by Michel Faber
Scholefield and Tovey are awake too; in fact, despite the lateness of the hour, they haven’t even left their premises in Conduit Street. Among other activities, they’ve been working on the Rackham pictures, attempting to produce miracles.
‘The head’s come out too small,’ mutters Tovey, squinting at a glistening female face that has just materialised in the gloom. ‘Don’t you think the head’s too small?’
‘Yes,’ says Scholefield, ‘but it’s useless for the purpose anyway. It’s too bright; she looks as if she has a lamp burning inside her skull.’
‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to photograph the three of them again, out of doors, in bright sunlight?’
‘Yes, my love, it would be simpler,’ sighs Scholefield, ‘but out of the question.’
They labour on, into the small hours of the morning. This commission of Rackham’s is a much more difficult challenge than the usual business of superimposing a boy’s face onto the body of a soldier, to give grieving parents an almost-authentic record of their missing son’s military eminence. This Rackham assignment involves all but insuperable incompatibilities: a face from a photograph taken in brilliant sunlight, by an amateur whose opinion of his own skills is grossly inflated, must be re-photographed, enlarged to several times its size, and imposed on the shoulders of a woman done in the studio by professionals.
By three o’clock, they have the best result that they can manage, given the raw materials. Rackham will simply have to be satisfied with this, or, if he isn’t, he can pay for the straightforward images of himself and his daughter, and forfeit the imperfect composite.
The photographers take themselves to bed in a little room adjoining the studio; it’s far too late now for them to catch a cab back to their house in Clerkenwell. Suspended from a wire in the darkroom hangs their day’s work: a fine photograph of William Rackham gazing into the Romantic eternity of a mountain summit, a fine photograph of William Rackham engrossed in the study of a book, a fine photograph of Sophie Rackham daydreaming in her nursery, and a most peculiar photograph of the Rackham family all together, with Agnes Rackham’s head transplanted from a summer long ago, abnormally radiant, like one of those mysterious figures purported by spiritualists to be ghosts captured on the gelatin emulsion of film, which were never visible to the naked eye.
THIRTY-TWO
Sophie Rackham stands perched on a stool by the window and wiggles her bottom slightly, to test if the stool wobbles. It does, a little. Carefully, because she can’t see below her skirt, she shifts her feet for balance, until she’s secure.
I am going to grow bigger than my Mama, she thinks, not defiantly, nor competitively, but because she has fathomed that her body is different in nature from her mother’s, and not destined to be petite. It’s as if she was fed a morsel of Alice’s Wonderland cake when she was a baby, and instead of shooting up to the ceiling in seconds, she is expanding the tiniest amount each minute of her life, an expansion that won’t stop until she’s very big indeed — as big as Miss Sugar, or her father.
Soon, she won’t need this stool to look out at the world. Soon, Miss Sugar — or someone — will have to arrange for her to get new shoes, new underwear, new everything, because she’s growing so big that almost none of her clothes fit her comfortably. Perhaps she’ll be taken into the city again, where there exist whole shops devoted to the selling of a single object, and each day they manage to sell one, because of the marvellous abundance of people endlessly surging through the streets.
Sophie lifts her spyglass, curling her fingers around the ridges of its telescoped design. She extends it to its full length of fourteen inches and peers out at Chepstow Villas. Pedestrians are few; nothing much is happening. Not like in the city.
Behind her, the handle of the school-room door squeaks. Can this be Miss Sugar returning already, even though she’s only just gone to help Papa with his letters? Sophie can’t turn too quickly in case she falls off the stool; if her spyglass shattered she would suffer seven hundred and seventy-seven years of bad luck, she’s decided.
‘Hello, Sophie,’ says a deep male voice.
Sophie is amazed to see her father standing in the doorway. The last time he visited her here, Beatrice was still her nurse, and Mama was at the seaside. She wonders whether curtsying would make a good impression on him, but a wobble of the stool dissuades her.
‘Hello, Papa.’
He closes the door behind him, crosses the room and waits for her to step down onto the carpet. Nothing remotely like this has ever happened before. She blinks in his shadow, looking up at his frowning, smiling bearded face.
‘I have something for you,’ he says, his hands hidden behind his back.
Sophie’s thrill of anticipation is tempered with fear; she can’t help wondering if her father has come to tell her she’s to be removed to a home for naughty girls, the way her nurse used to threaten he might.
‘Here, then.’ He hands her a picture-frame the size of a large book. Enclosed behind the glass is the photograph of her taken by the man who claimed to be able to balance elephants on his nose. The Sophie Rackham captured by him is noble and colourless, all greys and blacks, like a statue, but awfully dignified and grown-up looking. The fake backdrop has turned into a real room, and the young lady’s eyes are beautiful and lifelike, with tiny lights glowing inside them. What a beautiful picture! If it had colours, it would be a painting.
‘Thank you, Papa,’ she says.
Her father smiles down at her, his lips forming the smile-shape jerkily, as though he’s unaccustomed to using the stiff muscles involved. Without speaking, he reveals another framed photograph from behind his back: a picture of himself this time, standing in front of the painted mountains and sky, gazing into the future.
‘What do you think?’ he asks her.
Sophie can barely believe her ears. Her father has never asked her what she thinks before, about anything. How is it possible that the universe could permit this? He is old and she is young, he is big and she is small, he is male and she is female, he is her father and she is only his daughter.
‘It’s very good, isn’t it, Papa?’ she says. She wants to tell him how real the illusion is, of him standing in front of those mountains, but she doesn’t trust herself not to get tongue-tied and betrayed by her puny vocabulary. Nevertheless, he seems to guess what she’s thinking.
‘Queer, isn’t it, the way w-we know that this photograph was made in an upstairs room in a crowded street, and yet here am I, standing in the w-wilds of Nature. But that’s what we must all do, Sophie: present ourselves in the best light. That’s w-what A-A-Art is for. And History too.’ His stutter is getting worse as his ability to condescend to her level of discourse reaches the end of its rope. He’s about to leave, she can tell.
‘What about the other picture, Papa?’ she can’t help asking as he takes a step backward. ‘The one of us all?’
‘It …it wasn’t a success,’ he says, with a pained look. ‘P-Perhaps we’ll go back one day, and try another. But I can’t p-promise.’
And, without further conversation or parting words, he turns on his heel and walks stiltedly out of the room.
Sophie stares at the closed door, and hugs her portrait to her chest. She can scarcely wait to show Miss Sugar.
Late that night, when Sophie has long been asleep and even the servants are going to bed, Sugar and William are still discussing business by lamp-light in the master’s study. It’s a never-exhausted subject, whose intricacy continues to deepen even when they’re too tired to speak of it anymore. A year ago, if someone had asked Sugar what the running of a perfumery might involve, she’d have replied: Grow some flowers, get them harvested, mix them up in a potage, add the essence to bottles of water or cakes of soap, affix a paper label to the results, and trundle it to shops by the cartload. Now, such abstruse questions as whether that swindler Crawley can be trusted to estimate the cost of converting beam engines from twelve to sixteen horsepower, or whether it’s worth
sinking more money into wooing the port authorities at Hull, can easily swallow up twenty minutes each, before the first item of unanswered correspondence is even lifted off the pile. Sugar has come to think that all professions are like this: simple to outsiders, inextricably complex to those within. Even whores, after all, can prattle about their trade for hours.
William is in a strange mood tonight. Not his usual bad-tempered self; more reasonable, and yet melancholy with it. The challenges of business, to which his response in the early days of his directorship was rash enthusiasm, and more recently pugnacious defiance, seem suddenly to have sapped his spirit. ‘Useless’, ‘profitless’, ‘futile’: these are words he resorts to frequently, with a heavy sigh, burdening Sugar with the task of re-inflating his confidence. ‘Do you really think so?’ he says, when she reassures him that Rackham’s star is still on the rise. ‘What a little optimist you are.’
Sugar, knowing she ought to be grateful he isn’t angry with her, is perversely tempted to snap at him. After what she’s endured with Sophie today, she has grievances of her own, and is in no mood to be his encouraging angel. When will someone reassure her that everything is going to be all right?
I’m carrying your child, William, she’s tempted to tell him. A boy, I’m sure. The heir you want so badly, for Rackham Perfumeries. No one need know it’s yours, except we two. You could say you got me from the Rescue Society, not knowing I was already with child. You could say I’m a good governess to Sophie and you can’t bring yourself to condemn me for sins committed in my former life. You’ve always said you don’t give a damn what other people think. And in years to come, when your son has taken after you, and tongues have stopped wagging, we could be married. It’s a gift from Fate, don’t you see?
‘I think you should leave things as they are,’ she advises, pulling herself back to the realities of beam engines. ‘In order to recoup your investment, you’d have to see ten years of good harvests and no expansion from your competitors. The risks are too great.’
This reminder of his rivals darkens William’s mood even further.
‘Ach, they’ll leave me flapping my arms in the wind from their coat-tails, Sugar,’ he says, half-heartedly miming the motion from where he sits slumped on the ottoman. ‘The twentieth century belongs to Pears and Yardley, I can feel it in my bones.’
Sugar chews her lower lip and suppresses an irritable sigh. If only she could set him to work drawing pictures of Australian kangaroos, or give him simpler sums to do! Would he reward her with a big smile then?
‘Let’s worry about the rest of our own century first, William,’ she suggests. ‘It’s what we’re living in, after all.’ To signal the importance of dealing with the correspondence item by item, in the order that it comes, she takes the next envelope off the pile and recites the sender’s name. ‘Philip Bodley.’
‘Leave that,’ groans William, allowing himself to slide further towards horizontal. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. With Rackham’s, I mean.’
‘It’s not trouble, though, is it?’ she murmurs sympathetically, trying to let him know with her voice that he can share his most secret woes with her, and she’ll fortify him, like the best wife in the world.
‘Trouble or not, it doesn’t concern you,’ he points out, not belligerently, but with mournful resignation. ‘Remember I do have some sort of life beyond this desk, my love.’
She takes the endearment at face value, or does her best to. After all, he’s alluding to how indispensable she is to his business, isn’t he? She picks up the next envelope.
‘Finnegan & Co, Tynemouth.’
He covers his face with his palms.
‘Tell me the worst,’ he groans.
She reads the letter aloud, pausing only when William’s snorts of annoyance and mutters of scepticism prevent him from hearing the words. Then, while he’s digesting the missive, she sits silent behind his desk, breathing shallowly, feeling the ominous distension against her tender stomach, feeling the gorge of aggrieved pride inching upwards.
‘Sophie was impossible this afternoon,’ she finally blurts.
William, preoccupied with the Solomonic challenge of deciding whether bone-idle dockhands are truly to blame for the delays in unloading shipments at Tynemouth or whether his supplier is lying to him again, blinks uncomprehendingly.
‘Sophie? Impossible?’
Sugar takes a deep breath, and the seams of her dress press in on her swollen bosom and belly. In a flash, she recalls Sophie’s excitement following the visit her father paid on her; her preening pride in the photograph; her babbly happiness and scatter-brained inattentiveness that gradually gave way, as the afternoon wore on, to tearful frustration at getting sums wrong and failing to memorise the names of flowers; her poor appetite at dinner-time and hungry fretfulness at bedtime; her general air of having been pumped full of a foreign substance she couldn’t digest.
‘She claims you told her we’re all going to go back to the photographers again, very soon,’ says Sugar. said no such thing,’ objects William, frowning as he comes to the conclusion that life is a morass of misconstruance and treachery: even one’s own child, as soon as one makes a generous gesture, calls trouble down upon one’s head!
‘She insists that you promised,’ says Sugar.
‘Well, she’s m-mistaken.’
Sugar rubs her tired eyes. The flesh of her fingers is so rough, and the flesh of her eyelids so tender, she feels she could do herself an injury.
‘I think,’ she says, ‘that if you mean to pay more attention to Sophie, it might be better to do it while I’m present.’
William rears up on his elbows and glowers at her, incredulous. First Sophie and now Sugar! How fertile with complications and inconvenience females can be!
‘Are you telling me,’ he enquires tersely, ‘w-when and under w-what circumstances I sh-should see my own daughter?’
Sugar tips her head in submission, softens her tone as much as she can. ‘Oh no, William, please don’t think that. You’re doing wonderfully well, and I admire you for it.’ Still he glowers; dear Christ, what else can she say? Should she keep her mouth shut now, or is there anything useful she can do with it? My my, you’ve learned a dictionary full of words, haven’t you, dear? Mrs Castaway taunts her from the past. And only two of them will do you the slightest bit of good in this life: ‘Yes’, and ‘Money’.
Sugar takes another deep breath. ‘Agnes’s requirements made things so difficult for you,’ she commiserates, ‘for so many years, and now it’s awkward, I know. And Sophie really is terribly grateful for any interest you show in her, and so am I. I only wonder if it might be possible for you …for us … to be together a little more often. As a …as a family. So to speak.’
She swallows hard, fearful that she’s gone too far. But wasn’t it he who wanted a photograph of the three of them together? What was that picture leading to, if not to this?
‘I’m doing all I p-possibly can,’ he warns her, ‘to keep this w-wretched household functioning.’
His self-pity tempts her to shoot back a volley of her own, but she manages to resist; he’s clenching his fists, his knuckles are white, his face is white, she ought to have known better, their future is about to shatter like a glass flung against a wall, God let her find the right words and she’ll never ask for anything more. With a rustle of skirts she slips from behind the desk and kneels at his side, laying her hand solicitously over his.
‘Oh, William, please let’s not call this household wretched. You have achieved great things this year, magnificent things.’ Heart thumping, she slides her arm around his neck, but thank God, he doesn’t push her aside or explode into a rage. ‘Of course what befell Agnes was a tragedy,’ she presses on, stroking his shoulder, ‘but it was a mercy too, in a way, wasn’t it? All that worry and … and scandal, for all those years, and now at last you’re free of it.’ He is slackening; first one of his hands, then the other, settles on her waist. What a narrow escape she’s had! �
�And Rackham’s is having such a superb year,’ she goes on. ‘Half the problems we’re facing are caused by its growth, we mustn’t forget that. And it’s a happy household you have here, honestly it is. All the servants are very friendly to me, William, and I can assure you, from what I’ve overheard, they’re quite contented, and they think the world of you … ‘
He gazes up into her face, confused, sorrowful, needy, like a masterless dog. She kisses him on the mouth, strokes the insides of his thighs, nuzzles her knobbly wrist against his soft genital bulge.
‘Remember what I told you when we first met, my love,’ she whispers. ‘I will do anything you ask of me. Anything?
Gently, he restrains her arm as she begins to gather up her skirts. ‘It’s late,’ he sighs. ‘We should be in bed.’
She takes hold of his hand and guides it through the warm cottony layers towards her naked flesh. ‘My opinion exactly.’ If he can only feel what’s between her legs for one second, she’ll have him. More than any other incitement, it’s a woman’s juices he finds irresistible.
‘No, I’m serious,’ he says. ‘Look at the time.’
Obediently, she consults the clock, and while her head is turned, he wriggles away from her embrace. It’s half past eleven. At Mrs Castaway’s, half past eleven was the peak of evening trade. Even in Priory Close, William would sometimes visit her as late as midnight, bringing life and noise into her quiescent rooms as he barged in from the street, his overcoat dappled with rain, his voice rich with desire. So closely attuned were they then, that she could tell by the way he embraced her exactly which orifice he would plump for.
‘Oh, Lord, I’m tired,’ he groans, as the grandfather clock tolls the half-hour. ‘No more correspondence, please. Back into the breach tomorrow, eh?’
Sugar kisses him on the forehead. ‘Whatever you say, William,’ she says.
Next morning, Sugar prepares Sophie as usual. She helps her dress, breakfasts with her, installs her at her writing-desk in the school-room. Mere minutes into the lesson, an upsurge of nausea prompts Sugar to hurry out the door, taking deep breaths of an atmosphere that is suddenly stiflingly suffused with the flavour of oversweet porridge and chloral. She pauses on the landing, so dizzy she doubts she can reach her bedroom before vomiting, but then the constitution of the air seems to change, and the urgency passes.