by Michel Faber
With an incredulous shake of her head, Sugar closes the volume and picks up the next in chronological sequence.
Liebes Tagebuch, it announces on its opening page. Ich hatte einen zehr ermudenden tag. Welche Erleichterung zu dir zusprechen …
Sugar lets the pages flutter shut, and blows out the candle.
Enough, for a while, of the yellowed pages of the past. Life in the present goes on, and before we know it 1876 will be upon us.
Leaving aside Clara’s opinion that the Rackham residence is no better than Bedlam, the days of November pass peacefully. Sunrise and sunset follow each other at the scheduled intervals, and the house in Chepstow Villas fails to echo with screams or altercations. The mourning period for Henry Rackham is at an end, and everyone dresses cheerfully once more. Meals are cooked and judged a success; servants beaver at their tasks without requiring chastisement or dismissal. William spends his days plotting a bumper Christmas for Rackham Perfumeries, a Christmas that will show his business rivals how much the runty firm of his father’s day has grown. Agnes continues to commit her wisdom to ‘The Book’ and has not the slightest inclination to dig up her diaries, no, none, despite the pitiful vision of them swelling up with wetness in the cold dirty ground. She has received a visit from Mrs Vickery and, instead of gossiping as usual, astonished her with an account of Mr Allan Kardec’s excellent book, The Gospel as Explained by Spirits.
As for Sugar, her fears of being unequal to the task of teaching Sophie have faded. She’d imagined tantrums and cruel insolence — the sort of thing that happens in novels, where the poor governess is reduced to sobs of humiliation — but once again, novels are proved wrong, and her pupil is as diligent and placable as any teacher could hope for. Indeed, Sophie seems to regard her with awe, if only for her miraculous power to cure bed-wetting. Each morning, Sophie wakes in a dry, warm bed, blinking in disbelief at the wonder of it. What an extraordinary person Miss Sugar must be, to understand the Roman Empire and be able to control the flow of another person’s naughty wee-wee in the night!
Sugar is proud of her success, prouder than she’s been of anything else she can remember. The urine rash has faded entirely, leaving a pale pink bud between Sophie’s chubby thighs. This is how it should be. This is how everything should be.
Sugar basks in the child’s admiration, and gives her ten new words to spell each afternoon. She’s even been so bold as to write William a note, signed ‘Miss Sugar’, in which, rather than beseeching him to visit her bed, she primly requested the purchase of more books for the school-room. The act of inserting that letter under the door of his study felt, in its own way, every bit as roguish as her parlour trick with the squirting quim.
To Sugar’s surprise, her audacity is rewarded within thirty-six hours. On yet another rainy morning, she and Sophie enter the school-room, both half-asleep, and find a mysterious parcel perched on top of the writing-desk.
‘Ah!’ says Sugar as she unwraps the brown paper. ‘These are the books I asked Wi–uh … your father to get.’
Sophie is wide-eyed, impressed not just by the immaculate new volumes but by this clear evidence of Miss Sugar’s intimacy with the enigma that is her father.
‘Are they … presents?’ she asks.
‘Not at all,’ declares Sugar. ‘They are highly necessary items for your learning.’ And she lets Sophie see the spoils: a history book with engravings on every page, a country-by-country guide to the British Empire, a compendium of things to do with paper, glue and string, and a smart, slim volume of poems by Edward Lear.
‘These are modern books, up-to-date books,’ enthuses Sugar. ‘Because you’re a modern person, living today, don’t you see?’
Sophie’s eyes threaten to revolve in confusion, at this amazing notion that History is on the move, like a vehicle in which a six-year-old girl may ride. She’s always imagined History as a cobwebbed edifice, to whose colossal pedestal the insignificant speck of Sophie Rackham adheres like dirt.
By midday, Sophie has already memorised some of the verses of Mr Lear, a writer who is still alive — indeed, who wrote these words after Sophie Rackham was born!
‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked into the stars above,
And sang to a small cigar,
‘O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are,
What a beautiful Pussy you are’.’
And Sophie does a quick curtsy, a rare gesture ofjaunty exuberance.
‘Not quite right, Sophie,’ says Sugar, smiling. ‘Let’s read it again, shall we?’ Her smile hides a secret: this is not patience for its own sake, but a blow of revenge against her mother. Sugar has never forgotten the day in
Church Lane when, as a child of seven, she made the mistake of reciting, once too often in Mrs Castaway’s hearing, a favourite nursery rhyme.
‘No, my poppet,’ Mrs Castaway said, in the gentle tone she reserved for threats. ‘We’ve had enough of that now, haven’t we?’ This was always her mother’s final word on any matter, and so the nursery rhyme was dead, dead as a cockroach stamped underfoot.
‘It’s time,’ announced Mrs Castaway, ‘you learned some grown-up poetry.’ Standing at the bookcase, she ran her fingers — already red-nailed by then — along the spines. ‘Not Wordsworth and such,’ she murmured, ‘for then you might get a taste for mountains and rivers, mightn’t you, and we shan’t ever live anywhere near those …’ With a smile, she extracted two volumes, weighing them in her hands. ‘Here, child. Try Pope. No, better still: try Rochester.’
Sugar took the dusty book away with her into a corner, and how earnestly she studied it! But she found that with every line she read, she entirely forgot what little she’d understood of the last one, leaving only an odour of male superiority clinging to her brain.
‘Is there any other poetry you like, Mother?’ she ventured to ask when, shamed by her own stupidity, she handed back the volume.
‘I never said I liked poetry, did I?’ rejoined Mrs Castaway sourly, replacing the Rochester in the bookshelf with a hard shove, so that the book hit the wall behind. ‘Hateful stuff.’
How charmingly sweet you sing, Sugar now recites to Sophie, in her sincerest, most encouraging voice. Oh, let us be married; too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring? Can you repeat that after me, Sophie, and practise it until I return?’
Sophie and Sugar smile at each other. The child is imagining owls and pussycats. The governess is imagining Mrs Castaway perched on a dunce’s stool, her red-nailed hands trembling in impotent fury as a roomful of little girls circle her, reciting the same nursery rhyme for the thousandth time.
‘Let me hear it as I walk out,’ says Sugar, at the nursery door. Ensconced in her bedroom during the midday interval, whiling away the hours until Sophie’s lessons resume, Sugar applies herself to Agnes’s diaries. She finds that Miss Unwin’s schooldays are, at long last, drawing to a close.
Thank God for that! She’s read so many thousands of words, waded through a silky, satiny, cottony tide of make-believe gowns and gauzy friendships and woolly thoughts, in the hope that she’ll turn a page and there, suddenly, William’s tormented wife will stand starkly revealed. Instead, these schoolgirl journals have been like a novel whose cover trumpets gruesome deeds and mad passions, but which proves dull as an invalid’s omelette.
In her final days at Abbots Langley, the fifteen-year-old Agnes remains frivolously sane, and the final entry written on the last morning, dated May 3rd 1867, is a model of convention. She even composes a poem in honour of her school — seven stanzas so limp with feminine rhymes as to be almost boneless.
For none can thwart the Future onward rushing! she concludes, though the Future in her poem has long since stopped moving, stunned in its tracks by deadly sedatives of senti
mentality.
Valedictory ode dispensed with, Agnes turns to the challenge of finding a keepsake of Abbots Langley to take home with her.
The other girls, I’m afraid to say, have purloined every concievable trifle. Linen-clips, chalks, sheets of music, hair-pins fallen from Miss Wick’s head, honour cards: all have been gathered up. I even detected a shortage of spoons at the dinner table today.
On the next double page, the signatures of Abbots Langley’s twenty-four girls are committed, in blotchy rows, to the yellowed paper. Overleaf, Agnes continues:
As you see, I asked them all to sign, and so they did, even Emily, whose sins against me in Calisthenics I have decided to forgive. Dear Diary, I shall not have such friends again!
How I wept when I had all their names before me! The paper was quite wet when the tears were fresh-fallen, as you may see from the blurrs on the ink.
How various are the Hopes of we parting young Ladies! Some will soon be Married, but that is not for me, for Mama is ill and I must help her get Well. Some, with slimmer Prospects, are going to be governesses: may they find generous masters and agreable pupils! Of the ones who have failed to become Ladies (eg, Emily) I cannot imagine what will become.
Dear Diary, I had hoped to write so much more, but the day is almost gone, and I must rise early for my journey to-morrow. What a sorry Farewell this is! and what a muddle I am in! I shall write to you next from Home!
Your lovingfriend,
Agnes.
With these words, the volume ends.
The next, in a script so minuscule and clotted it’s like hemming stitch, begins:
My Mama is dead, and I am soon to follow. Lord have mercy upon us. Spare my Mama from Thy wrath, from the rigour of Thy justice, from eternalflames. Thou who forgavest Magdalen, I beseech Thee. But no One hears. My prayers turn to sweat on the cieling and drip down again. Mama bled until she was empty; He (her “husband”) stood by and did nothing. Now my Mama has been removed, to a grave in a cemetery where no one knows her. Day by day, our house becomes more infested with Demons. They chuckle in the rafters. They wisper behind the skirting-boards. They wait to have their way with me. He waits to have his way with me.
Sugar rummages through the stack of diaries and checks the opening pages, in case an intervening volume has escaped her notice. But no. One week it’s callisthenics and hollyhocks, the next it’s a smear of dried blood in the shape of a crucifix. Nor is this blood from a pinprick on the thumb, solemnising a schoolgirl pledge; this is thicker matter, incorporating a stiff clot at the point of the crucifix where Christ’s head might be.
Here you see my own blood, Agnes explains underneath. Blood from deep within me,
flowing from a hidden wound. Whatever killed my Mama, now kills me. But why? Why, when I am Innocent?
Sugar turns the page, and there’s more, much more: a welter of ink so thick as to turn the paper purple.
In the Dark of my sleep, the iron curls of the bed-frame become soft, and pout up like lips, to recieve the droplets of my blood through the honeycomb of the matress. Under the bed, demons as grey as mushrooms wait until the blood trickles down to them, then they suck and become pink. They suck until they are red and almost bursting. How tasty this one is, they cry! So much tastier than her mother! Give us more of this divine juice!
There can be no Rescue in this house where even the Rosary is forbidden. At His command, all who might help me are s in the crook of my arm. Their demon mouths will suck at nothing. When I can walk no longer I shall crawl into the fireplace, and give them such a bitter, ashen broth to feed on!
A brave declaration, but evidently Agnes weakened and went to bed after all. The next day’s entry begins: I wake in a bed of blood, and yet I live.
Another tirade follows, though less fervid than the first. Despite frequent recourse to words like ‘doom’ and ‘the end’, Agnes is niggled by the suspicion that Death has rather missed His moment.
A sumpcious dinner was served just now, with everyone urging me to join in. Mama is dead, and my own life ebbes away, and they expect me to dine on snipe and quail! I had a single ortolan on buttered toast, and a few mouthfuls of dessert, then begged to be excused.
Each day that follows, Agnes has greater difficulty maintaining the high pitch of her despair. Normalcy nibbles at the edges of her madness, infecting it with mundane thoughts. Lord Unwin, for all that she styles him Satan’s accomplice, takes her to a concert of ‘Mendelshon’ at the Crystal Palace one Saturday afternoon. Agnes’s terror of expiring in a pool of blood proves unfounded, and she ‘almost forgets’ her fatal affliction for the duration of the ‘really quite beautiful’ concert. When, on the fifth day, the bleeding ceases altogether, Agnes concludes that a compassionate angel must have interceded on her behalf. Her handwriting grows bigger, the demons in the rafters become pigeons and, within a few entries, she’s complaining that Cook put too much pepper in the kedgeree.
Thus does Agnes Unwin survive her passage to adulthood. Everyone, from her step-father to the man who delivers the woodfowl, compliments her on how she has blossomed into a lady, but no one informs her she has become a woman.
‘And when his prick comes out all bloody, you say, “Oh, sir, you have taken my maidenhood!” And weep a little, if you can.’
So speaks the long-forgotten voice of Sadie, a prostitute at Mrs Castaway’s in the Church Lane days, instructing Sugar how to make the most of the curse while she’s still young.
‘What if he doesn’t believe me?’
‘Of course he’ll believe you. You’re shaved smooth as a baby, and you’ve nothing on your chest — what’s to betray you?’ ‘What if he’s seen me before?’
‘No chance. For deflowerings, Mrs Castaway does her soliciting outside London. Madams all over England spread the word, put a whisper in ears that are waiting to hear. He’ll be a merchant or a clergyman, this fellow, and he’ll towk lahhk thaahht?
‘What if I bleed before he even comes into me?’
‘Do I have to teach you every little thing? Just keep yourself clean as a whistle! If he’s slow to start, bid him look at something amusing outside your window, and give yourself a quick wipe while his face is turned.’
‘Nothing outside my window is amusing.’
To which Sadie’s response was a raised eyebrow, as if to say, I can see why your mother calls you ungrateful.
Sugar closes Agnes’s diary, irritated by the need to blow her nose. Watery snot dampens her handkerchief, along with the tears on her cheeks. It’s November the 30th, 1875, and Sadie’s been dead for years, murdered not long after she left Mrs Castaway’s for Mrs Watt’s.
‘Gone to a better place’ was Mrs Castaway’s arch comment when she got the news. ‘She did say she would, didn’t she?’
Sugar drops her sodden handkerchief to the floor and wipes her face on her sleeve, then wipes her forearm on the bed. This black dress she’s wearing hasn’t been washed since she came to the Rackham house. She, who until recently wore a different gown every day of the week, now wears the same weeds day in, day out. The fringe of her hair has grown long; she ought to have it cut, but for the moment combs and pins keep it under control.
Her little room is as modest as it was when she first arrived. Aside from a few toiletries — old gifts from William — she’s imposed nothing of her own. The prints and knick-knacks from Priory Close, as well as her favourite clothes, are still packed up in her suitcases, which in turn are stacked on top of the wardrobe. There are other clothes too, boxes full, whose whereabouts she doesn’t even know; William has them ‘in storage’ somewhere.
‘You need only ask,’ he assured her, in that distant part of her life, little more than a month ago, when she was his mistress in rooms that smelled of perfumed baths and fresh sweat.
Sugar stands to look out of her window. The rain has eased off, and the well-manicured bushes and hedges of the Rackham grounds glisten spinach-green and silver. Shears the gardener is patrolling the faraway fences, check
ing that his Hedera helix is fanning out nicely against the lattice-work, for there have been too many nosy folk peering at the house lately. It’s five to two in the afternoon, almost time for a governess to return to her pupil. What the master of the Rackham house is up to, and who he’s thinking of, God knows.
Sugar scrutinises her face in the mirror, applies a little powder to her nose and peels a fleck of dry skin off her lower lip. She has run out of Rackham’s Creme de Jeunesse, and doesn’t know how to ask for more, short of adding it to a list of books for Sophie.
On the landing, as she walks towards the school-room, she pauses first outside William’s door, then Agnes’s, and peeks furtively through the keyholes. William’s study is flooded with afternoon sunlight, but vacant; he must be out in the world at large, bending it to his will. Agnes’s bedroom is dark; Mrs Rackham’s day is either already over, or has not yet begun.
On impulse, Sugar peeks through the nursery key-hole, in case the child should be revealed, vignetted in an act of misbehaviour. But no. Sophie sits on the floor next to her writing-desk, tidying up the carpet’s tufted edges with her stubby fingers, staring down contentedly at the faded Turkish patterns.
‘Small guitar, small guitar, small guitar …’ she murmurs, to brand the words indelibly on her brain.
‘God bless Papa,’ says Sophie that evening, her hands clasped over the coverlet, casting a steepled shadow in the candlelight. ‘God bless Mama. And God bless Miss Sugar.’
Sugar shyly reaches out to stroke the back of the child’s hair, but the candle-flame enlarges the shadow of her hand grotesquely, and she withdraws with a jerk.