by Michel Faber
How smug you are, Reader, if you are a member of the sex that boasts a scrag of gristle in your trousers! You fancy that this book will amuse you, thrill you, rescue you from the horror of boredom (the profoundest horror that your privileged sex must endure) and that, having consumed it like a sweetmeat, you will be left at liberty to carry on exactly as before! Exactly as you have done since Eve was first betrayed in the Garden! But this book is different, dear Reader. This book is a KNIFE. Keep your wits about you; you will need them!
Oh God, oh God: how is it possible that his daughter has fallen into the clutches of such a viper? Ought he to have guessed sooner than today? Would another man have come to his senses faster? It’s so obvious now, so terrifyingly self-evident, that Sugar was a madwoman: her unnatural intellect, her sexual depravity, her masculine appetite for business, her reptilian skin …Oh God, and what about the time she crawled, crablike, in pursuit of him, squirting water from her quim! What was he thinking of, to take this for an arousing bit of tomfoolery, an erotic parlour frolic, when any fool would recognise it as the bestial cavortings of a monster!
How is it possible, though, that God saw fit to install two madwomen in the bosom of his household, when other men are altogether spared? What has he done to deserve–? But no, such questions are a self-indulgence, and fail to solve the problem at hand. His daughter has been abducted, and is being conveyed, likely as not, towards a pitiful fate. Even if Sophie manages to slip out of her captor’s grasp, how long can a defenceless innocent survive in the nefarious maze of London? There are predators on every street corner … Not a week goes by that The Times doesn’t print reports of a well-dressed child being lured into an alleyway by a kindly-looking matron, then ‘skinned’ — stripped of its boots and clothes — and left for dead. Better by far if Sugar holds Sophie to ransom; whatever she asks, short of ruining him altogether, he will gladly pay!
William presses his thumbs against his eyes, and squeezes. Haunting his brain like a lurid lantern-slide is his recollection of his daughter weeping, her face contorted with grief as she beseeched him not to send Miss Sugar away. Her tiny hands, too fearful to clutch at him, clutched instead at the edges of her little writing-desk, as if it were a flimsy boat being tossed upon a tumultuous sea. Is this the picture he must carry with him to the grave? The photograph of Sophie taken at Scholefield & Tovey’s studio, which he offered to hand over to the police for the purposes of a ‘WANTED’ poster, is nowhere to be found — stolen by Sugar, evidently. Instead, he’s had to take scissors to the ‘family’ portrait, and snip Sophie’s face from it, despite knowing from his own photographic experience that an image of such tiny dimensions, when enlarged and retouched by careless strangers, is unlikely to bear much resemblance to his daughter …
But again, these are secondary considerations, mere details and distractions, which skirt around the central horror of his predicament. Yesterday his daughter was safely present and accounted for, shyly playing a tune on the piano, taking her first hesitant steps towards forgiving him, towards understanding that he did have her best interests at heart after all; today, she is gone, and his skull resounds with the memory of her weeping.
It’s beyond belief, how easily Sugar has committed this crime! Was there really no one to stand in her way? He’s interrogated his entire household, interrogated them no less thoroughly than the police, he’ll wager. The female servants know nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, swear they were too busy with their appointed tasks to notice the abduction. How can they have the temerity, the gall to assert this? The house is virtually unpeopled, yet it’s swarming with servants — what do they do all day, if not laze in armchairs and read tuppenny books in front of the kitchen fire? Could not one of their number be spared from these arduous activities to make sure that the last female Rackham didn’t get spirited away by a lunatic?
The males were only marginally more helpful. Shears confirmed that Miss Sugar didn’t leave by the front gate: a thousand thanks, Mr Shears, for this vital information! Cheesman said that he saw, at a distance, Miss Sugar and Miss Sophie go out for a walk, but thought nothing of it, since they often did so in the afternoons. Hearing this, William was sorely tempted to berate the fellow for his lack of imagination, especially since Cheesman knew damn well that this governess was no governess at all. Ah, but there’s the rub: Cheesman’s illicit knowledge. As the only Rackham employee with a prior awareness of Sugar’s true origins, Cheesman could make things damn awkward for him now that the police are involved. So, instead of suggesting that any man with a grain of sense would have asked Sugar a few penetrating questions, William contented himself with enquiring if Cheesman had happened to notice how the governess was dressed, and if she was carrying any luggage.
‘I ain’t much of a one for noticing the clothes on a woman, sir,’ said Cheesman, scratching his sandpapery chin. ‘An’ as for luggidge …I didn’t see none o’ that, neither.’
A search of Sugar’s bedroom confirmed the coachman’s impression: a full suitcase was found standing abandoned near the door. Its contents, when disgorged all over the floor by an incensed William, proved to be everything a woman might need if leaving home: grooming utensils, night-gown, underwear, toiletries (Rackham’s), the green dress she wore when first she met him. No clue, however, to where she might have gone.
William’s hand has begun to tremble, and he hears the fluttery rustle of paper in his lap — the maiden page of Sugar’s manuscript he still holds gripped between his fingers. He casts it from him, and butts his head back on the armchair. Another of Agnes’s embroidered trifles — an antimacassar decorated with robins and ornamental ‘R’s in honour of her new husband — is nudged off its perch and falls onto his shoulder. Irritably, he tosses it aside; it lands on the piano lid and slips off the lustrously polished wood. A pretty tune it was, that issued from that piano yesterday — and today the body that sat upon that stool has been sucked into a terrifying vacuum.
He grits his teeth, fighting back despair. Sugar and Sophie are out there somewhere. If only he could be granted, for just one hour, a God’s-eye-view, an aerial perspective far above the city’s rooftops but short of the obscuring clouds; and if only Sugar could be carrying on her person, unknowingly, a halo of guilt, an incandescent mark of criminality that made her glow like a beacon below, so that he could point down from the sky and cry: There! There she goes!
But no, such fantasies are not the way the world is. An unspecified number of policemen are dawdling through the streets, seeing no farther than the next corner, distracted by brawling hawkers and scurrying thieves, keeping their eyes half-open for a lady with a small child who, unlike all the hundreds of innocent respectable ladies with small children strolling the metropolis, must be arrested. Is this the best they can do, when the daughter of William Rackham is in danger of her life?
He leaps up, lights a cigarette and sucks on the smoke, pacing the room. His fury and agitation are worsened by his awareness that there’s nothing to distinguish him from any other man in this situation: he is behaving exactly the same as they would, pacing and smoking, waiting for other people to bring him news that’s unlikely to be good, and wishing he hadn’t drunk so much brandy.
The muddle of wet papers on the carpet is starting to steam faintly. With a grunt of disgust, he skims a page off the top, finds it unreadably blurred by rain, snatches up another.
‘But I am a father!’ is what his eyes light upon. ‘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.
The stomach within William’s own hairy belly churns in horror and he can read no further. Glowing in his mind is a vision of Sugar as she was when they first met, a gently smiling advocate of the bloodiest revenges. ‘Titus Andronicus, now there’s a play,’ she cooed to him across the table in The Fi
reside, and he failed to hear the warning bell, thinking only that she was making conversation. Bewitched by her precocious intellect, he imagined there was more to her than that — he took her to be a tender soul, cursed with loneliness, genuinely eager to please. Was he altogether mistaken? Pray God that some of what he saw in her was real; pray God she has a streak of kindness in her, or Sophie is doomed!
Letting the page fall, William stares at the French windows, whose panes rattle and stream with rain. A trickle of water has entered the room through the join, and trembles on the periphery of the floorboards. The carpenter gave his solemn oath that would never happen again! He said those windows were ‘sealed snug as a lady’s locket’, damn him! William still has the blackguard’s business card; he’ll call him back and make him do the job properly!
‘If you please, sir,’ says Letty, rousing him from his impotent wrath with a jolt. ‘Will you be having any supper?’
Supper? Supper? How can this imbecile imagine he has the stomach for supper on a night like this? He opens his mouth to scold her, to let her know that it’s precisely her numbskulled inability to understand there’s more to the world than plum-cake and cocoa that’s allowed this calamity to happen in the first place. But then he observes the look of fright on Letty’s face, and perceives her honest, canine desperation to please him. Poor girl: she may be a half-wit, but she means well, and the wickedness of women like Sugar isn’t her fault.
‘Thank you, Letty,’ he sighs, rubbing his face with his palms. ‘Some coffee, perhaps. And some bread and butter. Or …or asparagus on toast, if you can manage it.’
‘No trouble at all, Mr Rackham,’ chirps Letty, pink with gratitude that here, at last, is something that’s in her power to deliver.
Next morning, Rose brings William the silver tray of post, and he rifles through the envelopes, searching for ransom notes. In amongst the business correspondence, there are only three letters without a return address on the back. Too impatient for the nicety of the paper-knife, he rips them open with his fingernails.
One is an appeal on behalf of India’s lepers who, according to a Mrs Eccles of Peckham Rye, can be wholly cured if each businessman in Britain earning in excess of a thousand pounds per annum donates just one of those pounds to the post office box address below. Another is from the William Whiteley emporium in Bayswater, expressing confidence that every Notting Hill resident will by now be aware that Whiteley’s has added ironmongery to its cornucopia of departments, and that ladies shopping without a male escort and requiring luncheon can safely visit the refurbished refreshment room. The third is from a gentleman living a few hundred yards away in Pembridge Villas, enclosing a filthy sheet of paper decorated with hollyhock emblems and an ornate letterhead too damaged by muddy shoeprints to decipher. Inscribed in faux-Gothic calligraphy is the following list:
Minuet: 10
Gavotte: 9 ½
Cachucha: 8½
Mazurka: 10
Tarantella: 10
Deportment during engagements/partings: 10
Deportment during lulls: 9½
Well done, Agnes!
To which the gentleman from Pembridge Villas adds, on a separate clean sheet:
My wife is of the opinion that this may once have belonged to you.
Rose, when she brings her master the second mail, is discomposed to find him hunched over his study desk, sobbing into his hands.
‘Where is she, Rose?’ he groans. ‘Where is she hiding?’
The servant, unaccustomed to such intimacy from him, is caught off-guard.
‘Could she have gone home, sir?’ she suggests, nervously fingering the empty silver tray.
‘Home?’ he echoes, removing his hands from his face.
‘To her mother, sir.’
He stares at her, open-mouthed.
Having made himself sweaty and breathless by running from where he left Cheesman’s carriage ensnared in the Regent Street traffic, William Rackham knocks at the door of the house in Silver Street — the house that never was, despite the claims of More Sprees in London, in Silver Street proper.
After a long pause, during which he inhales deeply and attempts to calm the beating of his heart, the door is opened a crack. A beautiful brown eye peeps out at him, the focal point of a long, thin plumb-line vignette of alabaster skin, crisp white shirt, and coffee-coloured suit.
A woman’s silky voice speaks. ‘Have you an appointment?’
‘I w-wish to see Mrs Castaway.’
The eye half-shuts, displaying a luxurious eyelash. ‘Whether you’ll see her or not,’ replies the voice, honeyed with insolence, ‘depends on how bad a boy you’ve been.’
‘What!’ William cries. ‘Open the door, madam!’
The strange woman widens the slit until the steel chain that’s hung across it is stretched taut. Her mannish hair, oiled flat to her scalp, her coat and trousers — as smart as any swell’s — and her Mornington shirt-collar complete with cravat, send a chill of disgust down William’s spine.
‘I w-want a few w-words with Mrs Castaway,’ he reiterates.
‘You’re behind the times, sir,’ says the Sapphist, bringing a cigarette holder into view, and taking a puff on it, quick as a kiss. ‘Mrs Castaway is dead. Miss Jennifer Pearce is the proprietress here now.’
‘It’s … it’s a-actually news of Sugar that I’m after.’
‘Sugar’s gone, and so are the rest of last year’s girls,’ the woman retorts, smoke leaking from her nostrils. ‘Out with the old, in with the new, that’s our philosophy.’ And indeed, what Rackham can see of the house’s interior is renovated beyond recognition. An unfamiliar face peeks out of the parlour, followed by a body: an exquisitely dressed apparition in blue and gold Algerine.
‘It’s m-most important I find Sugar,’ he insists. ‘If you have any inkling of her w-w-whereabouts, I implore you tell me. I’ll pay you w-whatever you ask.’
The madam dawdles nearer, lazily swinging a tightly-furled fan as if it were a whip.
‘I have two things to say to you, sir,’ she declares, ‘and you needn’t pay for them. Firstly, the girl you call Sugar has renounced the gay life, as far as we know: you may care to rummage around for her in the kennels of the Rescue Society. Secondly, in our opinion, your soaps and ointments are not improved by having your image stamped upon them. Lord grant us some places where we don’t have to see a man’s face. Close the door, Amelia.’
And the door closes.
For a few moments following this outrage, William considers knocking afresh and this time demanding satisfaction, on pain of police escort. But then he cautions himself that these vile creatures may well be telling the truth about Sugar. She isn’t in this house, that’s clear enough; and if not here, then where? Is it really conceivable that Sugar might throw herself on the mercy of the Rescue Society? How else to explain the curious coincidence of Emmeline Fox sending Sugar a parcel only a few days ago? Is this yet another example of a clammy collusion between two tragically misguided females? Determined not to let anger cloud his reason, he wanders away from Mrs Castaway’s, back to the hurly-burly of Silver Street.
‘Missis play the piano, sir?’
After an excruciating omnibus ride, in which he sat face to face with a smirking dowager — she with an advertisement for Rackham’s Damask Rose Drops above her head, he with an advertisement for Rimmel’s Eau de Benzoin above his — William disembarks in Bayswater, and proceeds directly to the long row of modest little houses in Caroline Place. There he steels himself for his next struggle against the tightening bonds of tragedy.
Having received no answer the first time, William knocks louder and more insistently at the door of Mrs Emmeline Fox. The front window is shrouded with curtains, but he has seen two auras — auroras? — of lamp-light glowing through the layers of faded lace. Henry’s cat, roused by the commotion, has leapt onto the sill and now butts and strokes his furry snout against the cobwebby cross-piece of the window-frame. He looks fully twice the si
ze he was when Mrs Fox first bore him away from the Rackham house.
‘Who is it, please?’ Through the wooden barrier comes Mrs Fox’s voice, sounding sleepy, although it’s two in the afternoon. ‘It’s William Rackham. May I speak with you?’
There is a pause. William, windblown and conspicuous in the street, fidgets in frustration; he’s well aware that a visit of this kind — unaccompanied man upon lone woman — offends propriety, but surely Mrs Fox, of all people, ought to be prepared to bend the rules?
‘I’m not decent,’ comes her voice again.
William blinks at the brass number on her door, dumbstruck. At the street corner, a dog yaps joyously at a mongrel companion on the other side, and a boy in shirtsleeves casts a suspicious glance at the tubby bearded man with the angry face.
‘Couldn’t I come to see you,’ Mrs Fox goes on, ‘a little later this morning? Or afternoon?’
‘It’s a matter of great urgency!’ protests William.
Another pause, while Henry’s cat stretches himself to his full height against the window-panes, revealing a heroic girth and two downy balls. ‘Please wait a minute,’ says Mrs Fox.
William waits. What the devil is she doing? Ushering Sugar and Sophie out of her back door? Stowing them in a wardrobe? Now that he’s made the effort to come here, his initial suspicion that Mrs Fox might hold a clue to Sugar’s whereabouts has swollen into the manic conviction that she’s harbouring the fugitives herself.
After what seems an age, Mrs Fox opens up to him, and he steps inside her vestibule before she has a chance to object.
‘How can I help you, Mr Rackham?’
With a glance he appraises the state of her house — the musty smell, the subtle patina of dust, the iron bed-frame leaning against the wall, the piles ofbooks on the stairs, the burlap sack marked GLOVES FOR IRELAND blocking access to the broom-cupboard. Mrs Fox stares at him tolerantly, only the slightest bit shamed by her poorly kept house, waiting for him to offer her an explanation for his boorish imposition. She’s dressed in a calf-length winter coat with a black fur collar and cuffs, buttoned up to the breastbone. Under that, instead of a blouse or a bodice, she’s wearing a man’s shirt that’s none too clean and far too big for her. Her boots are buttoned only so much as will prevent them sagging like black banana peels off her naked ankles.