The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Somewhat neater-looking, but more disheartening, are the bags of clothing. Not Emmeline’s usual store of uncollected donations — the woollen gloves and darned socks and carefully mended bedding destined for the destitute of London and beyond — but Henry’s clothes. Three bags full, lying unopened in her bedroom, tied with string and stamped Tuttle & Son.

  Puss is dawdling around her skirts, miaowing, doing his best to butt her legs through the voluminous barrier of her skirts. Before he goes so far as to crawl underneath, Emmeline gets to her feet. How tired she is! It’s only afternoon, but she yearns to sleep. Not a doze, either, but a long, dark sleep to separate one day from the next. Impiously, she wishes God would relax the rules just this once and allow night to fall a few hours prematurely. The imbalance could be made up next day, couldn’t it, with a few extra hours of light?

  Stiff — so stiff that she almost wants her walking stick again — Emmeline shuffles to the kitchen, assuming that Puss, having taken the measure of the place, is now ready for some food.

  ‘Is that what you want, Puss?’ she asks, as he hesitates on the kitchen threshold, sniffing at the dirty bristles of a broom.

  What to give him? Now that she’s installed him in her home, she’s going to have to put some serious thought into how to persuade him to stay. An inspection of her cupboards and cool-chests confirms that, as well as having no cream, she has no raw meat, for she hasn’t been cooking lately, preferring to take her meals in restaurants (yes, deplorable, she knows: all those gaunt-cheeked families eking out their sustenance from scraps of mutton and crusts of bread, and here’s she, dining like a courtesan! But without Sarah’s help she just hasn’t been up to the challenge of cooking, and anyway, the stove that’s connected to the flue is the one that’s now out of reach.) Rather a shame she can’t take Puss with her to a restaurant, and order his dish along with hers … precisely the kind of common-sense solution that people can always be relied upon to reject out of hand. Ah! how English society hates pragmatism! Not the sort of pragmatism that gets factories built, but the sort that makes the life of its citizens more agreeable! Something to be discussed with Henry, when next she …

  With a sigh, she opens another cupboard and extracts a hunk of Leicester cheese, her own staple when the maid’s away. Puss yowls encouragingly.

  ‘I don’t suppose cats eat cheese?’ she says, tossing a small piece between his paws, but he pounces on the morsel and devours it with great relish. Another preconception disproved; she learns something new each day. Leaning against the superfluous oven, she feeds Puss the cheese, fragment by fragment, until he’s had enough, or is too thirsty to go on. She leads him to a dish of water, which he contemplates without enthusiasm; tomorrow she’ll buy him some milk.

  She ought to eat something herself; she’s had nothing today except bread, some cheese, tea, and Mrs Rackham’s fruit-cake. Her normal appetites have yet to be restored, and she still hasn’t recovered from the unpleasant discovery, on her return from hospital, of a box marked ‘PERISHABLES’ whose contents, after a brief sojourn at the warehouse of Tuttle & Son and then a rather longer one here, were perished indeed.

  She leans across a jumble of copper saucepans to open another cupboard, where she thinks she might have left a tin of biscuits. Instead, she finds another cache of books. A few minutes later, or maybe fifteen, having leafed through Mrs Rundell’s New System of Domestic Cookery, and stared a while at the inscription on its flyleaf, To my valued Friend Henry Rackham, Christmas 1874, she climbs the stairs, step by painful step.

  On the landing, very near the door to her bedroom, she spies two small dark-brown objects which appear from a distance to be cigars, but which prove at closer quarters to be faeces, and very smelly too. Emmeline closes her eyes and feels tears leak out; she cannot, cannot, cannot walk up and down the stairs again. Instead, she fetches a handkerchief from her bedside, from a box full of them, belonging to those days not so long ago, when she could be seized, at any time of day or night, with an irresistible desire to cough blood. Gingerly, she wraps the cat’s mess in the soft cotton, folding it round and round until it’s a kind of pomander. Parceled thus, it can surely wait till morning.

  In her shambles of a bedroom, she begins to undress, then, when she’s half-unbuttoned, suddenly realises why she can’t locate her night-dress. After a rather too vigorous attempt this morning to scrub an old bloodstain from it, she was obliged to mend a rip in the fabric, and — Lord help her sieve-like memory — she’s left it downstairs, slung over the back of a chair. Cannot, cannot, cannot. Just this once, she’ll have to sleep in her underthings.

  She struggles out of her dress and petticoat, clumsy-fingered with fatigue, but, once reduced to her chemise and pantalettes, becomes belatedly aware that she’s clammy with sweat, plagued by itches in her armpits, groin, and the cleft of her behind. Swaying on her feet, she briefly considers praying for the strength to go downstairs and dispose of the cat dung, fetch her night-dress, and boil some water for a wash, but decides that this would be an unworthy claim on God’s attention. Instead, she strips off her remaining clothing and, with a gasp of relief, crawls naked and feverish between the sheets.

  Only the very wicked or the very sick, she thinks, go to bed in the daytime. Tomorrow she must conserve her energies better, and not overtax this body which she so very nearly lost.

  The sheets are heavenly against her flesh, sweet numbness is spreading through her limbs, and although the sanction of nightfall is still a long way off, she feels herself drifting into sleep, only vaguely aware of a gentle commotion next to her in the bed which, only when she wakes next morning, she will discover to be Puss, by then nestled, in a state of perfect contentment, at her feet.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sugar’s bed, just right for the woman who slept in it previously, is too small for her. During her long first night in the Rackham house, during a sleep that’s tainted by the fitful barking of a distant dog, Sugar dreams all sorts of queer things. A while before dawn, she tosses one time too many, and a gangly naked leg swings out from under the sheets, dangling in the chill air, before bumping against the flank of her suitcase. In Sugar’s dream, this is translated into the callused fingers of a man, seizing her calf, crawling up her flesh towards her groin.

  ‘You needn’t shiver any more,’ says Mrs Castaway. ‘A kind gentleman has come to keep you warm.’

  Sugar tries to curl into a ball, bumps her ankle on an unfamiliar bedpost, and wakes.

  For a few moments she’s quite lost in her new room, this dark little chamber high above the ground, having grown so used to the spacious ground-floor quarters in Priory Close, always gently illumined by the street-light. She could almost be back in her old bedroom at Mrs Castaway’s, except that that was a good deal bigger than this. Also, there’s a peculiar smell under the bed, an earthy, damp smell, that reminds her of the rot in the first house she ever lived in — the hovel in Church Lane.

  Sugar leans over the edge of the bed and scrabbles underneath, and her fingers brush against the filthy pile of Agnes’s diaries. Ah yes, now she remembers. No sooner did the front door shut on Beatrice Cleave yesterday than she crept back down to the store-room and snatched the diaries while the snatching was good. Then, having stashed them under her bed, she hurried to attend to Sophie.

  Ah, Sophie.

  Sugar fumbles for a lucifer and lights two candles on her ugly yellow dresser, and rubs the sleep out of her eyes. I am a governess, she tells herself, as the world flickers into focus. Immediately she’s conscious of a gripe in her innards, then a sharp stab of pain. She’s eaten almost nothing for days, nor moved her bowels. Anxiety has frozen her. Now, she’s thawing out, and her belly is full of noises.

  The clock says half past five. How long has she slept? Quite a while; she went to bed last night almost immediately after the child did, at the infant hour of seven. She expected William to come and join her then, and was determined to stay awake — she even considered giving her clitoris som
e attention to prepare herself — but within minutes of laying her head on the strange-smelling pillow she was gone. If William did come to see her — and there’s no evidence that he did — he must have left her sleeping.

  In her memory, Sugar retrieves the events of yesterday in reverse order from Sophie’s bedtime — Sophie falling asleep, right before her eyes, as though obeying a command. Or perhaps only pretending? Sugar, too, knows how to fake unconsciousness, if there’s something to be gained from it …

  She’s a little actress, I warn you, was one of Beatrice’s parting wisdoms. She’ll wrap you round her finger, if she’s given half a chance.

  Sugar recalls the gently breathing face of Sophie on the pillow, the crisp sheets and blankets only half-way up Sophie’s stiff white night-gown, for Sugar was too shy to tuck them up to the child’s neck.

  What came before that? Hearing Sophie’s prayers. A litany of God-blesses. Who and what did Sophie pray for? Sugar can’t remember. The thought that she’ll surely hear the same prayers again this evening is at once reassuring and perturbing.

  But what happened before the prayers? Oh, yes, bathing Sophie in a tub next to her bed. The child did it all herself, really, except for the towel draped over her tiny wet shoulders. Sugar looked away, bashful, and, when the laundry-maid came to collect Miss Rackham’s washing, blenched as if caught in a naughty act.

  And before then? Ah yes, the business with the Gregory powder. Beatrice had stressed the absolute necessity of administering a nightly dose — indeed, her last words to Sugar before leaving the house were ‘Remember the Gregory powder!’ — but the look of revulsion on the child’s face as the vile spoonful approached her lips made Sugar lower the spoon at once.

  ‘Would you rather not, Sophie?’

  ‘Nurse says I’ll be sorry without it, Miss.’

  ‘Well,’ Sugar responded, ‘let me know if you’re sorry, and I’ll give it to you then.’ And, to the child’s relief, she tapped the horrid concoction of rhubarb, magnesia and ginger back into the tin.

  There were no formal lessons yesterday, because Sugar was trying to find out what Sophie had learned in life so far. This turned out to be a great deal, and Sophie grew quite exhausted recalling and reciting it all. Bible stories and moral homilies made up the bulk, but there was also a fair amount of what Beatrice Cleave described as ‘general knowledge’, such as which countries belong to England, and which ought to but don’t. There were nursery rhymes, little poems about the importance of being virtuous, and Sophie’s topic of greatest erudition, the elephants in India.

  ‘Their ears are smaller,’ stated the child, after many other revelations.

  ‘Smaller than what?’ Sugar enquired.

  ‘I don’t know, Miss,’ confessed Sophie after a dumbfounded pause. ‘Nurse knows.’

  Throughout the afternoon, as fact piled upon fiction in an ever greater muddle, Sugar repeatedly smiled and said, ‘Very good, Sophie.’ She didn’t know what else to say, and it seemed the right thing to be telling the child anyway. Judging by Sophie’s response — an ever-brighter glow of pride and relief — the words ‘good’ and ‘Sophie’ had all-too-rarely been coupled in the same sentence. Sugar spooned them into the child’s mouth like an illicit gift of bon-bons, enough to make her gloriously sick.

  So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie’s formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is.

  In the early morning gloom, by candle-light, Sugar opens the book handed to her, like a sacred chalice, by Beatrice. ‘Purchased by Mr Rackham himself, this was,’ the nurse said. ‘Everything Sophie should know is in it.’ Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People is its title, and very thick and densely printed it is too. The author’s name, Richmal Mangnall, sounds like the growl of a dog refusing to surrender a ball from its mouth.

  Sugar examines the first question, concerning the ancient monarchies that were founded after the Deluge, but gets stuck because she isn’t sure how to pronounce ‘Chaldean’ and is loath to start Sophie’s tuition off on the wrong foot. She reads further and, by the time she gets to ‘What were the Amphictyonies or Amphictyonic confederations?’, she’s fairly certain that some of this material is not yet within the scope of Sophie’s brain. She decides to skip a few thousand years — or, say rather, a dozen pages — and begin after the birth of Jesus, whom Sophie at least has heard of.

  That’s settled, then. Sugar lays Mangnall’s Questions to one side and fetches Agnes’s diaries out from their hiding-place. To her surprise, they are (she notices now) locked, each grimy volume banded shut with a hasp and a tiny brass padlock. Specks of soil fall into her lap as she strains to tear one of them open, but its dainty fastening proves stronger than it looks. Eventually, pricked by conscience, Sugar forces the lock by thrusting the point of a knife into it until the mechanism yields.

  At random, the pages fall open, to reveal Agnes in 1869, as follows:

  I am gripped by terror today — I feel certain there is a great trial in store for me, greater even than I have endured yet …Just this minute Clara has come in to tell me that Doctor Curlew is on his way, to “help me out of my misery”. Whatever can he mean? I know that the last time he was here I complained bitterly, and I may have said that after so many months of Illness I wished for nothing but Death, but I didn’t mean it! His black bag frightens me — it has knives in it, & leeches. I have begged Clara to stop him doing me any mischief if I should swoon, but she doesn’t appear to listen, and prattles that everyone is very worried about ‘the baby’ — how very late it is, & that it must come soon. Whose baby can this be? I wish William would keep me better informed about whom he invites to this house …

  A barb of pain burrows down through Sugar’s guts. With a groan she perches on the chamber-pot and doubles over, her loose hair piling up in the lap of her night-gown, her forehead resting on her knees, prickling with sweat. She balls her fists, but nothing comes, and the spasm passes.

  Back in bed, she takes up Agnes’s diary again, and flicks to the entry she saw before, expecting to learn, on the page following, how Sophie arrived into the world. But the very next entry after the one describing Agnes’s unenlightened labour begins thus:

  Have just returned from Mrs Hotten’s house, where I had my first dinner “out” since regaining my Health. Either the Hottens are most peculiar people, or manners have flipped Topsey-Turvey during my time of Illness. Mr Hotten put his napkin on his chest, and I was expected to eat my melon with a spoon. There were no asparagus tongs, and one of my potatoes had a “bone” in it. Everyone talked ceaselessly about the Barings, and made jokes about the cost of a Peerage. Mrs Hotten laughed with her mouth open. All evening I was either aghast or else bored. I shan’t go again. When will Mrs Cecil reply to my invitation, I wonder?

  And so on, and so on. Sugar flips through the pages: more and more of the same. Where is William? Where is Sophie? Their names don’t appear. Agnes goes to parties, presumably with her husband at her side; she returns home, presumably to her infant daughter.

  At Mrs Amphlett’s, I saw Mrs Forge, Mrs Tippett, Mrs Lott, Mrs Potter, Mrs Ousby … Such roll-calls fill the pages, stitched together with a tireless embroidery of I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I.

  Sugar prises open another couple of diaries. She reads a few lines here and there, but is daunted by the enormity of the task ahead. Twenty diaries, hundreds of pages, all cluttered with Agnes’s wearyingly tiny script. And instead of revelations that could be of some use to her should she bump into Mrs Rackham on the stairs today, there are only complaints about inferior china, dreary weather, and dust on the banisters. Only a few weeks ago, Sugar would have been very excited if she could have retrieved, from a pillar-box or a garbage-heap, just one letter written by Agnes Rackham; she would have pored over each line, wringing out maximum insight. Now, Agnes’s entire life lies here before her, in a mound of grubby diaries, and she doesn’t know wh
ere to start.

  Eventually, she decides there’s only one way to do it: begin at the beginning. Breaking each of the diaries open, she sorts them according to date until she has the earliest one in her hands.

  The inaugural page of this first diary, the smallest and most delicate of all the volumes, consists of several false starts, written in a neat if somewhat slanted hand. The date, 21 April, 1861, is rendered with especial care.

  Dear Diary,

  I do hope we shall be good friends. Lucy keeps a Diary and she says it is a very fine & amusing thing to do. Lucy is my best friend, she lives lived lives in the house next-door to where I live lived

  Agnes’s second attempt is directly underneath the first, equally neat, showing her determination not to be discouraged by one failure.

  28 April, 1861 Dear Diary,

  I do hope we shall be good friends. I think you will find I am as Faithful a little girl as ever lived. In May I shall be Ten Years Old. When I was younger I was very happy, tho’ we lived in a smaller house than we do now. Then my dear Papa was taken from us, and Mama said I ort not to be without a Father, and

  The two entries following this are not quite as neat, as if Agnes wrote them in a rush — hoping, perhaps, that sheer momentum might carry them over the obstacles that derailed the others.

  Dear Diary,

  How do you do? My name is Agnes Pigott, or should I say that was my name, but now

  Dear Diary,

  I

  The next entry, undated and obviously scribbled in furious haste, fills a double page overleaf.

  My dearest, most beloved Saint Teresa,

  Is it such a great Sin to hate my father if he is not my True father? I hate him so, I hate him until my teeth bite holes in my lips. He is an evil man and has cast a Spell over Mama to make her forget our dear Papa and she looks at him like a dog waiting for meat. She cannot see what I see — the cruelity in his eyes and his smile which is not a smile. I dont know what is to become of us because he has forbiden us to go to Church — the True Church — and instead he has taken us to his church and it is a shameless frord. Hardly anyone is properly dressed and everything is so common, they even have a Book Of Common Prayer. I dont suppose, dear Saint Teresa, that You have ever seen inside one of these places. There is only emptyness where Our Lady ort to be standing, and there is nothing to take home except a beging letter about the Clock-Tower Fund. My father My new father Lord Unwin says everything is the same as my old Church except that they are speaking the Queens English, but he does not understand (or perhaps he pretends not to) that if even one small word of a Spell is left out or pernounced wrong it doesnt work at all, as in “Columbine’s Enchanted Forest” when Columbine forgets to say ‘zabda hanifah’and she loses her wings. Lord Unwin hates the Church and Our Lady and all the Saints, he says “No more of that jibrish in this house” and by jibrish he means You, Saint Teresa.