by Michel Faber
And will the portals open, yammers the evangelist,
To me who roamed so long
Filthy, and vile and burdened
With this great weight of wrong …
Sugar considers hurrying downstairs and opening the portals of Mrs Castaway’s brothel to this idiot. Why not drag her indoors? Introduce her to the smell of semen? Offer her a swig of gin? A generous dose of Christian hospitality.
She edges back up to the window, peers down at the evangelist, who has paused in her song and stands still, head bent, as if in prayer. In truth, she is bending down to listen to her child. Her child is saying something Sugar cannot hear. The mother hunches down lower, visibly annoyed that the child’s words make no sense to her. The child begins to whimper and sniffle, evidently fed up with standing in the glare and the chill, singing to nobody in an alleyway that smells of fermenting horse piss.
After several seconds of flustered communication, the mother rummages in her basket and, from under the religious pamphlets, extracts an apple. She offers it to the child, who begins to weep louder. The mother seizes the little girl’s hand and pushes the apple into it, but the child’s grip fumbles – accidentally? wilfully? – and the fruit falls to the ground. At once – as though the impact of the apple has released a tripwire attached to the mother’s arm – the mother slaps the child in the face. The child, poorly balanced, trips and falls.
Sugar is on the stairs before she has time to think. She’s barefoot, clad in a bodice and rumpled skirt but without bonnet or shawl: barely dressed, in other words. She leaps down the stairs two steps at a time, determined to assault the evangelist, smash her ugly nose, crush her windpipe, break her skull on the cobbles like an over-ripe melon.
She bursts out of Mrs Castaway’s and out onto the street. The evangelist and the child are gone.
Sugar makes a noise like a cornered cat. She lurches first in one direction, then another, then teeters around. They can’t have vanished so soon! She hurries from the deserted mews to Silver Street proper, and peers up and down the thoroughfare. There’s a fruit barrow with Fat Meg behind it, and Fat Meg’s dog, scratching himself in the sun. There’s an old man selling shirt collars on a stick. A street-sweeper waiting for horse-turds to fall. Tess, a prostitute from a rival house, struggling to open a stiff parasol. Two swells, striding purposefully towards a cab they’ve hailed. A group of hard-faced, grubby boys in cloth caps. A policeman, watchful for illegal behaviours that have not been rendered invisible by bribery. But no fat matron in a black bonnet, no little girl.
Sugar stands in the public street, aware all of a sudden that she is barefoot, that the soles of her naked feet are pressed against gritty, probably shit-soiled cobbles; aware that her unbrushed hair is being lifted by the breeze, and that her bodice is unhooked at the back, and that everyone can see. Her legs are trembling with rage and frustration, but they might as well be trembling because she’s just been fucked against a wall. Tess, the rival whore, snaps her parasol open at last and, raising it, notices Sugar at last. Their eyes meet across a distance of fifty yards or so. Sugar turns sharply – cutting her left heel on a jagged stone – and flees.
Back in her bedroom at Mrs Castaway’s bawdy-house, Sugar soaks her feet in a washtub. The injury is nothing to speak of. The dirt is floating free already. It was plain, nondescript dirt, street grime, not shit; for this she is grateful. Soon she will dry her feet and rub them with scented oil.
Her heart has stopped thumping now. It beats inside her breast, regular and only a little harder than usual. She is master – or is it mistress? – of herself again. How to account for her lapse? How could she have acted so foolishly, when she prides herself on her cool judgement? A man can insult her in the vilest conceivable manner, and she can continue her business with a calm face and an icy heart. It is a point of honour with her that none of her customers has ever had the faintest idea what she was truly feeling. Yet this morning she has chased after a stranger, helpless with fury. She stood dishevelled and confused in public, her distress evident to any passerby. This must never happen again.
Still soaking her feet in the tub, she reaches over to the stack of reading matter and seizes hold of the topmost thing. It’s an issue of Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion, which she buys avidly despite having no real home, no family and no companion. She buys it because it includes a monthly summary of all the important things that have happened in the world, explained in simplified terms that ignorant young ladies and dim-witted matrons can understand. Sugar, who despises the pompous intrigues of politicians and the vainglorious exploits of businessmen, would be happy to remain perfectly ignorant of everything that goes on outside Soho, but she’s found that a rudimentary grasp of current affairs can be useful in her line of work: she can learn just enough to feign agreement with the views of her clients. And Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion has other things in it as well: pictures of pretty clothes, engravings of exotic animals from all over the Empire, advertisements, testimonials – and a serialised novel. It’s to this that Sugar turns as she soaks her feet.
Chapter 13: UNMASKED!
Oh, the predicament of poor Hornsby as he led the innocent Fred into foul streets the like of which the lad had plainly never seen before. On the one hand, he had a solemn duty, as Fred’s best friend, to pull him back from the precipitous decision to which he, Fred, was, in his lamentable ignorance, so unswervingly committed. On the other hand, Hornsby knew that the grief his friend would, in the minutes that were to follow, experience, would be of such dreadful intensity that this noble young man might never – not if he lived to be a hundred – recover from it.
‘There must be some mistake,’ said Fred, noting with growing alarm the shabby character of the dwellings they were passing, and the brute depravity on the faces of the inhabitants. ‘My lovely Violet cannot possibly live here.’
Hornsby made no reply, but pulled his friend ever deeper into the cesspool of wickedness.
‘This is the house,’ he said at last, as they came to a halt in front of the shabbiest, meanest house of them all; a house whose walls, were they not blackened with grime, might have blushed in cognizance of the depraved exploits transacted within them.
‘It cannot be,’ weakly remonstrated the ghastly-pale lad.
‘If, by cutting off my right arm at the shoulder, I could unmake the truth of it, I beg you to believe I would do so, my friend,’ said Hornsby. ‘But this wretched abode, it pains me infinitely to say, is the home of that false creature to whom you are engaged.’
The unhappy lad, profoundly offended by this slur upon the virtue of the person he loved more than any other, turned exceedingly red in the cheeks, and gathered his soft white hands into fists, poised to strike at his friend. But at that instant, the door of the sordid house in front of which they stood flew open, and there, in its dark, dismal, worm-eaten doorway, tainted by unwholesome shadows, stood Violet, aghast. Aghast for a moment only! – before she imposed upon her countenance a look of delighted surprise.
‘Beloved!’ she cried. ‘You never told me you were in the habit of performing charitable works! And what an extraordinary coincidence that our ministering purposes should cross in this most pitiful of places! I have just finished delivering to the wretched folk here a parcel of clean clothing, some soap and a pamphlet of Bible verses.
What the mortified Fred said in response to this unlikely declaration, Sugar doesn’t wait to find out. In a blind fury, she rips Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion into shreds, flinging it piecemeal all over her bedroom.
Once again, she’s out of breath, panting like a dog. Once again, her heart is beating far too loud against her rib-cage. Once again, damn it, she has allowed herself to lose her grip. She’ll never get out of Silver Street if she carries on like this. Only the steeliest resolve and the chilliest heart will rescue her from a life of subjection. A moment will come, on a day unheralded by any forewarning, when she will be presented with an opportunity to escape her fate, an
d she must be ready for that moment. A powerful man will stray into her life, with the intention of using her once and then disappearing back to his exalted sphere. But in the heat of the moment, he will let slip a confession, or mention a name he’d intended to keep secret, or perhaps he will simply get a look in his eye that she can match with her own, and there he’ll be: caught. It could happen in any of a hundred ways, ways she can’t even imagine on this humdrum morning in her hatefully familiar room with its faded wallpaper and rotten skirting-boards and rumpled old bedclothes. The only certain thing is that this golden opportunity will come once only, and her mind will need to be unclouded, her emotions strapped down.
She notices a pain in her right fist. Uncurling her fingers, she winces as a hair-thin slit opens up in the tender flesh between her palm and her middle finger. A paper cut. She has injured herself on Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion. Another lesson in restraint.
Sugar removes her feet from the tub and dries them on the hem of her petticoats. The skin on her soles has gone pale and wrinkled; tiny pellets of flesh rub off. The scratch on her heel is bloodless now. It has stopped hurting, although the paper cut on her hand is exquisitely bothersome.
It’s high time she got properly dressed and groomed. She walks over to the window, combing her hair. She looks down into the mews, at the cobbles. There’s nobody there now. But, balanced on her windowsill, ready, is the apple, shiny and firm. Sugar snatched it up from the ground as she stumbled back
to the house, loath to let it be scavenged by dogs, and now here it sits, scarcely bruised. Maybe the evangelist will return this afternoon, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; the apple will keep for a while. And, if the evangelist should return, Sugar will take the apple in hand, aim with the utmost care, and throw – straight and true.
Medicine
William Rackham sits at his desk and examines the label of the medicine he is about to take. He hopes there’s no morphine or cocaine in these little yellow pills, because the swig of Rennick’s Restorative Syrup he swallowed just an hour ago was generously laced with narcotics, and he still feels rather peculiar. Each passing year makes him less tolerant of intoxicants; he would gladly do without them altogether, were he not so prone to all sorts of complaints.
‘Persons of A FULL HABIT, who are subject to Headache, Depression of Spirits, Dullness of Sight, Nervous Affections, Singing in the Ears, Spasms, and all Disorders of the Stomach and Bowels, should never be without Frampton’s Pills of Health’, says the label on the bottle. The ingredients aren’t specified, however, except for the routine assurance that they are entirely natural, pure and unadulterated. William Rackham shakes one pill into his wrinkled palm and lifts it close to his nose. His long experience as a perfumer would certainly allow him to identify the smell of opium if any were perceptible. There is none.
He lays his hand down on the desktop, fingers folded loosely over the pill, delaying the moment. There is always the hope that he will draw a deep breath, exhale slowly, and feel the illness drain out of his body in an unexpected, delirious thrill. He draws the breath, exhales, waits. A gust of wind rattles his study window, and the lamplight dims momentarily, making him feel as though the walls of his room are contracting. He knows every inch of these walls, every calcifying spine of every long-unread book in the bookcases, every glint on the burnished wood of the clock, every yellowish blemish on the clockface, every faded print in every outmoded frame, every hairline crack in the ceiling cornices, every tiny air-bubble trapped behind the wallpaper. It seems like months since he set foot outside this gloomy sanctum.
It’s high time he paid a visit to his lavender fields. The journey to Surrey would be a tonic in itself; just to get away from London and its air of suffocating competition, its pervading sense of a million human creatures jostling and gasping for their own lungful of life. How sweet it would be to walk in the fresh air, with the sun overhead and damp soil underfoot, and the smell of acres of lovingly-tended lavender in his nose.
A cold chill runs down his back, as though a prankster is trickling ice-water under his shirt-collar. An intolerable itch attacks the insides of his nostrils and, before he can fetch his handkerchief from his pocket, he sneezes mightily. A hundred specks of opaque, watery snot are sprayed all over his desk. They glimmer on the surface of the dark green leather inlay.
William Rackham stares at the vista in dismay. If he summons a servant to clean up the mess, she will take one look at his desk, and another at his guilty face, and judge him to be no better than a helpless infant. But surely a man of his standing should not be cleaning up snot? And what should he use to clean it if he did? His handkerchief is white silk, and his desk is stained with ink, mottled with dusting-powder and, to be quite frank, a little mildewy on parts of the leather surface. His sleeve … Almighty God, is this a fair fate for a man who has already suffered a thousand humiliations? Wiping up snot with his sleeve?
He bends in his creaky chair and, with his free hand, retrieves a couple of crumpled sheets of paper from the wicker waste-basket. If he wields them with care, they will serve as cleaning-rags. Best possible use for them, really, these letters from people who no longer welcome the overtures of William Rackham, Esq.
Two sheets of crumpled paper. His correspondence has dwindled remarkably in the last decade and a half, dwindled along with his empire. ‘Empire’? Too grand a word, he knows. It never quite applied to Rackham Perfumeries, did it? But what word to use instead? ‘Business’ sounds grubby. ‘Concern’, that’s the safest. His dwindling concern.
Ah, but who could have blamed him for using the word ‘empire’, in those heady years when the world lay before him? Who could have failed to be swept up in his own pride, when he first mounted the crest of Beehive Hill, and looked down upon the vast rolling fields of lavender, the shimmering lake of Lavandula, his industrious domain? It seemed inconceivable that his manufactures should not make their way into every shop in the country – and for a brief time, in the mid-1870s, it was almost so. Nowadays, Newcastle, Leeds and Glasgow are still strongholds of his merchandise, and, for some reason that he’s never fully understood, regular shipments go to Calcutta. But here at home … He uncrumples a letter from a household goods emporium in Walthamstow, whose manager points out that the toiletries shelves are already overflowing with other men’s soaps and bathwaters. William sweeps the hateful piece of paper back and forth across his desktop, mopping the specks of snot with it. A second letter – unsolicited mail from the Tariff Reform League – scuffs the leather dry. All is well, until the next sneeze.
William tosses one of Frampton’s Pills of Health into his mouth and washes it down with a gulp of port. Alcohol is the best thing, really, for colds; better than any number of quack remedies and expensive drugs. Were it not for the absolute necessity of remaining sober enough to do his work, he would polish off a few bottles of port and wake up a day or two later, cured.
He picks up his pen, loads it with ink, and begins to write. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Determination is all. There is no time for self-pity. Push ahead, ignoring one’s suffering, and before one knows it the job is done.
Minutes later, a knock on his study door. It’s Letty, the maid, bringing him a plate of bread and cold meats.
‘The luncheon you asked for, Mr Rackham,’ she says.
He cannot recall asking for this. It does look like the sort of thing he would ask for, though, if he were peckish, which he suddenly remembers he is.
‘Thank you, Letty,’ he says.
She carries her serving-tray to his desk, puts the plate on the old brown ledger-book according to long-established custom.
‘Cup of tea, Mr Rackham?’
‘No thank you, Letty, I have a fever.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Rackham. Coffee?’
The half-empty bottle of port is standing on the desk, in plain view. William appraises the servant’s face, finds it vaguely well-disposed and unjudgemental, as always.
‘Y
es, some coffee,’ he says. And, with a nod that is half-way to a curtsey, the servant backs out of the room.
Good old Letty. He likes her. She’s not pretty anymore, and she’s grown rather scrawny and wrinkled, and walks with an unladylike gait, the result of crumbling hip-bones. But a servant shouldn’t be ladylike anyway; Rose was like that, with airs above her station. She left him in the lurch after only a few years of service, poached by a richer man. Letty is loyal, God bless her. And who’d have her now, if she weren’t? She’s lucky to have an indulgent master. He will keep her until she drops.
William lays aside his correspondence and selects a slice of meat. Roast beef, from yesterday’s dinner. Still succulent, with a nice crisp rind and a pink blush in the middle. His latest cook is not at all bad, despite her lack of talent for desserts. Lord, how many cooks has he had in the last fifteen years? It must be half a dozen. Why can’t these women remain in a good position when they’re put in one?
‘This is an unhappy house, Mr Rackham,’ one of the departing cooks told him. Stupid pug-faced biddy: she did precious little to make it happier! Her breakfast toast always had an ashy texture, and her puddings never had enough sugar in them. He would probably have dismissed her, if she hadn’t left first, and if it hadn’t been such an inconvenience to lose her.
The thought of puddings makes William crave something sweet. His luncheon plate is all savoury: roast beef, silverside, smoked ham. Even the butter on the bread is generously salted. Could he call Letty back and ask her to fetch him some marmalade? Or better still, some cake and custard? Or even better yet, some hot apple crumble, dusted all over with sugar?
Anything you ask of me. That’s what she said. That’s how she snared him. Sugar. The whore who called herself Sugar. Promised him all his dreams fulfilled. As whores always do.