The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  There are Turkish carpets underfoot, but they are threadbare, and the floorboards sigh softly beneath them. The walls of the corridor are concave on one side and convex on the other; striped wallpaper bulges and wrinkles like ill-fitting clothing, medallioned with framed prints whose glass is opaque with fug. Radiating from deeper inside the house is a smell of stale humidity, suggestive of …suggestive of all manner of things Henry Rackham has never known.

  ‘Plenty of fresh air upstairs,’ says the woman at his side, clearly worried he’ll leave her yet. If she only knew how salutary it is for him to be confronted with this squalor! On more than one occasion, he’s asked Mrs Fox to describe to him what a house of ill repute is really like and, despite her frankness, he’s still pictured it through a rosy tint of bacchanalian fantasy. Nothing — not common sense, not conscientious study of reports, not Mrs Fox’s word — has been able to banish from his mind the vision of a bawdyhouse as a sumptuous grotto of sensual delight. Now, sobered by the smell of truth, he steps into the receiving room: a dismal parlour, a gloomy gallimaufry of exhausted furniture and jaundiced ornamental crockery and military paraphernalia, lit by oil-lamps despite the sunshine straining to penetrate thick curtains the colour of bacon.

  Blocking the passage to the staircase sits a ruined old man in a wheelchair, his human features almost entirely obscured by scarves and knitted coverlets.

  ‘Sevenpence for use of the room,’ he mumbles, addressing no one in particular. Henry bridles, but his prostitute bats her eyelashes at him apologetically, as if she couldn’t have guessed he’d be so ignorant as to imagine she had a room of her own.

  ‘It’s only sevenpence, sir,’ she whispers. ‘To a man like you …’

  Even as Henry is fetching the coins out of his trouser pocket, the truth is dawning on him: this woman is a convenience of the poor, for the poor. She’s not meant for his consumption; possibly no gentleman of his class has ever set foot in this crumbling, malodorous lair. The very clothes on his back are worth more than anything in the room — furniture, crockery, war medals and all.

  ‘I don’t have sevenpence, here’s a shilling,’ he mutters shamefacedly as he hands the coins down. A gnarled claw closes on the money, and a woolly muzzle of scarf sags off the fellow’s face, revealing a swollen strawberry of a nose, varicose cheeks and a disgustingly gummy mouth.

  ‘Don’t be expecting change,’ the old man wheezes, emitting an oral flatus of ulcer and alcohol, and abruptly wheels out of the way, allowing Henry and the prostitute to pass through.

  ‘So,’ says Henry, taking a deep breath as they begin to mount the stairs together. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Caroline, sir,’ she replies. ‘And watch yer step, sir — the ones wiv the nails in are a bit chancy.’

  Two shillings buys Henry twenty minutes. Caroline sits on the edge of her bed, having given Henry her solemn promise not to do anything mischievous. Henry remains standing, stationed at the open window. He scarcely looks at Caroline as he asks his questions; instead he appears to be addressing the blackened rooftops and debris-strewn pathways of Church Lane. Every so often, he turns to look at her for half a second, and she smiles. He smiles back, for politeness’ sake. His smile, she thinks, is an unexpectedly sweet thing to behold. Her bed, he thinks, is like a manger lined with rags.

  In his twenty minutes, Henry learns a good deal about the different kinds of prostitute, and their habitats. Caroline is a ‘street girl’ who lodges in a house for whose use she (or preferably her customer) pays rent every time she enters. She assures him, though, that the mean and gloomy appearance of this place is entirely due to the ‘tight’ nature of its owner, Mrs Leek, and that there are other such lodging-houses whose owners take ‘a real interest’. In fact, she knows of one house in particular that’s owned by the mother of one of its girls. It’s ‘like a palace, sir’ — not that Caroline has ever been there — nor to a palace, neither — but she can imagine it must be true, because the same madam used to run a house in Church Lane, just three doors along from here, that’s got a bad sort of people in it now, but when Mrs Castaway was there, you could eat off the floors it was so clean. And the daughter has since become the mistress of a very rich man, but even when she lived here she was always like a princess — not that Caroline has ever seen a princess in the flesh, but she’s seen pictures, and this girl Sugar looked no worse. So you see what can be done when the folk in charge takes an interest. Take Caroline’s bedroom, now: it’s nothing to be proud of, she knows. ‘But if it was you, sir, workin’ ‘ere, wiv ‘im downstairs and the place smellin’ so bad of damp, would you be fagged polishin’ the bedknobs and puttin’ posies in a vase? I don’t fink so.’

  Henry enquires about brothels, and learns that they too are ‘a mixed bag’. Some are ‘prisons, sir, prisons’, where bullies and old hags keep the wretched girls ‘’alf naked and ‘alf starved’. Others are owned by ‘the importantest people’, and the girls ‘don’t get out of bed except for bishops and kings’ (a statement Henry needs to ponder momentarily.) One thing is clear to him: the neat distinctions made by books don’t mean much in the real world. There is a hierarchy, yes, but not of categories, rather of individual houses, even individual prostitutes, and the mobility that’s possible between one social division and the next is remarkable.

  He learns more about Caroline, too, in the twenty minutes his two shillings have bought him. To his dismay, she has nothing but contempt for the virtue she once possessed. Virtue don’t pay the rent, she sneers; if those folk who so value virtue in a woman had been prepared to house, feed and clothe her instead of just spectating on her pitiful struggles, she might have remained virtuous much longer.

  And Heaven? What’s Caroline’s opinion of Heaven? Well, she doesn’t see herself going there, but nor does she see herself going to Hell, which is only for really ‘bad’ people. About God and Jesus she has no opinions, but she considers the Devil ‘useful’ if he really does punish the wicked, and she hopes that the wicked people she’s known, particularly the owner of a certain dress-making firm, may suffer dreadful tortures after their deaths, though she has a feeling they’ll skip out of it somehow.

  ‘And would you ever consider returning home?’ says Henry, when her weariness of so much talking has brought her Northern accent once more to the fore.

  ‘Home? Where’s that?’ she snaps.

  ‘Yorkshire, I’d say,’ says Henry gently.

  ‘You been there?’

  ‘I’ve visited.’

  The bed creaks as she stands up from it. He can tell from her peevish sigh that his twenty minutes are, in her rough innumerate estimation, up.

  ‘I fink they’ve got all the whores they need in Yorkshire, sir,’ she says bitterly.

  In parting, they’re awkward with each other, each aware that Henry has crossed a boundary, that he has caused pain. Henry is mortified to be leaving her with this shadow of grief on her face: for all that he came here hoping to put the fear of God into her, he can’t bear to have caused her the prick of homesickness. She’s such a cheerful soul by nature, he can tell; how despicable of him to rob her of her smile! She, for her part, doesn’t know how to send him on his way, poor duffer. Kissing him would violate their agreement, but shutting her bedroom door on his earnestly frowning face seems awful harsh.

  ‘Come on, sir, I’ll see you down the stairs,’ she says, softening.

  A minute later, Henry Rackham stands in the alley, staring up at the house he has just left, at the upstairs window through whose filthy glass he has looked with his own eyes. A weight has lifted from his shoulders, a weight so burdensome that to be rid of it makes him almost giddy. Christ Jesus stands by his side here in the alley, and God is looking down from Heaven.

  How relieved he feels! If there weren’t so much muck on the cobbles just here, he would sink to his knees in grateful prayer. For she — the woman Caroline — touched his hand as he was leaving, and she looked into his face, and he felt no lust for her whatsoever �
�� not for her, not for any of her kind. The love he felt for her, as he returned her smile, was the same love he feels for any man, woman or child in peril; she was a poor thing suspended unawares above the Abyss.

  Nothing is impossible now, between him and all the Carolines of this vast metropolis! Let other men seek to win their bodies; he and Mrs Fox will strive to win their souls!

  ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.’

  With these words, delivered in a girlish rush, Agnes Rackham makes the leap back into the body which last sat here thirteen years ago. Unconsciously she hunches her shoulders to negate the few inches she’s grown, and so put before her eyes exactly that part of the confessional grille she always stared at as a child. The grille is unchanged in every vividly remembered detail: its wooden lattice-work is neither more nor less polished, its curtain of gold-threaded hemp neither more nor less frayed.

  ‘How long is it since your last confession?’

  Agnes’s heart thuds against her breast (which, in her mind’s eye, has become bosomless) as these words pass through the grille; it thuds not because she’s alarmed by the question or by the answer she’ll have to give, but rather because she hopes so fervently that the voice is the same one that reproved and absolved her all those years before. Is it? Is it? She can’t tell from eight short words.

  ‘Thirteen years, Father,’ she whispers. Sensational admission!

  ‘Why so long, child?’ Her ear is almost touching the screen, and still she can’t tell for sure if she knows the voice.

  ‘I was very young, Father,’ she explains, her lips almost brushing against the lattice, ‘and my father …I mean, not you, Father … and not my Heavenly Father … and not my–’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the voice hurries her along testily, and with that, Agnes knows beyond any doubt that it’s he! Father Scanlon himself!

  ‘My step-father made us Anglicans,’ she sums up excitedly.

  ‘And your step-father is now dead?’ surmises Father Scanlon.

  ‘No, Father, he’s abroad. But I’m grown up now, and old enough to know my mind.’

  ‘Very well, child. Do you remember how to confess?’

  ‘Oh yey, Father,’ exclaims Agnes, disappointed that the priest doesn’t share her view of the intervening years as mere blinks of an eye. She almost (to show him what’s what) launches into the Confiteor in Latin, for she rote-learnt it once, but she bites her tongue and plumps for English.

  ‘I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all the Saints and to you, Father, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Therefore I beseech blessed Mary, ever Virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, the holy’ (here Father Scanlon coughs and sniffs) ‘Apostles Peter and Paul, all the Saints, and you, Father, to pray to the Lord God for me.’

  A tuneless hum from the other side of the screen invites her to confess. Agnes has come prepared for this moment and removes from her new reticule a leaf of writing-paper onto which she has the previous evening noted all her sins, in order of their appearance in her diaries for the last thirteen years. She clears her throat delicately.

  ‘These are my sins. On the 12th of June, 1862, I gave away a ring that had been given to me by a friend. On the 21st of June of that same year, I told that friend, when she questioned me, that I still had the ring. On the third of October, 1869, at a time when all our roses had a blight, I stole a perfect rose from a neighbour’s garden and, later that day, I threw it away, lest someone ask me where I got it. On the 25th of January, 1873, I purposely stepped on an insect that meant me no harm. On the 14th of June 1875 — last week, in fact — while suffering a headache, I spoke harshly to a policeman, saying he was no use at all, and ought to be dismissed.’

  ‘Yes?’ the priest prompts her, just as he used to when she was a child.

  ‘That’s all, Father,’ she assures him.

  ‘All the sins you’ve committed in thirteen years?’

  ‘Why, yes, Father.’

  The priest sighs and shifts audibly in his chair.

  ‘Come, child,’ he says. ‘There must be more.’

  ‘If there are, Father, I do not know of them.’

  Again the priest sighs, louder this time. ‘Indiscretions?’ he suggests. ‘The sin of pride?’

  ‘I may have missed a few incidents,’ concedes Agnes. ‘Sometimes I’ve been too sleepy or unwell to keep my diary as I should.’

  ‘Very well then …’ mutters the priest. ‘Restitution, restitution … There’s very little you can do after such a lapse of time. If you still have the friend whose ring you gave away, tell her you did so and ask her forgiveness. As for the flower …’ (he groans) ‘forget about the flower. As for the insect, you’re free to step on as many as you please; they’re under your dominion, as the Bible makes clear. If you can find the policeman you insulted, apologise. Now: penance. For the lie and the harsh words, say three Hail Marys. And do try to examine your soul more deeply. Very few of us live through thirteen years committing nary a sin.’

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ whispers Agnes, folding the leaf of paper tightly in her palm, leaning forward for her absolution.

  ‘Dominus noster Iesus Christus te absolvat, mumbles the old voice, ‘et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo…’ Tears seep out of Agnes’s closed eyelids and trickle one after the other down her cheeks. ‘… ego te absolvo apeccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen?

  Agnes Rackham glides out of the confessional lighter than air, and hurriedly takes a seat in the back pews. For her illicit visit here this afternoon she has worn a veil and a plain charcoal-grey dress: a very different outfit from those she’s been showing off at Seasonal Occasions to be sure, but then here in Saint Teresa’s, Cricklewood, her attitude to being recognised is very different too. The back pews, far removed from the regular congregation, far from the altar and the candelabras, are so dark that when Agnes squeezes between them she almost trips on a prayer cushion not replaced in its pouch. Far above her head, the ceiling has been freshly painted sky-blue, and dotted with golden stars whose light is illusory.

  Now Agnes sits contented in the gloom, her face in the shadow of an overhanging cornice. The service is about to begin; Father Scanlon has emerged from the back of the confessional and walks towards the pulpit. He lifts the purple stole off his shoulders and hands it to one of the altar-boys in exchange for a different one. He’s hardly changed at all! His most important feature — the wart on his brow — is as large as ever.

  Enchanted, she watches the preparations for Mass, wishing she could participate, knowing she can’t. The fact that she knows no one in the congregation is no guarantee that no one knows her (she’s the wife of William Rackham, the William Rackham, after all), and she can’t afford to provoke gossip. The time isn’t ripe for the World to learn of her return to the True Faith.

  ‘Introibo ad altare Dei? announces Father Scanlon, and the ritual begins. Agnes looks on from the shadows, mouthing along with the Latin. In spirit she projects herself into the candle-lit centre of attention; when the priest bows down to kiss the altar, she inclines her own head; his every signing of the Cross she duplicates over her own breast; her mouth waters at the touch of imaginary bread and wine; her wet lips part to let God in.

  ‘Dominus vobiscum? she whispers, in rapturous unison with Father Scanlon. ‘Et cum spirito tuo?

  Afterwards, when the church is empty, Agnes ventures out into the light, in order to be alone with the religious bric-a-brac of her childhood. She dawdles past the seats where she and her mother sat, which, although different people sat in them today, are still identifiable by nicks and blemishes in the wood. All the fixtures are just as they were, except for a new mosaic in the apse depicting Mary’s heavenly coronation that’s far too bright and gets Her nose wrong. The plaque of the Ass
umption behind the altar is reassuringly unchanged, with Our Lady floating away from the pudgy, clutching hands of the hideous cherubs swarming around Her feet.

  Agnes wonders how long it will be before she’s bold enough to snub Anglicanism publicly and reserve a private seat for herself here, in the light near the altar. Not very long, she hopes. Only, she doesn’t know whom to ask, and how much it would cost, and whether it’s paid for weekly or yearly. That’s the sort ofthing William would be good for, if she could only trust him.

  First things first, though: she must do something to reduce the number of days her mother languishes in Purgatory. Has anyone else pleaded for Violet Unwin since her death? Probably not. On the evidence of her funeral, attended only by Lord Unwin’s Anglican cronies, she had no Catholic friends left.

  Agnes has always assumed her mother will be in Purgatory a very long time, as punishment for marrying Lord Unwin in the first place, and then for allowing him to rob her and Agnes of their religion. Strong interventions are needed.

  Opening her new purse under the light of the altar’s candelabra, she removes, from amongst the face-powder shells, smelling salts and buttonhooks, a much creased and tarnished Prayer card, on one side of which is printed an engraving of Jesus, and on the other an indulgenced prayer, guaranteed to shave days, weeks or even months off the sentence. Agnes reads the instructions. The requirement that she should just have received communion God will probably waive in the circumstances; in all other respects she’s eligible: she’s made Confession, she’s standing before a crucifix, and she knows by heart the words of the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory be to the Father for the Pope. She recites these, slowly and distinctly, and then reads the prayer on the card.

  ‘… They have pierced my hands and feet,’ she concludes. ‘They have numbered all my bones.’ Closing her eyes, she waits for the tingling in her palms and soles which always accompanied the reading of this prayer when, as a child, she used it to plead for dimly remembered aunts and favourite historical figures.