The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  And so, on his knees before her, he tells everything, almost. Full descriptions of the locales and of his meetings with idle men, urchins and the prostitute (he only omits his one lapse into prurience). Emmeline listens intently, her face aglow, her body restless, for she’s uncomfortable, shifting about in the chair as if her very bones are chafing against the wicker. While he speaks, he can’t help noticing how thin she has grown. Are those her collar-bones he sees beneath the fabric of her dress? What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones? In his visions of himself as a clergyman Mrs Fox has always been on hand, advising him, inviting him to confess his failings and his sorrows. His ambition is only strong when it wears the armour of her encouragement: stripped of that, it’s a soft and vulnerable dream. She must not die!

  Uncannily, she chooses this moment to reach out her hand to him and clasp it over his own, saying, ‘God grant that we might, in the future, work side by side in this struggle!’

  Henry looks into her eyes. Moments before, he was telling her that loose women have no power over him; that in their squalid poverty, he is able to see them as souls and souls only. All true enough, but suddenly he realises, as his hand tingles inside hers, that this high-minded and upright woman, knocked flat on her back by the brutal hand of disease, still inspires in him lusts worthy of the Devil.

  ‘God grant, Mrs Fox,’ he whispers hoarsely.

  ‘Church Lane, back entrance of Paradise, fankyerverymuch!’

  Having delivered a well-dressed lady to this repugnant quarter of the Old City, the cabman utters a snort of sarcasm; his like-minded horse dumps, as a parting gesture of disdain, a mound of hot turd on the cobbles. Resisting the temptation to tick him off, Sugar keeps her mouth shut and pays the fare, then tiptoes towards Mrs Leek’s house with the hems of her skirts lifted. What a morass of filth this street is! — the fresh fall of horse-shit is the least of its hazards. Did it always stink like this, or has she been living too long in a place where nothing smells but rose-bushes and Rackham toiletries?

  She knocks at Mrs Leek’s door, hears the Colonel’s muffled ‘Enter!’ and lets herself in, as she did so many times during her girlhood. The smell is no better inside, and the view, what with the grisly old man and the ever-increasing clutter of grimy junk in the parlour, no more heartening than the squalor out in the street.

  ‘Ah, the concubine!’ crows the Colonel maliciously, without any other greeting. ‘Think yerself blessed by good fortune, eh?’

  Sugar draws a deep breath as she removes her gloves and stuffs them into her reticule. Already she bitterly regrets bumping into Caroline in New Oxford Street yesterday and promising, in her mad hurry to be released from what threatened to turn into a long conversation, to pay her a visit. What a freakish coincidence, that Caroline should spot her twice in the same year, in a city of several million people — and at just the moment when she was hurrying to Euston Station to spy on the arrival of the Birmingham train! Looking back on it, it would’ve been better to spend a few more minutes with Caroline in the street, for William wasn’t on that damned train anyway, and now there’s the risk of him coming back this morning, and knocking at the door of her rooms, while she is here, wasting her time in a bawdy-house that smells of old man’s piss!

  ‘Is Caroline free, Colonel Leek?’ she asks evenly.

  Delighted to be the privileged withholder of information, the old man leans back in his wheelchair, and the topmost coils of his scarf fall away from his mouth. He’s about to regurgitate something from his festering store of disasters, Sugar can tell.

  ‘Good fortune!’ he sneers. ‘I’ll give you good fortune! Yorkshire woman, name of Hobbert, inherited her father’s estate in 1852: squashed by a falling archway three days later. Botanical sketch-maker Edith Clough, chosen out of thousands to accompany Professor Eyde on his expedition to Greenland in 1861: devoured by a big fish at sea. And only November last, Lizzie Sumner, mistress of Lord Price: found in her Marylebone maisonette with her neck–’

  ‘Yes, very tragic, Colonel. But is Caroline free?’

  ‘Give her two minutes,’ growls the old man, and sinks once more into his scarves.

  Sugar surreptitiously brushes the seat of the nearest chair with her fingertips, then sits. Blessed silence descends, as the Colonel slumps in the thickly-veiled sunlight and Sugar stares at the rust-flecked muskets on the wall, but after thirty seconds the Colonel spoils it.

  ‘How’s the perfume potentate, then?’

  ‘You promised not to speak about him to anybody,’ she snaps. ‘It was part of our agreement.’

  ‘I’ve said nowt to this lot,’ he spits, rolling his eyes up towards the rest of the house, that pigeon-warren of rooms he never ascends to, where men perform athletic acts with their young limbs and organs, and three loose women lodge and sleep, and Mrs Leek reads tuppenny books in her den. ‘How little trust you have, trollop, in a man’s word of honour.’

  Sugar stares down at her fingers. The scaling on her flesh is bad at the moment, painful. Maybe she’ll ask Caroline if she has any bear’s grease.

  ‘He’s very well, thank you,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Slips yer a big cake o’ soap every so often, eh?’

  Sugar glances up into his inflamed eyes, wondering if this remark was intended to be grossly bawdy. She hadn’t thought libidinous acts were of the slightest interest to Colonel Leek.

  ‘He’s as generous as I could wish for,’ she shrugs.

  ‘Don’t spend it all in the one place.’

  The dull sound of the back door slamming stumbles through the musty air. A satisfied customer has been discharged into the bright world.

  ‘Sugar!’ It’s Caroline, appearing at the top of the stairs, dressed only in a shift. At this angle and in this light, the scar from the hat factory is alarmingly livid on her chest. ‘Push the Colonel out the way if ‘e won’t go: ‘e’s on wheels, aint ‘e?’

  Colonel Leek, rather than submit to this indignity, wheels clear of the stairs.

  ‘–found with her neck cut almost in two by a silk scarf,’ he concludes, as Sugar trots up to her friend.

  Having offered Sugar her room’s one and only chair, Caroline hesitates to sit on the bed. Sugar understands the problem at once, and offers to help change the sheets.

  ‘There’s no clean linen,’ says Caroline, ‘but we can ‘ang this one up for a bit, so’s the air can get to it.’

  Together they pull the sheet from the bed and try to drape its wettest parts in front of the open window. As soon as they’ve managed it, the sun shines twice as bright.

  ‘I’m in luck today, eh?’ grins Caroline.

  Sugar smiles back, embarrassed. In Priory Close, she has a much simpler solution to this problem: every week, when no one’s looking, she carries a large parcel of her soiled sheets through the gates of a small park and, shortly afterwards, emerges without it. Then she goes to Peter Robinson’s and buys new bed-linen. Well, what’s she to do without a washerwoman? A vivid picture of Christopher, his small red arms ringed with soap-suds, flares in her brain …

  ‘Are you all right, Shush?’

  Sugar composes her face. ‘A slight headache,’ she says. ‘The sun’s awfully bright.’

  How long have Caroline’s window-panes been so appallingly begrimed by soot? Surely they weren’t so dirty last time? Did the room always smell this way?

  ‘Beggin’ yer pardon, Shush. I ain’t done me ablutions yet.’

  Caroline carries her ceramic bowl to the far side of the bed, more or less out of sight, as a concession to her guest. She crouches down, and busies herself with her contraceptive ritual: the pouring of the water, the unscrewing of the phials. Sugar feels a chill as she watches her friend unabashedly hike up her rumpled shift, one hand already gripping the plunger with its old rag head, her buttocks plumper than Sugar remembers, dimpled and smeared with semen.

  ‘Ach, it’s a bother, ain’t it?’ mutters Caroline, squatting to her task.

>   ‘Mm,’ says Sugar, looking away. She herself has not performed this ritual for some time — since moving to Priory Close, in fact. It’s not practical, when William stays the whole night, and even when he doesn’t stay … well, she takes long, long baths. Submerged in all that warm, clean water, her legs drifting gently apart underneath a white blanket of aromatic foam, surely she’s as thoroughly cleansed as it’s possible to be?

  ‘Almost finished,’ says Caroline.

  ‘No hurry,’ says Sugar, wondering if William is knocking at the door of their love-nest this very minute. She watches the bed-sheet billow placidly in the warm breeze, its glistening shapes already fading to snail-crusts. God, these sheets are filthy! Sugar is stung with guilt, that she discards scarcely used sheets in her local park every week, while Caroline has to toil and sleep on these old rags! Here are some almost-new sheets for you, Caddie — they only need to be washed … No, it’s out of the question.

  Caroline walks to the window, carrying her heavy bowl. From the waist up, she disappears behind the billowing sheet, ghost-like.

  ‘Mind yer ‘eads,’ she murmurs impishly, and sends the slops trickling illicitly down the back of the building.

  ‘I must tell you,’ she says a few minutes later, when she’s settled on the bare mattress, half-dressed now and combing her hair, ‘I must tell you about me newest regular — Well, four times now I’ve seen ‘im. You’d like ‘im, Shush. Very well spoken ‘e is.’

  And she begins to tell the story so far of her meetings with the sombre, serious man she’s nicknamed ‘The Parson’. It’s a dirt-common tale, nothing remotely novel in the world of prostitution. Sugar can barely disguise her impatience; she’s convinced she knows how this story ends.

  ‘And then he takes you to bed, yes?’ she suggests, to hurry Caddie up.

  ‘No!’ cries Caroline. ‘That’s the queer part!’ She wiggles her naked feet in suppressed mischief. Dirty feet they are too, thinks Sugar. How can anyone expect ever to make an escape from St Giles with feet as dirty as that?

  ‘Perhaps he’s queerer than you think,’ she sighs.

  ‘Nah, ‘e’s no marjery, I can tell!’ laughs Caroline. ‘I did ask ‘im, only last week, if it would be such a terrible thing if ‘e took me to bed — just the once — so as ‘e could see if ‘e liked it, or at least see what the fuss was about for other people.’ She squints with the effort of recalling precisely her Parson’s reply. ‘Standing there at the window ‘e was, same as always, never looking at me once, and ‘e told me … what was it? …’e told me that if all men like ‘imself gave in to temptation, there would always be poor fallen widows like me, always starvin’ children like me own boy was, always wicked landlords and murderers, because the Lord God was not loved enough by those as ought to know better.’

  ‘So what did you say?’ asks Sugar, her attention wandering over the innumerable taints of poverty in Caroline’s room: the skirting-boards too rotten to paint, the walls too buckled to paper, the floorboards too worm-eaten to polish: nothing here could be beautified by anything but fire and a wholly new start.

  ‘I said I didn’t see ‘ow men like ‘imself could stop women like me becoming poor fallen widows, or children from starvin’, except by marryin’ and pervidin’ for ‘em.’

  ‘So has he offered to marry and provide for you?’

  ‘Nearly!’ laughs Caroline. ‘Second time I saw ‘im, ‘e offered to get me honest work. I asked ‘im if it would be factory work, and ‘e said yes, and I told ‘im factory work wasn’t wanted. Well, I thought that was the end of that, but last week ‘e was on about it again. Said ‘e’d made enquiries, and ‘e could get me some work that wasn’t in a factory, but in a kind of store. If I was willin’, ‘e could arrange it with just a word in the right person’s ear, and if I doubted the truth of it, the name of the concern was Rackham’s Perfumeries, what I must ‘ave ‘eard of.’

  Sugar jerks like a startled cat, but fortunately Caroline has moved to the window, idly stroking the sheet. ‘And what did you say then?’

  ‘I said that any work ‘e could get me would wear me out, wear me to death, for much less than a shillin’ a day. I said that for a poor woman, all “honest” work is as near to bein’ killed slow as makes no difference.’ Abruptly she laughs, and fluffs out her newly combed hair with a few flicks of her hands. ‘Ah, Sugar,’ she says, spreading her arms wide to indicate her room and all it represents. ‘What line of work but this pervides the needs of life, for ‘ardly no toil, and then enough rest and sleep into the bargain?’

  And fine clothes and jewellery, thinks Sugar. And leatherbound books and silver-framed prints and cab-rides at the wave of a glove and visits to the opera and an Ardent bath and a place of my own. She looks into Caroline’s face and wonders, What am I doing here? Why am I welcome? Why do you smile at me so?

  ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘Do you want some money?’ Well, no, she doesn’t say that — not the part about money. She only says, ‘I have to go.’ ‘Oh! What a shame!’

  Yes, a shame. Shame. Shame. ‘Do you want some money?’ Say it: ‘Do you want some money?’

  ‘I–I’ve left my place in an awful mess. I came straight here, you see.’

  Say it, you coward. ‘Do you want some money?’ Five simple words. Stashed in your purse you have far more than Caddie will earn in a month. So say it, you coward … you louse … you whore!

  But Caroline smiles, embraces her friend, and Sugar leaves without giving her anything but a kiss.

  In the cab on her way back to Priory Close (‘and there’s an extra shilling for you if you’re quick about it’) Sugar stews in her iniquity. The soles of her shoes stink; she longs to wipe them on the lush green grass in the park where she leaves the bed-sheets each week. The parcel’s always gone when she next comes — doesn’t that mean that poor folk are finding it? Or if it’s a park warden who finds it, those sheets will surely be donated to poor folk eventually? Christ, with all the do-gooders that infest London, surely some of them will have this sort of thing in hand? Coward. Whore.

  When Sugar was poor, she always fancied that if she ever became rich, she’d help all the poor women in her profession, or at least all those she knew personally. Daydreaming in her room at Mrs Castaway’s, elbows resting on the pages of her novel, she would imagine calling on one of her old friends, bringing along a supply of warm winter blankets or meat pies. How easy it would be to do such things without the stench of charity! She’d brandish her presents not in the way that a hoity-toity benefactress distributes kindness to inferiors, but rather with robust glee, the way one urchin displays to another an audaciously ill-gotten gain.

  But now that she has the wherewithal to fulfil those fantasies, the stench of charity is as real as the horse-shit on her shoes.

  * * *

  Safely back in her own rooms, Sugar prepares for William’s return. Then, as the afternoon drags on and he doesn’t appear, she loiters into the study and, pricked by self-reproach, pulls her novel out of its hiding-place. Breathing deeply, she deposits the ragged burden on the writing-desk and seats herself behind it.

  The light is falling now in such a way that the glass of the French windows is almost a mirror. In amongst the greenery of her garden hovers her own face, perched on an insubstantial body that wafts out of the ground like smoke. The dark leaves of the rose-bushes impose a pattern on the skin of that face; her hair, motionless in reality, swirls and flickers with every gust of wind outside; phantom azaleas shiver in her bosom.

  The Fall and Rise of Sugar. So says her story’s title, familiar as a scar.

  She recalls her visit to the lavender fields in Mitcham. How the lowly Rackham workers ogled her as she walked near! In their eyes she was a lady paying a visit on the toiling poor; there was no sign of recognition, only that peculiar mixture of feline resentment and canine respect. Each one of those workers, as they shrivelled meekly away from the sweep of her skirts, was convinced she couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to lie sh
ivering under a blanket that’s too thin for the season, or have shins bloody with flea-bites, or hair infested with lice.

  ‘But I do know these things!’ protests Sugar, and indeed the pages that lie before her on the ivory-handled writing-table were conceived in poverty, and are full of it. Wasn’t her childhood every bit as hopeless as the childhood of anyone toiling for Rackham Perfumeries? Granted, her lot is better than theirs now, but that’s irrelevant: theirs could improve too, if only they were clever enough … Yet, on that day in the lavender fields, how hopelessly, how enviously they stared at the fine lady walking beside their employer!

  ‘But I am their voice!’ she protests again, and hears, in the intimate acoustic of her silent study, a subtle difference in the way her vowels sound today, compared to how they sounded before the Season. Or were they always as dulcet as this? Tell us a story, Shush, in that fancy voice of yours, that’s what the girls in Church Lane used to say, half-teasing, half-admiring. What sort of story? she’d ask, and they’d always reply, Something with revenge in it. And bad words. Bad words sound funny when you say them, Sugar. But how many of those girls could read a book? And if she told the lavender workers that she once lived in a London slum, how many of them would believe her, rather than spit on the ground?

  No, like all the would-be champions of the poor throughout human history, Sugar must confront a humiliating truth: the downtrodden may yearn to be heard, but if a voice from a more privileged sphere speaks on their behalf, they’ll roll their eyes and jeer at the voice’s accent.

  Sugar chews her lips fretfully. Surely her miserable origins count for something? She reminds herself that if William should decide to cast her out of this luxurious nest, she’d be homeless and without income, in direr straits even than the workers in the lavender fields. And yet … And yet she can’t banish from her mind the wrinkled, ragged men and women bowing to her, shuffling away backwards; the uneasy murmurs of ‘’Oo’s that? ‘Oo’s that? Sugar stares at the reflection in the French windows, the flickering head and shoulders augmented with leaves and flowers. Who am I?