by Michel Faber
No, William sighs, it’s all right. He is tired; this has been a weighty day for him too. And she was right to wonder how she’s to get fed in this new home of hers. But it’s all taken care of. He — or rather his bank — will post her a weekly allowance, more than sufficient for her independence. There are a number of excellent establishments on Marylebone Road, including breakfast rooms at the Aldsworth Hotel that he has no hesitation recommending; the omelettes there are especially good. The Warwick is superb for fish: does she like fish? Yes, she adores fish. What fish in particular? Oh, all fish. And she’s not to worry about keeping her rooms clean, either, or the laundry: he’ll procure a girl for her …
‘Oh no, William, that really isn’t necessary,’ Sugar protests. ‘I am really very domesticated, you know, when I want to be.’ (Completely untrue, she inwardly concedes — she’s never done a stroke of housework in her life. But if these rooms are to be her own, let them truly be her own!)
Indeed, as she and William lie on their newly christened bed together, she’s growing increasingly desperate to be alone. This gift of his …She won’t be able to believe it exists until he disappears and it fails to disappear with him. What can she do to make him go! Her kisses on his chest increase in frequency, like a nervous tic; she pecks softly in a line towards his genitals, hoping to force the issue one way or the other.
‘I must go,’ he says, patting her between the shoulder-blades.
‘So soon?’ she croons.
‘Duty calls.’ He is already donning his shirt. ‘In any case, I expect you’ll be wanting to get familiar with your little nest.’
‘Our little nest,’ she demurs. (There are your trousers, you fool! There!!)
Minutes later, as he’s stroking her goodbye, she kisses his fingers, and says, ‘It’s as if all my birthdays have come at once.’
‘Dear Heaven!’ Rackham declares. ‘I don’t even know when your birthday is!’
Sugar smiles as she selects, from the jumble of contending responses in her head, the perfect sentence to send him on his way, les mots justes for the closure of this transaction.
‘This will be my birthday from now on,’ she says.
After the door shuts, Sugar lies unmoving for a minute or two, in case William returns. Then, slowly, she swings her legs over the side of the bed, finds her feet on the unfamiliar floor, and stands up. Her camisole, much rumpled, falls down over her breasts. Pensively she smooths it with her palms, wondering if William’s boast that he has thought of ‘everything’ includes such a thing as an iron. Item by item she re-dresses herself. With a tiny clothes-brush from her reticule she brushes her skirts, which come up nicely. Exchanging the clothes-brush for a hand-mirror, she tidies her hair a little, and peels a flake or two of skin from her dry lips before leaving the bedroom.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ she cautions herself, aloud. ‘You’ve all the time in the world now.’
First of all she goes to … her study. Yes, her study. She stands at the French windows, looking out at the garden. In the morning it will be sunlit, won’t it, and dew will be twinkling on the neat beds of grass and the exotic plants she doesn’t have names for. Through her one little window at Mrs Castaway’s, there was never anything to see except dirty roof-tops and impatient human traffic; here, she has grass and … pretty green stuff.
The red roses in the hallway are another matter: they get up her nose, quite literally. How long ought she leave them there in that vase, before tossing them in the garbage where they belong? Always she has detested cut flowers, and roses in particular: their smell and the way they fall apart when past their bloom. The flowers she can tolerate — hyacinths, lilies, orchids — die firm on their stems, in one piece to the last.
Still, the bouquet is an emblem of the care with which William Rackham has prepared this place for her. What a lot of trouble he has gone to: how richly he has repaid the trouble she has gone to in cultivating him! The more she explores her rooms, the more evidence she finds of his thoughtfulness: the glove-stretcher and the glove-powderer, the shoe tree and the ring stand, the bellows for the fire, the bedwarming pans. Did he really think of all these things, or did he simply blunder through a Regent Street emporium and buy every damn thing in sight? Certainly there are some queer objects lying about. A magnetic brush, still in its box, claims to curl hair and cure bilious headaches. An expertly stuffed ermine lies curled up in front of her wardrobe as though waiting to be skinned, made into a stole, and hung up inside. Ornaments of silver, glass, pottery and brass jostle one another on the mantelpieces. Two dressing-tables stand side by side, one larger than the other but less attractively finished, inviting the conclusion that Rackham, after buying the one, had second thoughts and bought the other as well, leaving the final choice to her. Does this signal his blessing on any changes she wishes to make? Too soon to tell.
Damn those roses! They’re filling the whole place with their stink … but no, that’s not possible, not from one vase of blooms. There’s a mysterious surfeit of perfume in the atmosphere, as if the entire building has been sponged with scented soap. Sugar wrenches the French windows open, and fresh night air shoots up her nostrils. She pokes her face out into the dark, breathing deeply, sniffing the subtle odour of wet grass and the unsubtle absence of all those smells she’s so accustomed to: meat and fish, the droppings of cart-horses and ponies, sullied water gurgling down drainpipes.
A warm reflux of semen trickles down her thighs and into her pantalettes as she stands sniffing; she winces, clutches herself, pushes the windows shut with her free hand. What to do next? Wouldn’t it be astonishing if she opened the door of this wardrobe here and found, just where she needed it to be, the big silvery bowl and the box of poison powders? She opens the wardrobe door. Empty.
She runs back to the bedroom, checks under the bed on both sides. No chamber-pot. What does Rackham think she is? A …? The word she’s looking for, if it exists, eludes her …In any case, she’s just remembered that she has a bathroom. Sweet Jesus, a bathroom! She stumbles there immediately.
It’s an eerie little chamber, with a burnished wooden floor the colour of stewed tea, and shiny tricoloured walls — glazed bronze tiles on the dado, then a band of black wallpaper like a ribbon round the room, then a satiny coat of mustard-yellow paint up to the ceiling. All this casts a most peculiar light on the ceramic bathtub, washbasin and lavatory.
Sugar sits on the privy. It’s just like the one downstairs at Mrs Castaway’s, except it smells absurdly of roses: an essence sprinkled in the water. I’ll soon fix that, she thinks, and empties her aching bladder. She runs some water into the washbasin as she pisses, preparing to wash with a luxurious cotton towel. Every horizontal surface, she notes, is crowded with Rackham produce: soaps of all sizes and colours, bath salts, bottles of unguent, pots of cream, canisters of powder. The ‘R’s are all facing front, their orientation identical. She pictures William spending an age in here, arranging the containers thus, standing back to appraise the ‘R’s with narrowed eyes, and it makes her shiver in pleasure and fear. How he craves to please her! How insatiable is his need for recognition! She’ll have to anoint herself with every damned thing here, and sing its praises to him afterwards, if she knows what’s good for her.
But not tonight. Sugar flips the lavatory lever, and all her waste, magically, is swallowed into an underground Elsewhere.
Emerging from the bathroom, she notes that the rest of the place is still there, luxurious and silent, littered with shiny objects she’s only just beginning to recognise as her own. Abruptly, her shoulders begin to shake and tears spring into her eyes.
‘Oh dear God,’ she sobs, ‘I’m free?
She bursts into motion once more, dashing from room to room again, but this time more badly behaved: not girlish, not squealing in musical delight, but rampaging like a gutter infant, grunting and crying in ugly jubilation.
‘It’s all mine! It’s all for me?
She snatches the roses from their vase, crushing th
eir stems in her fist, and starts waving them around in a mad spilth of water. She whacks the blooms against the nearest doorjamb, crowing with angry satisfaction as the petals fly apart. She wheels about, whipping the disintegrating bouquet against the walls, until the floor is strewn with red and the stems are limp and splintered.
Then, ashamed and unnerved by her orgy, she stumbles over to the bookcase — the beautifully crafted, lustrously polished, glass-fronted, locked-with-a-brass-key bookcase that is hen, all hers — and swings its doors wide open. She selects from the shelves the most important-looking volume, carries it to the armchair in front of the fire, and, seating herself, begins to read. Or at least, pretends to; her mind has come too far adrift from its moorings for her to admit she’s not actually reading. One elbow on the chair’s arm, she sits demurely; she is buzzing with demureness. One hand cradles the book in her lap, the other presses knuckles against her cheek in a cosmetic pose of support. Sugar stares at the printed page, but what she pictures before her glassy eyes is not the words but herself sitting alone in an elegant, well-furnished room, Sugar demurely reading a book, anchored to this room of her own by a heavy volume.
For a measureless time she sits like this, every so often turning a page. She watches, from somewhere on high, the pale, intricately patterned fingers moving over the minute print. But for the ichthyosis afflicting them, they might be the hands of a well-born lady (and might there not be ladies afflicted by this condition?) moving across the pages. Sugar feels certain that somewhere, in a tranquil mansion, a genuine lady must at this very moment be sitting just as she is here, reading a book. The two of them are as one, reading together.
Eventually, however, the spell stretches thin, unfeasibly thin. She concedes she is not reading this book; that she has not the faintest idea what is in it nor even what it is called. In the same way as a painter, upon realising the light has failed, resignedly packs up his materials, Sugar shuts her book and lays it on the floor beside her chair. And, when she stands up, she finds she’s preposterously weary, weak at the knees and damp with sweat from head to foot.
She staggers into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. A crystal jug of water and a glass tumbler stand side by side on the bedside table: Sugar snatches up the jug and pours water directly into her mouth, heedless of spillage, two pints of it at least. When she’s satisfied, she sinks back on the pillows, her neck and breast plastered with wet hair.
‘Yes, I am free,’ she says again, but less ecstatically now. Her eyelids are falling shut; parts of her body feel numb, already asleep. She staggers to her feet in order to inspect the bedroom wardrobe. Empty. Of all the things Rackham has taken it upon himself to select for her, he has stopped short of nightwear. Couldn’t he have told her, when he came to fetch her from Mrs Castaway’s, to take a night-dress along!… Ah, but that would have given away his grand surprise.
Reeling with exhaustion, Sugar manages to extinguish all the lights and return to the bedroom, where she pulls off her clothing, lets it fall in a heap on the floor, and crawls into bed. After only a few moments, however, she crawls out again, her sleep-hungry body protesting against this delay at the very brink of sweet oblivion. Kneeling beside the bed, she lifts a corner of the sheet off the mattress, to verify what she knows already: that this bed, unlike her old bed at Mrs Castaway’s, doesn’t have several layers of clean sheets and waxed canvas. The sheet Rackham has soiled is the only sheet there is. She yanks it off the bed, and lays her naked body down on the bare mattress.
You can buy all the sheets you want tomorrow, she tells herself, as the warm luxurious covers settle over her. Gratefully she allows unconsciousness to spread up, like a tide, into her head. In the morning she will give thought to what she needs that Rackham hasn’t provided; in the morning she will design the armour of an independent life.
In the morning she will discover she’s forgotten to extinguish the fires, and the hearths will be black with exhausted ash, and there will be no warmth wafting up from Mrs Castaway’s overheated parlour downstairs, and no Christopher waiting outside her door with a bucket of coals. Instead she will have to suffer, for the first time in her life, the unmitigated rawness of a new day.
PART 3
The Private Rooms and the Public Haunts
THIRTEEN
Approaching the city by an unfamiliar route, her vision clouded by morning fog and the steam snorting up from the cab-horse’s mouth, the elegant young woman feels as though she’s never been here before. She’d thought she knew these streets like the back of her hand but, admittedly, even her own hands are a little strange to her, tightly enclosed in a virgin pair of the whitest dogskin gloves.
The Season has almost begun, and more and more of the Best People are leaving their country seats for London; Oxford Street is clogging up with human traffic, so the cab-man has veered off into the smaller streets, nimbly negotiating the intricacies of the social maze. One minute the elegant young woman is being pulled past elegant young houses built for the nouveaux riches, the next she’s craning her head at older, grander terraces owned by the old and grand, the next she’s rattling past ancient tenements which once housed peers and politicians but now, in overcrowded squalor, house a vast troop of serfs. Hollow-eyed men and women stare from every mews and stairwell, half-starved from the long wait for the Season, hungry for the work that it will bring. They can barely wait to start sweeping horse-shit from the path of advancing ladies, and taking in young gentlemen’s washing.
At last the cab-man steers his horse into Great Marlborough Street and everything looks suddenly familiar.
‘This will do!’ cries the young lady.
The cab-man reins the horse in. ‘Didn’t you say Silver Street, miss?’
‘Yes, but this will do,’ repeats Sugar. Her courage is failing, and she needs more time before facing Mrs Castaway’s. ‘I feel a little giddy — a walk will do me good.’
The cab-man eyes her slyly as she alights. Her easy candour with him counts against her; she cannot be what he at first took her to be.
‘Watch yer step, miss,’ he grins.
She smiles back as she hands him the fare, a saucy quip on the tip of her tongue — why not share, to the full, this moment of recognition, rogue to rogue? But no, she might meet him again one day, with William in tow.
‘I sh’ll take care,’ she says primly, and turns on her heel.
The sun has shed its cover of clouds by now, beaming all over the West End. The chilly air turns mild, but Sugar shivers beneath her dress and coat, for her camisole and pantalettes, clumsily washed in the bath-tub and dried in front of the fire, are still damp. Also, she had a mishap ironing one of the bed-sheets and burned a hole in it; she’ll have to judge if her allowance (the first envelope from Rackham’s banker arrived in this morning’s post) is enough to defray such mishaps. He’s given her an awful lot of money — enough to get a less elegant-looking woman instantly arrested, unless she took the bank-notes to a fence for conversion into coin — but maybe he won’t send her so much in future, and this is just to get her started. Perhaps, to spare herself the embarrassment of asking Rackham for a laundry maid after all, she could buy herself new sheets and underclothes every week! The thought is seductive — and shameful.
Carnaby Street is littered with beggars, many of them children. Some clutch worthless posies or punnets of watercress; others make no pretences, extending grubby palms and naked forearms that are bruised and blood-scabbed. Sugar knows all the tricks: the putrid shank of meat hidden inside a raggedy shirt, seeping pitifully through; the fake sores created with oatmeal, vinegar and berry juice; the soot-shadows under the eyes. She also knows that human misery is only too real, and there are drunken parents waiting to beat a child who fetches too little money home.
‘Ha’penny, miss, ha’penny,’ pleads a stunted girl in mud-coloured clothes and oversized bonnet. But Sugar has no small change, only a couple of new shillings and Rackham’s bank-notes. She hesitates, fingers pinched and clumsy
inside her new gloves; she keeps walking; the moment is gone.
* * *
At Mrs Castaway’s, she lets herself in the back way. Although it seems wrong to sneak into the house like a thief, it seems equally wrong to knock at the front door without a customer at her side. If only the house could be magically emptied of people for the duration of her visit! But she knows that her mother scarcely ever leaves the parlour, that Katy is too ill to go out, and that Amy sleeps till midday.
Sugar creeps up the stairs to her room. The house smells the same: musty and overbearing, a stale accumulation of bandaged water pipes and cosmetic repairs to the crumbling plaster, of cigar smoke and alcohol sweat, of soap and candle-fat and perfume.
In her bedroom, a surprise. Four large wooden crates, sitting ready to be filled, lids leaning up against them, generously hemmed with tacks. Rackham really has thought of everything.
‘A big giant brought ‘em,’ says Christopher from the doorway, his childish voice making Sugar jerk. ‘Said ‘e’d come back for ‘em when ‘e got the word.’
Sugar turns to face the boy. He has shoes on and his hair is combed, but otherwise he’s just as she would expect to see him, standing in her doorway with his bare arms ruddy and swollen, ready for the day’s load of dirty linen.
‘Hello, Christopher.’
‘Carried ‘em on one shoulder, ‘e did, ‘eld wiv one finger. Like they was straw baskets.’ Plainly, it’s important to the boy not to be dragged into awkward adult complications. Sugar’s abrupt disappearance from his life is nothing to get excited about; not compared to the amazing strength of the giant stranger who carried big wooden crates with one finger. Christopher looks straight at her like the African explorer-man on the tea-tin staring down the savages; if Sugar took him for the sort of fellow that gets attached to anyone, she’s got another think coming.