The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Why do You not speak to me any more? Are the walls of this unhappy new house a shield against Your voice? I cannot believe he is stronger than You. If You cannot speak to me aloud, perhaps You could wisper to me when Miss Pitt takes me out walking, or perhaps You could cause Your answer to appear on this page by the morning (or the next page if there is no room left.) I shall leave the pen in the ink, but please do not spill as Miss Pitt (my new governess) is very strict.

  Oh yes, You need to know what my questions are, they are, Where has my own dear Papa gone and when am I to see him again? And, How much longer is this evil man to have Mama and me in his power? He says I am to go to a School for Young Ladies as soon as can be aranged. I am very frightened of this as it will mean leaving Mama, and I have heard that schooling is a thing that takes many years. Also I dont wish to be a Young Lady because they are not permited to play with hoops any more and must get married instead.

  The remainder of the diary consists of blank pages, creamy and secretive. Sugar feels another barb of pain burrowing through her guts, and sits on the chamber-pot again. Foulness sputters out of her, scalding her as it goes. She hugs herself, shivering, biting her lips so she won’t exclaim blasphemies or obscenities. Instead, in between cramps, she breathes deeply and deliberately. I am a governess.

  A little while later, at half past six, Rose brings her a cup of tea. Sugar is fully dressed by then, her unruly abundant hair wound into a tight chignon, her body sheathed in black. The room is tidied, the diaries invisible — stashed under the bed, wrapped in the same shabby old dress she used as a disguise on her visit to the Rackhams’ church. God knows why she kept that dress — she needs no disguises now! But she did, and it’s come in useful after all.

  ‘Morning, Miss Sugar,’ says Rose, her nose wrinkling only momentarily at the diarrhoea stench still flavouring the air. ‘I–I didn’t know what biscuit you might like.’ And she proffers a plate containing three different ones.

  ‘Thank you, Rose,’ says Sugar, moved almost to tears by how friendly the servant is being. Either Rose hasn’t read any novels, or she’s under strict injunctions from her master to be amiable. ‘That’s very kind of you. I wonder if you could advise me on opening this window? I’ve tried, and can’t manage it.’

  ‘It’s painted shut, Miss, from the outside.’ Rose inclines her head apologetically. (The whole house is afflicted with minor inconveniences following the recent orgy of improvements.) ‘I’ll ask Mr Rackham to ask the gardener to climb up and fix it for you, Miss.’

  ‘No need, no need.’ Sugar is determined not to cause William the slightest bother, lest he feel that a governess from a more conventional source would have been less troublesome. When he comes up to see her, let it be because he desires her, not because he must face the consequences of hurried renovations. Nodding encouragingly at Rose, Sugar takes a sip of lukewarm tea and a bite of biscuit.

  ‘Qwor!’ her stomach exclaims, as the servant turns to leave.

  Minutes later, in a bedroom virtually identical to her own, Sugar wakes Sophie, and finds her drenched with urine. The little girl, confused and squinting in the lamp-light, is trapped in a swaddle of night-gown and bed-sheet clinging to her wet flesh, as though a pitcherful of piss has been poured on her body from knee to chest.

  ‘Uh … Goodness me, Sophie,’ says Sugar, after biting her tongue on several coarser responses.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss,’ says the child. ‘I’m bad.’ Her tone is matter-of-fact, not cringing or pitiful; she might be reciting a titbit of general knowledge that escaped her memory the day before.

  The metal tub of warm water is already stationed by the bed, deposited there by whoever does the work of little Christopher in the Rackham household. Sugar helps Sophie out of bed, assists her to remove her nightgown in such a way as not to rub her face in her own pee. The rest, the child does herself. Her stocky body and spindly arms disappear under a frothy lather of Rackham’s Bath Soap (still Supreme in its Bubble Production Far Beyond the Capacities of Other Soaps!, until such time as Sugar’s suggested rephrasing is adopted.)

  ‘Very good, Sophie,’ she says, looking away. The hairs on the nape of her neck tingle as she notices a pair of eyes glinting in the darkness: Sophie’s doll, slumped louchely on top of the dresser, its chin buried in its chest, its painted teeth grinning. Sugar and the manikin stare at each other until the bathwater has gone quiet, then she turns back to Sophie. The child is standing ready to be dried, her shoulder-blades quaking with cold, and Sugar wraps a towel around them; but, as she does so, she catches a glimpse of the smooth infantile vulva between Sophie’s legs, the firm, clearly defined sex glistening with water — and helplessly imagines a swollen, mauve-headed prick shoving its way inside.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss,’ says Sophie when she hears her governess grunt in distress.

  ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, dear,’ says Sugar, looking away towards the window as the child finishes drying. The sun appears to be on the rise, or at least the night is receding, and in Sugar’s lap, a very small petticoat lies ready.

  At half past eight, after they’ve eaten the bowls of porridge Rose has brought up to them, Sugar escorts Sophie to what used to be, until yesterday, the nursery. They tiptoe past dark, closed doors behind which are hidden the personal effects, and possibly the bodies as well, of William and Agnes Rackham respectively. Quiet as mice or burglars, they proceed to the end of the landing and let themselves into the unlit room where slate and rocking horse stand at the ready.

  A servant has stoked a fire in the hearth, raising the temperature of the air to a bearable chill. While Sugar lights the lamps, Sophie walks directly to the writing desk and sits down, her tightly-shod feet dangling a few inches short of the floor.

  ‘Dictation first, I think,’ says Sugar, as her intestines continue to make loud noises. ‘A few words at random, just to see how well you can write when you’re still half asleep!’

  The humour is lost on Sophie; she appears to regard this as a genuine attempt to catch her out when she’s least prepared. Still, she lays a blank sheet of paper on the writing-desk before her, and sits attentively, waiting for the first humiliation.

  ‘Cat,’ declares Miss Sugar.

  Face bowed to the page, Sophie inscribes the word, her tiny hand gripping the pen awkwardly, her big eyes gleaming as she strives to make the inky calligraphy perfect and beautiful.

  ‘Dog.’

  A fresh dip in the ink. A wince of disappointment as a dark blob disfigures the initial ‘d’ — this was the intended trap, no doubt! A second attempt.

  ‘Master.’

  Again the child writes the letters, painstakingly but (as far as Sugar can judge upside-down) with no apparent uncertainty about spelling. Which of them is being made a fool of here?

  ‘Mistress — no …ah … Girl.’

  Virgin, suggests a phantom prompter in Sugar’s head, a sly devil with the voice of Mrs Castaway. Virgin.

  ‘Ah …’ (she looks around for inspiration) ‘window.’

  Kept intact especially for you, sir.

  ‘Door.’

  Whore.

  The sun is shining brighter now, lightening the shadows of the schoolroom, warming the stale air. Sugar dabs her damp forehead with the black fabric of her sleeve. She hadn’t thought dictation could be such hard work.

  All morning, Sophie Rackham does as she is told. She writes, she reads aloud, she listens to an Aesop fable and regurgitates the moral. Her first formal history lesson is a model of compliance; Miss Sugar recites the facts five or six times, and Sophie repeats them until she has them engraved, or at least pencilled, on her memory. Thus does Sophie learn that in the first century, London was founded by the Romans, Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus, and Rome was burnt in the reign of Nero. Memorisation of these bare facts is a mere ten minutes’ work, mostly spent correcting Sophie’s tendency to pronounce the Holy City ‘Juice’lem’. However, the remainder of the morning flies by, as Sugar lays Mangnall’s book aside
and attempts to answer Sophie’s questions arising from her lesson, such as: Where was London before the Romans found it; Why didn’t Titus care for Juice’lem; and How could Rome catch fire if it was raining? Then, as soon as she’s mopped up these enigmas (in the case of Titus, with an improvisation of pure fiction), Sugar tackles the more fundamental questions, like What is a century and how does a person know he’s living in one; and Are there elephants in London.

  ‘Haveyou seen any elephants there?’ teases Sugar.

  ‘I’ve never been, Miss,’ says the child.

  At midday, when Sophie is scheduled to adjourn her lessons and play for a couple of hours, Sugar is free to do the same. The ritual, common in other households, of a child being brought downstairs, immaculately dressed and on its best behaviour, to eat lunch or dinner with its parents, is unknown in the Rackham house.

  The bright morning sunshine has been replaced by rain. Rose brings them their portion of the lunch that’s being served down below (to whom? Sugar wonders) and disappears again. Lessons aren’t due to resume until two, and Sugar is longing for the respite, if only for the opportunity to remedy her physical discomforts — numb, half-frozen feet, armpits clammy with sweat, a sore and itchy arsehole. While she eats her carrot pudding, she searches her vocabulary for an alternative to ‘arsehole’ — not ‘anus’, which still sounds coarse, but some elusive word that’s wholly innocuous and refined, that could be spoken in elegant company. No success. She’ll have to purify her words and thoughts, though, if she’s to be a fit governess. However little interest William may have shown in his daughter until now, he certainly won’t want her learning coarse language.

  ‘Be good, Sophie,’ she says, as she prepares to shut the child in the nursery — the school-room, rather.

  ‘Be Good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever? recites Sophie, playfully seizing her chance to complete the poem, like a catechism. ‘Do Noble things, not dream them all day long; And so make Life, Death, and that vast For-ever, One glad, sweet Song.’

  ‘Very good, Sophie,’ says Sugar, and closes the door.

  Back in her own room, the chamber-pot has been emptied and cleaned, and lavender essence has been sprayed in the air. The bed is made with fresh sheets and pillow-cases, and Sugar’s hair-brush, pin-box, buttonhook and so forth have been tidied into a neat pattern on the blanket. The swaddle of diaries under the bed hasn’t been disturbed, thank God. A decanter of water has been placed on the dresser, as well as a clean glass and a folded slip of paper.

  Sugar snatches up the note, thinking it must surely be from William. It’s from Rose, and says, Shears will see to the window — Rose.

  She undresses, washes the parts that need washing, and puts on the burgundy-coloured dressing-gown with the quilted breast that William particularly likes. She sits on the bed, her feet wrapped in a blanket, and waits. Tempting though it is to read Agnes’s diaries, she can’t risk it, because when William comes — as he surely must — he may not knock before entering, and what would she say then? Even if he did knock, the diaries are dirty, and cleaning the soil off her hands would take time …

  The clock ticks. The rain patters against the window, desists for a while, then returns. Her toes thaw one by one. William doesn’t come. Sugar calls to mind the frantic way he grips her when he’s fucking her from behind, his hands bearing down on her shoulders as if in the wild hope of collapsing their two bodies into one — as if, with a sudden, fantastical contraction of flesh, she might be concertina’d into his groin, or he disappear completely into hers.

  At ten minutes to two, she gets dressed again, buttoning herself into her black governess garb and hanging her burgundy gown back in the wardrobe. She has remembered, to her relief, that it’s Wednesday — William’s day for checking what proportion of the goods he’s ordered during the previous week has in fact turned up at the docks. By now, he’ll be in Air Street, frowning over dispatch notices, already formulating letters in his head that she’ll help him write when his annoyance has cooled. It’s a dreary task, but it must be done.

  * * *

  The remainder of the day passes quickly. Sophie, Sugar discovers, loves to be read to. So, in amongst more rote-learning from Mangnall’s Questions, and more disentanglement of confusions arising from that venerable book, Sugar reads aloud from Aesop, acting out the animals in different voices. At one point, after a particularly spirited duck-quack, she glances across at Sophie and thinks she detects a twitch of the lips that might be a hastily suppressed smile. Certainly the child’s eyes are wide and bright, and she barely breathes for fear of missing a single word. ‘ Whisssss-kers,’ says Sugar, gaining courage.

  Shortly before four, there’s a grinding and a jingling in the grounds below, and Sugar and Sophie go to the window to see the carriage emerging from the coach-house. Mrs Rackham, it seems, is going out to take her tea at another lady’s ‘At Home’, or perhaps intending to flit to several such. Darkness is already descending, and the weather is drizzly, but when Agnes hurries out of the parlour onto the carriage-way she is resplendent in pink, and her matching parasol looks luminous in the twilight. Cheesman gathers her into the cabin, and she’s borne away.

  ‘I should prob’ly get sick,’ says Sophie, nose pressed against the window-pane, ‘if I had a ride in that.’

  At seven, after a roast dinner and another hour or two spent in her bedroom waiting for William, Sugar returns to Sophie to discharge the last of her responsibilities. She can’t help thinking it’s futile to bathe Sophie at bedtime when, in all likelihood, it will need to be done again in the morning, but Sophie seems used to it and Sugar is loath to unravel established routines so soon. So, she goes through the ritual, and wraps the sweet-smelling child in her plain white night-dress.

  ‘God bless Papa and Mama,’ says Sophie, kneeling at the side of her bed, her tiny hands arranged in a steeple on the coverlet. ‘God bless Nurse.’ So incantatory is her tone that it hardly seems to matter that of this triumvirate, two have scant involvement in Sophie’s life and the third has abandoned her to suckle a new baby called Barrett. Father, Mother and Nurse are folkloric fixtures like Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or Great Huge Bear, Middle Bear and Little Small Wee Bear.

  ‘… and I am grateful that I am a little girl in England with a home and a bed, and God bless the little black children in Africa, who have no beds, and God bless all the little yellow children in China, who are made to eat rats …’

  Sugar’s eyes, focused on Sophie’s pale bare feet poking out from the hem of her night-dress, slowly cross. Whatever qualms she may have about embellishing, with sentimental and unhistorical anecdotes, the decision by Constantine the Great to stop the persecution of the Christians, she’s clearly doing no more than following in Beatrice Cleave’s footsteps. A great deal of rubbish has already been deposited in Sophie’s skull, and there’s more to follow.

  ‘Shall I … shall I read you a bedtime story?’ says Sugar, as she’s tucking Sophie in, pulling the sheets up to the child’s chin. ‘Thank you, Miss.’

  But by the time Sugar has fetched a book, it’s too late.

  In her own bed that night, after she’s finally given up waiting for William, Sugar lays out a selection of Agnes’s diaries before her on the blanket, one nestled in her lap, several others within easy reach. If she should hear William at her door, she’s decided what she’ll do: blow out the bedside candle and, under cover of darkness, toss the diaries back under the bed. Then, if he’s in the state she expects he’ll be in, he’s scarcely likely to notice, even by the light of a rekindled candle, that her hands are grubby. She’ll wipe them at her leisure, when his face is safely nuzzled between her breasts.

  Agnes’s next attempt at keeping her memoirs after the tirade against her step-father and his fiendish plan to have her schooled, is dated 2 September 1861, on the maiden page of a fresh volume grandly inscribed Abbots Langley School for Girls. The misery she’d expected to suffer if she were sent to such a place is nowhere in evidence; fo
r, not only does she render the name of the school with a proud flourish, but she also decorates the page margins with elaborate watercolour reproductions of the school’s hollyhock laurel emblem and its motto, Connie Il Faut.

  Addressing herself once more to ‘Dear Diary’ rather than ‘Saint Teresa’ or some other supernatural correspondent, the ten-year-old Agnes thus commences an unbroken record of her six years at school.

  Well, here am I in Abbots Langley (near Hampstead). Miss Warkworth & Miss Barr (the headmistresses) say that no girl is permited to leave here until finished’, but do not be alarmed, dear Diary, for by this they mean Clever & Beautiful. I have been thinking deeply on this and have decided that it would be a good thing if I was Clever & Beautiful because then I should marry well, to an Officer of the True Faith. I should describe my Papa to him and he would say, “Why, I have seen the very man fighting in distant lands!” and directly after we were married he would go on a Quest to find him. Mama & I should live together in his house, waitingfor him and Papa to return.