The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  As she rips and rends, her body convulses with infantile sobs, an incessant rapid spasming, and the tears run down her cheeks. Does he think she’s blind, and without a sense of smell? He stank of more than mud when he stumbled into the house, supported on either side by Bodley and Ashwell; he stank of cheap perfume, the sort worn by whores. He stank of sexual connection — a connection he’d probably say (in his favourite phrase lately) had ‘nothing to do with’ her! Damn him, snoring off his debauches in that bedroom where she’s never been invited! She ought to burst in on him with a knife, slit his belly open and watch the contents spill out in a torrent of gore!

  After a while, her sobs subside, and her hands grow weary of clawing the pages. She slumps against her dresser, surrounded by crumpled wads of paper, her naked toes lost under them. What if William should come in and find her like this? She crawls forward on her knees and picks up the paper-balls, tossing them into the fireplace. They’re consumed at once, flaring for the merest instant before shrivelling into ash.

  Better she should be burning Agnes’s diaries than her Christmas gifts from William. The volumes of Shakespeare are harmless, whereas the diaries could betray her any day or night. Where’s the good in continuing to hide them under her bed, when she’s gleaned all she can from them, and they can only cause trouble? Agnes won’t be back to reclaim them, that’s for certain.

  Sugar fetches one of the diaries into the light. Over the months, every speck of dried mud has been rubbed off, so that the delicate volume no longer looks as though it was rescued from a grave of damp earth, but merely looks ancient, like a relic of a bygone century. Sugar opens it, and the ruined fragments of its absurdly dainty padlock and silver chain dangle like jewellery over her knuckles.

  Dear Diary,

  I do hope we shall be good friends.

  Sugar flips the pages, witnessing once more Agnes Pigott’s struggles to be reconciled to her new name.

  It’s only what my governess calls an appelation, after all, for the conveniance of the World At Large. I am foolish to fret so. GOD knows what my real name is, doesn’t He?

  Sugar lays the diary to one side; she’ll destroy all of them but this one, the very first, which is small enough to be hidden out of harm’s way. She can’t help thinking there would be something … evil about destroying the first words Agnes entrusted to posterity. It would be like pretending she never existed; or, no: that she began to exist only when her death provided the meat for a newspaper obituary.

  Sugar extracts another diary from under the bed. It happens to be the final Abbots Langley chronicle, written by a fifteen-year-old Agnes preparing to go home and nurse her mother back to health. Dried flower-petals flutter out of its pages to the floor, crimson and white, weightless. Agnes Unwin’s valedictory poem reads thus:

  Our happy Joys of Sisterhood are done

  The Sun is through the redd’ning Heavens pushing

  Our little race of Learning now is run –

  For none can thwart the Future onward rushing!

  Squaring her jaw, Sugar consigns the diary to the flames. It smoulders and hisses softly. She looks away.

  Another diary is fetched from its hiding-place. Its first entry relates that there has been no reply from ‘the Swiss Post Office’ on the matter of where to send Miss Eugenie Soon-To-Be-Schleswig’s scrapbook of kittens. This volume, too, can go on the flames, when the first is consumed.

  Sugar picks up a third volume. Liebes Tagebuch … it announces on its opening page. Another for the fire.

  She picks up a fourth volume. It dates from the early years of Agnes’s marriage to William, and begins with an unreadable hallucination of demonic harassment, decorated in the margins with hieroglyphical eyes scrawled in clotted menstrual blood.

  A few pages further on, a convalescing Agnes reflects:

  I had thought, while I was being schooled, that my old Life was being kept warm for me, like a favourite dish steaming under a silver cover, waiting for my return Home. I now know that this was a tragic dillusion. My step-father was plotting all the while, to kill my dear Mother inchmeal with his cruelty, and to sell my poor Self to the first man that would take me off his hands. He chose William on purpose, I can see that now! Had he selected a suitor of a loftier Class, he would have been for ever running in to me, at the places where the Upper Ten Thousand meet. But he knew that William would drag me down from the heights, and that once I was sunk as low as I am now, he need never set eyes on me again!

  Well, I’m glad! Yes, glad! He wasn’t my father anyway. Admittance to the grandest Ball would not be reward enough to quell my revulsion at his company.

  All through the ages it has been like this: Females the pawns of male treachery. But one day, the Truth will be told.

  The odour of perfumed paper turning to punk begins to permeate the room. Sugar glances at the fireplace. The diary’s shape is still intact, but glows livid orange at the edges. She fetches another from under the bed, and opens it at random. It’s an entry she hasn’t read before, undated, but its ink is rich blue and fresh-looking.

  Dear Holy Sister,

  I know You have been watching over me, and please dont think I’m not grateful. In my sleep You assure me All will be well, and I am comforted and rest in peace against your breast; yet on waking I am once again afraid, and all Your words melt away from me as if they were snowflakes fallen in the night. I yearn for our next meeting, a bodily meeting in the world outside my dreams. Will it be soon? Will it be soon? Make a mark upon this page — a touch of Your lips, afinger-print, any sign of Your presence — and I will know not to give up Hope.

  With a grunt of distress, Sugar throws the diary into the fireplace. Its impact sends a shower of sparks flying, and it comes to rest on top of the still-smouldering carcass of the other one, but standing precariously upright. This, as far as the scientific principle of ignition is concerned, is by far the more efficient posture: the pages are licked into flame at once.

  She scrabbles under her bed once more, and what emerges is not another of Agnes’s diaries, but her own novel. How her heart sinks to see it! This raggedy thing, bulging out of its stiff cardboard jacket: it’s the embodiment of futility. All its crossed-out titles – Scenes from the Streets, A Cry from the Streets, An Angry Cry from an Unmarked Grave, Women Against Men, Death in the House of Ill Repute, Who Has Now the Upper Hand?, The Phoenix, The Claws of the Phoenix, The Embrace of the Phoenix, All Ye Who Enter Here, The Wages of Sin, Come Kiss the Mouth of Hell, and, finally, The Fall and Rise of Sugar — are tainted by her own juvenile delusions.

  She balances the sheaf of papers on its torn and frayed spine and allows it to fall open where it will.

  ‘But I am a father!’ pleads one of the novel’s doomed males, struggling impotently against the bonds the heroine has tied around his wrists and ankles. ‘I have a son and a daughter, waiting for me at home!’

  ‘Betteryou had thought of that before,’ said I, cutting through his shirt with my razor-sharp dress-making shears. Very intent I was upon my work, swivelling the scissors back and forth across his hairy belly.

  ‘See?’ I said, holding up a limp scrap of white cotton in the shape of a butterfly, its two halves held together by a shirt-button. ‘Isn’t that pretty?’ ‘Forpity’s sake, think of my children!’

  I leaned upon his chest, digging my elbows as hard as I could into his flesh, while speaking directly into his face, so close that my hot breath caused his eyes to blink. ‘There is no hope for children in this world,’ I informed him, hissing with fury. ‘If male, they will become filthy swine like you. If female, they will be defiled by filthy swine like you. The best thing for children is not to be born; the next-best thing is to die while they are still innocent.’

  Sugar groans in shame at the ravings of her old self. She ought to throw them on the flames, but she can’t. And the two sacrificed diaries of Agnes’s are still burning oh-so-slowly, giving off a pungent smell and smothering the coals with a veil of wilting black
card. There’s simply too great a volume of illicit paper here; it would take hours, days, to burn it all, and the smoke and stench would attract attention from the household beyond. With a sigh of resignation, Sugar shoves her novel, and the handful of diaries she’d condemned to extinction, back under the bed.

  In the middle of the night, from the heart of the dark, a hand is laid on Sugar’s thigh and shakes her gently from her sleep. She groans anxiously, anticipating her mother’s words: ‘You needn’t shiver any more… But her mother is silent. Instead, a deep male voice whispers through the gloom.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sugar,’ he is saying. ‘Please forgive me.’

  She opens her eyes, but finds she’s burrowed wholly under the sheets, her head wrapped up in linen, her arms wrapped around her abdomen. Gasping, she emerges into the air, squinting into the radiance of an oil lamp.

  ‘What? What?’ she mutters.

  ‘Forgive me for my oafish behaviour,’ repeats William. ‘I wasn’t myself.’

  Sugar sits up in bed and runs one hand through her tangled hair. Her palm is hot and sweaty, the hidden flesh of her belly feels suddenly cool for the lack of her hands upon it. William places the lamp on top of her dresser, then sits at the foot of her bed, his brow and nose casting black shadows over his eyes and mouth as he speaks.

  ‘I collapsed in town. Too much to drink. You must forgive me.’

  His voice, for all its imperative message, sounds flat and morbid, as if he’s counselling her against thinking ill of the dead.

  ‘Yes, yes of course, my love,’ she replies, leaning forward to take his hand.

  ‘I’ve been considering your opinion,’ he continues dully, ‘that it would be beneficial for Sophie to have more … outings in the company of …of us both.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ says Sugar. She notes the time on the clock above his head: it’s half past two in the morning. What in God’s name does he have in mind at this hour? A spin in the carriage, the three of them in their night-gowns, admiring the gas-lit streets of suburbia while Cheesman serenades them with a lewd ditty?

  ‘So, I’ve a-arranged …’ says William, extracting his hand from hers and fiddling with his beard as his stammer begins to take hold. ‘I-I’ve arranged a visit to m-my s-soap factory. For you and S-Sophie. Tomorrow a-afternoon.’

  For an instant, Sugar’s spirits are buoyed up on a wave of dizzy optimism almost indistinguishable from her usual morning nausea. Everything is falling into place! He’s seen the light at last! He’s realised that the only way to snatch happiness from the jaws of misery is to stay together, and damn what the world thinks! Now is the moment to throw herself into his arms, guide the palm of his hand to the curve of her belly, and tell him that immortality for the Rackham name – his immortality — is assured. You think there are only two of us here in this room, she could say. But there are three!

  Hesitating on the brink of this outburst, the words on the tip of her tongue, she seeks out his eyes in the inky shadows of his brow, and sees only a fugitive glint. Then the last thing he said begins to niggle at her wakening brain.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon …’ she echoes. ‘You mean … today?’ ‘Yes.’

  She blinks repeatedly. Her eyelids feel like they’re lined with grit. ‘Couldn’t it be another day?’ she suggests, very soft, to keep her voice sweet. ‘You’d benefit from a lie-in, don’t you think, after … well, after the night you’ve had?’

  ‘Yes,’ he concedes, ‘but this visit was a-a-arranged qu-quite some time ago.’

  Sugar, still blinking, strains to comprehend. ‘But surely it’s for you to decide–’

  ‘There’s another p-person coming too. S-someone whom I’m loath to i-inconvenience.’ ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes.’ He cannot look her in the eye.

  ‘I see.’ hoped you would.’ He reaches out to touch her. The aroma of alcohol still exudes from his pores, released in a waft from his armpits as he leans across the bed to lay his palm on her shoulder. His stubby fingers smell of semen and the perfume of street-walkers.

  ‘I haven’t told you o-often enough,’ he says hoarsely, ‘w-what a treasure you are.’

  She sighs, and squeezes his hand briefly, letting it go before he has a chance to lock his fingers into hers.

  ‘We’d better sleep, then,’ she says, turning her face away and dropping her cheek against the pillow. ‘My eyes, as you’ve pointed out, are bloodshot and ugly.’

  She keeps still, feigning cataleptic exhaustion, staring at his shadow on the wall. She sees the magnified black shape of his hand hovering in the space above her, trembling in its arrested impulse to soothe the anger from her flesh. The stale air of her little bedroom, already muggy with burnt writing-paper, burnt book-binding thread, and the scent of betrayal, grows intolerable with the tension of his yearning to make amends. If she could force herself to sit up for just one second, ruffle his hair and kiss him on the forehead, that would probably do the trick. She nuzzles her cheek harder into her pillow, and closes her fist under it.

  ‘Good night,’ says William, getting to his feet. She doesn’t reply. He picks up the lamp and carries its light out of her room, closing the door gently behind him.

  Next day, shortly after lunch, Sophie emerges from the school-room, ready to accompany her father and Miss Sugar to the factory where soap is made. Her face has been washed with that same soap this morning, by Rose (for Miss Sugar is slightly too crippled to wash and dress anyone just at the moment). Rose has a different way of combing and pinning Sophie’s hair and when Miss Sugar sees it she looks as though she wants to take the pins out and begin from the beginning. But she can’t because Rose is watching and Father is waiting and Miss Sugar is wrestling with her crutch, trying to walk in such a way as to pretend she hardly needs it and is just taking it along in case she gets tired.

  Sophie has been thinking a lot about Miss Sugar lately. She has come to the conclusion that Miss Sugar has another life beyond her duties as a governess and a secretary to Father, and that this other life is rather complicated and unhappy. This conclusion came to her quite suddenly, a few days ago, when Sophie peeked through the crack in her school-room door and witnessed her governess being carried up the stairs by Papa and Rose. Once long ago, on an occasion when Sophie disobeyed Nurse’s command not to peek out of the nursery door, she saw her Mama being carried up those same stairs, looking remarkably similar to Miss Sugar: unladylike, all rumpled skirts and dangly limbs, with only the whites of her eyes showing. There exist, Sophie has decided, two Miss Sugars: the self-possessed custodian of all knowledge, and an overgrown child in trouble.

  When the time comes to descend the stairs, Miss Sugar attempts two or three steps with the crutch, then hands the crutch to Sophie to hold while she leans heavily on the banister the rest of the way. Her face has no expression on it except for a half or perhaps a quarter smile (Sophie has just been introduced to fractions) and she gets to the bottom without showing much effort, although her forehead is twinkly with sweat.

  ‘No, I’m quite all right,’ she says to Father as he looks her up and down. He nods and allows Letty to dress him in his overcoat, then strides out of the door without a backward glance.

  Father is seated inside the carriage before you can say Jack Robinson. Sophie and Miss Sugar approach more slowly, the governess limping across the carriage-way with that same quarter-smile on her reddening face. Cheesman stares at her with his big head tilted to one side, his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat. His eyes and Miss Sugar’s meet, and Sophie understands at once that Miss Sugar hates him.

  ‘’Ere now, Miss Sophie,’ says Cheesman when Sophie comes within arm’s length and, reaching down, he snatches her off the carriage-way, through the cabin door and onto her seat, with a single sweep of his strong arms.

  ‘Allow me, Miss Sugar,’ he grins, as if he means to sweep her up too, but he merely extends a steadying hand as Miss Sugar climbs into the cabin. She’s almost safely inside, when she sways back a little — and instantly Chee
sman’s hands are on her waist, then they disappear behind her bottom. A rustling sound issues from Miss Sugar’s horse-hair bustle as the coachman pushes her up.

  ‘Take care, Cheesman,’ hisses Miss Sugar as she claws the coach’s upholstery and pulls herself inside.

  ‘Oh, I always do, Miss Sugar,’ he replies, bowing so that his smirk is hidden in the upturned collars of his coat.

  In a jiffy, they’re on the move, with horse-harness jingling and the ground shaking the frame of the carriage. They’re going all the way to a place called Lambeth! Miss Sugar has shown it to her on a map (not a very good or clear map, it must be admitted; it seems that the persons who make school-books are more interested in drawing ancient Mesopotamia at the time of Asshurbanipal than the London of today). Anyway, Lambeth is on the other side of the River Thames, the side that doesn’t have the Rackham house and the church and the park and the fountain and Mister Scofield & Tophie’s photography shop and Lockheart’s Cocoa Rooms where she ate the cake that made her sick, and all the rest of the known world.

  ‘You are turned out very nicely, Sophie,’ says her Father. She blushes with pleasure, even though Miss Sugar frowns and looks down at her own shoes. One of those shoes is very tight, swollen by the sore foot inside. The leather is stretched and shiny, like a ham. Miss Sugar needs new shoes, or at least one. Sophie needs new shoes, too; her feet are very pinched, even though she hasn’t fallen downstairs or anything of that sort: only grown bigger, from age. Wouldn’t it be good if Miss Sugar suggested a visit to a shoe shop, after the visit to Papa’s soap factory? If time is short, it would be a sensibler place to go than a Cocoa Room, because food ceases to exist as soon as you swallow it, whereas a well-fitting pair of shoes is a lasting boon for the feet.