The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Still the house and its grounds are steeped in the glimmering residue of the deluge. The carriage-way streams, its fine black gravel floating, grain by grain, towards the gates. Around the house proper, bright water spouts from drainpipes and leaks down the outer walls, washing over windows already as immaculate as they can be. In the garden, every leaf glistens in the glow of sunrise, and every branch hangs low; a spade which was driven securely into the earth the day before leans to one side and topples.

  In the subterranean kitchen, a bleary-eyed Janey mops at the puddles which, during the night, have trickled in through the grimy steam-vents, the scullery window and the stairwell. She stokes up the coppers with fresh coal, so the floors will dry and her fingers will thaw by the time she has to do anything complicated with them. Though she can’t see the daylight yet, she hears, by and by, the birds begin to sing.

  If Sugar were standing in the lane just off Pembridge Crescent, in that bowered spot where she waved to Mrs Rackham months ago, she would see Agnes standing at the bedroom window already, gazing out at the world through the sparkling glass. For Agnes slept most of yesterday’s daylight hours away, and has been wakeful through the hours of darkness since, waiting for the sun to follow her example. At the North Pole (if she’s to trust what books tell her) it’s day all the time, never night, which certainly would be agreeable. But what she can’t quite understand is: does that mean that Time itself stands still there? And if it doesn’t, does one’s numerical age, at least, never increase? She wonders which would be preferable: never changing because nothing ever changes, or growing hoary while remaining twenty-three forever. A conundrum to exercise the brain.

  Wary of risking a headache at the very start of the day, Agnes lays the North Pole aside and instead moves through her dim and silent house, descending the stairs and padding through the passage-ways, until she reaches the warmth and brightness of the already industrious kitchen. The servants there are not surprised to see her, for she pays a visit every morning lately; they know she hasn’t come to complain, so they carry on with their work. Amid a haze of delicious steam, the new kitchenmaid, What’s-her-name, is removing a fresh batch of Vienna bread from the oven; Cook is forking sheep’s tongues out of their bowl of marinade, selecting only those whose shape and size are likely to meet with the master’s approval.

  Agnes passes straight through to the scullery, where Janey is scrubbing out the wooden sink, having already finished with the stone one. The girl stands on tiptoe, her rump gyrating with effort; in her endeavour to keep the noise of her grunts and umphhs as soft as she can, she doesn’t notice Mrs Rackham’s approach.

  ‘Where’s Puss?’

  Janey jerks as if something has poked her, but recovers quickly.

  ‘’E’s be’ind the copper, ma’am,’ she says, pointing her swollen red hand. Why, you wonder, does she refer to Henry’s cat as ‘he’? Because Henry’s cat, despite the reputation that went before him, is male. On the morning of his arrival in the Rackham kitchen, Cook lifted him up by the tail to check his sex — something that poor Henry Rackham evidently never did.

  Agnes kneels on the spotless stone floor in front of the largest of the boilers.

  ‘I can’t see him,’ she says, peering into the shadows.

  Janey is prepared for this: she fetches a dish into which the kitchenmaid has doled a few rabbit and chicken hearts, necks and kidneys, and sets it down near the copper. Puss emerges at once, blinking sleepily.

  ‘Darling Puss,’ says Agnes, stroking his back, smooth as a muff and as hot as bread from the oven.

  ‘Don’t eat that,’ she advises him, when he sniffs at the dark clammy meat. ‘It’s dirty. Janey, fetch some cream.’

  The girl obeys, and Agnes continues to stroke the cat’s back, pushing him down on his belly, inches short of the bowl, in a slow rhythm of teasing restraint.

  ‘Your new mistress is coming today,’ she says. ‘Yes she is. You’re a heart-breaker, aren’t you? But I’ll give you up, yes I will. I’ll be brave, and content myself with memories of you. You little charmer, you.’ And she strokes him away from his offal one more time.

  ‘Ah!’ she sings in delight, as Janey returns with a china bowl. ‘Here’s your lovely, clean, white cream. Show me what you do with that?

  On her last morning in Priory Close, Sugar sits shivering at her writing-desk, staring through the rain-specked French windows at her little garden. The imminence of leaving it behind renders it, all of a sudden, inexpressibly precious, even though she’s done nothing to take care of it while living here: the soil has been scattered out of its orderly bed by weeks of heavy rain, the azaleas hang brown and rotten on their stalks, and a slimy heap of fallen leaves is banked up against the window-glass. Ah, but it’s my garden, she thinks, knowing she’s being ridiculous.

  Indeed there’s scarcely an inch of these rooms of hers that doesn’t inspire some nostalgia, some pang of loss, in spite of all the dissatisfaction and anxiety she’s endured here. All those lonely hours pacing the floor, and now she’s sorry to leave! Madness.

  Sugar shivers continually. She doused the fires too long ago, for the sake of not delaying William when he comes, and her rooms have grown cold. They seem colder still for being stripped of ornaments and decorations, and the pallid autumn light, mingling uneasily with the gas-lamps, worsens the denuded look of the walls. Sugar’s hands are chilled white, her bloodless wrists poking out of inky sleeves; she blows on her knuckles, and her breath is lukewarm and damp. All in black she sits, her mourning bonnet already fastened, her gloves ready in her lap. Everything she wishes to take along with her is already, at William’s request, gathered in the front room for easy portage; the rest he’ll no doubt dispose of somehow. Anything even slightly soiled — sheets, towels, clothing, no matter how expensive — she has already thrown out into the streets, for deserving scavengers to find. (The rain will have soaked everything, but with a bit of patience, some poor devil can surely redeem them.)

  In the discussion she and William had about the removal, no mention was made of the bed, though Sugar imagines her new quarters will be very small indeed. Will there be enough leg-room, she wonders, for her and William to do all they’re accustomed to doing? At the thought of her naked feet bursting out through the windows of a tiny steepled attic, Alice in Wonderland-style, she sniggers in suppressed hysteria.

  What in God’s name has she volunteered for? In a few hours, she’ll be solely responsible for Sophie Rackham – What on earth is she going to do with her? She’s an imposter, a fraud so outrageously transparent that … that even a child could see through it! Axioms, dictums and golden rules are what’s wanted in a teacher, but when Sugar racks her brains for some, what does she find?

  An occasion, five years ago perhaps, when her mother was called to her bedside shortly after the departure of a customer endowed like a horse. Having inspected the damage, Mrs Castaway decided that her daughter’s torn flesh would heal without stitches and, even as she was shutting up the medicine chest, gave this excellent advice for avoiding ‘bloodshed down below’:

  ‘Just remember: everything hurts more if you resist.’

  ‘They say,’ says Mrs Agnes Rackham to Mrs Emmeline Fox, ‘that your recovery is nothing short of miraculous.’

  Mrs Fox murmurs thanks as she accepts cocoa and a slice of cake from Rose. ‘Miracles are rare,’ she gently but firmly reminds her host, ‘and God tends to save them for when nothing else will do. I prefer to think I was simply nursed back to health.’

  But Agnes is having none of it. Here before her sits a woman whom she last saw limping painfully through the grounds of the church like a grotesque memento mori, causing an illicit susurrus of disgust and pity. Now, Mrs Fox looks in remarkable fettle, especially around the face; the skull that was so ghoulishly intent on disclosing itself is snugly clothed in flesh, the eye-sockets are no longer hollow. Indeed she looks almost pretty! And, let’s not forget, she walked in without the aid of a stick, carrying herself with
that confidence (as unmistakable as it is mysterious) that there is at one’s disposal enough breath and strength to last the whole day.

  ‘You’ve been in the Convent of Health, haven’t you?’ whispers Agnes.

  ‘No, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital,’ Mrs Fox replies. ‘You wrote to me there, as I’m sure you recall …?’ But Emmeline isn’t sure at all, because to be frank she’s finding Mrs Rackham’s wits a little on the scattered side today. For example, there are suitcases in the hall, and a mound of hat-boxes and furled umbrellas and so forth, clearly indicating that a member of the household is about to leave, but when tactfully questioned about this, Mrs Rackham appeared not to hear.

  ‘Perhaps I came at an inconvenient time?’ Emmeline fishes again. ‘Those suitcases in the hall … ‘

  ‘Not at all,’ says Agnes. ‘We have hours yet.’

  ‘Hours before what?’

  But Mrs Rackham has the same response to crude explicitness as she has to more delicate probing.

  ‘Hours before we might be interrupted,’ she assures her guest, ‘by anything that doesn’t concern us.’

  Rose offers the silver plate, and Mrs Rackham picks a slice of cake from the extreme left-hand side where, according to prior arrangement, the thinnest specimens are always laid. The slice in her fingers, a survivor of many abortive hot-knifings in the kitchen below, is so slender that the parlour lamp-light shines right through the fruit.

  ‘Come now, Mrs Fox,’ she simpers, nibbling her moist little rasher. ‘Are you saying you were snatched from the jaws of … You-Know-What, by nothing more extraordinary than good nursing?’

  Emmeline is beginning to wonder if, during the long months of her indisposition, the rules of casual intercourse have radically changed: what a strange little tete-a-tete this is! Still, she’ll give as good as she gets.

  ‘I never went about declaring I had consumption. Other people said I had it, and I didn’t contradict them. There are more important things to lock horns over, don’t you think?’

  ‘Henry told us he most definitely saw you on your deathbed,’ says Mrs Rackham, undaunted.

  Mrs Fox blinks incredulously, and for a moment seems in danger of some sort of outburst. Then she leans her head back against her chair and lets her big grey eyes grow moist.

  ‘Henry saw me at my worst, it’s true,’ she sighs. ‘Perhaps it would have been better for him if I’d disappeared for a while, and come back when it was all over.’ Staring over the railing of tragedy into that misty valley of the recent past where Henry can still be spied, Emmeline fails to notice Agnes nodding childishly, electrified by this apparent admission of supernatural powers. ‘I did tell him, though, that I’d get better. I remember telling him about what I call the calendar of my days, that God has put inside me. I don’t know exactly how many pages it has, but I can feel there are many more left than people thought.’

  By this point, Agnes is nearly squirming with excitement. Oh, to have such a magic calendar inside herself, and be able to verify (contrary to the estimate of that horrid newspaper article she simply can’t erase from her mind) that she has more than 21,917 days on the earth! Does she dare demand the secret, here and now, in her parlour on a chilly mid-morning at the beginning of November? No, she must tread softly, she can tell: Mrs Fox has that cryptic look about her, that Agnes recognises from portraits of mystics and death-survivors throughout the ages. Why, in a book hidden under her embroidery, The Illustrated Proofs of Spiritualism, there’s an engraving, done directly from a photograph, of an American Redskin gentleman sporting a ‘necklace’ of poisonous snakes, and his face bears an uncanny resemblance to Mrs Fox’s!

  ‘But do tell me,’ says Agnes, ‘what have you brought in your parcel?’

  With an effort, Mrs Fox retrieves herself from her reverie, and fetches up the heavy paper package that’s been leaning against the leg of her chair.

  ‘Books,’ she says, removing a pristine-looking volume and handing it over to Mrs Rackham. One by one she proffers them: slim treatises with such titles as Christian Piety in Daily Intercourse, The Bone Men’s Folly, and Carlylism and Christian Doctrine: Friends or Foes?

  ‘My goodness,’ says Agnes, trying to sound grateful despite her disappointment, for these books don’t appear to promise anything she wants to know. ‘This is awfully generous of you …’

  ‘If you turn to the fly-leaves,’ explains Mrs Fox, ‘you’ll see that generosity has nothing to do with it. These books belong to your husband — or at least, they’re inscribed to him, as gifts from Henry. I can’t imagine how they came to be back among Henry’s things, but I thought I should return them.’

  An awkward moment ensues, and Agnes decides she’s learned as much as she’s likely to learn during this particular visit.

  ‘Well,’ she says brightly, ‘shall we go down to the kitchen now, and see what we may find waiting for you there?’

  More than two hours after Sugar first considers the possibility that William has thought better of the whole idea, and an hour after she’s wept copious tears of dread and self-pity, convinced she’ll never see him again, the Rackham carriage jingles to a stop in front of the building, and William knocks for her.

  ‘Unavoidable delay,’ he declares laconically.

  After this, he doesn’t speak another word, preferring to supervise his coachman in the loading of luggage onto the roof of the brougham. Sugar, neither instructed to wait nor invited to leave, loiters in the hallway, as stiff as the coat-stand, while Cheesman lumbers in and out, a smirk on his face. Out of the corner of her eye, as she pulls on her tight black gloves, she can see him lifting one of her suitcases onto his broad shoulders, and fancies she can hear him sniffing for incriminating smells. If so, he sniffs in vain, for the rooms have a strangely sterile air.

  When the loading is finished, William gestures for her to leave, and she follows him out into the street.

  ‘Mind your step, miss,’ advises the cheerful Cheesman as, moments later, she clambers into the Rackham carriage, assisted ever-so-fleetingly by his hands on her rear end. She turns to stare daggers at him, but he’s gone.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ whispers Sugar to her rescuer, settling her rustling excess of black skirts on the seat opposite him.

  For answer William lays one index finger against his lips, and raises his bushy eyebrows towards the spot above their heads where Cheesman is taking up the reins.

  ‘Save it,’ he cautions her softly, ‘till later.’

  The great front door of the Rackham house opens a crack, then opens wider as the servant sees her master and the new governess. The hinges squeak, because this door was installed only last week: a massive showpiece of ornamental inlays and an elaborately carved ‘R’.

  ‘Letty,’ announces William Rackham augustly. ‘This is Miss Sugar.’

  The servant curtsies – ‘How d’you do, miss’ — but receives no reply.

  ‘Welcome to the Rackham house,’ proclaims the man himself. ‘I hope, no, I trust, you’ll be happy here.’

  Sugar crosses the threshold into the hall, and is immediately surrounded by the trappings of wealth. Above her head hangs a colossal chandelier, lit up by the sunshine beaming in through the windows. Vases of flowers so enormous and so liberally supplemented by green foliage that they resemble shrubs, stand on polished tables on either side of the great stairwell. On the walls, wherever a few square feet are not otherwise occupied, hang paintings of rural idylls in fine frames. Near the archway of the corridor leading to the dining-room and parlour, a grandfather clock swings its golden pendulum, its tock clearly audible — as are Sugar’s hesitant footsteps on the polished tile floor. Her eyes follow the spiral of mahogany banisters up to the L-shaped landing; somewhere up there, she knows, is her room, on the same level, thrillingly, as the Rackhams’.

  ‘What a beautiful house,’ she says, too overwhelmed to know if she means it. Her employer is gesturing in welcome; housemaids are scurrying all about; her predecessor’s luggage is
stacked up in the hall; all this fuss is caused by her, and makes her feel like the heroine of a novel by Samuel Richardson or those Bell sisters, whose name isn’t Bell at all but what is it? Her brain resounds with Bell, Bell, Bell … the true name escapes her …

  ‘Miss Sugar?’

  ‘Yes, yes, forgive me,’ she says, jerking into motion again. ‘I was merely admiring … ‘

  ‘Allow me to show you your room,’ says William. ‘Letty, Cheesman will help you carry the luggage in.’

  Together they ascend the staircase, their hands sliding along a polished banister each, a decorous space between their bodies, the tread of their feet muffled by the carpeted steps. Sugar remembers the many ascents she and William made on the stairs at Mrs Castaway’s; remembers especially the very first, when William was an idler in reduced circumstances, a miserable cringing creature with a fierce desire to see the whole universe flung to its knees before him. She glances sideways as they mount the stairs now: is this bearded gentleman really the same person as her baby-faced George W. Hunt, who, less than a year ago, begged her to let him be ‘debased’?

  ‘There is nothing I won’t submit to,’ she assured him then, ‘with the utmost pleasure.’

  ‘This is your room,’ declares William when, having led her along the landing, he ushers her through a door already set ajar.

  It’s even smaller than she’d expected, and plainer. Tucked under the single window, a narrow wooden bed, neatly made up with a quilt and flannel blankets. A pale-yellow birchwood chest of drawers with white china handles and a hinged mirror perched on top. One stool and one comfortable-looking armchair. A tiny table. For any more furniture than this, there simply isn’t the space. Picture-hooks dot the faded blue wallpaper like squashed insects; an ugly ceramic vase stands empty by the hearth. On the bare floorboards, not entirely covering them, lies a large rug, tolerably well-made, but no PerSiân splendour like the ones downstairs.