The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Hours later, when he and his wife are walking home in the lamp-lit dark, the disjunction between them is even worse; Sugar, grateful for the drizzle that allows her to hide under her parasol, follows close behind.

  ‘Well, that was awfully pleasant,’ declares William, awkwardly, ‘as always.’

  Agnes doesn’t reply, but trots mechanically on, her right hand pressed against her temple.

  ‘Do you have a headache, dear?’ says William. ‘It’s nothing,’ she replies.

  For a minute they walk in silence, then William laughs.

  ‘That Bunce fellow — he’s quite a character, isn’t he? Constance really does have an extraordinary circle of friends.’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes agrees, as the two of them reach the Rackham gates, and Sugar rustles past them in the gloom. ‘It’s a pity I detest her so much. Isn’t it odd that someone with a title can be so very smarmy and common?’

  To this, Sugar is fairly sure, William has no reply.

  The following night, the Rackhams stay indoors. Sugar walks the peripheries for as long as she can bear, growing colder and colder, then hails a cab back to Priory Close. The time, she discovers when she gets there, is only half-past eight; she’d imagined it was near midnight. Maybe William will still come and visit her! She haunts her rooms like a disconsolate animal, pacing the soft carpets just as restlessly as she paced the streets, until she surrenders to the comforting embrace of a warm misty bath.

  On the third night, however, her decision to sacrifice her idle hours to spying is, at last, richly rewarded. William leaves the house well after dark, alone, and hails a cab. The gods are on Sugar’s side, for a second cab trundles close behind, so she suffers not even a moment’s anxiety that William may escape her.

  ‘Follow the cab in front,’ she instructs her driver, and he tips his hat with a smirk.

  The journey ends in Soho, outside a small theatre called The Tewkes-bury Palace. William alights, unaware of Sugar alighting twenty feet away from him, and pays his driver, while she pays hers. Then he steps forward into the lamp-lit hurly-burly, glancing quickly around his person for pickpockets, but failing to spot the veiled woman at his rear.

  What, thinks Sugar, can William be seeking here? The Tewkesbury is a notorious meeting-place for homosexuals, and here are two well-dressed gentlemen advancing on him with outstretched arms. For a moment her lips curl in bemused disgust: have these florid fellows, now slapping William affectionately on the back, managed to lure him away from her bed? Impossible! No one plays the silent flute better than she does!

  Within seconds, however, her misunderstanding is dispelled. These men are Bodley and Ashwell, and the three friends have come here tonight especially to see the Tewkesbury’s featured attraction — Unthan, the Pedal Paganini, billed as ‘The Only Violinist in the World Without Arms!’

  Sugar joins the motley queue of working folk and well-heeled connoisseurs to pay for admission. Although only two bodies separate her from Rackham and his companions, she overhears their conversation only imperfectly through the raucous babble of the crowd.

  ‘… if I had no arms,’ Ashwell is saying, ‘… Impressionist painter!’

  ‘Yes!’ cries Bodley. ‘Specially made dummy arms! One hand purposefully clutching a paint-brush!’

  The three men laugh uproariously, though Sugar fails to see anything witty. Art has never been her strong suit; all those Magdalens and Virgin Marys hoarded by Mrs Castaway put her off. Now, waiting in line to enter a low Soho theatre, she makes a mental note: brush up on Art.

  Inside the Tewkesbury, a converted wool hall just about big enough for chamber concerts, but utilised instead for exhibitions of freaks and illusionists, Sugar shuffles amongst the herd of bodies. How horrid they smell! Don’t any of them bathe? She can’t recall ever noticing before the sheer uncleanness of common people. Rationing her breaths in the oppressive air, she takes her seat one row behind William and his friends.

  On stage, a succession of entertainers fritters the time away — whetting audience appetite, with their mediocre songs and surpriseless magic, for the main attraction. Bodley and Ashwell mutter loudly, and share private jokes; William endures passively, as though his companions are children whom he has indulged with an outing.

  At last there’s a surge of applause and whistling in the theatre, and a stage-hand places a large four-legged stool on the boards, close to the footlights. Moments later, a violin and bow are deposited on a red velvet cushion next to the stool, earning more applause and a few cheers. Finally, Unthan walks on. He’s a short man, smartly dressed in the garb of an orchestra musician, complete with tails but devoid of sleeves. His cleanshaven face, obviously not English, is in its structure a little simian, with a monkey’s look of alert melancholy. His curly hair has been persuaded to adhere in straight furrows by much oil and combing.

  With the profoundest solemnity Unthan takes his seat and begins, with his feet, to remove his shoes and stockings; titters from the audience leave him unmoved. He neatly folds the stockings and places each one into its corresponding shoe, then takes between his naked toes the body of the violin and deftly lifts it up onto his left shoulder, pinning it there with his chin. His left leg he lowers to the floor while the toes of his right move crablike along the violin’s neck until they rest on the lower notes of the fingerboard. With no visible difficulty, the contorted Unthan fetches up the bow with his left foot and swings it up to rest on the strings. There’s a faint clattering from the orchestra pit, then the ensemble begins to play, softly and sadly, a tune which sounds almost recognisable to all those present — until the Pedal Paganini begins his performance.

  Unthan plays execrably, sending a shiver of squeamishness, even outrage, through the theatre. Music is being molested here! Yet there is pity, too, excited by the spectacle of the little cripple sawing away, his face proud and sombre despite its monkeyish shape and the mass of crinkly hair working loose over his wrinkled brow. By the time Unthan has, some twenty minutes later, exhausted his modest repertoire, the audience’s mood has shifted, and many patrons — including Sugar — have damp eyes without knowing why. In the echoing decay of the orchestra’s final crescendo, Unthan fiddles one last vibrato flourish and, with a jerk of his feet, lets both violin and bow fall into his lap. He utters a startling cry of triumph or agony, then prostrates himself, the last of his hair unravelling. A full three minutes of thunderous applause ensues. ‘Ha ha!’ hoots Bodley. ‘Jolly good!’

  Afterwards, Messrs Bodley, Ashwell and Rackham stroll the streets of Soho, drunk as lords. All three are in high spirits, despite the drizzle; Unthan, they agree, was worth the price of admission — an all-too-rare circumstance in a world where, too often, pleasures fail to live up to the claims made for them.

  ‘Well, friends,’ declares William. ‘After this ape …ape … apex, all exshperience must be a shtep downwards. I’m going home.’ ‘My God, Bodley!’ exclaims Ashwell. ‘Do you hear this?’ ‘Can’t we tempt you with a fuck, Bill?’ ‘Not with you, Philip.’

  ‘A cruel thrust.’ The men are slowing to a standstill, allowing Sugar to move from shadow to shadow, closer and closer, until she’s ensconced in a cul-de-sac barely wide enough for her skirts. Her veil is damp with breath, her back wet with sweat, as she strains to hear. ‘Ach, but it’s spring, Bill,’ Bodley says. ‘London’s abloom with cunt. Can’t you smell it on the air?’

  Rackham pokes his nose clownishly upwards, and sniffs. ‘Horse dung,’ he pronounces authoritatively, as if analysing the constitution of a manufactured fragrance. ‘Dog shit. Beer. Cigar shmoke. Soot. Tallow. Rotting cabbage. Beer — did I shay beer already? Macassar oil, on my own head. Not an ounce of cunt, sirs; not sho much as a drachm.’

  ‘Oh? That reminds me, Bill,’ says Ashwell. ‘There’s something Bodley and I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a while. You recall the night we saw the Great Flatelli? Afterwards, we consulted More Sprees In London, and there was one girl described in the most glowing terms … ‘ />
  ‘Sshugar, as I recall, yes?’ William, for all his inebriation, sounds nonchalant.

  ‘Well, the queer thing is, Bodley and I went to her house, but when we presented ourselves, we were told she wasn’t at home.’

  ‘You poor gyps,’ mocks William. ‘Didn’t I warn you that might happen?’

  ‘Yes, I recall you did,’ pursues Ashwell. ‘However, we tried a second time, much later that evening …’

  ‘–and a third time,’ interjects Bodley, ‘a few weeks later …’

  ‘Only to be told that this Sugar girl had been “removed” altogether! “A rich man has taken her for his mistress,” the madam told us.’

  Sugar, her breath suddenly intolerably humid inside her veil, fumbles to pin the gauze back against her bonnet.

  ‘What a shame,’ William mock-commiserates. ‘Pipped at the post!’

  Inch by inch, Sugar leans her face forward, thankful for the rain as it cools her cheeks and prevents her breath clouding out of the shadowy passage to betray her.

  ‘Yes, but by whom, one wonders? By whom?’

  The men are in her sights now; fortunately they’re looking away. William laughs, and what an impressively natural performance it is! ‘No one I know, I’m sure,’ he says. ‘All the rich men of my acquaintance are pillars of deshency. That’s why I reshort to you two, for relief!’

  ‘But seriously, Bill …if you should hear a whisper …’

  ‘… About where this girl is to be found …’

  ‘If not now, then when her master has tired of her …’

  ‘We’re still dying to have a bash.’

  William laughs again.

  ‘My, my: all this devotion — caused by one li’l entry in More Shprees in London. Ah, the power of …of advertising!’

  ‘We do hate to miss anything,’ admits Bodley.

  ‘The curse of being a modern man,’ opines Ashwell.

  ‘Now, friends, goodnight,’ says Rackham. ‘A most diverting evening thish’s been.’

  The men shake gloved hands, and half-embrace, whereafter Bodley, being the best whistler of the three, pulls one glove off and shoves his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, to summon a hansom for William.

  ‘Mush obliged,’ says William. ‘I really muzzbe getting home.’

  ‘Of course, of course. And we really must … must what, Ashwell?’

  The two comrades are dawdling off into the dark already, leaving Rackham stationed under a lamp-post in expectation ofspeedy deliverance. Sugar appraises her man from the rear as he stands there. His hands are clasped behind his back, just over the part where, when naked, his unusually protuberant tailbone nestles between his buttocks. He seems taller than she remembered; his elongated shadow, pitch-black against the gas-lit cobbles, is cast straight towards her.

  ‘It’s high time we were in bed, too,’ Bodley is saying — or is it Ashwell? Their bodies are out of sight now, and their voices growing fainter.

  ‘Quite so. Any particular …?’

  ‘I thought Mrs Tremain’s.’

  ‘The wine’s not so good there.’

  ‘True, but the girls are first-rate.’

  ‘Will they let us bring our own in?’

  ‘Our own girls?’

  And they’re gone. For a few seconds William stands motionless, his head raised skyward as though he’s listening for the approach of a cab. Then, startlingly, he claps one palm against the lamp-post and twirls slowly around it, like an urchin child at play. He chuckles as he walks this narrow circuit, and his free hand swings through the air.

  ‘Abandon hope, you bumblers!’ he crows. ‘She’s gone … Shafe from you … Shafe from all of you! No one else will ever touch her …’ (Round and round the lamp-post still he twirls.) ‘No one!’

  And, as he laughs again, a hansom rattles into view.

  Sugar waits until he has climbed aboard before emerging from her hiding-place; his cheery cry of ‘Chepshtow Villas, Notting Hill!’ lets her know there’s no hurry to follow. He’s going home to sleep — and so, at last, can she.

  As the clatter of hoofs recedes, she limps into the light. Her muscles, tense as bowstrings for so long, have seized up, and one of her legs is completely numb. The grime of the alley’s cramped walls has smirched her skirts on both sides, a glistening sooty brand on the pale material. Yet she is elated. Rackham is hers!

  She hobbles along the road, grunting and chortling as the feeling returns to her nerves, longing to sink into her warm bath at home, knowing she’ll sleep like a baby tonight. She tries to whistle for a cab, but no sooner does she purse her lips than her mouth widens into a grin and she giggles throatily. Cackling, she hurries towards the thoroughfare.

  On her way, she meets a man walking unsteadily in the opposite direction; a massive man, a swell in every sense of the word, whose drunkenness is proclaimed on the breeze. When his downcast eyes see the swirling hems of a woman’s dress sweeping over the dark footpath towards him, he raises his face in curiosity. At once his puffy features light up in recognition, though Sugar can’t recall ever setting eyes on him before.

  ‘Is it …is it not Sugar?’ he stammers, rocking on his feet. ‘My prodigal siren, where have you been? I beg you, take me to your bed, wherever it is, and cure this cockstand!’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says Sugar, bowing slightly as she hurries past, her eyes fixed on the greater lights. ‘I’ve decided to become a nun.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Between the bottomless gutter of damnation and the bright road to Paradise,’ cries a matronly voice, ‘stand we!’

  Emmeline Fox cringes, and obscures her grimacing mouth behind her steamy tea-cup. Mrs Borlais is getting carried away again.

  ‘We can but extend our hands — oh, let us pray that some desperate soul seizes hold of us!’

  All around the meeting hall, the other members of the Rescue Society glance at each other, trying to determine whether their leader is calling them to prayer in the literal sense, or whether this is mere inspirational rhetoric. A dozen sensibly dressed ladies, most of them even less comely than the grey-faced Mrs Fox, reach a silent consensus, and their eyes remain open, their hands unsteepled. Outside the sooty windows of their Jermyn Street headquarters, London’s unconverted millions teem, shadowy ungraspables flickering past the glass.

  Mrs Nash approaches Mrs Fox, teapot in hand. A simple soul, is Mrs Nash; she’s hoping that in this Refreshment Interval between the Discussion and the Going-Forth there’s enough time left to pour her fellow Rescuers another cup of tea.

  But no: ‘Sisters, it’s time we were on our way,’ declares Mrs Borlais, and she sets the example by waddling out into the vestibule. Among the seated there is a rustle of disinclination, not because they fear the challenge of evangelism but because Mrs Hibbert forgot the biscuits today and had to go out and buy some, which means that most of the Rescuers are only on their first biscuit — some yet to take their first bite. Now their leader beckons them to rise, what can they do? They may be about to wrestle with Vice in the dark cesspools of Shoreditch, but can they be so bold as to walk out into the street eating biscuits? No.

  Mrs Borlais senses the wavering of enthusiasm, and takes it to be faintheartedness.

  ‘I implore you all to remember, Sisters,’ she calls, ‘that saving a soul from damnation is a thousand times more worthwhile than wresting a body from the claws of a savage beast. If you saved a person from a savage beast, you’d feel the pride of it as long as you lived! Be proud, then, Sisters!’

  Mrs Fox is first to stand behind Mrs Borlais, despite having no patience with such vainglorious stuff. In her opinion, the attitude of the Rescuer doesn’t matter — whether she’s proud or discouraged, zealous or weary. These things are transient. A million Christian people in the past felt pride, a million felt discouragement, and all that’s left of them now is their souls, and the souls they were able to save. ‘The Rescue, not the Rescuer’: this has always been Emmeline’s motto, and should have been the motto of th
e Rescue Society, too, if she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.

  ‘Let’s be off, then,’ she says breezily, to bridge the gap between savage beasts and uneaten biscuits.

  They go then, the Rescuers, all eight of them. United, as always, like soldiers in mufti. Yet, less than an hour after the Going-Forth, Emmeline Fox has strayed away from the main group and is in delicate pursuit of a pregnant child in a foul-smelling cul-de-sac.

  Sugar, for her part, is sitting in a spic-and-span, brightly lit tea-room in Westbourne Terrace, toying with a cold cup of the house speciality and a nibbled scone, eavesdropping on a servant. The servant sits at one table, eating and drinking merrily, gossiping with a chum; Sugar sits alone at another table, her unfocused eyes fixed on the reflection of the ceiling lamp floating in her tea, her back to the conversation, her ears burning.

  Don’t be judgemental: this is not the way Sugar usually occupies her Tuesday afternoons; in fact, it’s her first time. No, really! William Rackham is in Cardiff, you see, until Thursday, and Agnes Rackham is indisposed. So, rather than being idle, what’s the harm in following Clara, Agnes’s lady’s-maid, on her afternoon off, and seeing what comes of it?

  Indeed, it’s proved well worthwhile so far. Clara is a wonderfully loquacious creature, at least in the company of an Irish girl she calls (if Sugar hears rightly) ‘Shnide’ — another lady’s-maid, identically dressed. The tea-room is quiet, with only five customers; the ever-improving facilities of Paddington Terminus are bleeding it dry. Fortunately for Sugar, who might have had difficulty eavesdropping in the clinking hustle-bustle of the station, Clara and Shnide are agreed that it’s much nicer here, away from all the smelly foreigners and children. Sugar sips very slowly at her tea, occasionally toys with a minuscule mirror-image of Clara and Shnide in her teaspoon, and lets the efflux of gossip and discontent flow into her ears.