by Michel Faber
‘I’m so glad you’re enjoying your Christmas book, Sophie,’ says Miss Sugar, catching her at it once again.
‘Very much, Miss,’ Sophie assures her.
‘You are being a very good girl, doing all this reading and sketching while I help your father.’
Sophie blushes and bows her head. The desire to be good is not what impels her to draw her poor nigger doll riding on an elephant, nor is it why she reads Alice’s adventures and mouths ‘EAT ME’ and ‘DRINK ME’ when no one is listening. She does these things because she is powerless to do otherwise; a mysterious voice, which she doubts is God’s, urges her to do them.
‘Is it New Zealand’s turn yet, Miss?’ she enquires hopefully.
On the eighth day of Agnes’s absence, Sugar notes that Sophie doesn’t bother to ask if her Mama has still run away. A week, it seems, is the maximum time that the child believes a person could possibly remain missing before being discovered. No game of hide and seek could be drawn out to such length, no naughty deed could escape punishment so long. Mrs Agnes Rackham has gone to live in a different house, and that’s that.
‘Is Papa’s hand still sore?’ Sophie asks instead, when she and Sugar have finished eating their lunch and Sugar is about to leave for the study.
‘Yes, Sophie.’
‘He should kiss it and then hold it like this? the child says, demonstrating the manoeuvre with her own right hand and left armpit. ‘That’s what I do.’ And she gives Sugar an odd suppliant look, as if hoping that her governess will dutifully pass this remedy on to her grateful father.
Sugar does no such thing, of course, when she reports for work in William’s study. His visible injuries may be healing quickly, but his temper is worse than ever, and his stutter — to his utter fury — shows no sign of diminishing. Quaint advice from his daughter is not what he wants to hear.
With third and fourth posts still to be delivered, a daunting pile of correspondence has already accumulated, but precious little work gets done today, for William digresses constantly, bemoaning the treachery and disloyalty of his business associates. He also reminisces about Agnes — one moment asserting that the house is a mere shell without her, and that he’d give anything to hear her sweet voice singing in the parlour; the next that he has endured seven long years of suffering, and is surely entitled to an answer now.
‘What answer, my love?’ says Sugar.
‘Do I have a w-w-wife, or don’t I?’ he groans. ‘Seven years I-I’ve been a-a-asking myself that q-question. You cannot know the torment, of w-w-wishing only to be a husband, and being taken f-for everything else under the sun: an ogre, a f-fraud, a f-fool, a gaoler, a w-well-dressed prop to be s-seen w-with in the S-S-Season — God damn this s-stutter!’
‘It’s worse when you excite yourself, William. When you’re calm, it’s hardly there at all.’ Is this too arrant a lie? No, he appears to have swallowed it.
Stutter aside, Rackham is definitely on the mend. His sling hangs unused around his neck, and he no longer slumps snoring on the ottoman, but regularly lurches to his feet, to pace the floor. His vision is almost back to normal, and each time he wipes his liberally perspiring face with his handkerchief, more flakes of dried blood are dislodged, revealing pink new flesh underneath.
‘Shall we return to business, my love?’ Sugar suggests, and he grunts assent. For a few short minutes he’s composed, humming indulgently as she reads back the letters, nodding his approval of the figures, but then some unfortunate turn of phrase offends him, and the flimsy casing of his temper bursts again.
‘Tell the b-blackguard to hang himself with his own f-f-flax!’ he exclaims, and, ten minutes later, about a different merchant: ‘The dirty s-s-swine: he won’t get away with this!’ To such outbursts, Sugar has learned to respond with a long, tactful pause, before suggesting a more emollient wording.
But if William’s reaction to business correspondents is immoderate, it’s the soul of rationality compared to his reaction to visiting cards left by women of Agnes’s acquaintance.
‘Mrs Gooch? She has a l-lot to answer for! There’s more gin and opium swilling in her fat hide than in h-half a dozen Ch-Cheapside sluts put together. What does the ugly cow w-want, to invite Agnes to one of her s-seances?’
‘It’s a simple calling card, William,’ says Sugar. ‘Left as a courtesy.’
‘God damn the w-woman! If she’s s-so clairvoyant, sh-she should know better than to come s-sniffing around here!’
Sugar waits. There are several other calling cards on the silver tray Rose has brought in. ‘Would you rather,’ she suggests, ‘I made no mention of mail that doesn’t concern Rackham Perfumeries?’
‘No!’ he yells. ‘I w-want to know everything! Tell me everything, d’you hear!’
Ten days after Agnes’s disappearance, when the sun peeps through the clouds, Sugar decides to take Sophie out into the garden for her afternoon lessons.
It’s not a very pretty or comfortable garden just now — full of discoloured snow, slush and mud, and only the hardiest plants growing — but it makes a change from the house, whose interior is stormy with bad temper and apprehension, from the empyrean thunderbolts of the master to the draughty squalls below stairs.
Now that hopes are fading for Mrs Rackham’s safety, the servants have exchanged one anxiety for another: instead of worrying about the brouhaha the mistress will cause when she’s fetched home, they’ve become infected with the fear of their own dismissal. For, if Mrs Rackham doesn’t come home, the Rackham household will have too many servants. Clara will be the first casualty, but she may not be the only one; Mr Rackham is in a constant foul temper and makes threats and accusations of incompetence to any girl who fails to anticipate his whims. Letty has been in tears several times already, and the excitable new kitchenmaid, after being provoked to retort ‘I ‘ain’t got yer blessed wife!’, was ordered to pack her bags yesterday, only to be reprieved hours later with a gruff retraction.
All in all, it’s an unhappy household, pregnant with foreboding. So, out into the grounds Miss Sugar and Miss Rackham go, well rugged up in serge winter-wear, fur-lined boots, and gloves. There’s a whole world beyond the Rackham walls, if only one dresses warmly.
First they visit the stable, where Sugar endures an insolent stare from Cheesman in exchange for Sophie’s shy smile as she strokes the flank of a horse.
‘Don’t let that governess of yours get up to any naughty tricks, will you Miss Sophie!’ calls Cheesman jovially as they leave.
Next they visit the greenhouses, under the watchful eye of Shears, who won’t let them touch anything. Inside the glass receptacles, obscured by a fog of condensation, unseasonal vegetables are being nurtured — the first fruits of Shears’s grand plan to have ‘everything, all year round’.
‘What are you learning today, Miss Sophie?’ says the gardener, nodding towards the history book her governess hugs to her breast.
‘Henry the Eighth,’ replies the child.
‘Very good, very good,’ says Shears, who sees no point in schooling except to read instructions on bottles of poison. ‘Never know when he might come in handy.’
Social calls over and done with, Sugar and Sophie cross over to the perimeter of the Rackham grounds, and begin to make the rounds of its fences, exactly as Sugar used to do when she was spying on the house, except on a different side of the metal railings. Seeing the house now, without being obliged to squint through a barrier of wrought-iron, Sugar reminds herself that she once ached to know what lay inside those walls, and now she knows. Cheesman can be as insolent as he likes: she’s come further than she could ever have dreamed, and she’ll go further yet.
As they walk, Sugar relates the story of Henry VIII, as sensationally as she can, and with not the slightest qualm about embellishing. Indeed, she must discipline herself not to reproduce too much of the protagonists’ conversation, for fear of straining Sophie’s seemingly limitless credulity. The history of this dangerous king, with its simple p
lot and six complementary episodes, so much resembles a fairy-tale that Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves could almost be the Three Little Pigs or the Three Bears.
‘If Henry the Eighth wanted a son so badly, Miss,’ asks Sophie, ‘why didn’t he marry a lady who already had one?’ ‘Because the son must be his own.’
‘But wouldn’t any lady’s son belong to him, Miss, as soon as he married her?’
‘Yes, but to be a true heir, the son must be of the king’s own blood.’
‘Is that what babies are made of, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, there at the perimeter of the Rackham grounds, on the eighth of January 1876, at half past two in the afternoon. ‘Blood?’
Sugar opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it again.
One squirt of slime from the man, one fishy egg in the woman, and behold: they shall call his name Emmanuel, prompts Mrs Castaway helpfully.
Sugar passes a hand across her forehead. ‘Uh … no, dear, babies aren’t made of blood.’
‘How are they made, then, Miss?’
For a moment Sugar considers wild fabrications involving elves and fairies. Discounting these, she next remembers God, but the notion of God being responsible for conjuring individual infants into being, when He shows so little interest in their subsequent welfare, seems even more absurd. ‘Well, Sophie,’ she says, ‘the way it happens is …uh … babies are grown.’
‘Like plants?’ says Sophie, peering over the lawn at the coffin-like glasshouses and cucumber-frames littering Shears’s domain. ‘Yes, a little like plants, I suppose.’
‘Is that why Uncle Henry was put in the ground, Miss, when he was dead? To grow babies?’
‘No, no, Sophie dear,’ says Sugar hastily, astonished at the child’s ability to uncork the genies of death, birth and generation all at once. ‘Babies are grown in … they are grown in … ‘
It’s no use. No words will come, and even if they did, they’d mean nothing to the child. Sugar considers reaching down and touching Sophie on the belly; recoils from the thought.
‘In here,’ she says, laying one gloved palm on her own stomach. Sophie stares dumbly at the ten splayed fingers for a few seconds before asking the inevitable question.
‘How, Miss?’
‘If I had a husband,’ says Sugar, proceeding with caution, ‘he could … plant a seed in me, and I might grow a child.’ ‘Where do the husbands get the seeds, Miss?’
‘They make them. They’re clever that way. Henry the Eighth wasn’t quite so clever, it seems.’ And with that, the conversation is steered back into the tranquil waters of Tudor history — or so Sugar thinks.
But, hours later, when Sophie has been bathed and powdered and put into bed, and Sugar is tucking the blanket up to her chin and playfully arranging the halo of wispy blond hair on the pillow all around her sleepy head, there is one more thing to be fathomed before the extinguishing of the light.
‘I came out of Mama, then.’
Sugar stiffens. ‘Yes,’ she says warily. ‘And Mama came out of …’ ‘Her Mama,’ concedes Sugar.
‘And her Mama came out of her Mama, and her Mama came out of her Mama, and her Mama came out of her Mama …’ The child is on the verge of sleep, repeating the words like nonsense verse.
‘Yes, Sophie. All the way back through history.’
Without knowing why, Sugar suddenly longs to crawl into bed with Sophie, to hug her tight and be hugged in return, to kiss Sophie’s face and hair, then clasp the child’s head against her bosom and rock her gently until they’re both asleep.
‘All the way back to Adam and Eve?’ says Sophie.
‘Yes.’
‘And who was Eve’s mother?’
Sugar is too tired, at this stage of the evening, to think of solutions to religious enigmas, especially since she knows William is waiting for her in his study, with another stockpile of Rackham correspondence and irritable outbursts. ‘Eve didn’t have a mother,’ she sighs.
Sophie doesn’t reply. Either she’s fallen asleep, or this explanation strikes her as quite credible, given what she’s learned of the world so far.
‘Tell me,’ challenges William without warning, when Sugar is half-way through the scribing of a letter to Grover Pankey, concerning the brittleness of ivory. ‘Did you and A-Agnes ever become … intimate?’
Sugar lifts her face, and carefully lays the fully-loaded pen on the blotter. ‘Intimate?’
‘Yes, intimate,’ says Rackham. ‘The police detectives, w-when they spoke with the servants, were particularly interested in s-s-special f-friendships.’
‘Police? Here in the house? When was this?’ Even as she asks, she recalls Sophie standing at the school-room window with her spyglass, commenting on the departure of yet more ‘tradespersons’ belatedly soliciting Christmas charity. ‘No one spoke to me.’
‘No,’ says William, turning his face away from her. ‘I th-thought it was best they left you alone, because you w-were occupied with Sophie, and in-in case you might — for w-whatever reason — already be known to the police.’
Sugar stares across the desk at him. He’s done his pacing for the evening, and has, for the last hour, been stretched out on the ottoman. All she can see is his turban of bandage, his by-now rather grubby sling, and his foreshortened legs, which he keeps crossing and uncrossing. It’s difficult to believe that she ever was his lover, that she should have spent so many hours and nights in Priory Close bathing and perfuming her body especially for him.
‘A-Agnes f-formed some damn peculiar attachments w-w-with w-women she barely knew. W-we’ve f-found out she wrote to Emmeline F-Fox begging her for the ad-address of Heaven.’
‘I didn’t know your wife at all,’ says Sugar evenly.
‘When the police in-interviewed Clara, she said A-Agnes insisted that the person who f-fetched her back from the coach-house was her guardian angel, always at her s-side, her only f-friend in all the world.’
A chill of nauseous guilt travels down Sugar’s spine, simultaneous with an almost uncontrollable urge to giggle — a combination which, despite her long experience of abnormal physical sensations, she has to admit she’s never felt before.
‘The whole affair took five minutes at most,’ she tells William. ‘I heard her calling, I found her in the coach-house, and I escorted her back into the house. I didn’t say who I was, and she didn’t ask.’
‘Yet she trusted you?’
‘I suppose she had no reason to mistrust me,’ says Sugar, ‘never having met me.’
William turns and looks directly into her eyes. She holds his gaze, unblinking, innocent, calling upon the same reserves that have in the past allowed her to persuade dangerous customers that she’s more useful to them alive and yielding, than strangled and unco-operative.
The clock strikes half past the hour of ten, and William sags back against the ottoman.
‘I mustn’t keep you,’ he sighs.
Next day, having hurried to William’s study shortly after lunch as usual, Sugar finds the room empty.
‘William?’ she calls softly, as though he might spring, like a jack-in-the-box, from a cigar-case or a filing cabinet. But no: she’s alone.
She takes her seat at the helm of Rackham Perfumeries and waits for a few minutes, tidying stacks of paper, browsing through The Times. A new steamer is offering passage to America and back in twenty-five days, including visits to New York and Niagara Falls, leaving from Liverpool every Thursday. Sol Aurine produces the golden tint so much admired for five shillings and sixpence. An article called ‘A Multitude of Mishaps’ collects together the week’s explosions, fires and other calamities for the benefit of Colonel Leek. There’s a civil war in Spain, and another in Herzegovina. France is in a delicate new state. Sugar finds herself wondering what a republican victory in the elections might mean to the French perfume industry.
Also on the desk is a small stack of unopened correspondence. Should she make a start on it before William has the chance to complicate matters
with his bad temper? She could read what his business associates have to say, plan the appropriate response, and then, when William arrives, pretend to open the letters afresh, loudly slitting a different side of the envelope with the paper knife …
The clock ticks. After five minutes of idleness, she toys with the possibility of summoning a servant to the study and enquiring after William’s whereabouts, but she can’t quite muster the audacity to pull the bell-cord. Instead she leaves the study and goes downstairs, something she rarely does without Sophie in tow. Discoloured patches of the carpet appear under her shoes; she hadn’t noticed them until now. Stains of Agnes’s blood. No, not stains: the vigorously scrubbed absence of stains, leaving a blush of cleanness on surfaces otherwise subtly tarnished.
Tiptoeing, Sugar pokes her face into each of the rooms until she finds Rose — a rather startled and guilty-looking Rose, caught in the act of reading a tuppenny storybook by the parlour fire, with her feet on the coal-chest. In an instant, the easy familiarity they shared at Christmas shrivels like lace in a flame, and they are governess and housemaid.
‘Mr Rackham had no appointments today, as far as I’m aware,’ says Sugar primly. ‘I don’t suppose you know …?’
‘Mr Rackham was fetched early this morning, Miss Sugar,’ says Rose, ‘by police.’
‘By … police,’ echoes Sugar, like a half-wit.
‘Yes Miss Sugar,’ says Rose, clutching her book against her bosom, its lurid front cover obscured in favour of the back which, instead of a swooning slave-girl proclaims the wonders of Beecham’s Pills. ‘They came for him at about nine o’clock.’
‘I see,’ says Sugar. ‘I don’t suppose you know why, Rose?’