The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  William is nuzzling his face against her belly, murmuring encouragement to her, waiting to be given his secret.

  ‘I …I …’ she agonises. ‘I can shoot water from my sex.’

  He stares up at her, startled. ‘What?’

  She giggles, biting her lip to keep hysteria in check. ‘I’ll show you. It’s a special talent I have. A useless talent…’ To his open-mouthed stupefaction, she leaps up, fetches a glass of lukewarm water from the bathroom, and throws herself down on the floor before him. Without any erotic niceties, she hitches up her skirts, yanks off her pantalettes, and flings her legs over her head, the sides of her knees almost touching her ears. Her cunt opens wide like a nestling’s mouth, and with an unsteady hand she sloshes water into it, half a glassful.

  ‘God almighty!’ exclaims William as she repositions her feet on the carpet and, crawling crabwise, sprays a thin jet of water through the air. It splashes against the ottoman, inches from his trousers.

  ‘Next one will get you,’ threatens Sugar wheezily, adjusting her aim, but she waits until he’s ducked aside before squirting the next jet.

  ‘It’s not possible!’ laughs Rackham.

  ‘Stand still, scaramouch!’ she cries, and releases the final spout, the highest of them all. Then Rackham falls on top of her, pinioning her hands with his own, one knee lightly pressed against her panting stomach.

  ‘Is it all out now?’ he demands, and kisses her on the mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You’re safe.’ Whereupon they realign their bodies, so that he can settle in between her legs.

  ‘And you?’ says Sugar, as she helps him with his clothes. ‘Do you have a secret for me?’

  He grins apologetically as his manhood is pulled free of its swaddling.

  ‘What could possibly compare with yours?’ he says, and that is the end of the subject.

  Far away, in a squalid bedroom in a damp and grimy house, a prostitute, surprised by an unexpected visitor, holds out her palm and is given three shillings.

  ‘More questions, sir?’ she winks, but her voice trembles ever-so-slightly: she can sense from her man’s contorted face that he’s come for something different this time.

  He walks, rigid as a cripple, to her bed, and sits heavily on the edge. A square of light from the window shines on the spot directly beside him, leaving him in shadow.

  ‘The woman I love,’ he announces, in a low voice hoarse with passion, ‘is dying.’

  Caroline nods slowly, licking her lips, uncertain how else to respond; ever since the death of her own child, the demise of other human beings has meant less to her than it should.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she says, clutching the coins tight in her hand, to prevent them from jingling, as a gesture of respect. ‘A — a terrible shame.’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  ‘I–I ‘eard you, sir. The woman you love … ‘

  ‘No,’ he croaks, staring at the floor, ‘listen to me.’

  And, as his head sinks towards his chest, his shoulders begin to shake. He clasps his hands together, prayer-style, and squeezes until the flesh goes crimson and white. From his strangled throat come words too soft, and too distorted by sobs, to understand.

  Awkwardly, Caroline edges closer to him and, as his weeping grows more convulsive, sits next to him on the bed. The ancient mattress sags, and their bodies meet gently at the hip, but he doesn’t seem to notice. She leans forward, unconsciously aping his posture, and listens for all she’s worth.

  ‘God damn God,’ weeps Henry, giving the obscenity clearer diction, and greater vehemence, as he repeats it. ‘God damn God!’

  Knowing she’s heard him now, he loses what little self-control he had left. Within seconds he’s bawling like a donkey in a knacker’s yard, his body shuddering, his hands still clasped with such force that the bones beneath must surely snap into splinters.

  ‘Go-o-od da-a-amn Go-o-o-o-od!’ Henry continues to roar as, around his back, shyly and fearfully (for who knows what violence a man in despair may do?) Caroline lays one comforting arm.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Wake up,’ hisses a stern voice. ‘Remember where you are.’ Sugar rouses with a start, having nodded off in her seat. Blinking in the multi-coloured sunlight beaming through the stained-glass windows, she sits up straight, smooths her dowdy skirts and adjusts her horrid shawl. The ancient wife next to her, her pious duty done, turns her dim eyes once more to the pulpit, where the faraway rector is still busy casting his oratory across the sea of pews.

  Sugar glances at the other occupants of the free seats here in the back of the church, worried that they, too, noticed her falling asleep, but they appear oblivious. There’s an imbecile boy, growing increasingly cross-eyed in his attempts to scratch his nose with his bottom teeth. Next to him, nearest the escape route to the sunny outdoors, sits a shovel-faced mother with two babes cradled one in each arm, which she jigs slowly and gently to ensure their slumber is uninterrupted.

  In truth, much of the congregation is asleep, some with heads slung back and mouths open, others with chins sunk into their stiff, upturned collars, others leaning on the shoulders of relations. Sleep is almost irresistible, what with the hot weather, the tinted sunlight, and the rector’s droning voice: a conspiracy of soporifics.

  Surreptitiously, Sugar rubs her stiff neck and reminds herself what a fine idea it is to be here. William is away again (just for the day, this time, to Yarmouth), so what better way to spend her Sunday morning than to accompany the Rackham household to church?

  Not that there are many Rackhams in evidence. Their contingent has been sadly depleted since the honeymoon days of William’s marriage, when William and Agnes would turn up along with Rackham Senior and all the servants, and clucking ladies of the congregation would hint to the mystified Agnes that she’d soon be bringing a lively family with her.

  Yarmouth or no Yarmouth, William rarely attends anymore. Why should he listen to a windbag in a pulpit ranting about intangibles? In the world of Business, nothing is discussed that can’t be made real and viable: would that Religion could boast the same! So, usually it’s Agnes who attends in his stead, along with whatever servants can be spared. But Agnes isn’t here this morning, only her sour-faced maid. (Clara’s wide awake, not by virtue of greater piety but because she’s seething with resentment at the way Letty, who’s trusted to attend the evening service on her own, is in effect given Sundays off. She’s likewise envious of Cheesman, who’s free to wander around outside the church, smoking cigarettes and reading tombstones. And why doesn’t someone poke a parasol into that stupid scullery girl, Janey, to stop her snoring!)

  Sugar fidgets in the ‘poor pew’ of the church, many rows behind a small, barely visible child who may or may not be the daughter of William Rackham. Whoever she is, she moves not a muscle throughout the service, and is almost wholly hidden inside a stiff brown coat and oversized hat. Sugar tries to convince herself there must be something to be learned from the few inches of blonde hair that peep out, but her eyes keep drooping shut. She longs for the next brace of hymns, because even though these require her to sing unfamiliar words to tunes she doesn’t know, at least they jog her awake. Pitiless, the sermon saws on and on, a monotone that never reaches a crescendo.

  At the far left of the front pew, a handsome but angry-looking man is fidgeting too. He’s puffy-eyed and carelessly groomed, an odd sort of character to be at the forefront of the paying congregation. Every now and then, when he disagrees with the rector, he takes a breath so deep that it’s visible from the rear of the church, and very nearly audible from there, too.

  The rector is vilifying a certain Sir Henry Thompson for heresies whose precise nature Sugar can’t guess, having slept through a crucial part of the sermon, but she gathers that Thompson is espousing beliefs of a most foul and depraved kind and, what’s worse, winning a large public to his side. The rector suggests accusingly that there might even lurk, within his congregation this very morning, souls already l
ed astray by Sir Henry Thompson. Oh God, prays Sugar, please make him stop talking. But by the time her prayer is finally granted, all hope of a truce with God is lost.

  After the last hymns are sung, the congregation disperses slowly, many lingering in their seats to peruse their church calendars. The dissolute-looking man from the front row is not one of them; he barges out, striking accidental blows against several persons as he blunders up the aisle. This man, Sugar realises as he passes close by her, must be William’s older brother, the ‘dull, indecisive’ one who’s ‘been acting damned peculiar lately’.

  After Henry, an orderly procession of Notting Hill’s smartest and holiest files up the aisle, the men baking stoically in their dark jackets, the ladies decked out in the latest fashion, denying themselves only the glitter of ostentatious jewellery. Straggling in their wake comes the child who may or may not be William’s daughter, half-shrouded in the skirts of her matronly chaperone. She has Agnes’s china-blue eyes, and William’s lack of chin, and the yearning, defeated look of an impounded animal — the selfsame look that William had on his face, when she first appraised him in the smoky glow of The Fireside. Can a look prove paternity? Hardly conclusive: this child could be anybody’s. But for a fraction of an instant, the little girl’s eyes and Sugar’s meet, and something is communicated. For the first time today in this house of purported divinity, a spark of spirit has leapt through the stagnant air.

  It is you, isn’t it? Sophie? she thinks, but the child is already gone.

  As soon as she can safely do so, Sugar leaves her pew and follows the parishioners into the sunny churchyard. The little girl is being hurried — hustled, almost — towards the Rackhams’ carriage. Cheesman, loitering beside a marble column with two life-size angels wrapped wantonly round it, discards his cigarette and grinds it underfoot.

  With one Rackham whisked away, Sugar seeks out the sole remaining one: brother Henry — and finds she isn’t the only woman pursuing him. A wan-faced invalid whom Sugar observed, before the service, being assisted to her pew seat by a servant, is now receiving the same assistance to leave the church. Leaning heavily on a walking stick, she waves to Henry and calls his name, obviously determined to catch up with him.

  The effect on William’s brother is galvanic. He jerks to attention, doffs his hat to smooth his unwashed hair flat against his head, replaces the hat with care, straightens his tie. Even through the coarse muslin of her veil, Sugar can see he’s wrought a miracle on his face, banishing the anger and the bitter disaffection and replacing it with a mask of pitiful composure.

  The invalid, still escorted by a maidservant, moves not as a lame person does (that characteristic three-legged step), but bears down upon her walking stick as if it were a railing at the edge of a vertiginous cliff. She’s as pale and thin as a stripped branch, and the left hand which hangs over the servant’s arm looks very like a twig; the right, wrapped tightly around the handle of her cane, looks more like a knotted root. In the torrid heat that’s giving everyone around her pink or (in the case of some of the more elaborately dressed ladies) red faces, hers is white, with two mottled crimson blushes on her cheeks that flare and fade with each step.

  Poor doomed soul, thinks Sugar, for she recognises consumption when she sees it. But no sooner has this droplet of compassion leaked into her veins than she feels a gush of guilt flowing after it: Why don’t you go back to Mrs Castaway’s and visit Katy, you coward? She’ll be in a worse way than this stranger –if she isn’t dead already.

  ‘Ah! Henry! Were you hoping to escape from me?’

  The consumptive has managed to shake the servant from her side and walks alone, striving to make it look easy. The sight of her hunched shoulders and tightly interlocking fingers shocks Henry out of his standstill, and he rushes to her side, almost clipping Sugar across the bosom as he passes.

  ‘Mrs Fox, allow me,’ he says, extending his arms like heavy tools he’s unused to wielding. Mrs Fox declines the offer with a polite shake of her head.

  ‘No, Henry,’ she reassures him, pausing to rest. ‘This stick makes me quite steady … once I’m out of danger of being jostled.’

  Henry glares over Mrs Fox’s shoulder, indignant at all the wicked, contemptible people who might jostle her, including (nearest of all) Sugar. His arms, prevented from grasping Mrs Fox’s, hang at his sides, useless.

  ‘You shouldn’t be putting yourself at such risk,’ he protests.

  ‘Risk! Pfff!’ scoffs Mrs Fox. ‘Ask a destitute prostitute … under the Adelphi Arches … what risk is …’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ says Henry. ‘And I’d rather you were resting at home.’

  But Mrs Fox, now that she’s stopped moving, is regaining her breath by sheer force of will, sucking it up, as it were, from the ground through her stick. ‘I shall come to church,’ she declares, ‘as long as I’m able. After all, the church has one great advantage over the Rescue Society — it won’t send me a letter telling me not to come anymore.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re to rest, your father said.’

  ‘Rest? My father wants me to go travelling!’

  ‘Travelling?’ Henry’s face contorts with hope and fear and incomprehension. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Folkestone Sands,’ she sniffs. ‘By all accounts an Eden for invalids — or is it a Sheol?’

  ‘Mrs Fox, please!’ Henry glances uneasily about him, in case the rector is nearby. There’s only an anonymous veiled woman in shabby clothes, turning slowly and hesitantly as if unsure of her bearings.

  ‘Come, Henry, let’s walk together,’ says Mrs Fox.

  Henry is aghast. ‘Not all the way …?’

  ‘Yes, all the way — to my father’s carriage,’ she ribs him. ‘Come on, Henry. There are folk who walk five miles to work every morning.’

  Henry, provoked beyond endurance, begins to exclaim, ‘Not if…’, but manages to bite his tongue on any mention of fatal illness. ‘Not on a Sunday,’ he substitutes miserably.

  They resume walking, down the old path, the shaded avenue of trees, away from the sunlit congregation, followed by the veiled woman in the shabby clothes. Discreet distance and Mrs Fox’s breathlessness make Sugar miss some of what’s said; the words are turned to whispers on the breeze, like fluffs of scattered dandelion. But Mrs Fox’s shoulder-blades, straining and swivelling under the fabric of her dress, speak loud and clear.

  ‘What does it profit me,’ she pants, ‘to lie still and alone in my bed, when I could be here in the mild weather, in good company …’(a few words go astray) ‘… the chance to sing the Lord’s praises …’(a few more).

  The mention of ‘mild’ weather sends a chill of pity down Sugar’s spine, for she’s blinking droplets of sweat from her eyelashes behind her veil. The heat is punishing, and Sugar regrets denying herself — in her pauper’s disguise — the luxury of a parasol. What frigid blood must be coursing through this woman’s emaciated frame!

  ‘… this lovely day …indoors I should be cold and miserable …’

  Henry looks up into the fierce sky, willing the sun to be as mild as she believes it to be.

  ‘… something intrinsically morbid about lying in bed, under white sheets, don’t you think?’ Mrs Fox presses on.

  ‘Let’s talk of something else,’ pleads Henry. The graveyard is to their left, the headstones flickering through the trees.

  ‘Well, then …’ pants Mrs Fox. ‘What did you think of the sermon?’

  Henry looks over his shoulder to make sure that the rector is not on their tail, but he sees only the shabbily dressed woman and, some distance behind her on the path, Doctor Curlew’s maid.

  ‘I thought the greater part of it was … very fine,’ he mutters. ‘But I could’ve done without the attack on Sir Henry Thompson.’

  ‘True, Henry, quite true,’ gasps Mrs Fox. ‘Thompson bravely addresses an evil…’ (several words lost) ‘… time to admit to ourselves … very notion of burial … belongs to a smaller world … than ours has become …’
She stops a moment, sways on her stick, and waves one arm at the graveyard. ‘A modest, suburban churchyard like this … gives no clue to what will happen … when the population swells … Have you read … excellent book … What Horror Brews Beneath Our Feet?’

  If there’s a reply to this question, Sugar doesn’t hear it.

  ‘You ought to, Henry … you ought to. It will open your eyes. There could be no more eloquent … favour of cremation. The author describes … old graveyards of London … before they were all shut … noxious vapours …visible to the naked eye … ‘

  By now, her speech is painful to hear, and Henry Rackham casts frequent, agitated glances over his shoulder, not at Sugar but at the servant, who he plainly wishes would come and take matters in hand.

  ‘God made us …’ Mrs Fox wheezes, ‘from a handful of dust …so I fail to see … why some people think Him incapable …of resurrecting us … from an urnful …of ash.’

  ‘Mrs Fox, please don’t speak any more.’

  ‘And how substantial …I should like to know …do the champions of burial … think we are … after six months …in the soil?’

  Mercifully, the servant chooses this moment to bustle past Sugar and take the invalid firmly by the arm.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Rackham,’ she says, as Mrs Fox half-collapses against her. He nods and smiles a ghastly smile, a smile of impotence, a smile that acknowledges he’s less eligible to take her in his arms than an elderly housemaid.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he says, and stands watching as the two spindly women — whom he could, if required, lift off the ground, one in each hand –totter away together, step by feeble step. Immobile as a pillar, Henry Rackham waits until they’re safely installed in the doctor’s sombre carriage, then turns back to face the church. Sugar lurches into motion and walks past him, shame-faced behind her veil, for he must surely know she’s been spying on his agony.