The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Rose licks her lips nervously. ‘Please don’t tell anyone I said so, Miss, but I think Mrs Rackham has been found.’

  William Rackham signals, with nods of his head and inarticulate grunts, that the two police officers who’ve caught him can safely let him go. He is ready, once more, to stand on his own two feet; his moment ofgiddiness has passed, and he no longer needs to be supported under the armpits.

  ‘If you can manage it, sir,’ advises the mortuary attendant, ‘concentrate your attention on the parts that are least corrupted.’

  William steps forward, looking all around him, confirming that he is in Hell — an echoing, hissing, phosphorescent factory chamber whose apparent purpose is to manufacture the dead. Breathing the vile atmosphere — a vinegary, camphoric concoction kept at glacial temperature — more shallowly than he did when he was first brought in, he forces his chin to dip lower, and looks down at the naked corpse on the slab.

  The body is Agnes’s height, extremely thin, and female: that much he can swear to. A recent dousing of fresh water from the mortuary attendant’s hose has given it a glassy sheen; it glistens and sparkles under the mercilessly bright lights overhead.

  The face … the face is slack-jawed and half-rotten, an approximation of humanity, like a raw chicken carved into the shape of a face, an appalling culinary prank that was left uncooked. Three holes yawn in it: a mouth without lips or tongue, and two eye-sockets empty of eyes; each orifice is half-full of water and shimmers with reflected light. William imagines Agnes floating under the sea, imagines fish swimming up to her open eyes and nibbling tentatively at the plum-like flesh of her china-blue irises — and he sways on his feet, to gruff cries of ‘Steady, steady!’ on either side of him.

  Attempting to take the attendant’s advice, William searches for some part of the body that’s in tolerably good condition. This woman’s — or girl’s — hair is darkened from its sousing, and matted; if he could see it dried and neatly combed, he’d be able to tell its true colour …Her breasts are quite full, like Agnes’s, but the space between them has suffered a deep injury against submarine rock, ploughing the flesh apart, exposing the sternum, altering the contours of the bosom. There seems no part of the carcass on which he can rest his eyes without being revolted by the unveiling of bloody bone through chafed flesh, or a luridly pigmented blight on what ought to be alabaster perfection. On the gnawed hands, a few of the fingers are more complete than others, but there’s no wedding ring — a fact which the police inspector has already warned him means nothing, since every corpse dredged out of the Thames is bare of jewels by the time it reaches Pitchcott Mortuary, however gaudy it may have been when it first fell in.

  William’s eyes blur; his skull feels as though it will burst. What do these people want of him? What answer are they waiting for? Faced with a body so disfigured, would any other husband be able to do better? Are there men who could identify their wives from three square inches of unblemished flesh — an uncorrupted curve of shoulder, the precise shape of her ankle? If so, these wives must surely have offered their husbands more opportunities for intimate acquaintance than Agnes ever offered him! Perhaps, if it were Sugar here on this slab …

  ‘We understand, sir, if…’ begins the police inspector, and William groans in panic: the moment of truth has come, and he mustn’t be found wanting! One last time he surveys the corpse, and this time he focuses on the triangle of pubic hair and the mount of Venus from which it sprouts, a small haven of peachy flesh and delicate fleece which has escaped miraculously undamaged. He closes his eyes tight, and conjures forth the vision of Agnes on her wedding night, the only other occasion on which she lay exposed to his gaze in quite this pose.

  ‘This is sh-she,’ he announces hoarsely. ‘This is my wife.’

  The words, although his own voice has uttered them, deal him a ferocious blow: he reels as the fabric of his present and his past is wrenched asunder. The features of the woman on the slab swim out of focus, then sharpen fantastically, like a photograph emerging from developing fluid, until she is Agnes, and he cannot bear what has become of her. His Agnes, dead! His exquisite, angel-voiced bride, blighted, reduced to butcher’s refuse on a slab. If she had died seven years ago when he was courting her, on that same sunny afternoon when he bade her sit perfectly still for his camera and she looked at him as ifto say, Yes, I am yours; and if she had fallen into the Thames an hour later, and he had searched desperately for her all the seven years since, diving and diving in the same stretch of river; and if he had only just now pulled her lifeless body from the water, he could not have been more distressed than he is now.

  Convulsed with sobs and stammering blasphemies, he allows the steady arms of other men to escort him from the mortuary, a widower.

  THIRTY

  SECOND TRAGEDY BEFALLS RACKHAMS

  MRS. AGNES RACKHAM, wife of the Perfume Manufacturer whose products bear that name, was found drowned in the Thames on Friday. Although convalescing from rheumatic fever, she had made the journey from her Notting Hill residence to attend a concert at the Music School in Lambeth Palace, and a misunderstanding resulted in her being separated from her companions. Strong winds, slippery conditions on Lambeth Pier and Mrs. Rackham’s delicate health were the reasons given by the police for the fatal accident. This tragedy comes only four months after Henry Rackham, Mrs. Rackham’s brother-in-law, lost his life in a house fire. A funeral service will be held for Mrs. Rackham at her parish church of St. Mark’s, Notting Hill, on Thursday at eleven o’clock.

  Sugar hunches over the chamber-pot, stares down into its glossy porcelain interior, and inserts three fingers in her mouth. It takes a lot to make her gag, and her fingernails are scratching her gullet before she’s rewarded with a retch. But nothing substantial comes, only saliva.

  Damn! For the last week, or even longer — let’s say, ever since Agnes’s disappearance — she’s been sick most mornings, obliged to excuse herself from the school-room when the lessons are scarcely underway, to vomit up her breakfast. (Small wonder, what with her dread of Agnes being apprehended, her fears for her own part in the affair being discovered, the hazards of William’s terrible moods, and the sheer fatigue caused by working-hours that start at dawn and end at midnight!) Today she’s worried that if she doesn’t get her vomit over with now, in privacy, it will demand satisfaction of her later, in public, where she has nowhere to hide.

  She looks up at the clock; the funeral coaches are due to arrive any minute; her breakfast is determined to stay just where it is. She rises to her feet, and is dismayed to note that the heavy crape of her mourning-dress is already wrinkled. The horrid stuff creases at the slightest opportunity, the bodice is so tight it pinches her ribs when she breathes, and the double-stitched seam where the bodice joins the skirts is chafing her hips. Could the seamstresses at Peter Robinson’s have made a mistake? The box in which these clothes were dispatched has her measurements pencilled on the lid, exactly as she stated them on the order slip William had her complete, but the garments are a poor fit.

  Sugar has never been to a funeral before, though she’s read about them. In her former life, dead prostitutes simply disappeared, without fuss or ceremony; one day there’d be a corpse lying in a darkened room, the next day there’d be sunlight beaming in on an empty mattress, and bed-linen hanging out on the ropes between the houses. Where did the bodies go? Sugar was never told. Oh, there was that time when poor little Sarah McTigue was sold to a student doctor, but that wouldn’t have happened very often, surely? Maybe all the dead whores were clandestinely dumped in the Thames. One thing was certain: they didn’t have funerals.

  ‘Must Sophie go?’ she dared to ask William when he first gave the command. ‘Isn’t it unusual for a child–’

  ‘I don’t care if I put the world’s n-nose out of joint!’ he retorted, colouring up at once. ‘A-Agnes was a Rackham. There are damn f-few of us left, and we should all be there to m-mourn her.’

  ‘Could she perhaps go to the chu
rch service, but not to the graveyard?’

  ‘All of it, all of it. A-Agnes was m-my wife, and Sophie is m-my daughter. They say f-females at a f-funeral bring a risk of w-weeping. What’s wrong with w-weeping at a f-funeral? Someone has died, for God’s sake! Now stop p-paltering and write your m-measurements on this slip … ‘

  Sugar breathes shallowly, biliously, in her tight dress. For the dozenth time, she unfolds the torn-out newspaper page and re-reads the announcement of Agnes’s death. Every word of it is engraved on her memory, but still there’s something eerily authoritative about the actual print; the lies are stamped indelibly into the very fibres of the paper. Thousands of replications of this tragic little story, about the convalescing lady undone by her love of musical divertissements, have spilled from the printing presses and been disseminated into thousands of households. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword; it has killed Agnes Rackham and consigned her to History.

  To prevent herself re-reading Agnes’s death notice yet again, Sugar picks up one of her splendid volumes of Shakespeare. Truth to tell, she’s barely peeked in them since receiving them, having been so preoccupied with children’s schoolbooks and stolen diaries. It’s high time she exercised the more … literary muscles of her brain.

  She flips through the pages, searching for Titus Andronicus, which she used to think was unjustly underestimated — in fact, she recalls defending its gory frenzy for the benefit of a certain George W. Hunt when she first met him in The Fireside. Having found Titus now, she can’t make head nor tail of it; she must have been mad. William did tell her, on that first night, that she would come around to King Lear in the end — and he was right. She flips through the pages, reading no more than a word here and there, pausing only to look at the illustrations. What’s happened to her intellect? Has caring for Sophie softened her brain? She who once regarded the million words of Clarissa as a banquet, and would devour the latest book by Elizabeth Eiloart or Matilda Houston in a single sitting … Here she is, staring stupidly at an engraving of Lady Macbeth standing poised to jump off a parapet, as if this leather-bound compendium of literature were nothing more than a picture book for infants.

  From outside the window comes the sound of horses’ hoofs and a crunching of gravel: the funeral coaches have arrived. She ought to return to the school-room immediately, and show herself ready and able to chaperone Miss Rackham, but she looks through the window-pane first, leaning as close as she can short of pressing her nose to the glass. No doubt Sophie is doing the same.

  There are two coaches-and-fours visible below. One of the horses is directly under her bedroom window, fidgeting and snorting. In a more mischievous past she might have thrown a missile down on its nodding, befeathered head, or even aimed for the sable top hats of the coachmen perched behind. She can make out at least six sombre officiaries taking turns to poke their heads out of the coaches’ curtained windows. Every detail is monochrome: men, horses and harness, woodwork, wheels and upholstery, even the carriage-way gravel from which the last snow has melted: all black. Thoughtlessly Sugar wipes at the breath-clouded window-pane with her sleeve, then desists when she realises two things with a jolt: that crape is not waterproof, but leaves a grey smear on wet glass; and that the men down below may think she’s waving to them.

  She steps back from the window, shoves the chamber-pot back under the bed, snatches her gloves out of the Peter Robinson’s box, and hurries to rejoin Sophie.

  Sophie is at the window of the school-room, peering down at the horses and carriages with her spyglass. The French doll stands in the corner, its pink ball gown and bare arms more or less hidden under a makeshift cape of black tissue-paper, its plumed hat crudely disguised under a shawl fashioned from a black handkerchief. Sophie’s own mourning-clothes are not so flimsy; they encase her diminutive body like a black cocoon.

  ‘They have come for us, Miss,’ she says, without turning.

  ‘I’m a little frightened, Sophie,’ says Sugar, her black-gloved hand hovering in the air near Sophie’s shoulder, hesitating to stroke it. ‘Are you a little frightened, too?’ Ever since being told of her mama’s death, the child has neither wept nor misbehaved, instead exhibiting a stoicism too breezy to be true. Surely one cannot lose one’s mother and feel nothing?

  ‘Nurse told me all about funerals, Miss,’ says Sophie, pivoting on her heel to face her governess. She lowers the spyglass and collapses its ridged metal skin, with an oiled click, to the shortest length. ‘We shan’t have to do anything, only watch.’

  Sugar bends to re-tie the ribbon of Sophie’s bonnet, hoping that the gentleness with which her fingers brush against Sophie’s throat will reassure the child that she need only give a sign — the merest sign — of distress, and Miss Sugar will give her all the sympathy and affection she craves. But the over-gentle tying of a ribbon communicates no such thing: it only makes a knot that’s too loose, as though the governess is too clumsy and weak-fingered to dress a child properly.

  ‘What a sad beginning this is to the year!’ sighs Sugar, but Sophie doesn’t nibble at the hook.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ she says, in deference to the greater authority of her guardian.

  A pit four feet wide, six feet long and six feet deep has been dug in the dark, moist earth, and it is around this neat cavity that the throng of Agnes Rackham’s acquaintance is gathered. They stand shoulder to shoulder, or very nearly, allowing for the minimum proper distance between one body and another. Doctor Crane stands at the grave’s head, conducting the proceedings in his trumpustuous voice. He’s already delivered a long sermon in the church beforehand; now it appears he’s going to deliver it all over again, for the benefit of the additional mourners who’ve turned up for this stage of Mrs Rackham’s send-off.

  The slender and petite coffin, swathed in black velvet and garlanded with white blossoms, has been carried to the graveside by the undertaker’s assistants (the pallbearers being no more than an escort of honour) and now lies waiting on the rector’s word. It has a pregnant aura about it, as though it might burst open at any moment to discharge a living person, or the corpse of someone other than the deceased, or even a spill of potatoes. Such are the macabre fancies of quite a few of the mourners — not just those two who have reason to doubt that the casket contains Agnes Rackham.

  (‘It was she? You’re sure?’ Sugar asked William as soon as he returned from Pitchcott Mortuary.

  ‘I … yes, I’m sh-sh-sure,’ he replied, eyes glassy, sweat twinkling in his beard. ‘As sh-sh-sh …as certain as I c-can be.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’ Anything, please, but a shabby dark-blue dress with a grey apron front, and a pale-blue cloak …

  ‘Sh-she was n-naked.’ ‘But was she found naked?’

  ‘God almighty, d’you th-think I w-would ask such a question? Ach, if you could have seen w-w-what I have s-seen today …!’

  ‘What have you seen, William? What have you seen?’

  But he only shuddered, and screwed his eyes tight, and left the state of Agnes’s body to Sugar’s imagination. ‘Oh God, I pray th-this is the end of it!’

  Whereupon she stepped forward and embraced him, inhaling the vile odour with which his clothing was permeated. She stroked his clammy back, murmured assurances in his ear, saying yes, yes, this was indeed the end of it, and it was Agnes he saw, and thousands of people are drowned every year, more lives are lost that way than from almost any other cause, it said so in the newspaper only a week ago, and think of the weather on the night Agnes ran away, and her perilously delicate state. On and on she prattled, until his sobbing and shuddering subsided, and he was still.)

  Now he stands erect and solemn, a waxwork at the graveside, his face the instantly identifiable emblem of Rackham Perfumeries set atop the dark column of his mourning-suit. His facial injuries are disguised under a film of Rackham cosmetics expertly applied by Sugar, and his right hand — the only part of him that cannot be clothed according to strict convention — is sheathed in a loose black m
itten and supported in a black sling. Underneath the tight circumference of his hat, his head throbs to a dolorous rhythm.

  Unlike Henry’s funeral, which was conducted in the rain, Agnes’s ceremony is blessed with a clear sky, a lukewarm sun and a mild breeze. Two birds chirrup in the bare trees above, discussing the progress of Winter and the possibility that they will live to see Spring. The mourners fail to interest them; this jostling assembly of black creatures may have the attentive, hungry look of crows, and some of them are even festooned with feathers, but they’ve congregated in the wrong place, the silly things: there’s no food here, not a crumb.

  Just for curiosity’s sake, though, who has come today? What human beings have made the journey from their comfortable nests to witness Agnes Rackham being committed to the earth?

  Well, Lord Unwin of course — although what he would have done had he not happened to be vacationing in England, and had instead been in his more accustomed haunts of Italy or Tunisia, is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, he’s here, and his beautiful wife too, although she and Mrs Rackham regrettably never met.

  Henry Calder Rackham is the patriarch on William’s side, a less distinguished looking specimen than Agnes’s step-father, true, but not bad for his age. Poor man: the prospects of a grandson have grown dimmer the older he’s become; first he had two sons, one determined to be a bachelor clergyman and the other determined to be a bachelor profligate; then one son was dead and the other married to a woman whose child-bearing efforts stopped short of a male; now even she is gone. Well may he look glum.

  Who else has come? Well, moving on to the other sex: Lady Bridgelow, as well as a great many ladies of Agnes’s acquaintance, among them Mrs Canham, Mrs Battersleigh, Mrs Amphlett, Mrs Maxwell, Mrs Fitzhugh, Mrs Gooch, Mrs Marr — and is that Mrs Abernethy over there? Oh dear, one really should know. It looks like Mrs Abernethy, but wasn’t Mrs Abernethy supposed to have moved to India? Only after this ceremony is concluded will it be possible to clear up these little mysteries.