The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Mrs Gooch’s visit, and her excellent advice about pills and friendly pharmacists (‘That old sourpuss Gosling will only give you a lecture, but the others — if you bat your eyelashes sweetly — are no trouble at all’) have made such a difference to the quality of Agnes’s life that she’s determined to receive, from now on, as many visits from as many ladies as possible. Send out the message for all to hear: Mrs Agnes Rackham is ‘in’!

  She has thrown away all the calling cards she received during the dark times, the months of illness and pecuniary humiliations. New ones have taken their place — from new people, come to see the new Agnes Rackham.

  Today, Mrs Amphlett called. The dear woman, in choosing to visit between four and five o’clock, rather than three and four, treated Agnes not as someone seeking to re-enter Society after an illness, but as a healthy human to whom an ordinary social call was due. How kind of her!

  In the flesh, Mrs Amphlett differed remarkably from Agnes’s vague recollection of her, glimpsed across a ballroom two years ago. Then, Mrs Amphlett was (not to mince words) buxom and freckle-faced. Today, in Agnes’s parlour, she was thin as a reed, with a flawless white complexion. Of course Agnes, mad with curiosity, longed to sweep politeness aside and ask, but in the end, Mrs Amphlett volunteered the secrets, namely: (1) a diet of water, raw carrot and mouthfuls of oxtail soup, and (2) Rowlands’ Kalydor Lotion, with a little ‘finishing off’ from a face powder.

  ‘I should never have recognised you!’ Agnes complimented her.

  ‘You are too kind.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  (In truth, lovely though Mrs Amphlett looked, Agnes was just the slightest bit discomposed by the way the dear woman made several references to ‘the baby’ and ‘motherhood’, as if under the delusion that this were a fit topic for discussion. Might it perhaps be a little too soon after her confinement for Mrs Amphlett to be back in Society just yet? Agnes did wonder, but laid the thought aside, in a spirit of generosity. An ally in the Season is not to be sniffed at!)

  ‘And you, Mrs Rackham; you do look most terribly well. What’s your secret?’

  Agnes merely smiled, having by now learned her lesson not to mention her guardian angel to persons she wouldn’t trust with her life.

  Now Agnes stands at her bedroom window, wishing that her guardian angel would materialise under the trees, just there outside the Rackham gates. Her hand itches to wave. But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can.

  Moving to the mirror, Agnes examines her face. She is almost half-way through her twenties, and the spectre of senescence looms. She must take the utmost care to preserve herself from injury and decay, for there are some things that sleep cannot undo. Each night she travels to the Convent of Health, where her heavenly sisters soothe and tend her, but if she’s in too bad a state when she arrives at their ivy-crested gates, they shake their heads and scold her gently. Then she knows that in the morning when she wakes, she’ll still be in pain.

  She is in pain now. An illusion of falling snow twinkles in front of her right eye, and a pulse beats behind. Could it be that the last little rosy pill she took was disgorged, unnoticed, when she had the mishap with the chicken broth? Perhaps she should take another … although the mishap has left a bitter taste in her mouth and she would rather take a sip of Godfrey’s Cordial instead.

  On her left brow, almost invisible inside the crescent of golden hairs above her eye, is a scar, incurred in a fall when she was a child. That scar is permanent, an indelible flaw. How terrifying is the vulnerability of flesh! She frowns, then hastily unfrowns, for fear of the lines etching themselves permanently into her forehead.

  Closing her eyes, she imagines her guardian angel standing behind her. Cool hands, smooth as alabaster, are laid against her temples, massaging tenderly. Spirit fingers penetrate her skin and sink into her skull, insubstantial and yet as satisfying as nails against an itch. They locate the source of the pain, tug on it, and a clump of Evil comes away from Agnes’s soul, like a web of pith from an orange. She shivers with pleasure, to feel her naked soul cleansed like this.

  She opens her eyes, and is puzzled to find herself on the floor, sprawled supine, staring up at the slowly revolving ceiling and the worried upside-down face of Clara.

  ‘Shall I call for help, ma’am?’ the servant enquires.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Agnes, blinking hard. ‘I’m quite well.’

  ‘That Doctor Harris seemed a nice man,’ suggests Clara, referring to the physician who attended Mrs Rackham’s previous emergency. ‘Not a bit like Doctor Curlew. Shall I …?’

  ‘No, Clara. Help me to my feet.’

  ‘He was ever so concerned about your collapses,’ the servant perseveres, as she hauls her mistress up from the floor.

  ‘He was young … and handsome, as I recall,’ pants Agnes, adjusting to verticality with a giddy sway. ‘No doubt you’d enjoy … seeing him again. But we mustn’t waste his time, must we?’

  ‘I’m only thinking of your health, ma’am,’ insists Clara, nettled. ‘Mr Rackham has said we’re to tell him if you’re poorly.’

  Agnes’s hold on Clara’s arm spasms into a claw-grip.

  ‘You’re not to tell William of this,’ she whispers.

  ‘Mr Rackham said–’

  ‘“Mr Rackham” doesn’t have to know everything that goes on,’ maintains Agnes, inspired, as if by a tongue of fire, with the means to reassert control over Clara. ‘For example, he needn’t know where you found the money to buy that corset. It suits you terribly well, but …we ladies are entitled to some secrets, yes?’

  Clara turns pale. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Now,’ sighs Agnes, smoothing the creases from her sleeves, ‘be a dear and fetch me the Godfrey’s Cordial.’

  Intermittent, gentle gusts of wind, blowing through the French windows like the playful teasing of ghostly children, make the pages of Sugar’s novel flap. She has long ago put down her pen, and the breezes thrust the fluttering top sheet against the inky-nibbed instrument, creating an aeolian welter of nonsense. Sugar doesn’t notice, and continues to squint absent-mindedly into the sunlit foliage of her little garden.

  She’d hoped that by moving her escritoire very close to the open windows, close enough to breathe the fresh air of Priory Close and smell the earth below the rose-bush, she would be inspired to write. So far, nothing has come — though at least she’s still awake, which is an improvement on what happens whenever she takes the manuscript to bed …

  Outside on the footpath above her head, where almost no one ever seems to walk, a couple of sparrows are hopping to and fro, gathering scraps for a nest. Wouldn’t it be nice if they built their nest in the rose-bush just here? But no, the most interest they take in Sugar’s shady patch of untended greenery is to pilfer a twig from it, to house themselves elsewhere.

  The wind-blown page flutters again, and this time the pen rolls off, clattering onto the desktop. Instinctively, Sugar jerks forward, but succeeds only in bumping the inkwell so that three or four big droplets of black ink are knocked free of the table, to splash onto the skirts of her jade dress.

  ‘God damn God and all His …’ she begins angrily, then sighs. This is scarcely the end of the world. She can try to wash the ink out — and if it doesn’t go, or if she can’t be bothered, well, she can buy a new dress. Another envelope from William’s bank arrived this morning, to add to the others in the bottom drawer of her dresser. His generosity hasn’t diminished, or perhaps he lacks the imagination to alter the instructions to his banker; whatever the reason, she’s accumulating more money than she can spend, even if s
he were to make a habit of spilling ink on her clothes.

  She must finish her novel. Nothing like it has ever been published before; it would cause a sensation. If conceited fools like William’s school cronies can make a stir with their feeble blasphemies, think of the effect she could have with this, the first book to tell the truth about prostitution! The world is ready for the truth; the modern age is here; every year another report appears that examines poverty by means of statistical research rather than romantic claptrap. All that’s needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public — move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalise them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into streets where they’ve never dared set foot, a tale that throws back the sheets from acts never shown and voices never heard. A tale that fearlessly points the finger at those who are to blame. Until such a novel is published, prostitutes will continue to be smothered under the shroud of The Great Social Evil, while the cause of their misery walks free …

  Sugar stares down at the ink patterns the wind has made. It’s time she replaced them with something more meaningful. All the fallen women of the world are relying on her to tell the truth. ‘This story,’ she used to say to those of her friends who could read, ‘isn’t about me, it’s about all of us …’ Now, in her sunlit study in Priory Close, she begins to sweat.

  ‘I’m dying, Shush.’ That’s what Elizabeth said to her, on the last night she lived — the night before you met Sugar in that stationer’s in Greek Street. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll be cold meat. They’ll clean the room and toss me in the river. Eels’ll eat my eyes.’

  ‘They won’t toss you in the river. I won’t let them.’ Elizabeth’s grip on her hand was damned strong, for such a wasted bag of bones.

  ‘What do you mean to do?’ Elizabeth wheezed mockingly. ‘Gather up my mother and father, and all my relations, for a fancy Christian burial, with the vicar telling them how good I was?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Christ Jesus, Sugar, you’re such a shameless liar. Don’t you never blush?’

  ‘I’m in earnest. If you want a burial, I’ll arrange it.’

  ‘Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus … what mullock you talk. Is that how you got yourself into the West End? Telling men their cocks are the biggest you ever saw?’

  ‘There’s no need to insult me just because you’re dying.’

  The laughter cleared the air a little, but Elizabeth’s hand around her own was still tight as a dog’s jaws.

  ‘No one will remember me,’ the dying woman said, licking at the sweat rolling down her face. ‘Eels’ll eat my eyes, and no one will even know I’ve lived.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I was dead already, the first time I opened my legs. “After today, I have no daughter” — that’s what my father said.’

  ‘More fool him.’

  ‘A whole life, gone like a piss in an alley.’ In the sickly yellow light, and with all the sweat on Elizabeth’s cheeks, it was difficult to tell if she was weeping. ‘I tried, Shush. I did my best to stay out of God’s bad books. Even after I was a whore, I did my best, in case I got a second chance. Pick any day from the last twenty years, see what I tried, and you’d have to admit I didn’t give up easy.’

  ‘Of course not. Everyone understands that.’

  ‘Nobody’s come to see me, you know that? Nobody. Except you.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d all come if they could. They’re frightened, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. And that’s the biggest cock I ever saw …’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No I don’t want a drink. Are you going to put me in your book?’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The book you’re writing. Women Against Men, wasn’t it called?’

  ‘That was years ago. It’s had about a dozen titles since then.’

  ‘Are you going to put me in it?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘Never mind what I want. Are you going to put me in it?’ ‘If you want me to.’

  ‘Christ Jesus, Sugar. Don’t you never blush?’

  Sugar stands up from the writing-desk and walks to the French windows, to shake off the memory of Elizabeth’s clammy, grasping hand. Nervously she clenches and unclenches her own, imagining the dying woman’s sweat on them still, though she knows it’s her own perspiration prickling in the cracks of her leathery palms. She holds up her hands, angles the palms so that they’re lit up by the sunlight. Her skin has been frightful lately, despite the fact that she’s been salving her hands with Rackham’s Creme de Jeunesse nightly. Oh, for a jar of bear’s grease such as was always in supply at Mrs Castaway’s — but she can’t imagine where she could buy bear’s grease in Marylebone.

  Glancing downwards, she notes that the stains on her dress have expanded and merged into a very big blot indeed; she’d better change into a fresh dress in case William comes. She closes the untidy pages of her manuscript inside its hard covers. The phalanx of crossed-out titles stares up at her; the first few are densely inked, obliterated beyond recall, but the later ones are cancelled perfunctorily with a single line drawn through. Women Against Men is still clearly legible, as is its successor, An Angry Cry from an Unmarked Grave. The most recent, The Fall and Rise of Sugar, is a mere scrawl, tentative and thin. She opens at page one, and reads ‘All men are the same …’ and the twenty, fifty words that follow, in a single glance. How peculiar, the way a passage that’s been read many times can be read so fast, while something new must be read laboriously, word for word. This whole first page plays almost automatically in her mind, like a barrel-organ ground by a monkey.

  My name is Sugar — or if it isn’t, I know no better.

  I am what you would call a Fallen Woman, but I assure you I did not fall — I was pushed. Vile man, eternal Adam, I indict you!

  Sugar bites her lip in embarrassment, so hard she draws blood.

  Two hours later, having stowed her novel away in its drawer and read the latest Illustrated London News instead, Sugar is in the bath again. Half her life nowadays seems spent in the bath, preparing herself in case William should visit. Not that she regards him as worthy of such fuss, you understand; not that she doesn’t despise him, or, if that’s too harsh a word, at least strongly disapprove ofhim … It’s just that, well, his interest in her is a valuable commodity, and she ought to keep it alive for as long as she can. If she can make his affection last — his love, as he called it — she has a chance — a once-in-a-life-time chance — to cheat Fate. Under Rackham’s wing, anything is possible …

  Of all the nooks in her Priory Close suite, it’s this black-and-mustard bathroom, this glazed little chamber, that she’s most at home in. The other rooms are too big, too empty; the ceilings are too far away, the walls and floors too bare. She wishes they were cosy and cluttered with her own furnishings and bric-a-brac, but she’s been too timid to buy anything, and she can’t imagine what. Only this small bathroom, for all its eerie sheen, feels snug and finished: the ribbon of black wallpaper is perfect for staring into, the wooden floor glows in the light from above, the towels on the bronze rails are soft and plush, and all the little bottles and jars of Rackham produce are cheerful as toys. Most reassuring of all is the humid haze of steam that hangs above her tub, swirling back and forth with the slowness of cloud.

  She shouldn’t be bathing this often, she knows. It’s bad for her skin. That’s why her hands are sore and cracking; it’s not Creme de Jeunesse or bear’s grease she needs, it’s to spend less time immersed in hot soapy water! Yet, despite knowing this, every day, sometimes twice a day, she fills the tub and allows herself to slide in, because she loves it. Or, if love isn’t the right word, then …it comforts her. She’s awfully disconsolate lately, shedding tears for no apparent reason, suffering fits of anxiety, dreaming of childhood horrors she’d thought she’d forgotten. She, who only recently was the sort of woman who could hear a
man say, ‘What is there to stop me killing you now?’ and disarm him with a wink; she seems to be turning into a girl who couldn’t endure the sound of a lewd whistle in the street.

  ‘You’re going soft,’ she says to herself, and her voice, so ugly and unmusical compared to Agnes Rackham’s, reverberates in the steamy acoustic of the bathroom. ‘You’re going soft,’ she says again, trying to raise her tone as the words pass through her throat. A lilt, she must try to speak with a lilt. She succeeds only in lisping. ‘You sound,’ she says, tossing her sponge at her toes, ‘like a sodomite.’

  Her right hand stings like the devil; squeezing the sponge out has insinuated soap into the cracks of her palms, the tender, almost bleeding fissures in her flesh. In this sense at least, she’s undeniably softer than she used to be.

  ‘Oh, William, what a lovely surprise!’ she rehearses, trying for the lilt again, then laughs, a harsh sound against the tiles. A fart swims up through the bathwater and breaks the surface with a damp puff of stink.

  William, she knows, is unlikely to come today. The Season is at hand, and (as he regretfully explained to her, on his last visit) he’s going to be wretchedly busy, pulled from one dinner party to the next, shepherded ‘by force’ into theatres and opera houses.

  ‘Who’ll force you?’ she dared to ask. ‘Agnes?’

  He sighed, already out of bed, reaching for his trousers. ‘No, I mustn’t blame her. This elaborate game we play, this merry dance we must conform to whether we like it or not … its rules are set by grander authorities than my little wife. I blame …’ (and, apologetic for his hasty leave-taking, he spared a moment to stroke her freshly-washed hair) ‘I blame Society!’

  In Agnes Rackham’s bedroom, on Agnes Rackham’s bed, dozens of cards are laid out in the shape (more or less) of a human being.