by Michel Faber
He’s aware, of course, that the liaison between Sugar and the old man is rather less amicable than she’d claimed, but he has forgiven her. Indeed, had she and Colonel Leek been sharing confidential affections, he might have felt a prick of jealousy. It’s better this way: the old man’s pneumonic mumbling is so gruff that the field-workers won’t understand much of what they chance to overhear, and the fact that Sugar is wheeling him speaks louder than any declarations of kinship.
‘Enjoy the sunshine, why don’t you,’ she admonishes the Colonel as the three of them make their way up the gentle slope of Beehive Hill.
The old man coughs, giving the phlegm in his chest a slight jiggle.
‘Sunlight is bad,’ he wheezes. ‘It’s the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers’ legs. And when there’s no war on, it fades wallpaper.’
Sugar presses forward, rolling this talking Sisyphus stone farther up the slope, flashing William a smile of reassurance. Pay him no heed, her smile says. You and I know the value of this place — and the significance of this grand day in our lives.
‘It’s as I thought: they’ll feed on me like parasites, if I let them,’ mutters William. ‘They think I’ll swallow any story they tell me.’
Sugar cocks her head sympathetically, inviting him to explain.
‘They swear they’ve been pruning the older bushes for weeks,’ he scoffs. ‘Since yesterday afternoon, more likely! You can’t see how straggly they look?’
Sugar glances back. To her, the workers appear stragglier and less well cared for than the lavender.
‘It all looks magnificent to me,’ she says.
‘They ought to be putting a damn sight more cuttings in,’ he assures her. ‘Now’s the time when they’ll root freely.’
‘Hurgh-hurgh-hurgh!’ coughs the Colonel.
‘Your farm is much bigger than I dreamed it would be,’ remarks Sugar, to steer the conversation back to flattery. ‘There seems no end it.’
‘Ah, but,’ says Rackham, ‘it isn’t all mine.’ Taking advantage of their elevation, he points downhill, to a long line of white-washed stakes all along one of the paths. ‘Those mark the boundary of another farm. Lavender grows best the more of it there is. The bees don’t prefer one man’s bush to another’s. All in all, some half-dozen perfumeries own a portion of this land; my portion is forty acres.’
‘Forty acres!’ Sugar has only the vaguest idea how much this is, but appreciates it’s an enormous area compared to, say, Golden Square. Indeed, all the streets she’s ever lived in, if they were dug out of their polluted foundations by a giant spade, could be dumped in the pillowy centre of this lavender paradise, and discreetly buried in soft brown earth, never to be seen again.
And yet, as William has reminded her several times, this farm is only one tributary of his empire. There are other farms in other places, each devoted to a single bloom; there are even whaling boats on the Atlantic harvesting ambergris and spermaceti for Rackham Perfumeries. Sugar surveys the great lake of lavender before her, and measures it against a pomander of petals such as she might be able to hold in her hand. So much luxury, in such excess! An essence she might purchase in a tiny phial for a considerable sum is so abundant, here at its source, that it’s no doubt poured roughly into barrels and the overspills trampled into mud — or so she fancies. The concept is magical and indecent, like a vision of jewellers wading ankle-deep in gems, crunching them underfoot, shovelling them into sacks.
‘But really, Colonel,’ she implores the old man beneath her, half-teasing, half-impassioned. ‘This is all so …so glorious. Can’t you admit, at least, that it makes a nice change from Mrs Leek’s?’
‘Ah? A nice change?’ The old man fidgets furiously in his squeaking seat, straining to retrieve some salient facts from his encyclopaedic memory for disasters. ‘Granville’s Combined Orchards, burnt to a cinder, two and a half year ago!’ he proclaims in triumph. ‘Twelve dead! Lucifer factory in Goeteborg, Sweden, 27th of last month: forty-four burnt to death and nine mortally injured! Cotton plantation in Virginia last Christmas, down to ash in half a day, savages and all!’ He pauses, swivels his gaze around to William Rackham, and leers, ‘What a bonfire all this’d make, eh?’
‘Actually, sir,’ William replies with lofty condescension, ‘it does indeed make a splendid bonfire, every year. My fields are divided, you see, according to the age of the plants on them. Some are in their fifth year, exhausted, and will be burnt at the end of October. I can assure you the fire is big enough to make all Mitcham smell of lavender.’
‘Oh, how wonderful!’ cries Sugar. ‘How I should love to be here then!’
William blushes with pride, there on the hillock, his chin pushed out in the direction of his empire. What a miracle he has wrought — he, so recently an effete idler in straitened circumstances — now master of this vast farm with its quaint brown workers moving amongst the lavender like field mice. The sounds of industry belong to him too, plus the smells of a million flowers, plus even the sky immediately above, for if he doesn’t own these things, who does? Oh, granted, God is still supposed to own everything, but where’s the line to be drawn? Only a crackpot would insist on God’s ownership of Paddington Station or a mound of cow-dung — why quibble, then, with William Rackham’s ownership of this farm, and everything above and below it? William recalls the verses of Scripture his father was fond of quoting to the dubious young Henry: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Rackham Senior would lay emphasis on this word) ‘and have dominion over every thing that moveth upon the earth.’
So vividly does William recall this statement that he feels almost reinstated in the tiny body he occupied at seven years old, on the occasion of his own first visit to this farm, dawdling behind his older brother. Their father, dark-haired and big then, chose the lavender fields as that part of the empire which might appeal most to the boy who would one day inherit.
‘And are these ladies and gentlemen p’mitted to take home any of the lavender they harvest, Father?’ Clear as a bell across the years comes Henry’s childish voice — yes, Henry’s, for William would never, even at the age of seven, have asked such a stupid question.
‘They don’t need to take any home,’ Henry Calder Rackham enlightened his first-born indulgently. ‘They reek of it just by working in it.’
‘That is a very pleasant reward, I think.’ (What an ass Henry was, always!)
Their father guffawed. ‘They won’t work for that alone, boy. They must have wages as well.’ The expression of incredulity on Henry’s face ought to have alerted the old man that he had the wrong son earmarked for heir. But no matter, no matter … Time upraises all who are worthy.
‘Yaarr!’
Ignoring the bestial grousing of Colonel Leek, William surveys his fields once more before descending Beehive Hill. Everything is identical to how it was when he was a boy — although these workers cannot be the same workers who toiled in Henry Calder Rackham’s domain twenty-one years ago, for men and women, too, like enfeebled fifth-year plants, are uprooted and destroyed when they are exhausted.
A wrinkled, thick-set girl carrying on her back a sack of branches passes close by William and his guests, nodding in grim sycophancy.
‘You were telling us about the fifth-year plants, Mr Rackham,’ comes the voice of Sugar.
‘Yes,’ he loudly replies, as a second sack-bearer follows the first. ‘Some perfumeries harvest their lavender a sixth year. Not Rackham’s.’
‘And how soon after planting is the lavender ready to be used, sir?’
‘When the plants are in their second year — though they are not at their best until the third.’
‘And how much lavender water will be produced, sir?’
‘Oh, several thousand gallons.’
‘Isn’t that an astonishing thought, grandfather?’ Sugar asks the old man.
‘Eh? Grandfather? You don’t even know who your grandfather was!’
Suga
r cranes her head to confirm that the sack-bearers are out of earshot. ‘You’re going to get us all into mischief,’ she chides Colonel Leek in a feral whisper, jerking the handles of his wheelchair warningly. ‘I’d’ve had less bother from a beggar off the street.’
The old man bares his teeth and shakes his hideous head free of its swad-dlings. ‘What of it!’ he sneers. ‘That’s what comes of subterfuge. Charades! Fancy dress! Har! Did I ever tell you about Lieutenant Carp, who I served with in the last great war?’ (By this he doesn’t mean the war against the Ashantees, or even the Indian Mutiny, but the Crimean.) ‘There’s subterfuge for ye! Carp dressed up in a lady’s cloak and bonnet, and tried to cross over the enemy lines — the wind blew the cloak up over his head and there he was, hobbling around with his musket dangling between his legs. I’ve never seen a man shot so many times. Hur!Hur!Hur! Subterfuge!’
This outburst causes a few heads to pop up in the surrounding fields.
‘A most diverting anecdote, sir,’ says William frigidly.
‘Don’t mind him, William,’ says Sugar. ‘He’ll be asleep soon. He always sleeps in the afternoon.’
Colonel Leek churns his grizzled jaw in indignation. ‘That was years ago, trollop, when I weren’t well! I’m better now!’
Sugar bends low over him, one hand digging her thinly-gloved claws into his right shoulder, the other gently caressing his left.
‘Whisssky,’ she sings into his ear. ‘Whisssssky.’
Minutes later, when Colonel Leek is slumped in his chair, snoring, William Rackham and Sugar stand in the shade of an oak, watching the industry from a distance. Sugar is radiant, and not merely from the unaccustomed exercise of pushing the wheelchair; she’s deeply happy. All her life, she’s considered herself a city creature, and assumed that the countryside (imagined only through monochrome engravings and romantic poetry) had nothing to offer her. This conception she now casts off with joyful abandon. She must make sure this isn’t the last time she walks under these grand blue skies and on this soft, verdant earth. Here is air she means to breathe more often.
‘Oh, William,’ she says, ‘will you bring me here again, for the great bonfire?’
‘Yes, of course I shall,’ he says, for he can recognise the glow of happiness when he sees it, and he knows he is the author of that glow.
‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes, you have my word.’
Content, she turns to look towards the north-east: there’s a swathe of rain far, far away, sprouting a rainbow. William stares at her from behind, his hand shielding his eyes against the sun. His mistress’s long skirts rustle gently in the breeze, her shoulder-blades poke through the tight fabric of her dress as she lifts her arm to shield her face. All at once he recalls how her breasts feel against his palms, the bruising sharpness of her hips on his own softer belly, the thrilling touch of her rough, cracked hands on his prick. He recalls the lushness of her hair when she’s naked, the tiger textures on her skin like diagrams for his own fingers, showing him where to hold her waist or her arse as he slides inside. He longs to embrace her, wishes he could have his lavender fields empty for half an hour while he lies with Sugar on a verge of grass. What’s kept him from going to see her every night? What man worthy of the name wouldn’t have that exquisite body next to his as often as possible? Yes, he will, he must, go to see her much oftener in future — but not today; he has a lot to do today.
Sugar turns, and there are tears in her eyes.
The journey back to London, in the chartered coach-and-four, is purgatorially long, and the rain, so far away when Sugar stood in Rackham’s fields, has met them half-way and now beats on the roof. The coach travels slower for the bad weather, and makes mysterious stops in villages and hamlets along the way, where the coachman dismounts and disappears for two, five, ten minutes at a time. Returning, he fiddles with the horses’ bridles, combs the excess water from their hair, checks that the old fellow’s wheelchair is still safe and snug under the tarpaulin on the roof, performs actions against the undercarriage that make the cabin shake. Haste is not his watchword.
Inside the cabin, Sugar shivers, and grits her teeth to stop them chattering. She’s still in her lavender dress and nothing more, not even a shawl. Knowing she’d be wheeling Colonel Leek about today, and keen to make an enchanting impression on William, she did without extra layers of clothing; now she’s suffering the lack. The last thing she wants to do is snuggle close to the old man for warmth; he smells vile and, deprived of the support of his wheelchair’s arm-rests, he’s liable to keel into her lap.
‘Collapse of bridge in heavy rain, Hawick, 1867,’ he growls into the chilly, darkening space between them. ‘Three dead, not including livestock.’
Sugar hugs herself and looks out of the mud-spattered, rain-swept window. The countryside, so colourful and miraculous when she walked at William’s side on the lavender farm, has turned grey and godforsaken, like a hundred square miles of Hyde Park gone to seed, without any lights or gay pedestrians. The coach jogs slowly onwards, towards a lost metropolis.
‘Urp,’ belches Colonel Leek. The unsubtle fragrance of whisky and fermented digestive juices spreads in the bitter air.
A train might have been mercifully swift, not to mention (although William did mention it) a great deal cheaper, but the old man’s infirmity would have caused no end of bother at various stations along the way, and he’d still have needed a coach to take him to Charing Cross and again at the Mitcham end, so engaging a coach for the whole journey seemed more sensible. Seemed.
‘I give it six months,’ Colonel Leek is saying, ‘and you’ll be out on yer arse.’
‘I didn’t ask your opinion,’ retorts Sugar. (Cunning old blackguard: he’s fired an arrow straight into the heart of her anxiety. William Rackham should be sitting here next to her just now, whiling the hours away with lively conversation, warming her hands inside his: why, oh why, didn’t he accompany her?)
The Colonel clears his glutinous windpipe for another recitation. ‘Fanny Gresham — in 1834, mistress of Anstey the shipping magnate, abode Mayfair; in 1835, discarded, abode Holloway Prison. Jane Hubble, known as Natasha — in 1852, mistress of Lord Finbar, abode Admiralty House; in 1853, corpse, abode Thames estuary … ‘
‘Spare me the details, Colonel.’
‘Noooobody spared nothing, never!’ he barks. ‘That’s what I’ve learned in a long life walking this earth.’
‘If you were still walking, old man, we’d be on a train and back in London by now.’
There is a pause while the insult sinks in.
‘Enjoy the scenery, trollop,’ he sneers, nodding his gargoyle head towards her streaming window. ‘Makes a nice change, eh? Glo-o-orious.’
Sugar turns away from him, and hugs herself tighter. William cares for her, yes he does. Said he loves her, even — said it while drunk, admittedly, but not roaring drunk. And he allowed her to come to his farm, even though he could easily, once sober, have declared the subject closed. And he’s promised to let her come again, at the end of October, which is … almost seven months in the future.
She tries to take heart from the sheer number of Rackham’s employees. He is reconciled to a large amount of money flowing out from his personal fortune every week; it’s not as if Sugar’s upkeep is an isolated and conspicuous drain on his resources. She must regard herself, not as living out of his pocket, but as part of a grand tapestry of profit and expenditure that’s been generations in the making. All she need do is spin out her own stitches in that tapestry, weave herself an inextricable figure in it. Already she’s made marvellous progress: just think: a month ago she was a common prostitute! In half a year, who knows …
‘He’s a wind-bag,’ snarls Colonel Leek from inside his mulch of scarves, ‘and a coward. A nasty piece of work.’
‘Who?’ says Sugar irritably, wishing she were as snugly wrapped as he, but without the added ingredients.
‘Your perfumer.’
‘He’s no wors
e than most,’ she retorts. ‘Kinder-hearted than you.’
‘Horse-piss,’ cackles the old salt. ‘The thought of his own fat self at the top of the tree, that’s what he loves. He’d kill for advancement, can’t you see? He’d fill a dirty puddle with you, to save his shoes.’
‘You don’t know a thing about him,’ she snaps. ‘What would someone like you understand of his world?’
Provoked to rage, the Colonel rears up so alarmingly that Sugar fears he’ll pitch head-first onto the cabin floor. ‘I weren’t always an old spoony-man, you little bed-rat,’ he wheezes. ‘I’ve lived more lives than you’ll ever dream of!’
‘All right, I’m sorry,’ she says hastily. ‘Here, drink some more of this.’ And she offers him the whisky bottle.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he groans, settling back into his mulch of knitwear.
Sugar looks down at the bottle, whose contents are trembling and twinkling in the vibrating gloom. ‘You’ve hardly drunk any.’
‘A little goes a long way,’ the old man mutters, subdued after his outburst. ‘Drink some yerself, it’ll stop yer shivering.’
Sugar calls to mind his method of sucking whisky from the neck of the bottle, his toothless mouth closed round the smooth glassy teat. ‘No, thank you.’
‘I’ve wiped the end.’
‘Ugh,’ shudders Sugar helplessly.
‘That’s right, trollop,’ he sneers. ‘Don’t let anything dirty pass yer lips!’
Sugar utters a sharp moan of annoyance, almost identical to the one she uses for ecstasy, and folds her arms hard against her bosom. Mouth clamped shut to muffle the sound of chattering teeth, she counts to twenty; then, still angry, she counts the months of the year. She met William Rackham in November; now, in April, she is his mistress, with her own rooms and money enough to buy whatever she wishes. April, May, June … Why isn’t he here with her in this coach? There’s nothing she wishes to buy except his enduring passion for her …