by Michel Faber
Merely piddling in Sophie’s presence wouldn’t be so bad: a shared intimacy that might compensate, to some extent, for the erosion of dignity. But the pangs in her bowels are fearsome, and she’s loath to unleash a noisy flux of stink into the room, for that would ruin beyond repair the image of Miss Sugar the serene custodian of knowledge, and brand upon Sophie’s mind (and nose!) the gross reality of …of Miss Sugar the sick animal.
Hugging herself tight and biting her lip to suppress the cramps, she stares at the wall. A disgruntled employee has attempted to gouge a message into the ceramic: but the hardness of the surface has proved too obdurate.
Suddenly she must — absolutely must — sit down. Her stomach is skewered with agony, and every inch of her skin prickles with cold sweat; the flesh of her buttocks, bared in desperate haste as she claws handfuls of her dress onto her bent back and yanks down her pantalettes, is wet and slippery as a peeled pear. She lets herself drop heavily onto the seat, and with a stifled cry of anguish she slumps forward, her bonnet falling to the tiled floor, her hair unravelling after it. Blood and other hot, slick material erupts and slithers between her thighs.
‘Oh God!’ she cries. ‘God help me …!’ and a flush of dizziness seems to flip her upside down before she loses consciousness altogether.
A moment later – surely only a moment later? — she wakes on the floor, sprawled on the chilly damp tiles, her thighs slimy, her heartbeat shaking her body, her ankle throbbing as if caught in a steel trap. Craning her head, she sees Sophie cowering in a corner, face white as the stoneware, eyes huge and terrified.
‘Help me, Sophie!’ she calls, in an anxious hiss.
The child jerks forward, like a doll pulled by a string, but her expression is contorted by impotence. ‘I–I’ll go and fetch someone, Miss,’ she stammers, pointing at the door, beyond which lurk all the strong men and serviceable ladies with which her Papa’s factory is so well-stocked.
‘No! No! Sophie, please? begs Sugar in a frantic whisper, thrusting up her hands as she flounders in a tangle of her own skirts. ‘You must try.’
For another instant, Sophie looks to the outside world for rescue. Then she runs forwards, seizes her governess by the wrists, and heaves with all her strength.
‘Well,’ says William, when the goodbyes have been spoken and Lady Bridgelow has been borne away. ‘How did you like that, Sophie?’
‘It was most wondrous, Papa,’ replies the child, in a spiritless voice.
They’re seated in the Rackham carriage, their clothing exhaling the sweet scent of soap into the confines of the cabin, their knees almost touching, as Cheesman ferries them away from Lambeth. The visit has been a resounding success, at least in the estimation of Lady Bridgelow, who confided in William that she’d never had an experience that thrilled quite so many of her senses at once, and she could well imagine how it might overwhelm a person in less than robust health. Now he is left with Sugar, who does indeed look green around the gills, and Sophie, who looks as if she’s been subjected to an ordeal rather than given the treat of her life.
William settles back in his seat, rubbing his knuckles ruefully. How perverse his daughter is! One cross word and she’s sullen for the rest of the day. Disheartening though it may be to admit it, it’s highly likely the child has inherited Agnes’s unforgiving streak.
As for Sugar, she’s dozing where she sits — actually dozing! Her head lolls backward, her mouth is slack, it’s frankly disagreeable to behold. Her dress is rumpled, her hair is haloed with loose wisps, her bonnet’s slightly askew. Sugar would do well to take a page from the book of Lady Bridgelow, who, from the moment she alighted from her carriage to the moment she waved William adieu, was immaculate and bright as a button. What an unusual person Constance is! A model of dignity and poise, and yet so full of life! A woman in a million …
‘Waterloo Bridge again, Sophie,’ says William, offering his daughter the marvels of the world’s greatest river a second time that day.
Sophie looks out of the window. Once more she rests her chin on her forearms and examines those turbulent waters in which even big boats don’t look quite safe.
Then, glancing up, she sees something genuinely miraculous: an elephant floating through the sky, an elephant keeping still as a statue. SALMON’S TEA is the message emblazoned on its bulbous flank, and it dawdles above the rooftops and chimneys on its way to those parts of the city where all the people are.
‘What do you think, Sophie?’ says William, squinting up at the balloon. ‘Should Rackham’s get one of those?’
That evening, while William makes a start on the day’s accumulated correspondence, the remainder of his household does its best to return to normal.
A few doors farther along the landing, Sugar has refused, as gracefully as she can, Rose’s offer to put Sophie to bed. Instead, she asks for a tub of hot water to be delivered to her own bedroom, a request which Rose has no difficulty understanding, having noted that Miss Sugar looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.
The day has been long, long, long. Oh God, how can a man be so blind to the needs of others? Cruelly oblivious to how much Sugar and Sophie yearned to go home, William protracted the outing to an unbearable length. First: lunch in a restaurant in the Strand, where Sugar almost fainted in the airless heat and was obliged to eat underdone lamb cutlets that William praised, from previous acquaintance, as divine; then a visit to a glover; then a visit to another glover, when the first one couldn’t provide Sophie with a soft enough kidskin; then a visit to a shoe-maker, where William was finally rewarded with a smile from his daughter, when she stood up in her new boots and took three steps to the looking-glass. If only he’d left it at that! But no, encouraged by that smile, he took her to Berry & Rudd, the wine merchants in James Street, to get her weighed on their great scales. ‘Six generations of royal families, both English and French, have been weighed on these, Sophie!’ he told her, while the proprietors leered in the background. ‘They’re only for persons of great consequence!’ Then, as a final treat, the promised climax to the afternoon: a visit to Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms.
‘What a jolly threesome we are today!’ he declared, for an instant the very image of his own father, dangerously over-filled with the gas of bonhomie at Christmas. Then, when Sophie was occupied with the earnest study of a dessert menu the size of her upper body, he leaned forward and murmured close to Sugar’s ear, ‘D’you think she’s happy now?’
‘Very happy, I’m sure,’ Sugar replied. Only when leaning forward in her seat was she made aware, by a sharp sting of pain, that the hair of her genitals was glued to her pantalettes with dried blood. ‘But I think she’s had enough.’
‘Enough of what?’
‘Enough pleasure for one day.’
Even when they were back in the Rackham house, the ordeal was not quite over. In a virtual replication of the aftermath of her first visit to the city weeks before, Sophie was violently ill, vomiting up the same mixture of cocoa, cake and undigested dinner, and then, inevitably, there were tears.
‘Are you sure, Miss Sugar,’ said Rose at bedtime, hesitating at the door of Miss Rackham’s room, ‘you wouldn’t like me to help you?’
‘No thank you, Rose,’ she said.
Whereupon – finally — seven hours and forty minutes after Sugar’s fall from a blood-spattered earthenware basin onto the floor of the latrine of the Rackham Soap Works — she and Sophie are allowed to go to bed.
Other than holding Sophie’s nightshift and handing it over, there’s nothing Sugar can do to assist; she leans heavily against the bed while the child undresses and climbs in.
‘I am very grateful to you, Sophie,’ she says hoarsely. ‘You are my little rescuer.’ As soon as the words have left her lips, she despises herself for making light of the child’s courage. It’s the sort of patronising remark William might make, treating Sophie as if she were a clever little dog performing an amusing trick.
Sophie lays her head back on
her pillow. Her cheeks are mottled with exhaustion, her nose bright red. She hasn’t even said her prayers. Her lips twitch to ask a question.
‘What’s an imbecile, Miss?’
Sugar strokes Sophie’s hair, smoothing it back from her hot forehead. ‘It’s a person who’s very stupid,’ she replies. Burning to ask a couple of questions of her own – Did you look into the water-closet’s basin before you pulled the handle to flush it? And what did you see? — she manages to resist. ‘Your father didn’t mean to call you that,’ she says. ‘He was angry. And he hasn’t been well.’
Sophie shuts her eyes. She doesn’t want to hear any more about grownups who aren’t well. It’s high time the universe was restored to its normal function.
‘You mustn’t worry about anything, little one,’ says Sugar, blinking tears off her eye-lashes. ‘Everything will be all right now.’
Sophie turns her head aside, burying her cheek deep in her pillow.
‘You won’t fall down again, will you, Miss Sugar?’ she demands, in a strange tone between a sulk and a croon.
‘I’ll be very careful from now on, Sophie. I promise.’
She touches Sophie lightly on the shoulder, a forlorn gesture before turning to leave, but suddenly the child rears up in bed and throws her arms tight around Sugar’s neck.
‘Don’t die, Miss Sugar! Don’t die!’ she wails, as Sugar, poorly balanced, almost pitches headlong into the child’s bed.
‘I won’t die,’ she swears, staggering, kissing Sophie’s hair. ‘I won’t die, I promise!’
Not ten minutes later, with Sophie soundly asleep, Sugar sits in a large tub of steaming warm water in front of the fire. The room no longer smells of burnt paper and glue, but of lavender soap and wet earth: Rose, God bless her, has finally managed to prise the window open, breaking the stubborn seal of paint.
Sugar washes thoroughly, repetitiously, doggedly. She squeezes sponge-fuls of soothing water over her back and bosom, squeezes the sea creature’s porous skeleton until it’s like a damp powder puff, then presses it to her eyes. The rims are sore from weeping: she really must stop.
Every now and then she looks down, fearing what she might see, but there’s a reassuring film of suds that disguises the pinkish tinge of the water, and any clots of blood have either sunk to the bottom or are hidden inside the froth. Her injured foot is very swollen, she knows, but it’s invisible to her, and she fancies it hurts less than it ought to. Her cracked ribs (she strokes a lathered palm over them) are almost healed, the bruises vivid. The worst is over, the crisis has passed.
She reclines into the tub as deeply as its circumference allows, snivelling again. She bites her lower lip until the flesh throbs, and finally she has her sorrow under control; the convulsing water settles into stillness — or as still as water can be with a living body in it. In the opaque moat that shimmers between her legs, every heartbeat makes the water quiver like the lapping of a tide.
A few doors along the landing, at the same time as Sugar is taking herself to bed, William opens a letter from Doctor Curlew that begins thus:
Dear Rackham,
I’ve deliberated long and hard whether to write or keep silent. I don’t doubt you are sick to death of my “meddling”. Nevertheless there is something I could scarcely fail to notice when I attended your daughter’s governess after her mishap, and my resolution to hold my tongue about it has caused me no little botheration since …
This preamble is longer than the story itself, which takes only one sentence to tell.
In Sugar’s bed, in the dark, many people are under the sheets with her, talking to her in her sleep.
Tell us a story, Shush, in that fancy voice of yours.
What sort of story? she asks, peering into the dappled waters of her dream, trying to put names to the indistinct faces submerged beneath.
Something with revenge in it, the voices giggle, irredeemably coarse, doomed to live out their lives in Hell. And bad words. Bad words sound funny when you say them, Sugar.
The giggles echo and re-echo, accumulating on top of one another until they’re a cacophony. Sugar swims away from them, swims through the streets of an underwater city, and even in her dream she thinks this odd because she has never learned to swim. Yet it seems a skill that comes without teaching, and she can do it without taking her night-gown off, propelling her body through sewer-like alleyways and bright transparent thoroughfares. If this is London, its population has floated away like debris, and has ended up somewhere far above, a scum of human flotsam tarnishing the sky. Only those people who are of consequence to Sugar have remained below, it seems.
Clara? calls a voice from a nearby, quite the loveliest and most musical voice Sugar has ever heard.
No, Agnes, she replies, turning a corner. I’m not Clara. Who are you, then?
Don’t look in my face. I will help you, but don’t look in my face.
Agnes is lying supine on the cobbles of a narrow lane, naked, her flesh white as marble. One thin arm is draped across her bosom, the other crosses it downwards, hiding her pubic triangle under her childish hand.
Here, says Sugar, shedding her night-gown and draping it over Agnes. Let this be our secret.
Bless you, bless you, says Agnes, and suddenly the watery world of London disappears, and the two of them are in bed together, warm and dry, tucked up snug as sisters, gazing into each other’s faces.
William says you are a fantasy, murmurs Agnes, reaching forward to touch Sugar’s flesh, to banish her doubt. A trick of my imagination.
Never mind what William says.
Please, my dear Sister: tell me your name.
Sugar feels a hand between her legs, gently cupping the sore part.
My name is Sugar, she says.
THIRTY-FOUR
There is no name written on either of the two envelopes that Sugar finds slipped under the door of her bedroom the following day; one is blank, the other marked ‘To Whom It May Concern’.
It’s half past twelve in the afternoon. She has just returned from the morning’s lessons in the school-room, where Sophie let her know from the outset that there must be no disruption, distraction or idleness to spoil the serious business of learning. Yesterday was all very interesting, but today must be different — or rather, today must be the same as any other day.
‘The fifteenth century,’ recited Sophie, with the air of one who has been entrusted with the responsibility for saving that epoch from slatternly neglect, ‘was an age of five principal events: printing was invented; Consternople was taken by the Turks; there was in England a civil war that lasted thirty years; the Spaniards drove the Moors back to Africa; and America was discovered by Christopher … Christopher …’ At which point she looked up at Sugar, wanting nothing more nor less than the name of an Italian explorer.
‘Columbus, Sophie.’
All morning, despite being tempted a dozen times to burst into tears, and despite the steady leak of blood into the makeshift chauffoir pinned to her pantaloons, Sugar has been the perfect governess, playing the role exactly as her pupil required. And, in a fitting conclusion to the morning’s business, she and Sophie have just shared a meal of sieved vegetables and milky rice pudding, the blandest lunch they’ve yet been served, evidence that someone must have informed the kitchen staff of Miss Rackham’s distressed digestion. The disappointed look that Sugar and Sophie exchanged when Rose put this steaming pap in front of them was by far the most intimate moment they’ve shared since the day began.
Now Sugar returns to her room, anticipating the blessed relief of removing the blood-stained cloth from between her legs and replacing it with a clean one. Last night’s washtub, sadly, has been removed, although she could hardly have expected Rose to leave it sitting there, a body of cold water with a glutinous red sediment on the bottom.
Postponing her creature comforts for a minute, she stoops clumsily to pick up the envelopes. The unmarked one, she expects, is a note from Rose informing her, in case she had
n’t noticed, that the window is unsealed. Sugar opens the envelope, and finds a bank-note for ten pounds and an unsigned message scrawled on plain paper. In a majuscule, childish script that might have been written left-handed, it says:
It has come to my notice that you are with child. It is therefore impossible for you to remain as my daughter’s governess. Your wages are enclosed; please be prepared to leave your room, with all belongings and effects, on the first of March of this year (1/3/76). I hope the Letter of Introduction (see other envelope) may be of some use to you in the future; you will note I have taken a liberty re your identity. The fact is that in my opinion, if you are to get anywhere in life, it is necessary to have a proper name. So, I have given you one.
Further discussion of this matter is out of the question. Do not attempt to come and see me. Kindly keep to your room whenever the house is visited.
Sugar re-folds the sheet of paper in its original order of creases and, with some difficulty, for her fingers have become cold and numb, she replaces it in its envelope. Then she opens the lavender-tinted envelope marked ‘To Whom It May Concern’, sliding her thumb along its flap to avoid tearing its formal integrity. The sharp edge of the paper cuts her flesh, but she doesn’t feel it; she worries only that she’ll stain the envelope or its contents. Balanced on her crutch, licking her thumb every few seconds before the hair-fine line of blood has a chance to well into a loose droplet, she extracts the letter and reads it. It is written, with care, on Rackham letterhead, and signed with William’s name, as neatly as any of her forgeries.