The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  To fix an extra wing on her prayer, she walks over to the nave where the votive candles sit, and lights one. The hundred-holed brass tray looks just as it should; the very gobs of melted wax around the holes seem not to have been scraped off since she stood here last.

  Agnes next stands under the pulpit, which she never dared do as a child, for the top of it is carved in the shape of a massive eagle, with the Bible resting across its back and spread wings, and its head pointing straight down at the onlooker. Fearlessly, or very nearly fearlessly, Agnes stares up into the bird’s dull wooden eyes.

  Just then the church bell begins to toll, and Agnes must stare into the eagle’s eyes all the harder, for it’s at just such a signal that magical creatures come to life. Cling, Cling, Cling, goes the bell, but the carved bird doesn’t stir, and when the tolling stops, Agnes looks away.

  She’d like to visit the crucified Christ behind the pulpit, to verify her recollection that it was the middle finger on His left hand that was broken and glued back in place, but she knows time is getting on, and she must go home. William may be wondering what’s become of her.

  As she walks up the far aisle, she reacquaints herself with the sequence of paintings of Christ’s journey to Golgotha hanging high upon the walls. Only, she’s passing under them in reverse order, from the Deposition to the Judgement Before Pilate. These dismal images, too, have remained unchanged for thirteen years, retaining all their varnished menace. As a child, she was afraid of these scenes of suffering set against grim, storm-laden skies: she used to shut her eyes against the glistening mark of the birch-whip on the ghastly grey skin, the slender trickles of dark blood from the thorn-pricked forehead, and most especially, the nailing of Christ’s right hand. In those days, she only needed to glimpse, by accident, the mallet in mid-swing, for her own hand to spasm into a fist, and she’d have to wrap it protectively in a fold of her skirts.

  Today she sees the paintings very differently, for she’s since suffered many tortures of her own, and knows there are worse things than an agonising death. Moreover, she understands what she was never able to understand as a child: namely, why, if Jesus was magic, did He let Himself be murdered? Now she envies the haloed martyr, for He was a creature, like Psycho and the Mussulman mystics in the Spiritualist books, who could be killed and then return to life intact. (In Christ’s case, not quite intact, she has to admit, as He had those holes in His feet and hands, but then that would be less of a misfortune for a man than a woman.)

  She pauses in the doorway to the vestibule and briefly contemplates, before leaving, the face of Jesus as Pilate condemns him. Yes, there’s no mistaking it: the serene, almost smug equanimity of one who knows: ‘I cannot be destroyed.’ It’s exactly the same expression as is on the face of the African chieftain on the burning pyre (–engraving made by an eyewitness, or so the author of Miracles and Their Mechanisms, currently under her bed, assures her.) So many people in history have survived death, and here’s she, for all her devoted study into the matter, still excluded from that elite! Why? She’s not asking for fame — she’s not the son of God, after all — no one need even know she’s done it, she’d be ever so discreet!

  But she mustn’t spoil this wonderful day with sorry thoughts. Not when she’s had absolution, and mouthed Latin in unison with her childhood priest. She hurries out of the church, looking neither right nor left, resisting the temptation to linger amongst the displays of religious merchandise and compare, as she used to, one painted miniature with another, trying to decide which was the very best Lamb, the very best Virgin, the very best Christ, and so on. She must return to Notting Hill, and have a little rest.

  Outside, darkness has fallen. For a moment, she’s in a quandary how she’ll get home: then she remembers. William’s marvellous gift: her very own brougham. She still can’t quite believe she owns it, but there it stands, waiting outside the stonemason’s workshop opposite the church. Its darkbrown horses turn their blinkered heads placidly at her approach, and in the driver’s seat, wreathed in smoke from his pipe, sits …

  ‘Cheesman?’ she calls, but softly, almost to herself, for she’s still experimenting with her ownership of him.

  ‘Cheesman!’ she calls again, this time loud enough for him to hear. ‘Back to the house, please.’

  ‘Very well, Mrs Rackham’ is his reply, and within moments she’s snug inside the coach, rubbing her shoulders shyly against its upholstery as the horses jerk into motion. What a fine brougham it is! It’s grander than Mrs Bridgelow’s, and hers cost £180, according to William. A major expenditure, then, but well worth it — and not before time, either, because there isn’t much of the Season left.

  She has forgiven William for not consulting her; it really is a faultless brougham, and Cheesman could hardly be bettered (he’s taller and handsomer than Mrs Bridgelow’s coachman, for a start). And it was evidently terribly important to William to keep it a surprise. What a surprise it was indeed, when, a week ago, she mentioned she had an errand in the city and asked him if he knew when the next omnibus was due, and he said, ‘Why not take the brougham, my dear?’

  ‘Why, whose brougham?’ she naturally enquired.

  ‘Yours and mine, my dear,’ he said, and, taking her by the hand, led her to see her birthday gift.

  Now the miraculous Cheesman is taking her home — this human birthday present of hers, a man of few words, a discreet fellow on whom she already knows she can rely. Last Sunday he took her to Church – English Church — in Notting Hill, and next Sunday he’ll do so again, but tonight he’s taken her to Mass, and she can tell he’ll do that again, too. Why, she could probably command him to take her to a Mosque or a Synagogue, and he’d tap the horses’ flanks with his folded whip, and they’d be off!

  Tomorrow he’ll take her to the Royal Opera House, where Madame Adelina Patti is singing Dinorah. Everyone will see her (Agnes, that is, not Madame Patti) alighting from her new brougham. Who’s that? people will whisper, as a Cinderella-like figure emerges from the burnished body of the carriage, white skirts tumbling out like froth … Euphoric with anticipation, still tingling from the thrill of Father Scanlon’s absolution, and rocked in the bosom of her very own brougham, Agnes dozes, her cheek resting against the tasselled velvet pillow William has given her for just that purpose, as the horses bear her homewards.

  That the Rackhams now possess a brougham is no secret from Sugar. She helped William choose it, from a folio of designs, and advised him on what his wife’s needs and desires might be.

  Yes, thank God, the tide has turned, and Rackham is once again paying her regular visits. He can no longer stand being dragged from one pompous spectacle to another, he says, when he has so much work to do. He has shown his face in all the right places, he’s suffered Royal Institution lectures about pterodactyls, he’s suffered Hamlet in Italian, and now, by Heaven, he’s endured enough for the sake of Society.

  Lord knows, halfof these events he’s only attended because he was afraid Agnes might take one of her ‘turns’, and he’d have to step in. But she seems to have got over whatever was possessing her, she’s not fainting or having fits in public anymore, in fact she’s behaving perfectly, so he’s damned if he’s going to chaperone her to every concert, play, garden party, charity banquet, horse race, pleasure garden, flower show and exhibition from now till September. Half a dozen workers at the Mitcham farm were killed on Tuesday, in a poisoning incident wholly unrelated to Rackham Perfumeries, but it meant police enquiries, and where was he at the time? Snoring his head off at the Lyceum, that’s where, while a fat Thespian in a cardboard crown pretended to be succumbing to poison. What an abject lesson, if any were needed, in the necessity to draw a line between make-believe and reality! From now on, he’ll accompany Agnes only to what’s absolutely unavoidable.

  Oh, and yes, of course, he’s missed Sugar dreadfully. More than he can say.

  Sugar glows with happiness, reassured by the fervour of his embrace, the effusion of renewed intimacy be
tween them. She was afraid she’d lost her grip, but no, he’s confiding in her more than ever. Her fears were all in vain; she’s securely woven into the tapestry of his life.

  ‘Ach, what would I have done without you!’ he sighs, as they lie in each other’s arms, warm and sated. Sugar pulls the bed-clothes up over his chest, to tuck him in, and as she does so she releases a whiff of their love-making from under the soft sheets, for there’s scarcely an inch of her he hasn’t reclaimed.

  The business with Hopsom has ended well, with Hopsom more or less satisfied and Rackham’s reputation intact — thanks, in no small measure, to Sugar’s excellent advice. The new Rackham’s catalogue is a great success, purged entirely of the old man’s crude turns of phrase, and now so much improved by Sugar’s elegant suggestions that there’s been a notable increase in orders from the gentry. Even a few weeks ago, William was still saying things like ‘But this can be of no interest to you’ or ‘Forgive me: what a subject!’; now, he speaks freely of his business plans and anxieties, and it’s plain her opinion is worth gold to him.

  ‘Don’t be envious of Pears, dear heart,’ she murmurs soothingly to him one night, when, in a flush of melancholy after his passion is spent, he confesses how small he feels in comparison with that industrial colossus. ‘They have land and suppliers you don’t have, and that’s that. Why not turn your thoughts to the things about Pears you can compete with, like … well, like the pretty illustrations on their posters and labels. They’re very popular, you know: I’ll wager half the reason so many people are partial to Pears is the appeal of those pictures.’

  ‘Rackham’s does use illustrations,’ he reminds her, wiping the damp hair on his chest with a handful of bedsheet. ‘A fellow in Glasgow paints them, and we have them engraved. Costs a fortune, too.’

  ‘Yes, but fashions change so terribly quickly, William. For instance, the engraving in The Illustrated London News just now: with all due respect to your man in Glasgow, the girl’s hair is already out of style. She has her frisette gummed to her forehead, instead of hanging soft and free. Women notice these things … ‘

  She has her palm cupped over his genitals, can feel his balls moving in their pouch as his manhood comes slowly back to life. He accepts that she’s right, she can tell.

  ‘I’ll help you with your illustrations, William,’ she croons. ‘The Rackham woman will be as modern as tomorrow.’

  In the days that follow, true to his word, William leaves the hurly-burly of the Season more and more to his wife, and spends the time thus freed with Sugar, or with the affairs of Rackham Perfumeries, or (preferably) both at once. Three times in one week she has him in her bed, including an entire night sleeping side by side! Nor is he in any hurry to leave in the morning; she has bought provisions of shaving soap, razors, cheese, anything he might fancy while he emerges from his nest of slumber.

  One particular Friday, though, he has to go to Birmingham, to investigate an insolvent box factory whose asking price is almost too good to be true. And so, on the night that William must spend in a Brummie guesthouse, Sugar accompanies Agnes to the Royal Opera House, to see Meyerbeer’s Dinorah.

  The two of them meet in the foyer — or as nearly as Sugar dares. In the swarming pre-performance crowd, only one body stands between the two women at any given moment, as Sugar hides now behind this person, now that one, peeking over stiff black shoulders and puff sleeves.

  Mrs Rackham is dressed all in bone-white and olive green and, if truth be told, looks exceedingly wan. She smiles at anyone who might be watching her, but her eyes are glazed, her grip on her fan is rather tight, and she walks with an ever-so-slight totter.

  ‘Delightful to see you!’ she chirps to Mrs This and Mrs That, but her heart clearly isn’t in it and, making her excuses after only a few seconds of conversation, she retreats into the crowd. By seven o’clock she’s already in her seat for the performance, thus abdicating the chance to display her finery to serried rows of captive onlookers. Instead, she massages her temples with her gloved fingers, and waits.

  Two hours later, when it’s all over, Agnes applauds feebly while all around her erupt in jubilation. Amid cries of ‘Encore!’ she squeezes out of her aisle and hurries towards the exit. Sugar follows at once, although she is a little worried that the people in her own aisle will conclude that she hasn’t enjoyed herself. She has! It was majestic, superb! Can she applaud and cry ‘Encore!’ while stumbling past people’s knees, stepping on their feet in her haste to pursue the fleeing Mrs Rackham? No, that would be too absurd; she’ll just have to make a bad impression.

  In the entrance-hall, a surprising number of opera-goers have already rendezvoused. These are the jaded elite, the barons and baronesses sleepy with boredom, the monocled critics lighting each other’s cigars, the frivolous young things impatient to flit on to other entertainments, the senile dowagers too sore to sit longer. A noisy babble is discussing cabs, the weather, mutual friends; masculine voices can be heard pooh-poohing the performance, comparing it unfavourably with Dinorahs seen in other countries in other years; feminine voices are decrying Adelina Patti’s dress sense, while epicene ones are just as loudly praising it. Through this throng, Agnes Rackham attempts to make her escape.

  ‘Ah! Agnes!’ cries an obese lady in a claret-hued, eye-catchingly horrid satin dress. ‘Opinion, please!’

  Agnes freezes in her tracks, and turns to face her captor.

  ‘I haven’t any opinion,’ she protests in an uncharacteristically low and unmusical voice. ‘I merely wanted some air …’

  ‘Goodness, yes, you do look peakish!’ exclaims Mrs So-and-So. ‘Are you sure you’re getting enough to eat, my dear?’

  Standing close behind Agnes, Sugar observes a shudder travelling down the buttons of her back. There is a pause, during which the hubbub quietens, perhaps by mere coincidence rather than general curiosity about Mrs Rackham’s response.

  ‘You are fat, and ugly, and I’ve never liked you.’ The words ring out distinctly, in a harsh monotone unrecognisable as Agnes’s, issuing from somewhere much deeper than her piccolo throat. It’s a voice that makes the hairs stand up on the nape of Sugar’s neck, and transfixes Mrs So-and-So like the snarl of a savage dog. ‘Your husband disgusts me,’ Agnes goes on, ‘with his slobbering red lips and his old man’s teeth. Your concern for me is false and poisonous. Your chin has hairs on it. Fat people shouldn’t ever wear satin.’ And with that, she turns on her heel and hurries out of the hall, one white-gloved hand pressed hard against her forehead.

  Sugar hurries after, passing close by the mortified Mrs So-and-So and her slack-mouthed entourage, who cringe backwards as if the rules of the game are now so topsy-turvy that an attack from a total stranger would be no surprise.

  ‘Excuse me,’ wheezes Sugar as she leaves them gawping.

  Her haste is justified: Agnes doesn’t even stop at the cloakroom, but rushes directly out of the building onto the gas-lit street. The doorman has barely enough time to retract his rubbery neck from the open door before Sugar slips through the space herself, brushing his nose with the velvet shoulder of her dress.

  ‘Pardon me!’ they ejaculate simultaneously, to the wind.

  Sugar peers into the jostling confusion of Bow Street, a populous glut of hawkers, harlots, foreigners and decent folk. For a moment she fears she’s lost Agnes in the kaleidoscope, especially as there’s a constant stream of horse-drawn traffic camouflaging one side of the road from the other. But she needn’t have worried: Mrs Rackham, lacking the dark green coat and black parapluie she’s failed to redeem from the cloakroom, is easy to spot; her white skirts sweep along the dark footpath and weave through the pedestrians. Sugar has only to follow the lightest object, and trust that it’s Agnes.

  The pursuit lasts less than half a minute; Mrs Rackham ducks sideways out of Bow Street into a narrow alley, the sort that’s used by whores and thieves for their convenience — or by gentlemen in need of a piss. Indeed, the instant that Sugar slips inside its murky
aperture, she’s assailed by the smell of human waste and the sound of furtive footsteps making themselves scarce.

  The footsteps are certainly not Agnes’s: a short distance into the alley, Mrs Rackham lies sprawled face-down and dead-still, in the muck and the grit. Her skirts glow in the dark like a mound of snow that has miraculously survived the coming of Spring.

  ‘Damn …’ breathes Sugar, paralysed with alarm and indecision. She looks backwards, and verifies that from the point of view of the passers-by in Bow Street five yards behind her, she’s in another world, a shadowy limbo; she and Agnes have left the lamp-lit mainstream, which flows on without them, oblivious. Then again, Sugar knows very well that Scotland Yard is not far around the corner, and if there’s any place in London where she’s liable to be grabbed by a couple of uniformed runners and asked what exactly she knows about this lady lying lifeless at her feet, it’s here.

  ‘Agnes?’ No response from the motionless body. Mrs Rackham’s left foot is twisted at a crazy angle and her right arm is slung wide, as if she fell from a great height.

  ‘Agnes?’ Sugar kneels at the body’s side. She reaches her hand into the darkness under the soft blonde hair and cups one of Agnes’s cheeks in her palm, feeling the warmth of it — the fleshy heat of it — smooth and alive like her own naked bosom. She lifts Agnes’s face off the cold, gritty cobbles, and her fingers tingle.

  ‘Agnes?’ The mouth against Sugar’s hand comes to life and murmurs wordlessly against her fingers, seeking, it seems, to suck her thumb. ‘Agnes, wake up!’

  Mrs Rackham twitches like a cat haunted with dreams, and her limbs flail feebly in the dirt.

  ‘Clara?’ she whimpers.

  ‘No,’ whispers Sugar, leaning close to Agnes’s ear. ‘You’re not home yet.’