice but to sit face-to-face with one’s fellow passengers.
‘High Street already,’ murmurs an old man to his wife very near Sugar. ‘We’ve made good time.’
Sugar looks past their wrinkled heads at the world outside. It’s sunny and green and spacious. The omnibus slows to a stop.
‘Chepstow Villas Cor-nerrrl’
Sugar alights right behind the elderly couple. They don’t hurry away from her, but accept her walking in their wake as if she’s respectable, just like them. Her disguise, evidently, is perfect.
‘Chilly, isn’t it?’ one old dear mutters to the other, while the sun beams down on Sugar’s perspiring back.
I am young, she thinks. It’s a different sun shining on me from the one that shines on them.
Sugar walks slowly, allowing the old folk to forge ahead. The ground beneath her feet is extraordinarily smooth, as near as cobble-stones can get to parquetry; she imagines an army of paviours patiently completing it like a jigsaw puzzle while the placid citizens look on. She walks on, sniffing the air and goggling at the handsome new houses, trying hard to absorb the Notting Hillness of Notting Hill, trying to imagine what the choice of such a place for a man’s home reveals about him. This, not the stench of the city, is the air my William breathes, she reminds herself.
What she knows about William Rackham so far would hardly fill a book. She knows his preferences in orifices (conventional, unless he’s in a bad mood) and how he feels about the size of his pego (it’s a respectable size, isn’t it, though some other men may be bigger?), and she’s inscribed on her memory all his opinions in literature, down to the last witticism at George Eliot’s expense. But William Rackham the family man and citizen? An elusive creature, not identifiable as the lover she embraces.
Now, she walks along his home street, determined to learn more. How quiet it is here! And how spacious! Moats of greenery everywhere, and trees! Pedestrians are few and far between; they have nothing to sell, they are pensive and unencumbered, they stroll. Carts roll into view very slowly, and take their own sweet time to amble away. There are no shrieks of laughter or distress, no vertiginous stacks of decaying housing, no din of industry or smell of faeces, only curtains in the windows and birds in the trees.
One large house, set well back from the street, is fenced all around in freshly painted cast-iron; as she walks past, Sugar runs her gloved hands along the knots and curls. It’s only after a minute that she realises the dominant motif in the iron design is the letter ‘R’, repeated hundreds and hundreds of times, hidden among the curlicues.
‘Eureka,’ she whispers.
Adjusting her bonnet, she peers through the eye of the largest ‘R’ she can find. Her lips part, her mouth dilates in awe as she takes stock of the house, its pillars and porticos, its carriage-way and gardens.
‘My God. You’ll keep me better than you do now, my dear Willy,’ she softly prophesies.
But then the Rackham house’s front door swings open, and Sugar instantly pulls her hands away from the gate and retreats. She hurries around the corner into a different crescent, looking neither right nor left, wishing herself invisible. It’s all she can do not to break into a run; her bustle bounces against her bottom as it is. A stiff wind springs up where there was no wind before (or was it at her back, gently pushing her on?), stinging her face, almost tearing her bonnet off, flapping the skirts of her dress. She shelters — hides — behind the first public monument she comes to: a marble column commemorating the fallen in the Crimean War.
She peeps from behind the plinth, her cheek brushing against the names of young men who are no longer alive, subtle absences in the smoothness of the marble. A woman is coming down Pembridge Crescent, a small blonde woman with a perfect figure and a chocolate-and-cream-coloured dress. She walks briskly, bobbing slightly as she advances. Her eyes are so big and blue that their beauty can be appreciated at twenty yards’ distance.
This, Sugar is certain, is the wife of William Rackham.
He’s alluded to her once or twice, by way of comparison, but stopped short of naming her, so Sugar has no name to put to this pretty young woman drawing near. ‘Always-Sick’, perhaps. Apart from her bosom, which is full, Mrs Rackham inhabits a body of remarkably infantile scale. Nor is her body the only childish thing about her: is she aware, Sugar wonders, that she’s biting her lower lip as she walks?
Just as Mrs Rackham reaches the monument, a peculiar thing happens: the whole of North Kensington undergoes a remarkable meteorological phenomenon — the sun is covered over by sheets of dark-grey cloud, but continues to shine with such brilliance that the clouds themselves assume an intense luminos
ity. Down below, the crescent and everything in it is coated with a spectral light that lends an unnatural definition to each and every cobble, leaf and lamp-post. Everything stands out sharply and nothing recedes, at once revealed and obscured in a glow as treacherous as polar twilight.
Mrs Rackham stops dead. She looks up into the heavens in naked terror. From her hiding-place behind the column, Sugar can see the convulsive swallow in her white throat, the sheen of dread in her eyes, the angry red pimple on her forehead.
‘Saints and angels preserve me!’ she cries, then spins on her axis and flees. Her tiny feet all-but-invisible beneath her frothing hems, she glides back down the road like a bead sliding along a string, her progress unnaturally straight, unnaturally rapid. Then the pretty chocolate-coloured bead that is Mrs Rackham veers, and disappears, as if following a twist in its string, through the Rackham gates.
Moments later, the sun is unveiled again, and the world loses its eerie clarity. Everything is back to normal; the Gods are appeased.
Sugar gets to her feet, pats the dust off her skirts with her palms. She moves sluggishly, as though roused from a deep sleep. All she can think is: Why has William never told me his wife has such a beautiful voice? To Sugar’s ear, Mrs Rackham, even in the grip ofterror, sounds like a bird — a rare bird pursued for its song. What man, if he could hear that voice whenever he pleased, wouldn’t listen to it as often as possible? What ear could tire of it?
It’s the voice she wishes she’d been born with: not hoarse and low like her own croak, but pure and high and musical.
Go home, you fool, she cautions herself, as the first few raindrops spatter against the plinth. All this clean air is going to your head.
A few days later still, Henry Rackham, desperate to confide, yet having not a single confidante in the world except Mrs Fox, to whom he can’t possibly confess this particular secret, calls upon his brother William.
Intimacy hasn’t always flowed smoothly, it must be said, between the Rackham brothers. Despite their blood ties, and despite Henry giving William the benefit of the doubt in many things, Henry can’t help noticing their differences. Devoutness, for example, has never been William’s strong point, although they do share — judging from past conversations — a passionate desire to improve the world, and reform English society.
From William’s point of view, his older brother is dismal company indeed. As he put it once to Bodley and Ashwell: Henry has that werewolf look of someone who ought to be ravaging virgins, then scourging his flesh in remorse while the townspeople surround the castle with flaming torches, baying for his blood — but alas, no such racy scenario ever accompanies his fraternal visits. Instead, Henry always bemoans, in vague, irritatingly opaque terms, his unworthiness for anything he aspires to. What a pitiful head of Rackham Perfumeries he would have made! Surrendering his claim to William may well have been the only clever thing the poor dullard ever did!
Still, William has lately resolved to be generous and hospitable to his brother, and forgive him his shortcomings. It’s all part and parcel of being the chief Rackham now: this receiving of visits from troubled family members, this imparting of advice.
On the rainy afternoon that Henry does finally cough up a secret, it’s cold enough indoors for both men to regret that Spring has already been put into effect in the Rackham house. Granted, the banishing of Winter furnishings is a social obligation that must be obeyed, but Agnes has obeyed it rather earlier than necessary, and now, on her instruction, the fireplace in the parlour has been rendered wholly useless. Force of habit makes the men sit near it still, even though it’s empty and brushed out, sporting a small philodendron where the flames ought to be, and lace curtains embroidered with crocuses, robins and other vernal symbols. Henry leans forwards, closer to his brother and the hearth, trying to warm himself on what’s not there.
‘William,’ he is saying, the furrow in his brow identical to the one he already had as a boy of seven, ‘Do you think it’s wise for you to have so much to do with Bodley and Ashwell? They’ve published that book you know – The Efficacy of Prayer — Have you seen it?’
‘They’ve given me a copy,’ admits William. ‘Boys will be boys, yes?’
‘Boys, yes …’ sighs Henry, ‘but with the capacity of men to do harm.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says William, folding his arms against the chill and glancing at the clock. ‘They’re surely preaching to the …ah … converted is the wrong word here, isn’t it?…to the deconverted, shall we say. How many people d’you really think are going to regard prayer any differently as a result of this book?’
‘Every soul is precious,’ fumes Henry.
‘Ach, it’ll all blow over,’ counsels the younger brother. ‘Ashwell’s last book, The Modern Dunciad, was a scandal for two months, and then …?’ William flings a handful of fingers wide, to mime a puff of smoke.
‘Yes, but they’re taking this book all around England on a sort of … grand tour, showing it off at working men’s clubs and so on, as if it were a two-headed giraffe. They read it aloud, taking parts, mimicking the voices of feeble old clerics and angry widows, and then they solicit questions from the audience … ‘
‘How do you know all this?’ asks William, for it’s news to him.
‘I’m forever running into them!’ cries Henry, as though lamenting his own clumsiness. ‘I’m convinced they follow me — it can’t be mere chance. But you, William, you must be careful — no, don’t smile — William, they’re becoming notorious, and if you’re seen to be thick with them, you may become notorious as well.’
William shrugs, unconcerned. He’s too wealthy now to fear the gossip of the righteous, and in any case, he’s noticed a tendency lately amongst the Best People to seek out the notorious, to add a bit ofspice to parties.
‘They are my friends, Henry,’ he chides gently, ‘from so long ago …the best part of twenty years.’
‘Yes, yes, they were once my friends too,’ groans the older Rackham. ‘But I can’t be loyal to them as you are, I can’t! They cause me nothing but embarrassment.’ Henry’s large hands, one on each of his knees, are white-knuckled. ‘There are times — I hardly dare confess it — there are times when I wish I could simply be rid of them and all their memories of the man I used to be; when I wish I could wake one day to a world of perfect strangers who knew me only as …as …’
‘A man of the cloth?’ prompts William, staring in pity at those hands of Henry’s, clutching at his ungainly knees as if at the rim of a pulpit.
‘Yes,’ confesses Henry, and (oh, for Heaven’s sake!) hangs his head.
‘You haven’t … taken Orders, have you?’ enquires William, wondering ifthis is the oh-so-coy secret Henry has been struggling to divulge.
‘No, no.’ Henry fidgets irritably. ‘I know I’m not ready for that yet. My soul is far from …ah … any sort of purity.’
‘But isn’t the idea of it — forgive me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here — Isn’t the idea of it that you …ah … become pure while you’re taking the Orders? I mean, that the process itself effects a sort of transformation?’
‘That isn’t the idea at all!’ protests Henry.
But, inwardly, he fears that it is. The real truth of his reluctance to take the first steps towards becoming a clergyman, at least since he’s known Mrs Fox, is that he’s terrified his examiners will peer into his soul and tell him he is unfit not only for the collar and the pulpit, but for any sort of Christian life.
As a layman, he’s spared that awful judgement, for although he’s his own harshest critic, there’s one respect in which he’s lenient on himself: he doesn’t believe his sins disqualify him from striving to be a decent person. As long as he remains a layman, he can be impure in thought and word, or even in deed, and afterwards he can repent and resolve to do better in future, disappointing no one but himself and God. No one else is dragged down by his sins; he is the captain of his soul, and if he steers it into dark waters, no inn
ocent person risks shipwreck along with him. But if he aspires to leadership of others, he cannot afford to be such a poor captain; he’ll have to be a stronger and better man than he is now. Sterner judges even than himself will have the right — nay, the obligation — to condemn him. And surely his depravity is written all over his face? Surely anyone can guess that his soul is rotten with carnal desires?
Perhaps it’s this belief that his secret must already be suspected by everyone except Mrs Fox, and all the more so by his brother, a man of the world, that finally makes it possible for Henry to confess, on this rainy afternoon in front of the frilly hearth.
‘William, spoke to a prostitute last week,’ he says.
‘Really?’ says William, roused from near-somnolence by this promising titbit. ‘Did Mrs Fox bring her along to a meeting?’
‘No, no,’ grimaces Henry. ‘I spoke to her in the street. In fact, I …I have been speaking to prostitutes in the street for some time now.’
There is a pause while the brothers gaze first at each other, then at their shoes.
‘Speaking only?’
‘Of course, speaking only.’ If Henry notices his brother’s shoulders slump slightly in disappointment, he’s not put off by it. ‘I’ve fallen into the habit of walking in a wretched part of London — High Street — no, not the High Street here, the one in St Giles — and conversing with whoever addresses me.’
‘Which, I take it, is mainly prostitutes.’