by Michel Faber
This is what she learns: William Rackham is nasty piece of work, a tyrant. His grasp on the workings of his household has metamorphosed from a limp-wristed dabble to an iron fist. Once upon a time he couldn’t bear to look you in the face, now he ‘stares right through you’. Last week he gave a speech about how other men as wealthy as himself would get themselves grander servants in a flash, but that he won’t dream of it, for he knows how hard his own girls work to earn their keep. Of course now everyone below stairs is terrified.
But William Rackham isn’t the worst of it: no, the brunt of Clara’s spite is borne by her own mistress, a sly, two-faced creature who feigns illness and frailty one day, the better to bully her unsuspecting servants with a sudden display of bad temper and outrageous demands the next.
‘Last December,’ complains Clara, ‘I thought she was going to die. Now sometimes I think I will.’
Clara is considering, she says, finding a new position with less difficult masters, but she’s worried the Rackhams won’t write her a good testimonial. ‘It would be just like them,’ she hisses. ‘If I’m good, they won’t let me go; if I’m bad, they’ll kick me into the gutter.’
‘Slaves, that’s what we are,’ affirms Shnide. ‘No better than slaves.’
The conversation moves on to the topic of Clara’s and Shnide’s men friends; they each have a lover, it transpires. Sugar is taken aback to learn this: she’s always forgetting that unattached women seek out male company when they’ve no need to. Pimps she can understand; rich benefactors, too. But friends? Friends with no money, living in lodging-houses, like Clara’s Johnny and Shnide’s Alfie? What can the attraction be? Sugar is all ears, but by the time the servants kiss and rise to leave, she’s none the wiser. How can these two bundles of spite, this petty pair of gossips, profess ‘love’ for anybody? (Particularly if that body is a man’s gross and dog-smelly one, hairy-faced, oily-headed, dirty-fingernailed …)
‘Mind what I said,’ says Shnide. ‘Don’t let him walk all over you.’
Who is she referring to? Clara’s Johnny? Or William Rackham? Clara simpers as though she feels quite capable now of subjugating either man, or both. You simpleton!Sugar feels like shouting at her. This true love of yours most likely has his cock stuck deep in a trollop! And William will throw you into the street like a rotten apple if you dare to defy him! Her anger is ferocious, having not existed a moment before; it bursts fully formed out of silent obscurity, like a fire in a shuttered warehouse. She bites her lip as the servants prattle their way out of the door, onto the sunny street; she squeezes her tea-cup in her hands, praying she doesn’t shatter it, half-wishing she might.
‘Nice cup of tea, was it?’ says the tea-room proprietor sarcastically soon after, as Sugar is paying her pittance for the privilege of eavesdropping in comfort for an hour.
Watch your step, hisses Sugar inside her hot skull. You need all the bloody custom you can get.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, and demurely inclines her head, the very picture of a lady.
A couple of hours later, Agnes Rackham is standing at the window of Clara’s bedroom — not a place she normally haunts, but nowadays there’s no telling when one’s guardian angel is going to pop up, and these attic bedrooms make such excellent roosts from which to glimpse her. Squinting through the glass, Agnes examines the sun-dappled trees under which her guardian angel sometimes materialises, on the eastern periphery of the Rackham grounds. There’s no one to be seen there — well, no one of consequence. Shears is fussing about, tying metal wires around the stems of the flowers to make them grow straight, pulling up weeds and stuffing them into the pockets of his trousers. If only he would go away, perhaps her guardian angel would appear. She’s shy ofstrangers, Agnes has found.
Clara’s bedroom smells unpleasantly of perfume. How odd that the girl should be scrupulously odourless while working, but that when she comes finally to bed, she should anoint herself with scent. Agnes leaves the window and bends to sniff the servant’s pillow. It stinks of something vulgar: Hopsom’s, perhaps, or one of Rackham’s cheaper lines. How regrettable that William must put his name to such garbage; in the Future, if his star continues to rise, perhaps he’ll produce only the most exquisite and exclusive perfumes — perfumes for princesses.
Agnes sways on her feet. The pain in her head is bad again; if she’s not careful, she’ll pitch forward and be found sleeping on Clara’s bed, her face nestled in that pungent pillow. She straightens, returns to the window. And there, under the sun-dappled trees, barely distinguishable through the incandescent lances of the freshly painted fence, moves the flickering form of her guardian angel. Within moments, it’s gone, sucked back into the ether; there’s not even time for a wave. But it was there.
Agnes hurries out of Clara’s room, breathing deeply. Her heart flutters in her chest, her bosom tingles as if there’s a hand pressed hard against each breast, the pain in her head is ebbing deliciously, dwindling to a small lump of coldness behind her left eye, quite bearable; the fist of ice lodged in her skull has melted to the size of a grape.
She descends the stairs — the dreary uncarpeted servants’ stairs — to where the proper parts of the house begin. Hurrying to the parlour, she’s surprised and delighted all over again by the new wallpaper there, and she takes a seat at the piano. Open before her is the sheet music of ‘Crocuses Ahoy!’, marked with her own annotations to warn her when the demi-semiquavers are coming. She plays the opening bars, plays them again, plays them over and over. Softly and sweetly, using this piano phrase as accompaniment, she hums a new melody, her own, purely out of her head. The notes she sings, hesitant at first, resolve themselves into a fetching tune. How inventive she is today! Quite the little composer! She resolves to sing this song of hers as long as she can stand it, to send it as far as Heaven, to nag it into the memory of God, to make time pass until someone is summoned to write it down for her, and it’s printed up nicely and ferried to the far corners of the earth, for women everywhere to sing. She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.
Later, when she’s tired of composing, Agnes goes to her bedroom and plays with her new hats. She parades them in front of the mirror, holding her head high, smoothing the wrinkles out of her silky hips. Reflected back at her she sees a confident young woman (this word is all the rage in the ladies’ journals lately, so it must be safe to use), well-armoured in her shiny bodice; a proud, elegant woman with nothing to be ashamed of.
‘I am again a beauty,’ she hears herself say.
She picks up the nearest of many hatboxes, lifts its lid and pulls out the mass of crepe paper. The glass eyes of a stuffed thrush twinkle emerald against the jade felt of the hat on which the bird is fixed. Agnes lifts the treasure from its box by the brim, and tentatively strokes the thrush’s feathered shoulder. A year ago she would have been afraid of it, in case it came back to life on her head; now she’s merely looking forward to showing it off in public, because it really will look awfully pretty.
‘I am not afraid.’
No, Agnes is not afraid — and lately has been proving as much, everywhere. Like a person contriving to pass a vicious dog by hailing it cheerily, she is able to walk into ballrooms and dining-halls that bristle with dangers, and simply sweep past them all. No doubt many of the ladies who call out to her so pleasantly are hiding sharp feminine hatreds with which they’d love to stab her, but Agnes doesn’t care. She’s the equal of any of them!
Already she has a number of triumphs to her credit, because the Party that Lasts a Hundred Days is well underway, and Agnes Rackham is proving to be one of its unexpected luminaries, all the more fashionable for the slight frisson of risk posed to those jaded diversion-seekers who flit towards her light.
‘Agnes Rackham? No really, dear: delightful! Yes, who’d have imagined it? But let me tell you about her dinne
r party! Everything was black and white: I mean everything, dear. Black tables and chairs, white table-cloth, black candle-holders, white crockery, cutlery painted white, white napkins, black finger-bowls. Even the food was black and white, I tell you! There was sole, with blackened skin still on, and the mushrooms were black, and so was the bakedpumpkin …in white sauce. Alfred was cross, though, that there was no red wine — only white! But he bucked up as the evening went on. Mrs Rackham was so cheerful, she was singing to herself, in the sweetest voice. No one knew how to behave at first — should we just pretend we didn’t hear? — but then Mr Cavanagh, the barrister, started singing ‘pom pom pom’ in a baritone underneath her, like a tuba, and everyone decided it must be all right. And after dinner there were ices — with licorice sauce! By that time we were all feeling ever so unconventional, we were almost wicked, and no one minded a bit. Such a peculiar woman, is Mrs Rackham. But oh! such a delightful time we had. I almost fainted with amusement!’
Novelties like the black-and-white dinner party are the hallmark of Agnes’s growing fame. Her head is crowded with innovations; the only problem is vetting them to cram the very best into the limited number of scheduled opportunities. The cinnamon-scented candles? The idea for the blindfolds and the parcels? They’ll have to wait until the 24th and the 29th respectively …
In all things she is the modernest of the modern. The backs of her dresses are perfect curving slopes, their line unbroken by bows and flounces. She’s heard a rumour that the days of the cuirass bodice are numbered and that the polonaise is about to return: if and when it does, she’s ready! As for hats, she’s given all her old ones to Miss Jordan, to do something charitable with. Her new chapeaux are festooned with humming-birds, sparrows and canaries; the grey velvet one (earmarked for an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall on June 12th) features a turtle-dove, which is sure to elicit gasps. (What the gaspers won’t realise is that these large fowl actually weigh quite lightly on the head! Something happens to the creatures when they’re stuffed, Agnes doesn’t know what, but the result of it is that one could easily support half a dozen stuffed doves on one’s head, though of course that would be vulgar — a single dove is sufficient.) As for the Prussian blue hat with the pigeon, well … her instinctive good taste has caused her to have second thoughts. After much deliberation she’s decided to have the pigeon removed and replaced with a blue tit, because … well, there’s something common about pigeons, however expensively they are stuffed.
Ah! Decisions, decisions! But it’s not her intrepid judgement alone that’s making her shine so brightly this Season: luck is with her also. In no respect is this more obvious than the hair colour that’s currently in fashion: her own! She already possesses the blonde tresses that everyone so desperately desires, as well as an excellent store of hair-pieces, allowing her to construct the elaborate styles that are de rigueur in the Best People. All her rivals are having terrible trouble obtaining blonde, since most of what’s sold to wig factories is dark stuff from French peasant girls.
As for her figure: another stroke of luck! The near-skeletal arms and waist given her by her illness are exactly what the times require; in fact, she’s a good few ounces ahead. While other ladies are torturing themselves with starvation diets, she has inherited la ligne effortlessly. Is it any wonder, then, that she still doesn’t eat much, even now that she’s well enough? Gorging herself when she has the thinnest waist she’s ever had would be criminal, and the Queen, God bless her, is a chastening example of what happens to a lady of small stature who overindulges. A segment of fruit and a slice or two of cold meat are quite filling, she’s found, especially in conjunction with a dose of that sweet blue tincture recommended by Mrs Gooch. Alone in bed at night, Agnes takes especial pleasure in counting her ribs.
Last week she tried on a dress that she and Clara made on the sewing-machine in December — and its waist and arms were wrinkled and baggy! So, rather than trying to fix it, she’s given it up for dead, and started afresh with a proper dressmaker. What extravagance! But there’s no longer any question of economy: William is a rich man now, and his allowance to her seems limitless. The disapproving stares and cautioning words of previous years are gone without a trace; he even suggests expenditures to her, and smiles benignly whenever she ushers a procession ofparcels up the stairs.
He’s doing his best, is William, to make amends — Agnes has to admit that. Nothing can ever atone for the pain she’s suffered, but … Well, there’s no doubt he’s providing for her now. And he looks really quite presentable with his new beard, and he’s dressing smartly.
She’s noticed too that he’s perfected the knack, essential in the right circles, of behaving as if he made his fortune long ago, rather than being in the midst of making it. Puffing serenely on a cigar, leaning his head back as if contemplating an enquiry from the ether, he radiates the power his wealth confers upon him, but speaks not a word about Rackham Perfumeries, rather about books and paintings and the wars in Europe. (Not that Agnes cares a feather for wars in Europe: let them burn Paris to the ground, and she’ll design her own dresses!) All sorts of well-connected people, at recent gatherings, seem drawn to William’s corner of the room. Imagine that! William Rackham, the overgrown university student, the idler: a success!
As for her own performance in public, she’s doing splendidly, better than she could have hoped. She hasn’t collapsed once, and there have been no incidents such as occurred in past Seasons, when a perfectly normal remark or action was spitefully misconstrued by others, and she was in disgrace. She’s learned a lot from that: she’s learned to keep an eye on herself at all times.
Agnes peers into her wardrobe mirror, her favourite because it can be swivelled to any angle and, if she kneels and looks up into it, she can see herself as though from above. Since almost everyone in the world is taller than she, this is invaluable. She kneels now, and looks up, and there she beholds what God or the folk in the Royal Albert Hall’s balconies might look upon: a most fetching specimen, a credit to her sex. She opens wide her china-blue eyes, to banish a frown line from her forehead. Pass, says a voice from behind the looking-glass.
Prostrated so close to the carpet’s complicated Turkish pattern she feels faint again, and staggers to her feet. A few breaths of cool air at the window-sill are all she needs to keep the head-spin at bay.
Which reminds her: how ideal is the itinerary of this year’s Season! Why, it might have been devised solely for her! Very few of her assignations are spent cooped up in crowded rooms; instead she’s almost always out of doors, in gardens and courtyards and streets and pavilions. The fresh air alone is a tonic, and whenever she feels faint she can seize hold of something solid and pretend to be admiring the view. And when all eyes are raised to watch a fireworks display, no one notices one small pill disappearing between her lips!
She doesn’t mind having to attend operas and concerts, for although these confine her indoors they leave her mind free to wander, except during the Intervals. Propped up in her seat next to her husband, she leaves her body unattended, her spirit floating up above, looking down at herself from the chandeliers.
(It’s a remarkable view, for others no less than for Agnes. Lately, she’s using a novelty fabric in her dresses and gloves that glows in dim light. Thus, when the theatre or the opera house turns dark in anticipation of the tragedy on stage, Agnes Rackham remains visible. The patrons in the balconies observe her white hand raising tiny binoculars to her face, and Mrs Rackham is seen to shed a sympathetic tear, for the binoculars are in fact disguised smelling-salts, and quite pungent when held near the eyes.)
In this fashion, Agnes has sat through Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Royal Italian Opera, Meyerbeer’s The Huguenots, and Verdi’s Requiem, conducted by the alarmingly foreign Signor Verdi himself, at the Royal Albert Hall. She was present and accounted for, too, at Mr Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Lyceum, but enjoyed the appetiser, Mrs Compton’s Fish out of Water, rather more, though she knew better than t
o mention this to anyone. For variety’s sake, and so that she could bring it up in conversation, Agnes also went to see Signor Salvani’s Hamlet, all in Italian, at the Theatre Royal, and found this to be an altogether superior experience, particularly the sword-play which was conspicuously more vigorous, and the Ophelia who was rather vulgar, and therefore deserved to die more than the English one. (Agnes still shudders at the memory of being confronted, on a visit to an art gallery years ago, with that terrifying painting by Millais: the shock of seeing an innocent young lady of her own age and complexion — though thankfully not blonde — drowned, dead, open-eyed, with a crowd of men standing before her, admiring how well she was ‘done’.)
Alone in her bedroom, Agnes crosses herself, then looks around nervously, in case anyone has seen her do it.
‘Clara?’ she says, experimentally, but Clara is still away, gossiping with Mrs Maxwell’s girl Sinead no doubt, or whatever else she can find to occupy her afternoon off.
I must think about getting a maidservant who’s closer to me in wit, thinks Agnes, all of a sudden. Honestly, when I tried to explain the significance of Psycho, she hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about.
(For the benefit of those unlucky souls who missed it: Agnes is recalling here the premier exhibition, at the Lyceum, of ‘Psycho’, a child-sized mechanical figure which, in the words of the programme, danced and performed tricks ‘without the aid of wires or confederates’.)
For Agnes, seeing Psycho has been the highlight of her Season’s theatre-going so far. Indeed, so deeply moved was she by the demonstration that she hardly heard the muttered complaints of Bodley and Ashwell from somewhere to the left of her husband. She was utterly convinced that Psycho was independent of the gentleman who stood by him on the stage, and that his life came from an unseen Elsewhere. The conjuring tricks he performed with his noiselessly revolving limbs meant nothing to her in themselves; rather, she was electrified by the realisation that this little mechanical man was immortal. Whereas her own soul must be consigned to Limbo should her body happen to be destroyed (in a fire, for instance, such as might break out in this very theatre!) Psycho would endure. Even if he were crushed flat, he could simply be melted down and re-cast, and his animating soul would simply slip back inside. Oh, lucky creature!