The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  No one blames a man for sending his wife to a hospital when she breaks a leg or gets smallpox. This is no different, I tell you.’

  William sips unhappily at his port. ‘I do wonder,’ he muses, ‘if there isn’t something physically the matter with her …’

  ‘I’ve investigated her inside out. There’s nothing wrong that won’t correct itself if she’s properly handled.’

  ‘Sometimes, when she’s behaving very badly, just before she collapses, I could swear one eye is bigger than the other … ‘

  ‘Humphh. I imagine she’s having trouble looking you straight in the face. I’m sure any woman would, during such a performance.’

  Abruptly, the fuggy silence of the smoking-room is penetrated by the pure tones of a piano, fingered most fetchingly in the parlour nearby. After a fluent prelude, Agnes begins to sing, serene and joyful as a bird. The look of wistful sentimentality that softens William’s features makes Curlew want to groan with frustration.

  ‘Rackham,’ he argues, ‘you really must rid yourself of this fond notion that your wife is a well person who suffers occasional bouts of illness, rather than a sick person who occasionally has a good day. Tell me: if one of the machines that bottle your perfumes was running amok, breaking all the glass and spraying scent everywhere, and it was doing it time after time, and then, just as you summoned a fellow to repair it, it seemed to cure itself, would you assume the fault was gone, and no repairs were necessary?’

  ‘Human beings are not machines.’

  An odd philosophy, Curlew refrains from remarking, for an industrialist. ‘Well,’ he sighs, to the accompaniment of Agnes’s angelic trills, ‘if you won’t consider an asylum, there are some immediate measures I urge you to take. First, stop her going to Mass. Being a Catholic is no crime, but your wife was an Anglican when she married you and an Anglican she should still be. If her faith in the Roman Church were anything more than a delusion, she’d be trying to convert you, not pleasuring herself with secret excursions to Cricklewood. Secondly, it’s high time Agnes admitted she’s a mother. This absurd pantomime of avoidance has gone on far too long. If you won’t consider what’s best for Agnes, think of your daughter, now that she’s old enough to ask questions. Being deprived of a mother’s love can’t be doing her any good, don’t you see?’

  William nods slowly. Unpalatable though the truth may be, there’s no gainsaying the superior wisdom of a man who knows his profession. A mother cannot deny her offspring forever without some harm coming of it: that’s a fact.

  ‘It seems like only a few months ago she was a babe in arms,’ he mutters in Agnes’s defence, calling to mind his occasional glimpses of the infant Sophie swaddled in Beatrice’s embrace. But the child has grown like a weed, and he has to concede that yesterday, when he met Sugar and Sophie in the street, he was taken aback by his daughter’s look of watchful intelligence.

  ‘I don’t wish to distress Agnes unnecessarily,’ he says.

  ‘With what’s at stake here, Rackham,’ pronounces the doctor, ‘a modicum of your wife’s distress may prove a cheap price to pay.’

  William grimaces assent; the negotiations are concluded, both parties having conceded some ground while appearing to stand firm. Breathing easier, the host offers his guest more port.

  ‘Now tell me, Doctor,’ he says. ‘How is your daughter?’

  Emmeline Fox stoops to pick up the cat turds at the top of the stairs with her fingers. The droppings are quite dry, after all, and she can wash her hands as soon as she’s disposed of Puss’s mess. Honestly, the fuss some people make about dirt. They should be obliged to live for a day in a Shoreditch slum, where slime drips down the walls and children are disfigured by rat bites …!

  Emmeline squats to her task, her loose hair falling over her face — the more shit she picks up, the more she finds. Puss really has been very naughty. If he doesn’t mend his ways soon, she’ll have to banish him from her bed and make him sleep out of doors.

  ‘Do you hear that, Puss?’ she says, as if the casual inspection of her thoughts is another of his bad habits. He doesn’t deign to reply.

  She tosses the turds into a cardboard box that used to contain stationery, and now contains about a fortnight’s worth of cat droppings. The whole caboodle will be tipped into a hole in the garden, as soon as she buys a spade, which she certainly will do this morning, and never mind the stares of the ironmonger.

  She descends the dusty stairs in her bare feet; indeed, she’s altogether naked. The convention of dressing for bed has ceased to make sense to her and, despite the approach of winter, she doesn’t miss her night-gowns at all. She scarcely feels the cold; her extremities can be bone white and she’ll be unaware of suffering. What do the fortunate know of cold, anyway, snug in their well-heated houses?

  Not that her own house is terribly well-heated just now. She’s forgotten to bring the coal in, and all the hearths need cleaning. It really is high time she replaced Sarah; three months without a servant is taking its toll. There are plenty of good girls to be had through the Rescue Society; she need only tidy the place a little so as not to make too bad an impression.

  Emmeline washes with a flannel (she had a proper bath only yesterday) and dons her work clothes — that is, the smart but practical dress she wears when visiting the poor. Her stomach growls, reminding her not to leave the house without eating, as she too often does.

  In the kitchen, she squeezes between Henry’s stove and her own, to fetch the bread from the cupboard overhead. The loaf still has the knife stuck in it, which is just as well, since she’s mislaid a lot of cutlery lately. There’s no butter, but there’s a bounteous supply of tinned meat and fish, a wonderful boon for the independent woman. She considers the Belgravian Ox Tongues, but plumps for salmon. Fish oil, she’s read, is good for the brain.

  Henry’s cat comes padding in, making ingratiating noises and butting his head against Emmeline’s skirt.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ she scolds him, as she rummages for a clean cup to make herself a hot drink. Then she remembers she has no milk, and without milk she dislikes both tea and cocoa. No matter; soon enough, Mrs Nash will pour her a nice cup of tea at the meeting hall.

  ‘Here, you shameless thing,’ she says, emptying the remainder of the salmon directly onto the kitchen floor. ‘Always taking advantage of me … Why don’t you go out and get some honest work, hmm? I ought to call you Spoony-Puss.’

  Henry’s cat cocks its head. ‘Miaow?’

  Emmeline must hurry now; she slept later than she thought, having stayed awake most of the night writing dozens of replicas of the same letter urging the governors of local schools not to forsake the children hiding in the rookeries. If she doesn’t leave soon, she’ll miss the tea and biscuits.

  Where is her bonnet? Oh yes: it’s hung on Henry’s bed-frame, which still stands upright against the wall of the sitting-room. (She did find a home for the mattress, courtesy of Mrs Emerson’s recent appeal for bedding, but the iron frame was judged too heavy.) With a couple of hat-pins, and a ribbon tied under her chin, Emmeline transforms herself into Mrs Fox, ready for the fray.

  Just as she’s about to open her front door, a letter whispers through the slit, and falls at her feet. She stuffs it into her purse, and dashes.

  Comfortably seated at the Rescue Society’s meeting hall, cup of tea at her elbow, Mrs Fox opens the envelope. A single sheet, obsessively folded into a tiny square, falls onto the table. Mrs Fox smooths it out before her, and squints at its Lilliputian script.

  Time is fast running out, it says. I know that you are a good and kind person, despite your Father’s dark Allegiences. (I too had an evil father, so I sympathise) I know that you have already claimed your Second Body. People say that you are not pretty and that your Complexion is bad but they do not look beneath at the beauty of your Soul. How radiant that Soul must be, knowing its fleshly home is Immortal! As for me, my earth-born flesh is showing dreadful signs of decay, and I cannot bear the thought of being trap
ped in it for much longer. I happen to know that my Second Body is waiting for me at the Convent of Health. Please, please, please divulge to me where the Convent is. I am ready to go, but I fear my Guardian Angel expects me to be patient and wait until the Bitter End. You are my only hope. Please grant me the Secret Knowledge I crave. In the name of the regard we held in common for Henry, I beseech you, Agnes R.

  Mrs Fox folds the letter back into its envelope. All around her, the refreshments are being cleared away and her sisters are putting on their coats and gloves. Mrs Rackham’s plea will have to wait, in favour of lost souls nearer to hand.

  That evening, resting on her bed with Puss purring against her thigh, Mrs Fox re-reads the letter.

  She’s in irritable spirits; her afternoon with the Rescue Society has not been a success. The streets of Shoreditch are rich veins of Godless destitution, true, but devilishly difficult to penetrate: the residents are hostile, and most doors slam shut at the approach of a Rescuer. There was one whore who consented to speak to Mrs Fox, but she was in a state of inebriation so severe that serious discussion was impossible.

  ‘You’d make a good whore yerself!’ the giggling trollop assured her. ‘I c’n tell! You ain’t wearin’ a corset, are yer? I c’n see yer teats!’

  Mrs Fox tried to explain that she’d been very ill, and had found it difficult to breathe when constrained by a stiff carapace; and that, in any case, modesty has nothing to do with corsets, for decent women existed long before such garments were invented … But the whore was having none of it.

  ‘You ain’t ‘ad children, by the looks of yer,’ she chortled, tickling Emmeline under the swell of her bosom. ‘Men like that.’

  Now Emmeline slumps on her bed, footsore, grimy, with particles of soot gritting on her tongue, and {bother!) still no milk for cocoa. And if that weren’t bad enough, here, again, is this letter in which Agnes Rackham begs her for the secret of physical immortality.

  How to reply?

  With the truth, of course, however unwanted it may be. Emmeline fetches pen and paper, and scrawls the following:

  Dear Mrs Rackham.,

  I am sorry to tell you that you are mistaken. None of us can hope to be immortal unless it be in the spirit through Christ {see Romans 6:7–10; I Corinthians 15:22 and

  most particularly 15:50). If I can help you in any other way, I will do it gladly. Yours sincerely, E. Fox

  She folds this note into an envelope, seals it and, almost in the same motion, tears it to shreds. The vision of Mrs Rackham receiving the letter in an ecstasy of anticipation, only to find a rebuttal and a few Scriptural references, is too pitiful.

  Perhaps sending a book would be more use? It would obviate the need for a personal rebuff, and might be more effective in dispelling the miasma of Mrs Rackham’s delusion. Emmeline leaps off the bed and begins to fossick in the dusty, furry piles of books that litter her house, searching for The Ruined Temple, an autobiography written by an evangelist with a wasting disease, which she lent to Henry when he was making such a fuss about her own decline. It was a slim volume, with a distinctive spine, but she cannot, for the life of her, find it, and the dust she raises provokes her to a frenzy of sneezing.

  But what’s this? A thick pamphlet she can’t recall ever seeing before. On its reverse, commendations from such authorities as ‘A. E., of Bloomsbury’: For lovers of pleasure, this is nothing less than the bible! On the front, in embossed black print: More Sprees in London — Hints for Men About Town, with advice for greenhorns. She opens the book, and finds it inscribed on the flyleaf to Henry, from Philip & Edward, with an additional note: Your future parish? Good luck!

  Emmeline winces in pain at Bodley and Ashwell’s cruel prank and, to her own astonishment, hot tears spring to her eyes, falling onto the pamphlet. Through a haze of weeping, she flips through the pages, some of which are dog-eared, presumably to mark particular prostitutes whom Bodley and Ashwell were keen to sample.

  Mrs Fox leans her head back, embarrassed at her incontinence of snivelling. She’ll study this horrid little book in detail later; it may, for all the grief it’s causing her now, prove to be a blessing in disguise. She must regard it … yes, that’s it: she must regard it as an invaluable inventory of the women whom she’ll do her utmost to find and rescue. Yes, some good will come of this after all!

  ‘Your cup oftea, Miss.’

  Sugar jerks awake from troubled dreams, blinking in the half-light. She looks up: a figure she doesn’t recognise is looming over her bed, holding a tea-cup in one hand, and a burning lamp in the other, for the day has barely begun. As she hauls herself up onto her elbows, disentangling her arms from the bed-clothes, she senses a weight on her legs, and finds an open diary nestled face-down on her left thigh.

  Damn! She can only hope the servant takes it to be a schoolbook, or a diary of Miss Sugar’s own, rather than stolen property.

  ‘Uh … thank you … Rose,’ she croaks, her throat parched, her vision blurred. ‘What …uh …’

  ‘Half past six, Miss, on a fine Tuesday morning.’

  ‘Fine?’ Sugar cranes her head towards the dark window in which Rose’s lamp is reflected in a halo of frost.

  ‘I mean only to say, Miss, that it’s stopped snowing.’

  ‘Ah, yes …’ Sugar rubs her eyes. ‘I’m sure I’d sleep all day if it weren’t for you. ‘ Instantly she regrets this limp gesture of ingratiation, which only makes her seem a slattern. Keep your mouth shut until you’ve woken up, she cautions herself.

  When Rose and her lamp have made their exit, the first feeble glimmerings of dawn edge into Sugar’s room. If she squints hard, she can discern strange white shapes suspended outside her window, like ghosts hovering absolutely immobile, twenty feet above the ground. A rustling gust of wind, and the ghosts begin to disintegrate at the edges, their white extremities falling out of sight. Snow in the trees, powdery and evanescent.

  Shivering, Sugar takes a swig of tea from the absurdly dainty cup. How strange she still finds it, this ritual of being served tea at the crack of dawn by a servant, instead of waking at ten or eleven with the sun beaming on her face. In an instant, she’s transported back in time — not to Priory Close, but farther still — to the top floor of Mrs Castaway’s, with the pigeons cooing in the rafters, the sun mercilessly golden, and little Christopher knocking for the dirty linen.

  You should have taken Christopher with you, a reproachful voice hisses in her sluggish brain. Mrs Castaway’s is no place for a child.

  She bites her biscuit, spilling a flurry of crumbs on the breast of her night-gown. He’s a boy child, she tells herself. He’ll grow into a man like all the rest of them. And the world is made for men.

  She drains her tea, a mere swallow’s worth, barely enough to wet her dry tongue. Why is she so tired? What happened yesterday? The last thing she can remember, before falling into a long, confused dream in which a woman shrieked and wailed in a howling wind, is Agnes Unwin’s announcement that she’s engaged to marry William Rackham.

  The diary has fallen shut in Sugar’s lap. She opens it again, thumbs its soil-stained pages, finds the part where she lost consciousness.

  I am Engaged to Marry a man, writes Agnes, and I scarcely know Who he is. How terrifying! Of course I am awfully well aqcuainted with him — so well that I could write a book of all the clever things he says. But Who is he really, this William Rackham, and what does he want of me that he doesnt have already? O, I pray I dont bore him! He smiles & calls me his odd little sprite — but am I singular enough for a man of his disposition?

  When I think of marrying, it is like thinking of diving into dark waters. But do dark waters become any clearer if one stares into them for years & years before diving? (Oh dear: perhaps I oughtnt to have used this comparison, since I am not a swimmer!)

  But I mustnt fret. All things are possible for two persons in love. And it will be unutterably sweet not to be Agnes Unwin anymore! I can hardly wait!!!

  ‘My Mama didn’t go to b
ed at all,’ complains Sophie, befuddled and whim-pery, as Sugar helps her into her clothes. ‘She was outside in the garden, shouting, all night, Miss.’

  ‘Perhaps you dreamed it, Sophie,’ suggests Sugar uneasily. The sheer effort of facing the day, of getting dressed and groomed by seven o’clock so that she can help Sophie do the same, has pushed her nightmare into the past; the tormented wailing has been muffled to a murmur. Now, when she tries to recall it, the woman’s voice is no longer solitary, but accompanied by others, male and female. Oh yes, and there’s a vague impression of a ruckus on the stairs.

  ‘Nurse says that weeping and making a fuss fools no one,’ Sophie remarks out of the blue, pouting like an imbecile as Sugar brushes her hair, teetering in her tight little shoes each time the comb snags her scalp. She’s not quite awake yet, that’s plain.

  ‘We all must do our best, Sophie,’ says Sugar, ‘to be brave.’

  At half past nine, shortly after the day’s lessons have begun, the lonely privacy of the school-room is interrupted by a knock on the door. Normally, once the breakfast dishes have been removed, no one disturbs them until lunch, but here is Letty appearing in the doorway, empty-handed and solemn.

  ‘Mr Rackham would like to see you, Miss Sugar,’ she says. ‘See … me?’ Sugar blinks uncomprehendingly.

  ‘In his study, Miss.’ Letty’s face is benign, but not very rewarding to read; if there are any woman-to-woman confidences written on it, they’re written too faintly for Sugar to decipher.

  Sophie looks up from her writing-desk, waiting to learn what turn the world will take next. With a nod and a hand gesture, Sugar signals for work to continue on the naming and drawing of musical instruments, having just convinced Sophie that her sketch of the violin with the droopy neck can stay, rather than be ripped out of her copy-book and portrayed afresh. Sophie bows down to her task again, pressing her ruler onto a half-drawn violoncello as if it’s twitching to slither from her grasp.