The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ asks Agnes of Clara, who has just entered and is contemplating the display with a frown of puzzlement.

  Clara looks closer, wondering if her mistress is playing a joke on her, or if she’s merely mad as usual.

  ‘It’s …invitations, ma’am.’

  Indeed, the mosaic-like shape with the unnaturally small waist and big head is fashioned entirely from cartes d’invitation — all requesting the pleasure of Agnes’s company in the Season ahead.

  ‘It’s more than that, Clara,’ says Agnes, encouraging her servant to develop a latent appreciation of symbolism. Again, the poor menial suspects she’s being gulled and, after a long pause, Mrs Rackham puts her out of her misery.

  ‘It’s forgiveness, Clara,’ she says.

  The servant nods, and is relieved to be excused.

  Yet, unbeknownst to Clara, Mrs Rackham is quite right, and not mad. To many of the ladies and gentlemen seeking to participate in the Season, the month inaugurated by Fool’s Day is one of galling humiliation, as they discover they’re among the Unforgiven. The invitations they sent out for dinner parties and other ‘occasions’ to be held in May have harvested a mound of replies inscribed Regret Not Able To Attend, and no reciprocal invitations have come. Thus the lengthening April evenings find men sitting up late by their dying firesides, staring with the stoniness usually reserved for bankruptcy or a wife’s infidelity; women shed tears and plot impotent revenges. One can be almost sure, if Lady So-and-So’s ball is to be held on May 14th, that not to have received a lace-edged carte d’invitation by April 14th is a decree of exile.

  Not that social ruin is wrought all at once: few of those who shone in the better constellations one year are utterly cast down the next; more often, in order to identify themselves as fallen, fiendishly complicated calculations must be made in the mathematics of rank. For Agnes Rackham no such calculations are necessary; doors are opening for her everywhere.

  It is rather to Henry and Mrs Fox that the April mails have brought no joy. Each received a few invitations — more than none, but less than ever before.

  Each of them has laid their invitations away in a drawer, and replied Regret Not Able To Attend. In Mrs Fox’s case, the reason is ill health: she’s no longer in any state to attempt all the standing, promenading, croqueting and so forth that the Season requires. Her well-being has faded so remarkably that strangers notice it at once and murmur: ‘Not long for this world.’ Friends and relatives are still half-blinded by the after-image of her former vigour, and whisper that Emmeline looks ‘under the weather’ and ‘ought to rest’. They advise her to enjoy the Spring sunshine, as there’s no better tonic for pallor. ‘And do you think,’ they ask her tactfully, ‘it’s good for you to be spending quite so much time in the slums?’

  The second Sunday morning in April finds Mrs Fox and Henry Rackham, as always, walking together down an aisle of trees, after church.

  ‘Well,’ Henry pronounces stiffly. ‘I, for one, am not sorry to be excused from the coming revelry.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ says Mrs Fox. ‘But that isn’t what we’re fretting about, is it? We haven’t been excused; we’ve been rejected. And for what reasons, one wonders? Are we both such Untouchables? Are we so far beyond the pale?’

  ‘Evidently so,’ frowns Henry, walking slowly and dolefully. He has, as always, failed to notice the tongue in her cheek — one of his most endearing weaknesses, in Emmeline’s estimation.

  ‘Ah, Henry,’ she says, ‘we must face the truth. We have nothing to offer our peers. Just look at you: you could have been the head of a great Concern, but instead you refuse all but a meagre allowance, and live in a cottage the size of a labourer’s. No doubt the Best People have decided that if they let you in their door, who knows what human refuse will come knocking next?’ She observes Henry blushing. Och, why does he blush so? He’s worth ten of the ‘Best People’!

  ‘Also,’ she continues, ‘you’re a man who can’t tolerate God being made to stand aside for gaiety, and … well, you must admit that makes you rather a dull prospect at a party.’

  He grunts, blushing darker. ‘Well, there’s a string of dinner parties to which I was invited — at my brother’s house. I asked to be spared.’

  ‘Oh but Henry, Mrs Rackham thinks the world of you!’

  ‘Yes, but at William’s dinner parties I’m always shoved opposite someone I can’t abide, and for the rest of the evening I’m condemned to the most tiresome intercouse. This year, I decided: no more. I run into Bodley and Ashwell often enough as it is.’

  ‘Dear Henry,’ smiles Mrs Fox. ‘You could have ignored them. They are jackals; you are a lion. A reticent and gentle sort of lion, I’ll admit, but …’

  ‘I did not ask William not to invite you.’ Anger is making him walk faster, and she must struggle to keep up with him, her dainty boots, so much smaller than his feet, trotting over the cobbles.

  ‘Ah, well,’ she says, lifting her skirts ever-so-slightly to ease her progress. ‘I shouldn’t imagine an unattractive widow is ever in great demand. Much less one who works. And then, if the work is reforming fallen women … well!’

  ‘It’s charitable work,’ declares Henry. ‘Plenty of the Best People do charitable work.’ Her description of herself as unattractive has made him walk even faster: he must outrun his desire to extol her beauty.

  ‘The Rescue Society is a charity, I suppose,’ concedes Mrs Fox. ‘In the sense that our labour is unpaid.’ (As she trots by his side, she fumbles in her sleeve, trying to extract a handkerchief she has stowed there.) ‘Though I’ve met ladies who presumed I must be drawing a wage …As if no woman would do such work unless she were in desperate want. Nobody quite knows, you see, if Bertie left me well-or badly-off. Ah, rumours, rumours … Do let’s sit down for a while.’

  They’ve come to a stone bridge, whose bowed walls are low and smooth and clean enough to sit on. Only now does Henry notice that Mrs Fox is breathing laboriously, perspiration twinkling on her pale face.

  ‘I have marched you too fast again, big oaf that I am,’ he says.

  ‘Not at all,’ she pants, dabbing her temples with her handkerchief. ‘It’s a fine day for a brisk walk.’

  ‘You look weary.’

  ‘I have a cold, I think.’ She smiles, to reassure him. ‘A cold, now that the warm weather is here. You see? Contrary as always!’ Her breast rises and falls with the rapidity of a bird’s but, mindful of the impression she is making, she leaves room for a quick breath between clauses. ‘You look weary too.’

  ‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

  ‘My father has very …effective medicines for that,’ Mrs Fox declares. ‘Or you could try warm milk.’

  ‘I prefer to let Nature take its course.’

  ‘Quite right,’ says Mrs Fox, closing her eyes to quell a surge of giddiness. ‘Who knows? Tonight you may sleep like a baby.’

  Henry nods, hands clasped between his knees. ‘God grant.’

  They sit for a while longer. Water burbles unseen below them and, in time, another pair of church-goers cross the bridge, gesturing almost imperceptibly in greeting.

  ‘You know, Henry,’ says Mrs Fox, when the passers-by have gone. ‘My sisters at the Rescue Society have urged me …to work less during the Season …to enjoy some recreation …to take advantage of the coming delights …’ She squints eastwards, as if she might catch a glimpse of London’s squalid rookeries from here. ‘And yet, away from the streets, I achieve nothing … And every day, one more woman comes to that pass where there’s no longer any hope for a good life — only a good death.’ She looks to her friend, but his eyes are downcast.

  Henry is staring into the chiaroscuro pictures of his imagination. An anonymous woman, unscathed from a thousand carnal acts, has finally reached ‘that pass’ to which Mrs Fox refers — the fateful copulation when the worm of Death enters her. From that moment on, she is doomed. Hair grows on her body as she degenerates from human to bestial form. On
her deathbed, still unrepentant, she is monstrously hirsute, sporting hair not just on her pudendum but also her armpits, arms, legs and chest. Henry imagines a sort of curvaceous ape, raving in agonised delirium on a filthy mattress, witnessed by surgeons aghast under the lanterns they hold in their raised and trembling fists. Those ‘wild women’ brought back from Borneo — those are probably nothing less than the moribund victims of sexual excess! After all, aren’t these island races notorious for their–

  ‘Ah well,’ sighs Mrs Fox, pushing herself erect once more and dusting off her bustle with a tiny clothes-brush from her reticule. ‘We must have our own private little Season, Henry, just you and I. Its highlights will be conversation, walks, and health-giving sunshine.’

  ‘Nothing could give me more pleasure,’ Henry affirms, glad that she’s not quite so breathless. But, although the sun is shining strongly on them both, Mrs Fox’s face remains most terribly pale, and her mouth is still most indecorously open, as if a physical imperative, in defiance of decorum, has parted her lips.

  Sugar looks over her shoulder at her reflection in the mirror, guiding her hands as she buttons up her dress. She wields a pair of ‘whore’s hooks’ — curved, long-handled instruments so nicknamed because they enable a woman to don a lady’s dress without the aid of a maidservant.

  When the last button, at the very nape of her neck, is fastened, Sugar runs two fingers around the silken lining of the tight collar, freeing the stray hairs trapped there. She has chosen this outmoded slate-grey dress because William has never seen her wear it, and so if he catches a glimpse at a distance, he shan’t recognise her. Her hair she has parted, uncharacteristically, down the middle and knotted back in a severe chignon, so that scarcely a wisp of it can be seen under her bonnet.

  ‘This will do,’ she decides.

  She’s tired of waiting for William. Days go by without a visit; then, when he does call on her, he has a mind full of concerns from his secret life — secret from her, that is. All his friends and family know him better than she, and they haven’t any use for the knowledge; it’s so unfair!

  Well, she refuses to remain in the dark. Her destiny advances not one whit while she languishes in her rooms, drying her hair in front of the fire, reading newspapers, reading about excise duty to prepare for conversations that never come, telling herself she isn’t hungry, resisting the temptation to fill the bathtub. The more William does without her, out there in a world in which she plays no part, the less inclined he’ll be to confide in her. From his cast-off perfume books she can learn about spirituous extract of tuberose, and oil of cassia as a cheap substitute for cinnamon, but she needs to understand so much more about William Rackham than that! More than he’s ready to divulge!

  So, she has made up her mind: she’ll spy on him. Everywhere he goes, she will follow. Whatever he sees, she will see also. Whoever he meets, she’ll meet too — if necessarily at a distance. His world will become hers; she’ll lap up every drop of knowledge. Then, when at last William finds the time to visit her, and she has his wrinkled brow against her breast, she can astound him with how instinctively she understands his troubles, how unerring is her intuition of his needs. By sharing his life illicitly, she’ll earn the privilege of sharing it legitimately.

  She pauses, for one last glance in the mirror before leaving the house. She’s scarcely recognisable, even to herself.

  ‘Perfect,’ she says, and unhooks a parasol from the hideous but sturdy coat-stand. What became of the flimsy one William kicked so angrily? He put it out in the street, and the next day it wasn’t there anymore. Did scavengers pounce on it, perhaps? Do such things happen in the decorous streets of Marylebone?

  She steps out into the fresh air and casts an eye over her surroundings. Not a soul in sight.

  * * *

  For the next three days and a half — or, as she calculates, fifty-five whole hours of waking existence — Sugar attempts to become William Rackham’s shadow.

  An unconscionable amount of that time is wasted loitering near his house in Chepstow Villas, waiting for him to emerge. She paces up and down the street and mews on three sides of the Rackham grounds, to keep her toes from going numb and her mind from going off its hinges, and twirls her parasol impatiently. What can William be doing in there? He’s certainly not playing parlour games with his wife and daughter! Is he writing Rackham correspondence, perhaps? If so, how long can a few letters possibly take, now that the Hopsom affair is out of the way? Rackham Perfumeries is a large concern with a hierarchy of employees; aren’t there what-d’you-call-’ems — subordinates, underlings — taking care of more mundane matters? Or is it breakfast that occupies William so long? No wonder he’s getting tubby, if he spends half the morning eating. Sugar, by contrast, begins each spying day with a bun or an apple bought from a street-seller on her way here.

  Fortunately the weather is mild, on these first few mornings of her surveillance of the Rackham house. The gardener is constantly poking around in the grounds, satisfying himself that the new growth is only in the designated places — another reason why Sugar can’t loiter too long in the same spot. She’d hoped that the mild weather would permit William’s daughter to come out to play, but the child’s nurse keeps her well under wraps. Sugar’s not even sure of the child’s name; one morning, the gardener yelled ‘Hello, Miss Sophie!’ while peering up at a window on the first floor — and was shortly afterwards accosted by a matronly-looking servant, who had a word in his ear, causing him to cringe in apology. Sophie, then — unless Shears’s greeting was addressed to the nurse. How humiliating to be acquainted with every vein of William’s prick, but not know the name of his daughter! All Sugar’s attempts to extract it without appearing to be pumping him have failed; nor can she risk uttering it herself, in case he’s withholding it on purpose. So, until the nurse decides that the weather is finally good enough for little girls to be brought forth, Sophie Rackham must remain a rumour.

  On the second day, Mrs Rackham herself emerges from the front door and, accompanied by her maid, walks purposefully forth. Sugar is tempted to follow, for Agnes is plainly on her way to town, and her enchanting voice, too far away to be intelligible, sings like Pied Piper flutings on the breeze. But Sugar resolves to stay hidden in her shady bower of trees; it’s William she ought to be tailing, and besides, there have been too many moments already when the curtains at one of the Rackhams’ windows suddenly parted and Agnes was standing there, staring out at the world — or, more often than not, staring straight at the spot where Sugar happened to be dawdling. It’s a good thing Sugar is veiled, and under a parasol for good measure, or Mrs Rackham would surely have committed her face to memory by now.

  No, it’s William she’s waiting for. It’s William whose movements and habits she needs to know intimately. And what Sugar learns in these first fifty-five hours of stalking him is that, for all his talk of being an individualist and keeping his duller business rivals guessing, he is a man of habit.

  Two p.m. is his hour for catching the city-bound omnibus. On each of the three days, he makes his rendezvous with the great lumbering vehicle and climbs into the cabin, taking his seat facing the sunnier side of the road. Sugar, hurrying on to the steely lip of the omnibus at the last possible instant, climbs up to the roof and takes a seat over William’s head. At this quiet time of day, she’s spared the indignity of rubbing shoulders with a jostle of bowler-hatted clerks; instead, she shares the hard benches and nippy air with other misfit souls who have reason not to ride below. On the first day, a gaggle of fat mothers with toddling children too restless to risk within the cabin; on the second, an old man with a six-foot-long parcel bound in twine; on the third, another mother and child, four stiffly-dressed sightseers conversing excitedly in a foreign tongue, and one pale young man clutching a dark book in his knobble-wristed hands.

  On this third journey, Sugar makes the mistake of folding up her parasol and relaxing against the back of her seat, confident that William will get out at the
usual stop, the nearest to his Air Street office. Indeed William does, but not before the pale young man has been captivated by the beauty of the grey-clad woman in the veil and, taking her relaxed pose for a Pre-Raphaelite slump of lassitude, he leaps up gallantly to assist her when she rises to go.

  ‘Allow me,’ he begs, his slightly frayed arms offering themselves, his eyes glowing with every kind of yearning imaginable.

  Sugar, anxious lest the disembarking William Rackham should turn and look up at them, hesitates on the stair.

  ‘No need, no need,’ she whispers, aware that her soft croak will only compound the misunderstanding. ‘Thank you.’ And the omnibus moves off with her still on it.

  Not that it makes much difference. She alights at the next stop, and walks back to the Rackham office, a dreary grey building with an ornamental ‘R’ on a brass plaque.

  William spends the same amount of time there every day, about two hours, doing God knows what. She longs to be a fly on the wall of that inner sanctum, but instead must hang about on the streets, counting hansoms to ease the boredom.

  At five o’clock, after consuming the same cake from the same cake-shop and waiting for the worst of the traffic to abate, William heads for home. She wishes he’d decide to go to Priory Close instead (in which event she would follow on behind and contrive to meet him on the footpath, pretending to have been taking a constitutional). But William does not alight prematurely; he stays on the omnibus all the way to Chepstow Villas.

  Yet, after William’s return to the Rackham house, small rewards do come Sugar’s way.

  On the first evening, William and Agnes go out for dinner to Lady Bridgelow’s and, because the residences are only a dozen houses apart, they set off on foot — with Sugar following at a discreet distance. She notes that the Rackhams, although they advance side by side, are unconnected; not merely disdaining to walk arm-in-arm, but scarcely acknowledging each other’s existence. William proceeds with loosely clenched fists, his shoulders squared, as if steeling himself for a formidable challenge.