The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  I do not know how Miss Warkworth & Miss Barr & the other mistresses mean to ‘finish’ me, but I have seen some of the older girls who have been at Abbots Langley for years, & they look most pleased with themselves & are some of them very Tall & Graceful. In evening dress I am sure they would look just like Ladies in paintings with a fine Officer by their side.

  I have been instaled in my room, which I must share with two other girls. (There are, I think, thirty all-together. I was very worried about this before I came, for I knew I should have to live with strange girls who might be cruel & was almost sick with dread at the thought of being at their mercy. But the two girls in my room are not so bad after all. One is named Letitia (I think that is how it is spelt) and though she is a little older than me & says she comes of better family, she has been made so teribly ugly by a Disease that she lacks the spirit to put on airs. The other girl has wept & snifled since her arrival but said nothing.

  At Dinner some other girls (whom I first took for school-mistresses, they looked so old–I suppose they are almostfinished) tried to make me reveal who my Father was & I would not tell them, because I feared they would make fun of Papa. But then another spoke up, “I know who her father is–He is Lord Unwin”, & that struck them all very quiet! Perhaps I betrayed Papa a little by not speaking up for him as my True father, but dont you think I should be glad of what small benifit I recieve from being now the stepdaughter of Lord Unwin? Whether it is wrong or not, I am greatful for whatever helps me suffer less, for I hate to suffer. Every scratch and gash upon my heart is there yet, not the slightest bit healed, making me fear that the next injury will be my last. If only I could be spared any more wounds, I should arrive safe into Marriage, and after that I should be free of all care. Wish me luck!

  (I can speak freely to you, dear Diary, for it is only the letters I send by the Post that I must give up unsealed to Miss Barr.)

  I have more to tell, but Miss Wick (of whom more to-morrow) has just called by, warning us that we must put out the lights. And so, dear Diary, I must put you under lock and key, & ask you not to worry over me yet, for it seems I may survive my education after all!

  Your loving Friend,

  Agnes.

  Sugar reads another twenty or thirty pages before succumbing to exhaustion — and, to be honest, the odourless, deadly gas of boredom. Agnes’s promise that there should be ‘more to-morrow’ of Miss Wick is faithfully kept, and indeed Miss Wick, and all the other Misses whom Agnes lacks the literary talent to bring to life, rear their featureless heads not just tomorrow, but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  In her final minutes of wakefulness, Sugar wishes she could float through the Rackham house like a ghost and see its inhabitants now, as they really are. She wishes she could pass through the heavy wooden door of William’s study and see what he’s up to; wishes she could peer into his very brain and winkle out his reasons for avoiding her. She wishes she could see Agnes, the real flesh-and-blood Agnes whom she has touched and smelled, doing whatever it is that Agnes does in her room at night … Even the sight of Mrs Rackham sleeping would, Sugar’s sure, reveal more than these ancient soil-stained reminiscences!

  Lastly, she imagines floating into Sophie’s room, and murmuring in the child’s ear the gentle suggestion that she hop out of bed and use the pot one more time. No supernatural fantasy, this: she could, if she chose, make it come true. How happy Sophie would be, waking next morning in a dry bed! Sugar breathes deeply, gathering her nerve to throw the warm bed-clothes aside and hurry barefoot through the dark to Sophie’s room. A minute or two of discomfort is all she’ll have to endure to complete this mission of mercy — yes! She’s up, she’s tiptoeing along the landing, candle in hand!

  But, like those childhood dreams she can still recall, when she’d be convinced she was leaving her bed to use the pot, only to discover, as soon as she let go, that she was wetting herself inside a humid cocoon of bedding, the mission of mercy occurs in her sleep only, and its happy ending is trapped like a moth in her snoring head.

  Next morning, in the cold light of dawn, while the wind whoops and fleers and a chatter of sleet harasses the eastern windows of the Rackham house, Sugar tiptoes up to Sophie’s bed, pulls back the covers, and finds the child steeped in urine as usual.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss.’

  What to reply? ‘Well, we’ve no other sheets, and it’s raining outside, and I’ll soon be entertaining visitors who won’t appreciate your dirty smell in their noses — so what do you suggest we do, hmm, my little sorry poppet?’ The words echo in Sugar’s memory, tempting her to speak them aloud, with that same teasing, affectionately bitter tone Mrs Castaway used fifteen years ago. How quickly they spring to the tip of Sugar’s tongue! She bites them back in horror.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about, Sophie. Let’s get you clean.’

  Sophie wrestles with her night-dress, whose sodden fabric sucks at her flesh inch by inch, plastered to the contours of her ribs. Sugar comes to the rescue, tugging the horrid thing free of Sophie’s arms and rolling it into a wad, disguising with a cough her sharp intake of breath as the acid urine stings the cracks in her palms and fingers. She can’t help noticing, when the naked child steps from her sour-smelling bed into the tub, that Sophie’s vulva is an angry red.

  ‘Wash well, Sophie,’ she advises airily, looking away into the shadows, but there’s no escape from the memory of her own inflamed genitals, examined in a cracked mirror in Church Lane, the moment the fat old man with the hairy hands finally left her alone. I have a clever middle finger, yes I have! was what he’d told her, as he poked and prodded between her legs. A most frolicsome little fellow! He loves to play with little girls, and make them happier than they’ve ever been!

  ‘Finished, Miss,’ says Sophie, her legs trembling with cold, her lamp-lit shoulders smouldering with steam.

  Sugar wraps the towel around Sophie’s shoulders, half-lifts her out of the tub, and helps her dry everywhere, dabbing at the clefts. Then, just before the pantalettes go on, she sprinkles some Rackham’s Snow Dust between Sophie’s legs, and pats the talc gently onto the sore flesh. The smell of lavender flavours the air between them; the child’s sex has been powdered pale as a whore’s face, with a thin red mouth, only to disappear inside white cotton in a faint puff of talcum.

  After Sugar has buttoned Sophie into an ill-fitting blue dress and straightened her white pinafore, she pulls the bed-sheet from the mattress (lined with a waxed undersheet, just like her own bed at Mrs Castaway’s!) and pushes it into the bathwater to soak. Is there a reason, she wonders, why the bed-sheet must be washed immediately and hung to dry in that nasty little room downstairs, while Sophie’s night-dress and indeed all the other laundry in the house is taken care of in the normal way by the servants? Was there perhaps, once upon a time, a complaint from the laundry-maid that a daily load of soiled linen was an intolerable imposition? Or was this ritual Beatrice Cleave’s idea, with no purpose but to remind Sophie how much bother she caused her long-suffering nurse?

  ‘I wonder what would happen,’ muses Sugar as she sploshes up to her elbows in the tepid yellowish water, ‘if we put this sheet with the other things to be washed.’ She scoops the tangle of heavy linen up and begins to wring it, waiting for Sophie’s response.

  ‘It’s too full of dirtiness, Miss,’ says the child, solemn in her role ofintro-ducing a newcomer to the unchallengeable realities of the Rackham domain. ‘My bad smell would be spread into the good parts of the house, onto the nice clean beds, ev’ywhere.’

  ‘Did your Nurse tell you that?’

  Sophie hesitates; the day’s interrogations have evidently begun, and she must be careful to answer correctly.

  ‘No, Miss. It’s … common knowledge.’

  Sugar lets the matter drop, wrings the sheet as dry as she can. She leaves Sophie to comb her hair, and carries the wad of damp linen out of the room, to follow in Beatrice Cleave’s footsteps one more time.

  The landing is still q
uite gloomy, but the receiving-hall below is thinly covered with milky daylight, and the sun’s overspill extends half-way up the stairs, making the second part of Sugar’s descent more confident than the first. What would William think, if he met her hurrying through his house like this, carrying a wad of wet whiffy linen before her? A vain conjecture, since she meets no one. Although she knows the nether regions of the Rackham house must be a hive of industry at this hour, none of it is audible, and she feels like the only soul haunting its luxurious passage-ways. The silence is such that she hears the carpet underfoot, the barely perceptible squirm of its dense-woven pile as she walks upon it.

  The odd little store-room with the copper pipe spanned between its walls is warm as an oven half an hour after a cake has been removed. All trace of mud and mucky water has been scrupulously cleaned from the corner where Agnes’s diaries lay in those few hours before Sugar snatched them; and, contrary to her fears, there is, in the diaries’ place, no stern notice to the effect that theft will be punished with instant dismissal.

  Sugar hangs the bed-sheet over the copper pipe. Only now does she notice that the talcum powder trapped in the cracks of her palms has mingled with bathwater, delineating the freakish convolutions of her skin with a network of creamy lines. Clots and smears of this perfumed slime also cling to the bed-sheet, resembling thick male seed.

  William, where are you? she thinks.

  The morning is spent on the Roman Empire and dictation, with two fairy stories as a treat. Sugar recites them from a slim cloth-covered book whose spine is frayed and whose pages are much-thumbed. Illustrated and with Revised Morals, proclaims the title page, along with a hand-written inscription:

  Dear Sophie, A good friend of mine has scolded me for giving you the Bible last Christmas, saying you are too young for it yet. I hope you will enjoy this little book almost as much. Fond wishes from your tiresome Uncle Henry.

  ‘Do you remember your Uncle Henry?’ enquires Sugar lightly, in between exotic enchantments and supernatural rescues.

  ‘They put him in the ground,’ says Sophie, after a few moments’ wrinkle-browed thought.

  Sugar reads on. Fairy stories are a novelty for her; Mrs Castaway didn’t approve of them, because they encourage the belief that everything turns out exactly as it should, whereas ‘You’ll find out soon enough, child, that nothing ever does.’ Mrs Castaway preferred to nurture the infant Sugar on folk tales (the nastier the better), selected episodes from the Old Testament (Sugar can still list each of Job’s trials), and true-life accounts: indeed, anything with a full complement of undeserved suffering and apparently motiveless deeds.

  At midday, when Rose brings Sugar and Sophie their share of luncheon, she brings a message too. Mrs Rackham is entertaining visitors downstairs, and wishes to show them — the visitors, that is — the house. Mr Rackham therefore requests that Mrs Rackham be left wholly undisturbed in this objective. Wholly undisturbed, you understand. ‘And if you fancy, there’s more galantine, and I’ll bring up the cake shortly,’ adds Rose, to sweeten the bitterness of their imprisonment.

  Silence settles over governess and pupil when the servant has left. True to the pattern of this November, the morning sun fades away and the room dims, its windows rattling in the wind. The slap of raindrops sharpens into the clatter of hailstones.

  ‘Well, these visitors are much the poorer,’ says Sugar at last, ‘for not seeing your lovely nursery — your lovely school-room, I should say. It’s the cheerfulest room in the house, and your toys are very interesting.’

  There is another pause.

  ‘Mother hasn’t seen me since my birthday,’ says Sophie, staring at the pistachio kernel on her plate, wondering if, under this strange new post-Beatrice regime, she may go unpunished for refusing to eat this bit of her galantine.

  ‘When was your birthday?’ enquires the governess. ‘I don’t know, Miss. Nurse knows.’ ‘I’ll ask your father.’

  Sophie looks at Sugar wide-eyed, impressed at the easy familiarity the governess seems to have with the exalted and shadowy figures of the adult world.

  Sugar picks up the Mangnall and opens it at random. ‘… commonly called the “ComplutenSiân Polyglot”, from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcala,’ is what her eyes light upon. Instantly she resolves to tell Sophie a story from The Bible instead, embellished with her own character glosses and evocations of Galilean fashions of dress, followed perhaps by a little more Aesop.

  ‘What happened on your birthday?’ she asks Sophie, in an even tone, as she leafs backwards and forwards through the Bible. ‘Did you do something wicked?’

  Sophie gives the question some thought, her frowning, slightly pudgy face flickering with silvery-grey light from the hail-spattered window. ‘I don’t ‘member, Miss,’ she says at last.

  Sugar hums amiably, as if to say, ‘No matter’. She’s decided against Job, considers doing Esther until she sees how thick it is with murder and the purification of virgins, and then gets ensnarled in Nehemiah, whose endless lists are even more boring than Agnes Unwin’s. She looks around the room for inspiration, and spots the painted wooden animals jostled in a corner.

  ‘The story,’ she declares, closing the book, ‘of Noah’s flood.’

  That evening, after Sophie has been laid to rest, Sugar returns to her own room for the long night. William is in the house, she knows, and Agnes has gone out visiting: ideal conditions for him to pay a visit on his paramour. Secreted here in a dingy, box-like little chamber with ugly wallpaper disfigured by pictureless picture-hooks, she disports herself on the bed, her breasts perfumed under the quilted fabric of her burgundy dressing-gown.

  An hour passes, boredom begins to set in, and Sugar pulls Agnes’s diaries out from under the bed. The rain batters against the window. Perhaps it’s just as well that Shears has not yet climbed up and broken the paint-seal, for that wind-swept water looks as though it would love to get in.

  Back in Abbots Langley, in a revamped cloister stocked to the ceiling with adolescent girls, Agnes Unwin’s education goes on and on. As far as Sugar can tell (reading between the lines of Agnes’s breathless but soporific account) hard study is no longer much on the menu, supplanted by an increasing stress on ladylike ‘accomplishments’. On such subjects as Geography or English Agnes has nothing to say, but she records her elation at receiving praise for her needlepoint, or the misery of going for walks in the school grounds accompanied by a teacher of German or French and having to do conjugations on demand. As the years pass, Agnes never achieves more than mediocrity in any academic pursuit, earning many a ‘P’ (for ‘Pretty well’) in her copybook, but Music and Dancing are an almost effortless joy to her. One of the few vividly evoked pictures in Agnes’s narrative is of being seated at one of the music room’s pianos with her best friend Laetitia two octaves to the left of her, playing at the tap of a baton the same tune that four other girls at two other pianos are playing likewise. Her poor spelling never attracts anything harsher than a tut-tut of reproof, while in Arithmetic, she’s often spared penalty for mistakes, as long as the calligraphy of the sums is perfectly formed.

  Although Agnes misses not a single day of her journal, Sugar is unable to show the same diligence, and skips pages here and there. Where’s her reward for risking being caught red-handed — grubby-handed — by William, should he burst in and find her reading his wife’s stolen diaries? And dear God, how much of this school-room froth can she swallow? Where is the real Agnes in all this? Where is the flesh and blood woman who lives farther down the landing, that strange and troubled creature who is William’s wife and Sophie’s mother? The Agnes in these diaries is a mere fairytale contrivance, as far-fetched as Snow White.

  A knock at her door makes her jerk violently, sending the diary flying off her lap. In a couple of frenzied seconds she’s retrieved it and shoved it under her bed, wiped her hands on the rug, and licked her lips three times to give them a glisten.

  ‘Yes?’ she says.

  Her door swing
s open, and there stands William, fully dressed, immaculately groomed, much as a business associate might expect to see him standing in the doorway of an office. On his face, nothing readable.

  ‘Come in, sir,’ she bids him, doing her best to modulate her tone half-way between solemn deference and seductive purr.

  He walks inside, and shuts the door behind him.

  ‘I’ve been fearsomely busy,’ he says. ‘Christmas is almost upon us.’

  The absurdity of this statement, combined with her own tightly-screwed nerves, brings her to the edge of hilarity.

  ‘I’m at your service …’ she says, squeezing one sharp-nailed fist behind her back, using the pain to remind her that whatever she may be about to do with William — discuss the finer points of Rackham merchandising, pull him to her breast — it won’t be improved by shrieks of hysterical laughter.

  ‘I think I have it under control,’ he says. ‘The orders for bottled perfumes are even worse than I feared, but the toiletries are thriving.’

  Sugar squeezes her fist so hard that her vision blurs with tears.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ William enquires, his tone simultaneously breezy and glum. ‘Tell the truth, now: you rue the day you came, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she protests, blinking. ‘Sophie is a well-behaved little thing, and a willing pupil.’

  His face darkens subtly; this is not a topic he relishes.

  ‘You have a weary look — especially under your eyes,’ he says.

  With effort, she shows him a fresher and livelier face, but it’s not necessary: he wasn’t complaining, only expressing concern. And what a relief, that he remembers what her eyes ought to look like!

  ‘Shall I hire a nursery-maid for you?’ he offers. His voice is a queer mixture, as subtle a blend of elements as any perfume: there’s disappointment, as though he too had cherished a dream that as soon as she crossed the threshold into his house they’d embark on a life of uninterrupted carnal bliss; there’s sheepishness, as if he knows he’s to blame for what’s happened instead; there’s contrition, for any nuisance she’s endured in his daughter’s company; there’s dread, at the prospect of finding an additional servant when he has a thousand other things to do; there’s pity, at the sight of her lying in Beatrice Cleave’s utilitarian little bed; there’s affection, as if he wishes he could restore the sparkle to her eyes with a single caress; and, yes, there’s desire. A sentence of seven words only, and it’s suffused with all these nuances, evaporating like the notes that make up the octave of a well-crafted bouquet.