The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Other pedestrians bear down on her constantly, weaving around her, making a play of almost bumping into her and exclaiming ‘Oh! I beg your pardon!’ when they plainly mean ‘Can’t you decide if you’re going into this stationers or not!’ Her eyes swim with tears; she’d counted on being able to use the toilet in Mrs Castaway’s, and now she burns for relief.

  ‘Ooh! Watch your step!’ says a fat old woman, also in mourning, but grumpy with it. She looks a little like Mrs Castaway. A little.

  Sugar dawdles in front of a suitcase-maker’s shop. In its window, a travelling case is exhibited, clasped wide open by means of invisible wires, to show off its luxuriously quilted interior. Nestled inside it like a huge pearl, signifying that the ownership of such a superb suitcase makes the world one’s oyster, sits … a world globe. All she need do is walk into this shop and ask if they’d consider selling the globe; they can easily buy another, for a fraction of what she’s willing to pay for this one; the entire transaction ought to be over in five minutes, or five seconds if they say no. She balls her fists and cranes her chin forward; the soles of her boots seem glued to the footpath; it’s no use. She walks on.

  She reaches Oxford Street just as the Bayswater-bound omnibus pulls away. Even if she were prepared to treat the onlookers of Regent Circus to the bizarre spectacle of a woman in mourning running after an omnibus, she’s far too sore to run. She ought to have bought the globe; or else, she should not have loitered like an imbecile in front of cigar importers and court dressmakers. Everything she does will be wrong today; she’s doomed to make one bad decision after another. What has she achieved since leaving the Rackham house? Nothing, only buying the medicines in Lamplough’s, and it’s too late for all that, too late. And while she’s away from the house, William will be maddened with suspicion, and he’ll search her room, and find Agnes’s diaries… and oh God: her novel. Yes, at this moment, William is probably sitting on her bed, his jaw stiff with rage as he reads the manuscript, a hundred pages written in the same hand that drafts his tactful replies to business associates, but here describing the desperate entreaties of doomed men as a vengeful whore called Sugar cuts their balls off.

  Amy tells me you’re writing a novel, dear.

  I wouldn’t believe everything Amy tells you, Mother.

  You know no one in the world will ever read it, don’t you, blossom?

  It amuses me, Mother.

  Good. A girl needs amusement. Toddle upstairs now, and put in a happy ending for me, won’t you?

  The pain in Sugar’s bladder has grown unbearable. She crosses the Circus because she has a notion there’s a public lavatory on the other side; when she gets there, she discovers it’s a men’s urinal. She looks back towards Oxford Street, and observes another omnibus trotting past. Between her legs, the Creme de Jeunesse has turned disgustingly slimy and her flesh throbs in pain, as if she’s been abused by a party of men who refuse to stop and refuse to leave and refuse to pay. Oh, don’t snivel so, hisses Mrs Castaway. You don’t know what suffering is.

  Sugar stands in the street, weeping and sobbing and shaking. A hundred passers-by avoid her, regarding her with pity and disapproval, letting her know with their expressions that she’s chosen a most inconvenient spot for this performance; All Souls’ Church is nearby, or she could have availed herself of a park, or even a disused graveyard, ifshe’d been prepared to walk half a mile.

  Finally, a man approaches her — an uncommonly fat, clownish-looking man, with a bulbous nose, furzy white hair, and fearsome great eyebrows like crushed mice. He edges towards her shyly, wringing his hands.

  ‘There, there,’ he says. ‘It’s not as bad as all that, is it?’

  To which Sugar’s response is a helpless, snot-nosed giggle that rapidly develops, despite her efforts to control it, into paroxysmal sobs of laughter.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ says the old man, squinting benignly. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’ And he waddles back into the crowd, nodding to himself.

  The head of Rackham Perfumeries, muddle-headed from his afternoon nap, stands in his parlour staring at the piano, wondering if he’ll ever hear it played again. He lifts its melancholy lid and strokes the keys with his good hand, his fingertips brushing the same ivory surfaces that Agnes’s fingertips were the last to touch: intimacy of a kind. But his touch is too heavy: one of the keys triggers the hidden hammer and strikes a solitary resounding note, and he stands back, embarrassed, in case a servant comes and investigates.

  He walks over to the window and pulls the sash, parting the curtains as wide as they can go. It’s raining: how dismal. Sugar is out there somewhere, without an umbrella he shouldn’t wonder. Better she’d stayed at home and helped with the correspondence; the second post has been delivered, and it appears Woolworth has indisputable proof that Henry Calder Rackham never paid the £500 that was owing, thus putting William at one corner of a damn awkward triangle.

  A vision of the naked woman on the mortuary slab flickers in his brain. Agnes, in other words. She’s resting peacefully now, he trusts. The rain intensifies, pelting down, turning into hail, tittering against the French windows, sighing into the grass.

  He fumbles to light a cigar. His broken fingers are healing slowly; one of them has set a little crooked, but it’s a deformity only he and Sugar are likely to notice.

  Obscure noises emanate from elsewhere in the house, not recognisable as footsteps and voices, scarcely audible above the downpour. Will he ever write that article for Punch, about rain making servants skittish? Probably not: during this last year he hasn’t written a single word that was not directly related to his business. Anything philosophical or playful has been postponed into oblivion. He’s gained an empire, but what has he lost?

  A slight dizziness prompts him to take a seat in the nearest armchair. Is it the concussion? No, he’s hungry. Rose didn’t disturb his sleep at lunch; he need only ring for her and she’ll bring him something. She could fetch The Times from his study, too; he’s only glanced at it so far, to verify that the news of the day concerns a gorilla, and not Agnes Rackham being found alive.

  Foolishness. He’ll know that his head has fully recovered from its battering when such daft fantasies cease to plague him. Agnes is gone forever; she exists only in his memories; there isn’t even a photograph of them together, more’s the pity, except for the wedding portraits taken by that blackguard of an Italian, in which Agnes’s face is a blur. Panzetta, that was the fellow’s name, and he had the impudence to charge a fortune too …

  He reclines in the armchair, and stares out into the rain. Through the shimmering veil of years he glimpses Agnes caught in a summer shower, hurrying under the shelter of a pavilion, her pink dress and white hat emphasising the healthy flush of her rain-flecked cheeks. He remembers running at her side, and being light-headed with pleasure to have shared this moment with her, to have been the man — out of all her suitors — who saw her like this, a radiantly beautiful girl on the very brink of ripeness, flushed rosy-pink, skin twinkling with rain, panting like a deer.

  She never once snubbed him, he recalls now. Never once! Not even when she was surrounded by her other suitors, rich well-connected fellows all, whose lips were wont to curl at the very sight of a manufacturer’s son. But they hadn’t a chance with Agnes, these effeminate boobies. Agnes appeared only intermittently aware of their presence, as if she might at any moment wander off and leave them stranded, like pets someone had unwisely left in her care.

  But she never wandered off from the company of William Rackham. He wasn’t boring: that was the difference. All those other fellows liked nothing better than to hear the sound of their own voices; he preferred the sound of hers. Nor was it solely the music of that voice that charmed him; she was less stupid than the other girls he knew. Oh, granted, she was ignorant about the usual topics girls are ignorant about (broadly, anything of consequence), but he could tell she had an unusual and original mind. Most strikingly, she had an instinct for metaphysics that he
r flimsy education had left entirely uncultivated; she truly did ‘see a World in a grain of sand, and a Heaven in a wild flower.’

  Recalling these things in his parlour as the rain begins to ease and his head droops back onto one of Agnes’s embroidered antimacassars, William suddenly sneezes. This, too, reminds him of his radiant Agnes Unwin — in particular, how irritatingly, delightfully, superstitious she was. When he asked why she always exclaimed the words ‘God bless you!’ so promptly — and loudly — whenever anyone sneezed, she explained that during that momentary convulsion, the invisible demons that fly all about us may seize their chance to enter. Only if a considerate bystander blesses us in the name of God, when we’re too busy crying ‘Achoo’ to bless ourselves, can we be sure we haven’t been invaded.

  ‘Well, I see I owe you my life, then,’ he commended her.

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ she retorted mildly. ‘But God should bless people. It’s what He’s supposed to be for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, Miss Unwin, you must be careful. People will accuse you of taking God’s name in vain.’

  ‘They already do! But…’ (a charming smile played on her lips) ‘they only say so because of the demons inside them.’

  ‘From all the unblessed sneezes.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  At which William laughed out loud: damn it, this girl was funny! It only required a special sort of man to perceive her gently mischievous brand of wit. Each time he met her, she came out with more of it, always delivered in a teasing, solemn tone before breaking out into a smile behind her fan; and on the feathery foundations of their banter, they built their engagement.

  He desired her, of course. He dreamed of her, lost seed over her. And yet in his heart of hearts, or loin of loins, he had no urgent designs upon her; there was, after all, a whole class of women provided especially for that purpose. When he imagined Agnes and himself married, his vision was scarcely physical at all; he pictured the two of them lying asleep in each other’s arms in an enormous white raft of a bed.

  When they were newly engaged, she confided to him how afraid she was of losing her figure — by which he took her to mean, through childbirth. Immediately he decided he would take precautions, and spare her this burden. ‘Children?’ he declared, relishing the thought of flouting yet another convention, for in those days he cared not a button for the petty expectations of fathers and other busybodies. ‘Too many of them in the world already! People have children because they want immortality, but they’re fooling themselves, because the little monsters are something else, not oneself. If people want immortality, they should claim it on their own behalf!’

  He’d consulted her face then, fearful that his resolve to win enduring fame through his writings might impress her as vainglorious, but she looked deeply pleased.

  In dreams, both waking and sleeping, he would imagine himself and Agnes together, not just as newlyweds, but in their mature years, when their reputation would have achieved its zenith.

  ‘There go the Rackhams,’ envious onlookers would say, as they strolled through St James’s Park. ‘He has just published another book.’

  ‘Yes, and she has just returned from Paris, where I’m told she had thirty dresses made for her, by five different dress-makers!’

  A typical day, in this future of theirs, would begin with him lounging in a wicker chair in his sunlit courtyard, checking the proofs of his latest publication, and dealing with correspondence from his readers (the admirers would get a cordial reply, the detractors would be instantly destroyed with his cigar-tip). And he’d have no shortage of detractors, for his fearless opinions would ruffle many feathers! On the lawn beside him, a pile of ash would smoulder, of all the bores who needn’t have bothered to send him their complaints. Agnes would come gliding across the grass at around noon, resplendent in lilac, and scold him serenely for making the gardener’s life a trial.

  Slumped in his parlour now, in January 1876, a man bereaved, William winces in pain at these recollected dreams. What a fool he was! How little he understood himself! How little he understood Agnes! How tragically he underestimated the ruthlessness with which his father would humiliate them both during the tenderest years of their marriage! From the outset, every portent was already pointing towards Pitchcott Mortuary, and the wretched woman on that slab!

  As he lapses once more into a doze, he sees Agnes before him, as she was on their wedding night. He lifts her night-dress: she is quite the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Yet she is rigid with fear, and gooseflesh forms on her perfect skin. So many months he’s spent praising the beauty of her eyes, to her obvious delight; but much as he’d like to spend two hundred years adoring each breast, and thirty thousand on all the rest, he yearns for a more spontaneous union, a mutual celebration of their love. Should he quote poetry to her? Call her his America, his new-found-land? Shyness and unease dry his tongue; the look of dumb horror on his wife’s face obliges him to continue in silence. With only his own laboured breath for company, he presses on, hoping she might, by some magical process of communion, or emotional osmosis, be inspired to share in his ecstasy; that the eruption of his passion might be followed by a warm balm of mutual relief.

  ‘William?’

  He jerks awake, confused. Sugar is standing before him in the parlour, her mourning-clothes shining wet, her bonnet dripping rain-water, her face apologetic.

  ‘I didn’t achieve anything,’ she confesses. ‘Please don’t be annoyed with me.’

  He straightens up in his seat, rubbing his eyes with the fingers of his good hand. There’s a crick in his neck, his head aches and, swaddled inside his trousers, his prick is slackening in its sticky, humid nest of pubic hair.

  ‘No matter,’ he groans. ‘You need only tell me w-what you want, and I can arrange it for you.’

  Three days later, during the writing of a letter to Henry Calder Rackham, which Sugar has been instructed, after some hesitation, to begin ‘Dear Father’, William suddenly enquires, ‘Can you use a sewing-m-machine?’

  She looks up. She’d thought she was ready for anything today: her sore privates have cleared up enough for her to contemplate the act of love, provided it’s done gently; her stomach has just this morning ceased convulsing from the effects of the wormwood and tansy tincture, and she’s giving her poor body a much-needed rest before trying, as a last-ditch resort, the pennyroyal and brewer’s yeast.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ve never handled one.’

  He nods, disappointed. ‘Can you sew the usual w-way?’

  Sugar lays the pen on the blotter, and tries to judge from his face how kindly he might take to a joke. ‘Skill with a needle and thread,’ she says, ‘was never the greatest of my talents.’

  He doesn’t smile, but nods again. ‘It wouldn’t be possible, then, for you to a-alter a dress of A-Agnes’s, so that it fit you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she says, much alarmed. ‘Even ifl were a seamstress, I… well, our shapes … they’re very different … uh, weren’t they?’

  ‘Pity,’ he says, and leaves her to stew in her unease for several minutes. What the devil is he getting at? Does he suspect her of something? He was away in the city yesterday, for the first time since the funeral, and in the evening made no mention of where he’d been …To the police, perhaps?

  At last he rouses himself from his reverie and, in a clear and authoritative tone, with scarcely any stammer, declares: ‘I have arranged for us all to go on a l-little outing together.’

  ‘Us … all?’

  ‘You, me and Sophie.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘On Thursday, we’ll go to the city, and have our photographs taken. You’ll have to wear your m-mourning-clothes on the way there, but please take along with you a cheerful and pretty dress, and another for Sophie. There’s a changing room at the photographer’s, I’ve checked.’

  ‘Oh.’ She waits for an explanation, but he’s already turned his head as if the subject is closed. She li
fts the pen from the maculated blotter. ‘Is there any particular dress you’d like me to wear?’

  ‘One that’s as attractive as possible,’ William replies, ‘w-while still looking completely respectable.’

  ‘Where is Papa taking us, Miss?’ says Sophie on the morning of the big day.

  ‘I’ve told you already: to a photographer’s studio,’ sighs Sugar, trying not to let her displeasure at the child’s excitement show.

  ‘Is it a big place, Miss?’

  Oh, be quiet: you’re just babbling for the sake of it. ‘I don’t know, Sophie, I’ve never been there.’

  ‘May I wear my new whale-bone hair clip, Miss?’ ‘Certainly, dear.’

  ‘And shall I take my shammy bag, Miss?’

  The mere sound of you, little precious, suggests Mrs Castaway, is becoming tedious in the extreme. ‘I … Yes, I don’t see why not.’

  Decked out in mourning, with a change of clothing packed in a tartan travelling case that once belonged to Mrs Rackham, Sugar and Sophie venture out into the carriage-way, where the coach and horse stand waiting for them.

  ‘Where’s Papa?’ says Sophie, as Cheesman lifts her into the cabin.

  ‘Putting his toys away, I expect, Miss Sophie,’ winks the coachman.

  Sugar climbs hurriedly in, while Cheesman is busy with the case and before he has a chance to lay his hands on her.

  ‘Mind how you go, Miss Sugar!’ he says, delivering the words like the concluding line of a bawdy song.

  William emerges from the front door, fastening a dark-grey overcoat over his favourite brown jacket. Once all the buttons are done up, it will take a sharp-eyed pedestrian indeed to spot that he’s not in strict mourning.

  ‘Let’s be off, Cheesman!’ he calls, when he’s climbed into the cabin with his daughter and Miss Sugar — and, to his daughter’s delight, his word instantaneously becomes fact: the horses begin to trot, and the carriage rolls along the gravel, up the path towards the big wide world. The adventure is beginning: this is page one.