by Michel Faber
‘No, thank you,’ says Sugar. ‘There’s no need, really there isn’t. I haven’t slept very well yet, it’s true, but I’m sure it’s the new bed. I do miss our old one in Priory Close: it was such a pleasure to sleep in, wasn’t it?’
He inclines his head — not quite a nod; a gesture of concession. It’s all Sugar requires; at once, she steps forward and embraces him, clasping her palms well down his back, lifting one thigh to nuzzle between his trouser-legs.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ she says, laying her cheek against his shoulder. The odour of masculine desire is faintly perceptible, escaping from the almost hermetic seal of his shirtcollar. His prick hardens against the soft pressure of her thigh.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he says hoarsely, ‘about the dimensions of this room.’
‘Of course not, my love, I wasn’t complaining,’ she coos in his ear. ‘I’ll get used to this little bed soon enough. It wants only to be …’ (she shifts one hand to his groin, and traces the shape of his erection with her fingertips) ‘christened.’
She walks him a few steps backward, sits down on the edge of the bed, and frees his cock from his trousers, taking it immediately in her mouth. For a few moments he stands silent as a statue, then begins to groan and — thank God — stroke her hair with clumsy but unmistakable tenderness. I have him still, she thinks.
When he begins to thrust, she lies back on the mattress and pulls her dressing-gown up over her bosom. With a muffled cry he falls inside her; and, contrary to her fears, her cunt gives him a welcome more lubricious than she could have organised with half an hour of preparation.
‘Yes, my love, spend, spend,’ she whispers, as he pushes to a climax. She wraps her legs and arms tightly around him, peppering his neck with kisses, some of which are artfully calculated, some heartfelt, but how many of each, she has no way of knowing. ‘You are my man,’ she assures him, as the cleft between her buttocks runs warm and wet.
A few minutes later, lacking a source of washing water, she is cleaning his groin with a handtowel dipped in a drinking glass.
‘Remember the first time?’ she murmurs mischievously.
He tries to grin, but it turns into a mortified wince. ‘What a disgrace I was then,’ he sighs, staring up at the ceiling.
‘Oh, I knew you were a great man in the making,’ she soothes him, as the rain finally stops and silence settles around the Rackham house. Dried and dressed, William lies in her arms, though there’s barely room for the two of them on the bed.
‘This business of mine …’ he muses regretfully. ‘Rackham Perfumeries, I mean …I lose hours, days, entire weeks of my life to it.’
‘It’s your father’s fault,’ says Sugar, echoing an old complaint of his as though it were an impetuous outburst of her own. ‘If he’d built the company on more well-reasoned foundations … ‘
‘Exactly so. But it means I spend an eternity unearthing his mistakes and shoring up his …his … ‘
‘Flimsy architecture.’
‘Exactly. And all the while neglecting’ (he reaches up to stroke her face, and one of his legs falls off the side of the narrow mattress) ‘the pleasures of life.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ she says. ‘To remind you.’ She wonders if this is the moment to ask him if she’s permitted to knock at the door of his room, rather than waiting for him to knock at hers, but the crunching of gravel on the carriage-way outside, under wheels and hoofs, alerts them both to Agnes’s return.
‘She’s better lately, isn’t she?’ asks Sugar, as William rises to his feet.
‘Lord knows. Yes, conceivably.’ He smooths his hair back over his scalp, preparing to leave.
‘When is Sophie’s birthday?’ asks Sugar, loath to let him go without learning one small thing about this strange household she has come to, this warren of secret rooms whose inhabitants so rarely seem to recognise each other’s existence.
He frowns, consulting a mental inventory already over-full with burdensome particulars. ‘August the … August the something.’ ‘Oh, that’s not so bad, then,’ says Sugar. ‘How so?’
‘Sophie told me Agnes has kept away from her since her birthday.’
William regards her with the oddest look, a mixture of annoyance, shame, and a sadness deeper than she’d ever imagined could reside in him.
‘By “birthday”,’ he says, ‘Sophie means the day of her birth. The day she was born.’ He opens Sugar’s door, impatient lest his wife should, on this night of all nights, be quicker than usual in dismounting from the carriage. ‘In this house,’ he sums up wearily, ‘Agnes is childless.’
And with that, he steps out onto the landing, makes a stern hand gesture as if to say ‘Stay!’ and shuts her in.
Many hours later, when Sugar has been lying awake, in the dark, for as long as she can bear, and the Rackham house has grown so still she’s sure everyone in it is shut into one room or other, she gets up out of bed and lights a candle. Barefoot, carrying the waxy flame in her hand, she pads out onto the landing. So tiny she feels, tiptoeing through the gloom of this grand and cryptic residence, but her shadow, as she passes the doors forbidden to her, is huge.
Silent as a wolf or a fairytale ghost, she slips into Sophie’s bedroom, and creeps up to the little girl’s bedside. William’s daughter sleeps deeply, her eyelids quivering infinitesimally with the strain of keeping those enormous Agnes eyes veiled with skin. She breathes through her mouth, occasionally moving her lips as if responding to a dreamed or remembered stimulus. ‘Wake up, Sophie,’ whispers Sugar. ‘Wake up.’
Sophie’s eyes flutter open; her china-blue irises revolve in delirium, like those of a baby doped into a coma by Godfrey’s Cordial or Street’s Infant Quietness or some other brand of laudanum. Sugar pulls the chamber-pot out from under the bed.
‘Jump out for a minute,’ says Sugar, sliding her hand down the warm, dry back of Sophie’s night-dress and pulling her heavy little body upright. ‘Just for a minute.’
Sophie struggles to obey, inept, her eyes wild with confusion at the extremity of the darkness.
Sugar takes hold of the smooth infant hands inside her own cracked and peeling palms, and lifts them into space. ‘Trust me,’ she whispers.
TWENTY-FOUR
Madness! Sheer madness!
Half the problem with this house, if you ask the servants, is that the Rackhams have a wicked habit of staying up when they should be sleeping, and sleeping when they should be awake.
Take this very instant, for example. Clara tiptoes along the landing, candle in hand, at half past midnight, a time when long-suffering servants ought surely to be able to rest their heads on their pillows, secure in the knowledge that their masters and mistresses will cause no more trouble till the morning. But what’s this? Clara confirms, by bending to squint into the key-hole of each of the bedrooms in turn, that not a single Rackham is asleep.
Madness, if you ask Clara. Just because William Rackham has increased her yearly wage by ten shillings, does he expect her to kiss his shoes in gratitude for the privilege of working here? Ten shillings is all very well, but how much is a good night’s sleep worth? She’s lost plenty of those! Take tonight, for example! Doors opening and shutting, noises she simply must investigate, for who can tell what Mrs Rackham will do next? Ten shillings per year … What’s that to a man whose face is engraved on placards in the omnibus? Why, she has half a mind to tell him she wants a shilling for every hour his mad wife keeps her awake! What’s the wretched woman up to now? Something daft, no doubt. And tomorrow, while the faithful lady’s-maid is expected to stand at the ready, dead on her feet, Mrs Rackham will likely as not be lying in bed, snoring the day away, drooling onto her sunlit pillow.
As for the Rackham child, she ought to be put down at seven p.m. and stay put down till seven next morning. The new governess — Miss Sugar — clearly has no idea how to deal with children … What foolishness is she up to? Clara peers through the key-hole of Sophie Rackham’s bedroom, and se
es — madness! — candle-light swaying this way and that, and the shadow of Miss Sugar enveloping the child’s. Interfering with her, Clara shouldn’t wonder. From the moment the woman set foot in the house, Clara could smell it on her: the stink of badness. This self-styled governess, with her highly suspect walk and her slut’s mouth — where on earth did Rackham find her? The Rescue Society, maybe. One of Emmeline Fox’s ‘success stories’, come to fiddle with little Sophie in the middle of the night.
And Rackham himself? What’s he doing awake? Clara peers through his key-hole, and has an unimpeded view of the great man’s desk, with the great man busily scribbling. Can’t he wait till morning to persuade more people to buy his perfumes? Or are these scribbles the novel he always used to tell his wife he was busy conceiving? William is going to publish a novel, Clara, Mrs Rackham would say, at least once a month during the lean years. The best novel in the world. Soon we shan’t need to put up with his father’s bullying anymore.
Clara moves on to Agnes’s door, and bends to peek. Mrs Rackham has all the lights on, and is decked out in a magenta gown. Lunacy! At least she hadn’t the nerve to summon her lady’s-maid to help her dress … But why is she pacing to and fro? And what is that book she holds aloft like a hymnal? It looks like an accounts ledger — not that Mrs Rackham can add twelve and twelve, poor simpleton.
Clara would like to spy longer, but Agnes suddenly stops pacing and stares directly at the key-hole, as if she’s noticed a glimmer of Clara’s eye on the other side. Acute hearing? Animal cunning? The sixth sense of the mad? Clara doesn’t know quite what it is, but she’s learned to be wary of it. Holding her breath, she hurries back to bed on tiptoe.
Agnes Rackham stands tall — as tall as a person of her height can stand — and raises her eyes to the ceiling. There’s a spider on it, climbing over the ridges of the plaster rosette. Agnes isn’t afraid of spiders, at least not thin wispy ones, and has no desire to have him removed. Freshly inspired by a pamphlet sent to her all the way from America – The Divine Enthreadedness of All
Things, by Ambrosius M. Lawes — she knows that this little spider is a soul just like herself, albeit of a lower order.
Moreover, she feels unusually well just now. The bilious headache that ruined her day is gone, and the interior of her skull feels fresh and purified. She really must learn to act faster when her stomach tells her she oughtn’t to have eaten her dinner — out with it at once! A moment of unpleasantness, and she’s a new woman!
Accordingly, she has tonight begun a new diary — no, not a diary — that was a slip of the tongue, or a slip of the mind. No, she’s already promised herself she shan’t be writing any more diaries. Such tiresome things they are, full of complaints and grievances, which are better buried in case prying eyes should find them.
No, what she’s writing now is something much greater and more profound. This past Season, for all its triumphs, was the last Season she’ll ever take part in. A different destiny has grown to fruition inside her, and she must acknowledge its calling. For years she has moved as a fashionable lady among other fashionable ladies, denying her deeper nature. For years she has devoured every book of arcane knowledge she could find, and told herself she was merely doing it out of curiosity — now the time has come to declare the Truth.
She holds her new diary — no, not diary — up to the light. What is she to call it? It’s a big, handsome thing, the size of a ledger, but without lines or columns. On its virgin first page, she has written, in her best Gothic calligraphy, The Illuminated Thoughts & Preturnatural Reflections of Agnes Pigott. For short, she’ll call it … ‘The Book’.
She walks back and forth in her bedroom, re-reading that first page-full of words which, for the sake of ceremony, she refrained from penning until the stroke of midnight. Now it’s a quarter to one, and here it is: inscribed for posterity, the inky ‘o’s still glistening!
Lesson 1. God and oneself
God is a Trinity. But what all-too-few people know is that we are all Trinities. We have firstly our First body, (which I shall call our Father Body), being the body we
inhabit from day to day. We have secondly our Second body, (which I shall call our Sun Body. This body is kept safe for us, by the Angels of Paradise, in Secret Places all over the world, waiting for the Resurrection. Thirdly we have our Third, or Spirit body, which I shall call our Holy Ghost Body, also known as the soul). Lesson 2. The mistake often made
Most of the suffering in this World comes from ignorance of our Second body. We make the mistake of thinking that when our First body is gone, we must spend the rest of Eternity as a Ghost. Not so! All the great & reliable authorities, including Saint John the Divine, Mr Uriah Nobbs, &c, are agreed that the Afterlife will be conducted upon this Earth, and the Saved will be given new bodies for the occasion.
Lesson 3.
Agnes paces her bedroom, trying to decide on a sufficiently powerful Lesson 3. She considers writing about the Convent of Health and her own guardian angel, but rejects this as too personal. Everything she writes from now on must have universal appeal, illuminating essential truths. Discussing the particulars of her own situation would make ‘The Book’ too much like a diary — and diaries are dead thoughts, lost yesterdays, vanity. Words for the grave.
Which is why she doesn’t regret burying her diaries one little bit, and why they can be eaten by worms, for all she cares! From this night onward, all her words are immortal!
Safely back in bed after putting Sophie on the pot, Sugar opens another of Agnes Unwin’s diaries and balances it in her lap. She lifts one thigh slightly to catch the candle-light, then begins to read.
It’s 1865 in Abbots Langley, and Agnes considers herself a Lady at last. By Sugar’s standards, she hasn’t yet done a single grown-up thing or thought a single grown-up thought, but in Agnes’s view she is nearly ‘finished’. The elegant mademoiselles of the ladies’ journals, once her idols, are now rivals. She informs her diary, in case her diary didn’t already know, exactly how she wears her hair (swept back from the ears, two thick ringlets on each side, ‘sealed’ with a small chignon at the nape of the neck). She wears copies of the latest French fashions, constructed in needlework class. Although no mention is made of anything so gross as flesh, she’s presumably near enough full-grown to fill the dresses she so lovingly sketches.
Her curriculum, now that she’s thirteen, is even flimsier than when she was nine; everything has been reduced to the essentials: Dancing, Music, French and German. These last two are a stumbling block for Sugar: she has little French and no German, Mrs Castaway having been of the opinion that men are partial to a bit of French on a girl’s tongue, but that German sounds like old clergymen vomiting. So, whenever Agnes starts a diary entry with Bonjour, mon cherjournal, or Liebes Tagebuch, Sugar yawns, and flicks ahead.
Little Miss Unwin is learning the gavotte, the cachuca and the minuet but, despite the romantic purpose of such dances, seems wholly ignorant of the male sex. Her experience of courtship, aside from secretive and shortlived infatuations with schoolmistresses and other girls, amounts to nil. The hope she once had, of marrying a soldier who would set off in search of her real father, has been discreetly permitted to die; now her imaginary husband is a dashing nobleman with a winter residence in the south of France. Another fantasy, to be sure, but this one doesn’t come out of thin air:
Eugenie was taken away from school today, in tears. She is to be married next month, to her secret correspondent from Switserland! In the circumstances, I thought it would be mean to remind her about my water-colour brushes. Perhaps she will post them.
Sugar snorts aloud, a helpless exclamation of contempt. How sweet it would be to cure Agnes’s selfishness with a stinging slap to the cheek! But then she remembers the time she helped Agnes in the Bow Street alley, when Mrs Rackham was nothing more than a bloodied and frightened child, trembling in Sugar’s arms, pleading to be taken home.
In all the excitement, Eugenie has also forgotten her Scr
apbook of kittens, writes the fourteen-year-old Miss Unwin. Some of the little darlings are not even paisted in yet! I do declare, if this Swiss banker loves Eugenie half as much as he says, he had better make sure she gets her Scrapbook back!
Now at last Sugar understands: this muddle-headed, minuetting adolescent is a lady, as fully adult as she’ll ever be. Yes, and all the ladies Sugar has ever seen, all those patrician damsels dismounting imperiously from their carriages, or promenading under parasols in Hyde Park, or parading in to the opera: they are children. Essentially unchanged from when they played with dolls and coloured pencils, they grow taller and gain a few ‘accomplishments’ until, at fifteen or sixteen, still accustomed to being made to sit in a corner for failing to conjugate a verb or refusing to eat their pudding, they go home to their suitors. And who are they, these suitors? Self-assured young men who’ve already travelled the world, fathered illegitimate children and survived the pox. Bored with young men’s pleasures, they turn their attention to the enterprise of marriage and, casting their eye over the new season’s bloom of elaborately dressed children, they pick themselves a little wife.
Laetitia has lately begun to smell, poor thing, writes Agnes on the final page of yet another journal. What a misfortune, to be first ugly and now smelly! But I am far too well-bred to tell her so. God bless Education, for it teaches us to spare the feelings of our fellow creatures. If all the girls in the World were sent to Abbots Langley, what a World this would be! — with ne’er a cross word spoken, and everyone knowing precisely how to behave. Is there any “mal du monde” that Education cannot cure? Je ne croispas!