The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Sugar opens her mouth, but finds her tongue momentarily useless; she hadn’t imagined, nor did William warn her, that Sophie would have any needs whatsoever beyond tutelage.

  ‘I …we agreed …W–Mr Rackham and I,’ she stammers, ‘that I’ll care for Sophie in all respects.’

  Beatrice raises her eyebrow again, her gaze steady despite the rain of invisible blows she’s receiving from the urine-soaked slipper.

  ‘You can always insist on a nursery-maid being hired,’ she says, in a tone that suggests this would be a most excellent idea, and that Mr Rackham is deplorably remiss not to have arranged it already. ‘There’s money pouring into this house, Miss Sugar – pouring in. A new front door was installed only last week, did you know?’

  Sugar shakes her head and, as Beatrice launches into a nuisance-by-nuisance, screw-by-screw account of the door’s investiture, she begins seriously to consider how to raise the subject of trains without appearing daft.

  ‘I’m sure Sophie won’t be any trouble,’ she says, in Beatrice’s pause for breath after a pair of ‘swindling’ carpenters have (according to the nurse’s reckoning) been paid for one oblong of carved wood much the same sum as would employ a nursery-maid for a year. ‘I’m sure you’ve reared her so well that nothing remains but for me to …ah … carry on your good work.’

  Beatrice frowns, momentarily dumbstruck, praise having succeeded where the invisible slipper failed. But, before Sugar can follow through with a pointed allusion to long journeys and precious time, the nurse recovers.

  ‘Come and I’ll show you where Sophie’s wet bedding can be hung,’ she says. Whereupon, as she and Sugar move towards the door, she addresses her first words directly to the child: ‘Stay here, Sophie.’ The black-shrouded manikin, still perched motionless on the high-backed chair, merely blinks her big blue Agnes eyes, and doesn’t even dare turn her head to watch them go.

  All the way downstairs, Beatrice speaks of Sophie — or rather, of Sophie’s clumsiness, Sophie’s deficiencies in posture, Sophie’s forgetfulness, the unreasoning prejudice Sophie has against certain perfectly suitable items of clothing, and the great importance of not weakening in one’s stand on Sophie and broccoli. As they walk through the sumptuously decorated corridors below stairs, Beatrice shares with the new governess an inventory of what Sophie can be granted if she’s good, and what she can be denied if she’s ‘not so good’. This inventory is so exhaustive that it isn’t finished — only interrupted — by their arrival in a claustrophobic store-room adjacent to the kitchen.

  ‘It was built as a wine cellar,’ explains Beatrice, as they’re enveloped in warmth and the pleasant smell of evaporated linen-soap, ‘but then Mr Rackham ran out of wine, and hadn’t the means to replace it.’ She casts Sugar a meaningful glance. ‘This was a few years ago, of course — before the change came over him.’

  Sugar nods, oddly perturbed by the knowledge that she was that change. Beatrice is removing a cotton bed-sheet from a long copper pipe which, for no divinable purpose, connects one wall with the other.

  ‘Then he got a craze for photography,’ she goes on, folding the rectangle of linen against her breast, ‘and for a while it was what you call a “darkroom”. But then he had an accident with some poison, and the smell never went no matter how much the floors were sluiced out, and then a man came and said it was the fault of damp, and so this boiler pipe was passed through …’ She halts in mid-explication, her eyes narrowing. ‘Hello, what’s this?’

  On the floor, in one shadowy corner, lies a heap of what appears to be garbage. It proves, on closer inspection, to be wet and muddy papers, in the form of notebooks or diaries.

  ‘I must have a word with whoever’s responsible,’ she sniffs. ‘This room is not a cesspit.’

  ‘Ah, but you have a train to catch,’ blurts Sugar. ‘Don’t you? Please, leave the matter in my hands.’ And, like an answered prayer, a nearby grandfather clock goes bong, bong, bong and bong again.

  When Beatrice Cleave is finally gone, and her belongings have been removed from the hallway, and the servants are no longer standing at the windows watching the carriage dwindle out of sight, Sugar returns, alone, to the bedroom where Sophie was told to ‘stay’. What else can she do?

  She’d expected William to seek her out after the nurse’s departure and give her a more fulsome welcome, but he’s melted away, and she can hardly go poking her nose into all the rooms of the house in search of him, can she? No. With every carpeted stair she mounts, she appreciates ever more sharply that her brief hour of grace is over. She’s not a visitor here anymore, but … a governess.

  Even as she opens the bedroom door, she’s preparing for a dismal sight, a sight to sink her heart and send a shiver down her spine: the sight of Sophie Rackham sitting bolt upright on that stiff-backed chair, like an eerie museum specimen not quite killed by taxidermy, rigid with fear and mistrust, her huge eyes staring straight into Sugar’s soul, and expecting … what?

  But this, when Sugar enters, is not the sight that greets her. Little Sophie, although she most assuredly did stay where she was told, has found the long wait far too long, and fallen asleep in her seat. Her posture, so maligned by Beatrice, is indisputably poor just now, as she lies slumped and skew-whiff, her head lolling against one shoulder, her skirts rucked and wrinkled, one arm lying limp in her lap and the other dangling in space. A wisp of her blonde hair flutters as she breathes and, clearly evident on the black material of her tightly-buttoned bodice, there’s a patch that’s blacker than the rest, from drool.

  Sugar approaches softly, and kneels, so that her face is level with the slumbering child’s. In sleep, with cheeks puffy and lower lip protruding, it’s obvious that Sophie’s face has failed to replicate Agnes’s beauty; as soon as those big china-blue eyes are shut, there’s nothing of the mother left, only William’s chin and brow and nose. How sad, that unless the Rackham fortune intervenes, spinsterhood can already, at the age of six, be foretold in this girl’s flesh and bones! Her torso, too, is William’s, puppyish enough now, but carrying the seeds of stockiness. Why not let her sleep? suggests a tempting voice of cowardice and compassion. Let her sleep for ever. But Sugar, knowing she must wake her, kneels and waits, wishing that the proximity of her breath would somehow be enough to do the job.

  ‘Sophie?’ she whispers.

  With a wet snortle, the child begins to convulse into consciousness and, for one priceless instant, the universe offers Sugar a gift: the chance to be the first thing that a newly-woken spirit encounters, before there’s any time for fear or prejudice. Sophie is blinking in confusion, too befuddled to recognise whose face is hovering near — a far less fundamental concern, for someone freshly yanked out of the womb of dreams, than how this world compares to the one she’s left. What’s it like, this waking life? No sooner has it dawned on the girl that she’s most likely committed some terrible sin, and can expect to be punished, than Sugar reaches out a hand and lays it gently on her shoulder, saying,

  ‘It’s all right, Sophie. You fell asleep, that’s all.’

  Stiff and sore, Sophie allows herself to be helped off the chair, and Sugar decides, then and there, that being a governess is not going to be as hard as she feared. Flushed with relief, she makes her first mistake.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ she says. ‘Do you remember?’

  Sophie, striving with all her might to compose herself into that strange new animal, a pupil, looks perplexed. Here’s the inaugural question from her governess, and it’s a puzzler — maybe even a trick, to catch her out!

  ‘No, Miss,’ she admits. Her voice is Agnes’s exactly, but softer and less finely modulated — still musical, but more a mournful little bell than an oboe d’amore.

  ‘In church,’ Sugar prompts her. ‘I looked at you, and you looked back.’ (Even as she says it, it does sound rather a flimsy experience.)

  Sophie bites her bottom lip. A hundred times her nurse has told her she ought to pay more attention in church, and here�
�s the retribution!

  ‘Don’t ‘member, Miss.’ Words spoken in infant despair, in the shadow of a dunce’s cap.

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ says Sugar, and raises herself off her knees. Only when they’re both standing up straight does the scale of things become disconcertingly obvious: Sophie’s head scarcely reaches her waist.

  ‘Well now,’ Sugar presses on, making her second mistake, ‘I’m so glad Beatrice is gone, aren’t you?’ Her tone, she hopes, is playfully conspiratorial, like one child to another, to leave no doubt where her sympathies lie.

  Sophie looks up at her — such a distance between their faces! — and pleads, ‘I don’t know, Miss.’ Her brow is creased with anxiety; her tiny hands are clasped tight in front of her skirts, and this queer new world, now that she’s fully awake, is a dangerous place after all.

  What to do? What to do? Bailing up, from the well of books she’s read, whatever she can find on the subject of children, Sugar asks, ‘Do you have a doll?’ An inane question, she reckons, but it lights an unexpected spark in Sophie’s eyes.

  ‘In the nursery, Miss.’

  ‘The nursery?’ Sugar is reminded with a jolt that she hasn’t been there. The very place where she’ll be teaching Sophie, and she’s yet to see it! Granted, in Beatrice’s lecture on the proper maintenance of the Rackham child, the nursery was frequently referred to, but somehow Beatrice ended up leaving the house without having gone so far as to show the governess ‘what I expect you’ll be calling the school-room now’. Maybe she would have, if only Sugar hadn’t mentioned trains and sent her scurrying.

  ‘Take me there, then,’ she says, offering, after a moment’s hesitation, her hand. Will it be accepted? To her great relief, Sophie takes hold.

  At the first touch of the child’s warm fingers, Sugar feels something she would never have guessed she could feel: the thrill of flesh against unfamiliar flesh. She, who has been fingered by a thousand strangers, and grown insensible to all but the crudest probings, now experiences a tingle, almost a shock, of tactile initiation; and with that shock comes shyness. How gross her own fingers are in comparison with Sophie’s! Is the child disgusted by the cracked and horny surface of Sugar’s skin? How snugly or loosely should their hands clasp? And who will decide when they let go?

  ‘Lead the way,’ she says, as they step out.

  Once again, the Rackham house seems deserted, less a home than a hushed emporium of clocks, mirrors, lights, paintings, and a dozen different wallpapers. The nursery is tucked away in the tail of the landing’s L-shape, and on the way to it Sugar and Sophie pass several closed doors.

  ‘That’s Father’s thinking room,’ whispers Sophie, unasked.

  ‘And the next one?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss.’

  ‘And what about the first door, back there?’ ‘That’s where Mother lives.’

  The nursery, when they step inside it, is quite a heartening sight, at least by contrast with Sophie’s bedroom. It’s a fair size, with a larger than average window, an assortment of cabinets and trunks, a writing desk, and some toys — indeed, more toys than Sugar ever possessed. Over here are some painted wooden animals for a Noah’s ark (the ark itself not in evidence), over there is a crudely-fashioned but generously proportioned doll’s house with a few bits of dolls’ furniture in it. In the far corner, a rocking horse with a hand-knitted ‘saddle’, and a stack of gaily-coloured baskets filled with knick-knacks too small to identify. A dull green writing-slate, unsullied by chalk, stands ready on four wooden legs, purchased specially for this new chapter in Sophie Rackham’s life.

  ‘And your doll?’

  Sophie opens a trunk, and fetches out a flaccid rag-doll with a dark brown head, a grinning nigger on whose threadbare cotton chest is embroidered the word ‘Twinings’. He could hardly be more hideous, but Sophie handles him tenderly, with a hint of sadness, as if conceding that he’s ever-so-slightly less alive than she’d like to think he is.

  ‘My grandpapa gave him to me,’ she explains. ‘He’s supposed to sit on top of an elephant, but the tea weren’t empty yet.’

  Sugar ponders this for a second or two, then lets it go.

  ‘Why do you keep him in a trunk?’ she asks. ‘Wouldn’t you like to take him to bed?’

  ‘Nurse says I’m not to have a smelly old doll in my good clean room, Miss,’ Sophie replies, a note of grievance creeping into her stoicism. ‘And when he’s in here, she don’t like to look at his black face.’

  This is the opportunity Sugar has been waiting for, to redeem herself.

  ‘But it must be very gloomy and dreadful inside that trunk,’ she protests. ‘And surely he must get lonely!’

  Sophie’s eyes have grown larger even than normal; she’s teetering on the brink of trust. ‘I don’t know, Miss,’ she says.

  Again Sugar kneels, on the pretext of examining the doll more closely, but really to allow Sophie to read her face. ‘We’ll find a better use for this trunk,’ she says, helpfully tucking one of the doll’s dangling legs into the crook of Sophie’s arm. ‘Now, what’s your doll’s name?’

  Another puzzler. ‘I don’t know, Miss. My grandpapa never said.’

  ‘So what do you call him?’

  ‘I don’t call him any name, Miss.’ Sophie chews her lip, in case such rudeness, even to a creature made of biscuit and rag, warrants a scolding.

  ‘I think you should give him a name,’ declares Sugar. ‘A handsome English name. And he may live in your room from now on.’

  For just a few seconds longer, Sophie looks doubtful, but when the extraordinary new governess nods her head in reassurance, she draws a deep breath and cries,

  ‘Thank you, Miss!’

  In joy, she’s not so plain after all.

  A few dozen streets away, while Sophie is introducing Miss Sugar, item by item, to the wonders of her nursery, Emmeline Fox is sitting half-way up her stairs, taking a rest before continuing. She’s done rather a lot today, for a woman still not wholly well, and it’s a kind of bliss to sit here, one’s head nuzzled in the carpeted hollow of a stair, breathing in silence.

  Is there still a wheeze in her windpipe? Perhaps a slight one. But she has definitely, as Mrs Rackham put it, escaped the jaws of You-Know-What. How sweet it is, and how tiresome too, to feel the ache of exhaustion in one’s legs, the hard edge of a stair against one’s shoulder-blades, the pulse of her heart in the veins of one’s temples. She has been given this body, this poor vehicle of bone and sinew, for a while longer; pray God she uses it well.

  The visit to Mrs Rackham was awfully tiring, especially the walk home, carrying the cat (a solid creature, no featherweight!) in its wicker basket through the streets of Notting Hill. No doubt her decision to do without a cab, or even her servant Sarah, will keep the gossips prattling — all the more so, if any of them should learn the truth, that Sarah has gone back to prostitution, her ‘ailing grandfather’ having landed himself calamitously in debt at horse races throughout the Season.

  Another girl, likewise from the Rescue Society’s stable of rehabilitated strumpets, is supposed to be starting next Wednesday, but Emmeline wants to tidy the house a little before then, so as not to discourage the girl at the outset of a respectable career. So, that’s what she’s doing now: getting things in order. Well, not right now, of course; right now she’s sitting half-way up the stairs, watching the passing of ghostly pedestrians through the frosted glass of the front door below.

  The delivery of Henry’s worldly goods, especially since it was effected while she was in Saint Bartholomew’s and unable to supervise the workmen, has pushed this little house of hers over a line — the line, to be frank, between clutter and chaos. There’s not a room where there’s enough free space remaining for one to … well, swing a cat, as they say. Certainly Puss has, since his arrival, been most intrigued and confused, roaming up and down the stairs, in one door and out the other, reacquainting himself with his master’s furniture and his master’s contraptions, all stacke
d and crammed in unfamiliar places. Of particular concern to him is the bewildering phenomenon of Henry’s bed, which stands upright against the wall of the sitting-room, its mattress slumped drunkenly against the iron framework, no use to man or beast. At least half a dozen times since Emmeline released him into her house, he has attempted to draw this to her attention, in the clear hope that she’ll put it right.

  Emmeline has to admit that her house looks more like a Cheapside junk shop now. In the kitchen, there are two of everything: two stoves, two crockery cupboards, two ice-pails, two stock-pots, two kettles, two bain-maries, and so on and so on — even two spice racks, Henry’s selection almost identical to hers. All very unfortunate, given that she’s no better at cooking than she ever was, and even less inclined to improve.

  Throughout the house, chairs and stools are stacked two-and three-high, some precariously, others inextricably, but by far the greatest source of muddle is the superabundance of books: Henry’s volumes added to her own. In every room, and in the passages as well, great piles of them, some stacked logically, sandcastle-style, from large up to small, others stacked the other way round, tempting gravity and the caressing snout of Henry’s cat. Nor can she blame the men from the salvage company for the haphazard stacking: it was she who removed these books from their boxes, only to see what had survived the fire, and what hadn’t. Her skills in the storage of physical objects, however, leave a lot to be desired, and already there have been several spills. The never-particularly-stable tower of New Testaments, which the man from the Bible Dissemination Society never did come back for, has sprawled all over the landing, and some unlucky exemplars have even fallen through the banisters onto the floor below.