The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Agnes stands at her window now, a handkerchief clasped inside her fist as she scans the grounds’ perimeter for signs of her guardian angel. Shears waves to her from the hydrangea beds. Agnes smiles, then casts her eyes down at her fist. She opens it, and the handkerchief blossoms out of her palm, unharmed. Oh, to be like that handkerchief!

  Agnes has been thinking a great deal about Death and Resurrection lately. Queer topics to be pondering amidst the hurly-burly of the Season, but she can’t help it: it’s her philosophical turn of mind. She can be cheerful, and sing enchantingly for guests, but really, is there anything in Life as important as what happens to one’s body after Death?

  Whisper it not, but Agnes is suspicious of Heaven as conventional religion describes it; she has no wish for any posthumous paradise of wraiths. What she wants is to wake up, corporeal, in the Convent of Health, ready to begin a better life. Almost every night she dreams the same dream, in which she walks through the ivy-laden portcullis of the convent, no longer Agnes Rackham of Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, but not a ghost either.

  How nice it would be to speak of these things with her brother-in-law, Henry. In several of the spiritualist books hidden under her bed, there is mention of a Heaven on Earth. Biblical scriptures promise (or so the authors claim) that the virtuous will one day claim their resurrected bodies … Surely Henry could tell her more, knowing so much about the Bible and other mystical works! (And besides, she likes him. He’s not like most Anglicans she knows; he has an indefinably Catholic sort of air about him. He reminds her, just a little, of the Saints and the Martyrs. William told her once that the reason Henry isn’t a clergyman yet is that he doesn’t consider himself sufficiently pure and high-minded for it, but she suspects that that’s all nonsense, and the real problem is that Anglicanism isn’t pure and high-minded enough for Henry.)

  ‘Is Henry invited to this?’ she keeps asking William, each time they attend a party.

  ‘No,’ William keeps replying, or, ‘Damned if I know,’ or, ‘If he was, I doubt he’ll have come.’ And sure enough, Henry Rackham is never there.

  ‘What about here’?” Agnes persists, at public events that are open to all. ‘Absolutely anyone can come to this.’

  ‘Henry detests opera,’ William will mutter, grumpy to have yet more of his valuable time wasted by social obligations. Or, ‘Henry disapproves of histrionics. Can’t say I blame him, either.’

  ‘Chin up, William dear: there’s Mrs Abernethy.’

  And, determined to make the best of things, Agnes draws a deep breath, clutches her binocular smelling-salts to her bosom, and files in through the glittering vestibule to take her place among … well, if not the Upper Ten Thousand, then certainly the Upper Twenty.

  Much as Agnes might wish to turn her head, by chance, at one of the Season’s events and see Henry Rackham making his way towards her, her wish is never granted. Yet she does have one faithful fellow-traveller, if only she knew it: one person who presses through crowds to get close to her, who braves blustery weather to attend the same theatres as she, who pays high prices to sit near her and watch her glow gently under subdued lighting.

  Sugar is having her first Season.

  Not legitimately, of course; not in the sense that the Best People are having one. But, to the limit of her capabilities, to the fullest extent that money can buy, she is participating. Some doors and thresholds are only for the select few, the haloed gentlefolk with invitations from Mrs So-and-So and Baroness What-Have-You. Whenever the Rackhams pass through one of these, Sugar cannot follow. But when they attend anything less exclusive, particularly in the open air or a large venue that admits a chattering throng, Sugar is sure to be dawdling in the Rackhams’ wake, soaking up the atmosphere, revolving slowly in the crowd like flotsam in the slipstream of a barge.

  Anxious to attract as little attention as possible, Sugar has adopted a strict policy of sober dress. Her wardrobe, once so sumptuous in its greens, blues and bronzes, has faded to shades of grey and brown; she walks on the stylish side of mourning. Against such dusky hues, the redness of her hair is a curse rather than a blessing, and her skin appears pale and sickly. Everyone calls her ‘madam’, and cabbies help her dismount as if she might snap her ankles on the unaccustomed hardness of the street. Only a few days ago, an urchin boy in Piccadilly Circus offered to wipe her wet umbrella dry on his grubby shirt for a ha’penny, and she was so taken aback she gave him sixpence.

  It’s most peculiar, this respectability; especially since, wherever she follows the Rackhams, she’s by no means the only whore in the crowd. Theatres, opera houses, sporting fields and pleasure gardens are favourite haunts of the better-class harlots during the Season, and there’s no shortage of stray gentlemen loitering on balconies and behind marquees wishing to be rescued from boredom. Amy Howlett used to go once upon a time, before she grew too short-tempered to endure all the waiting.

  Face hidden behind a fan, or behind her veil, Sugar plays the game — and enjoys it. Why has she never done this before? Granted, the allowance she gets from Rackham is more than she ever earned at Mrs Castaway’s, but she can hardly claim to have been too poor to set foot in a concert hall until now. Yet all those years she shut herself away in her upstairs room, like a prisoner! Oh, all right, yes, she did write a novel — or most of a novel — but even so, would an outing to the theatre have been so terribly frivolous? How odd to recall that in her book, ‘Sugar’ solicits a victim in the Haymarket after a performance of Measure for Measure — a play Sugar has read and re-read in candle-lit silence but never bothered to cross a few streets to see in the flesh. What can she have been thinking of all this time?

  Well, she’s making up for it now. Following the Rackhams on their itinerary, she has been to every theatre and opera house in London several times over — or so it seems to her. In the crowded cloakrooms of these gilded palaces she removes her cape or coat, and stares all about her at the authentic ladies doing likewise. Do they notice her staring? And if so, can any of them imagine that she’s more accustomed to the company of women dressed only in corsets and pantalettes, powdering the bruises on their naked breasts?

  But no, they accept her unquestioningly, these wealthy women, and this pleases Sugar more than she could have thought possible. She’d expected to despise them as she’s always despised them but, up close, her hatred fails her. In fact, if truth be told, Sugar feels a thrill, a thrill almost of affection, whenever one of these ladies makes any sort of deferential gesture towards her …A smile of courtesy, say, at the hat-stands, a murmur of ‘After you in the lavatories, a backwards step conceding her right-of-way on a carpeted staircase … Such ephemeral tokens of respect make Sugar tingle with satisfaction.

  And what about when she’s weaving through crowds of Regent Street shoppers during the three o’clock chaos in pursuit of Agnes Rackham? She’s continually brushing against chattering, parcel-carrying ladies, and finding herself showered with apologies. In Billington & Joy, shop-walkers flock around her, begging to assist her, and she must retreat from them in case Agnes should turn around to catch a glimpse of her rival! Smiling behind her veil, Sugar tries to deflect fuss by protesting she’s merely the chaperone of a young lady elsewhere in the store.

  And by God’s hairy bollocks, they seem to believe her!

  Yes, Sugar is enjoying the Season so far. Its hurly-burly isn’t tiring her a bit; in fact, it makes for a nice change. All those lonely, empty days in her rooms at Priory Close have cured her of desire for solitude; the lure of silence, so attractive when she was younger, has faded. Now she’s ready for action.

  Not that there’s much action in some of her assignations with the Rackhams. Plays and concerts can be a trifle on the long side, especially when entirely in Italian and when the seats aren’t so soft. Sugar’s hindquarters have gone to sleep a number of times during the marathon histrionics of bewhiskered Hamlets and Malvolios, or the heroic trilling of top-heavy matrons. Yet, though her arse may have slept, her attention h
as remained awake, taking frequent stock of the Rackhams sitting near her.

  William’s most commonly manifested emotion during the more long-winded spectacles is boredom; he reads his programme, stifles yawns, and allows his eyes to wander from the people in the aisles to the chandeliers above. On more than one occasion he has looked straight at Sugar, blindly ignorant of who she is, seeing her only as a bonnet in the dimness, a nondescript dress amongst surplus finery. Sometimes he snoozes, but mostly he’s fidgeting his way through the Season.

  Agnes, by contrast, is keenly attentive to every instant of every performance, lifting her opera glasses frequently, smiling when required, and applauding with the nervous rapidity of a cat scratching at a flea. In between times, she sits still, and her face shines pellucid and enigmatic, like a statue of a transfigured saint. Is she enjoying herself? How can Sugar tell? Pleasure is on the inside, and the easiest thing in the world to fake.

  Sugar’s pleasure is real enough, though. It must be, since no one is watching her and she feels it nonetheless.

  Most precious of her discoveries in this, her first Season, is good music. All her life she’s been indifferent to music, or hostile to it. Music for her has always been unbearably tainted by poverty, religiosity, drunkenness and disease: the ingratiating warble of beggars, the wheeze of organs ground by monkeys, the tankard-swinging ballads in The Fireside, the sanctimonious toll of church bells. As for Katy Lester’s ‘cello-playing at Mrs Castaway’s all those years — she realises only now how much she loathed it. ‘Very beautiful, Katy,’ she used to say, whenever the girl had finished playing some lugubrious air or other. What she really should have said was, ‘I’m glad you’re down here with us rather than upstairs with a man, but can you please stop scraping that damned catgut?’

  In this first Season, Sugar is hearing music as if she’s never heard the stuff before. Grand, uplifting, inspiring music played by large ensembles on gleaming instruments she can’t put a name to. Removed from the for-lornness of Mrs Castaway’s parlour or the shabbiness of the streets, and marshalled together for no other purpose than to make a joyful noise: this is how it should be. Even the ‘cellos look impressive when it isn’t Katy Lester playing them; instead of just one scuffed old instrument, pitted by cinders from the hearth, there are eight of them, burnished to a rich lustre, all being bowed with great zest and precision. How strange it is to see a row of men — indeed, a whole orchestra full of men — intent on an activity that’s not only innocent but … noble. These fellows have nothing on their minds except making music. Can that really be? So many men together, and no evil? She watches them cradle their instruments gently, watches them hastily turn the pages on their music stands in the momentary pauses between blowings or bowings, while above and beyond them the glorious sound goes on and on.

  ‘Bravo!’ she cries along with everyone else when it’s over. So great is her excitement that she has forgotten what she came here for; standing among a jubilant crowd on her five-shilling balcony, she claps her hands and stares raptly at the performers on stage, not at William and Agnes in their 10s. 6d. arena seats directly beneath her.

  This spontaneous display, this abandon, has become part of Sugar’s repertoire only gradually. At the very first concert she attended with the Rackhams, she was too shy to open her mouth while all around her were shouting; indeed, she was barely able to applaud. But, finale after finale, she’s learned to lose herself, and by now she has a taste for it. The other night, just as the final cymbal clash of The Huguenots resonated around the rafters of the Royal Albert Hall, Sugar leapt up from her seat and cheered as loud as anything and, glancing to the left of her, she caught the eye of a bewhiskered old man, similarly moved. In that single instant they understood everything they needed to about each other; they were as intimate as it is possible to be; and they would most likely never see each other again.

  ‘Bravo!’ yelled the old gentleman, and she bravoed with him, not daring to look at him again in case their spark of communion should fizzle out.

  Of course she knows she’s surrounded by people who would, if the truth of her station were obvious, edge away from her in fear of being polluted. She is filth in their midst. Never mind that plenty of these decent ladies resemble prostitutes a good deal more than she does; never mind that this throng is full of Mrs So-and-Sos who are garishly dressed, whiffy with scent, scarred with powdered blemishes — still it’s she, unfailingly demure and freshly washed, who’s the secret obscenity here. She might as well be a mound of excrement fashioned into human shape. They smile at her, the Mrs So-and-Sos; they apologise when they brush against her skirts, only because they don’t know her. Oh, the bliss of being among people who don’t know her!

  ‘Isn’t this divine?’ enthuses a wrinkly matron in the seat next to Sugar at the Royal Albert Hall. Her eyes are pink from her husband’s cigar smoke, her greying hair is supplemented with several not-quite-matching blonde hairpieces. ‘All the way from Italy!’

  The lady is referring to Signor Verdi on the stage below them, an impish old rogue who is at this moment pointing his stubby baton at the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society, conjuring them to stand, inviting the audience to applaud their efforts to sing his brand-new Requiem.

  ‘Yes, divine,’ replies Sugar. It’s a word that tastes strange on her lips, but not offensive. Signor Verdi has moved her — not just with the tunes of his Requiem, but with the dawning understanding that this monumental work of music, this architecture of sounds to rival the Royal Albert Hall itself, was written on smudgy sheets of paper by a single person: an old Italian fellow with hair in his eyes. The rumble of double-basses that reverberated in her abdomen was caused directly by him putting pen to paper, probably late at night as he sat in his shirt-sleeves, Signora Verdi snoring in the next room. It’s a kind of male power she hasn’t thought about before, a power sublimely uninterested in subjugating her or putting her to use or putting her in prison, a power whose sole aim is to make the air vibrate with pleasure.

  So, yes, ‘Divine,’ she says to the wrinkly matron with the ill-matching hair-pieces, and is rewarded with a smile. Only then, as the applause fades and the more elderly members of the audience stand to leave, does Sugar realise she has forgotten about the Rackhams. Are they still in the building? No sign of them. Perhaps she has missed a highly significant moment, a dumbshow between William and Agnes that would have spoken volumes, had she only witnessed it. Perhaps Agnes did something unforgivable in public.

  In time, Sugar decides that being a little distracted in the presence of great music is not such a bad thing. She can’t spy on the Rackhams every minute of every day; some things are bound to escape her. And she’s awfully dedicated, really: Let there be no music — or bad music — and she’ll watch the Rackhams with scarcely a blink, even if on stage there are fierce actors posturing with swords, or metal manikins dancing on invisible strings.

  What does she learn, staring down on the Rackhams as they watch these performances? Not much. William is hardly going to leap up from his seat in St James’s Hall and shout his deepest fears to all and sundry, while Agnes, despite the outrageous behaviour of which William insists she is capable, refrains from running amok even in the most Gothic of buildings. Nevertheless Sugar is convinced that if she can only share the Rackhams’ public life — see what they see, hear what they hear — she’s bound to share their private life as well. And there’s no telling when something William has seen at one of these concerts or plays will come back to him in their shared bed. Mr Walter Farquhar’s Prometheus in Albion, for example, at the end of which William was unusually wide-awake and yelling bravo …If she can ferret out the poem on which it’s based, and profess a love for it, he could tell her about the play and she could introduce him to the poem: what a cosy tete-à-tête that would make!

  At yet another première, she watches William file out of the theatre with Agnes at his side. Is she leaning on his arm? She must be tired or unwell; it can’t be affection. Take her home
and put her to bed, William, for God’s sake, Sugar thinks, then come and see me. But no sooner have the Rackhams stepped out of the auditorium than they’re ushered into the company of smiling strangers, and Sugar spends the night alone.

  By far the best and most rewarding spying, which makes her feel as if she’s genuinely intimate with the Rackhams, is to be had at open-air events, and the weather this year is unusually good. Even after sundown it’s mild, and the nights are lent the illusion of warmth by fairy lanterns, and by the braziers and stoves of street vendors, the glow of pub windows, and swarms of sumptuously dressed ladies everywhere. (Well, not everywhere, of course. Church Lane, St Giles, is no doubt as dark and filthy as always. But who’d want to go there??)

  At the Grand Garden Fête on Muswell Hill, half a crown admits Sugar to the moonlit grounds of the new Alexandra Palace mere seconds after William and Agnes have passed through the gates. (Only vulgar people come during the day.) Thereafter, as long as she doesn’t venture too close to the lanterns hung from the trees, she can walk almost directly behind the Rackhams without being recognised.

  Sugar has been following William and Agnes for several weeks now. She knows the slope of William’s shoulders and the wiggle of his backside like … well, like the back of her hand. She knows exactly how much Agnes’s hips sway (hardly at all) and how rapidly her bustle bobs up and down (very). In any crowd, especially of pedestrians, Agnes Rackham is likely to be the woman least mistakable for a prostitute. Every inch of her diminutive body speaks of containment and untouchability. How beautiful she is! Her skin isn’t rough and freckled like Sugar’s, but smooth as a newly unwrapped tablet of soap. Her hair is the colour a woman’s hair ought to be, and fine as embroidery silk. Her shape is so perfect — How can Sugar walk behind her and not feel like a monster? Her own flat chest compared with Agnes’s pretty bosom; her own masculine paws, freakishly large compared with Agnes’s dainty hands; her own gait — half-man, half-slut — compared with Agnes’s graceful locomotion. And, of course, that voice. Even when speaking the most humdrum words (‘No thank you, William,’ or ‘You have some sugar on your moustache’), she sounds as though she’s singing softly to herself. Oh, to have a voice like that! Not hoarse and low, but smooth and lilting. How can anyone with such a voice possibly be the burdensome nuisance that William makes her out to be?