The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  My name is Sugar. So says her manuscript, shortly after the introductory tirade against men. She knows all the lines by heart, having re-written and re-read them countless times.

  My name is Sugar — or if it isn’t, I know no better. I am what you would call a Fallen Woman …

  Rather than see the embarrassingly pompous sentence: Vile man, eternal Adam, I indict you! that lies in wait at the end of the paragraph, she flips the page, then the next, and the next. With sinking spirits, she leafs through the densely-inked pages. She’d expected to meet herself here, because this namesake of hers shares her face and body, right down to the freckles on her breasts. But in the yellowed manuscript she sees only words and punctuation marks; hieroglyphs which, although she remembers watching her own hand write them — even remembers the ink drying on particular blotted letters — have lost their meaning. These melodramatic murders: what do they achieve? All these straw men meeting grisly ends: what flesh-and-blood woman is helped by it?

  She could ditch the plot, maybe, and substitute a less lurid one. She could aim to tread a middle ground between this gush of bile, and the polite, expurgated fictions of James Anthony Froude, Felicia Skene, Wilkie Collins and other authors who’ve timidly suggested that prostitutes, if sufficiently deserving, should perhaps be excused hellfire. With a new century only a generation away, surely the time is ripe for a stronger message than that? Look at this stack of papers — her life’s work — there must be hundreds of things worth salvaging!

  But as she skims the pile, she doubts it. Permeating almost every line, souring every remark, tainting every conviction, is prejudice and ignorance, and something worse: blind hatred for anything fine and pure.

  I watched the Fine Ladies parading out of the Opera House. (So wrote the Sugar of three years ago, a mere child of sixteen, cloistered in her upstairs room at Mrs Castaway’s, in the grey morning hours after the customers had gone home and everyone else was asleep). What shams they were! Everything about them was false. False were their pretenses of rapture at the music; false were their greetings to each other; false their accents and their voices.

  How vainly they pretended that they were not Women at all, but some other, higher form of Creature! Their ball-gowns were designed to give the impression that they did not walk on two fleshy legs, but rather glided on a cloud. ‘Oh, no,’ they seemed to say. ‘I do not have legs and a cunt between them, I float on Air. Nor have I breasts, only a delicate curve to give shape to my bodice. If you want anything so gross as breasts, go see the udders of wet-nurses. As for legs, and a cunt between them, if you want those, you will have to go to a Whore. We are Perfect Creatures, Rare Spirits, and we trade only in the noblest and finest things in Life. Namely, Slave Labour of poor seamstresses, Torture of our servants, Contempt for those who scrub our chamber pots clean of our exalted maidenly shit, and an endless round of silly, hollow, meaningless pursuits that have no

  There the page ends, and Sugar hasn’t the heart to turn it and read further. Instead she shuts the manuscript and rests her elbow on it, chin sunk into her palm. Still fresh in her mind is the night she went to hear the Requiem by Signor Verdi. No doubt there were ladies in the audience for whom it was nothing more than an opportunity to flaunt their finery and chatter afterwards, but there were others who emerged from the auditorium in a trance, quite unaware of their bodily selves. Sugar knows: she saw it on their faces! They stood reverent, as if they were still listening to the music; and, when prompted to walk, they walked like sleepers to an adagio rhythm still echoing in their heads. Sugar met the gaze of one such lady, and they both smiled — oh, such a guileless, open-hearted smile! — upon seeing the love of music reflected in each other’s eyes.

  Years ago, even months ago, if she’d been handed the iconoclast’s mallet, she’d gladly have smashed the opera houses to the ground; she’d have sent all the fine ladies fleeing from their burning homes straight into the embrace of poverty. Now she wonders … this spiteful vision of pampered ladies growing filthy and haggard in factories and sweater’s dens alongside their coarse sisters — what sort of justice does it strike a blow for? Why can’t it be the factories that are smashed to the ground, the sweater’s dens that are consumed in flames, rather than the opera houses and the fine homes? Why should the people living on a higher plane be dragged down to a lower, rather than those on a lower rising to a higher? Is it really such an unforgivable affectation to forget one’s body, one’s flesh, as a lady might do, and exist merely for thought and feeling? Is a woman like Agnes really blameworthy for failing to imagine there could exist such a thing as a cloth-wrapped plunger for swabbing a stranger’s semen from the …the cunny? (The word ‘cunt’, even in the privacy of her mind, seems unmentionably crude.)

  One more time, she opens her precious manuscript, at random, hoping against hope to find something she can be proud of.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I mean to do,’ I said to the man, as he struggled feebly against his bonds. ‘This cock that you are so proud of: I shall make it big and stiff, the way you like it best. Then, when it is at its height, I shall take this strand of sharp steel wire, and tie it around the shaft. Because I am going to give you a little present, yes I am!’

  She groans and closes up the pages. No one in the world will ever want to read this stuff, and no one ever shall.

  Feeling a wave of self-pity rising inside her, she lets it break, and buries her face in her hands. It’s already afternoon, William hasn’t come, there are tiny blue birds twittering in her garden, innocent beautiful things that put to shame all the poisonous ugliness in her despicable story … Christ, she must be about to have her monthly courses, to be thinking this way. When chirruping blue tits seem like agents of righteous chastisement, it’s time to bring out the chauffoirs …

  The sound of the bell startles her so violently that her elbows jerk forward and send her novel flying. Its pages scatter all over the study, and she pounces on them to gather the mess together again, crawling back and forth across the floor. She barely has enough time to dump the manuscript back in the wardrobe and kick the door shut on it before William lets himself in at the front — for, of course, he has a key.

  ‘William!’ she calls, in undisguised relief. ‘It’s me! I mean, I’m here!’

  From the first embrace, in the hallway by the coat-stand, she can tell that her returning Ulysses is not in a lustful mood. Oh, he’s very happy to see her and be given a hero’s welcome, but there’s also a reticence in his stance as she presses her body against his, a subtle evasion of any reunion between Mons Veneris and Mons Pubis. Instantly, Sugar softens her posture, loosens her arms, and strokes his whiskery cheek.

  ‘How dreadfully tired you look!’ she observes, in a tone of lavish commiseration such as might be warranted by multiple spear-wounds or at least a very nasty cat-scratch. ‘Have you slept at all since I last saw you?’

  ‘Precious little,’ admits William. ‘The streets around my guest-house were crowded with dipsomaniacs singing at the tops of their voices, all night long. And last night, I was worrying over Agnes.’

  Sugar smiles and leans her head sideways in empathy, wondering if she should bite on this rare mention of Mrs Rackham — or whether William will bite her if she does. While she wonders, she escorts him companionably into … which room? The sitting-room, for now. Yes, she’s decided: both Agnes and the bedroom can wait until his ruffled spirits have been well and truly smoothed.

  ‘Here,’ she says, installing him on the ottoman and pouring him a brandy. ‘Something to rinse the taste of Birmingham from your mouth.’

  He slumps in gratitude, unbuttons his bulging waistcoat, tugs at his cravat. He hadn’t realised, until these attentions were lavished on him, that they’re precisely what he’s been longing for since his return home yesterday. The arm’s-length efficiency of his own housemaids, the uncomprehending indifference of his distracted wife: these were a poor welcome, and have left him hungry for richer fare.

  ‘I’m gl
ad someone’s pleased to see me,’ he says, tilting his head back and licking the brandy on his lips.

  ‘Always, William,’ she says, laying the palm of her hand on his perspiring brow. ‘But tell me, did you buy the boxing factory?’

  He groans and shakes his head.

  Sitting beside him on the ottoman, Sugar experiences a perfectly timed visitation from the Muse. ‘Let me guess’ (she mimics a gruff-voiced, toadying scoundrel of the Northern manufacturing class): “Nowt wrong ‘ere, Mr Rackham, that a good engineer and a dollop of mortar wouldn’t fix”, hmm?’

  William hesitates for an instant, then hoots with laughter. ‘Precisely.’ Her crude stab at a Birmingham accent was closer to Yorkshire, but otherwise she’s devilishly accurate. What a superb little machine her brain is! The muscles of his back and neck relax, as the realisation sinks in that he’s absolved of explaining his decision about the factory: she understands — as always, she understands.

  ‘Well, the Season’s almost over now, thank God,’ he mutters, knocking back the last of his brandy. ‘The dog days are upon us. No more dinner parties, no more theatre, and just one more wretched Musical Evening …’

  ‘I thought you’d excused yourself from everything already …?’

  ‘Well, yes, almost everything.’

  ‘… because you believed Agnes was better.’

  He stares deep into his glass, frowning.

  ‘She’s been fairly good, I must say,’ he sighs, ‘at least in public. Better than last Season, at any rate. Although she could hardly fail to be better …’ Conscious of how faint this praise is, he strives to brighten his tone. ‘She’s a highly-strung thing, but I’m sure she’s no worse than many.’ He winces — he hadn’t meant to sound so ungallant.

  ‘But not as good as you hoped she’d be?’ suggests Sugar.

  He nods equivocally, a loyal husband under duress. ‘At least she’s stopped prattling about being watched over by a guardian angel … Although whenever we go out, she’s always casting glances over her shoulder …’ He slumps further into the ottoman, resting his own shoulder on Sugar’s thigh. ‘But I’ve ceased to challenge her; she only gets wound up if I do. Let her be chaperoned by ghosts, I say, if that’s what’s needed to keep her in order … ‘

  ‘And she is in order?’

  He’s silent for a minute, as she strokes his head, and the coals sizzle and adjust their positions in the hearth.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I ask myself if Agnes is faithful to me. The way she’s continually peering into the crowds, hoping, I’d swear, to catch sight of a particular person … Have I a rival to contend with, I wonder, on top of everything else?’

  Sugar smiles, heavy-hearted, feeling dragged down by the syrupy weight of deception, like a woman wading through deepening waters in fast-swelling skirts and petticoats.

  ‘Mightn’t she just be keeping an eye out for her guardian angel?’ she suggests scampishly.

  ‘Hmm.’ William lounges against her touch, unconvinced. ‘I was at a musical evening last week, and in the middle of a Rossini song, Agnes swooned in her chair. It was for an instant only, then she roused and whispered, “Yes, bless you, lift me up — your arms are so strong!” “Whose arms, dear?” I ask her. “Shush, dear, the lady’s still singing,” she says.’

  Sugar feels like laughing, wonders if it’s safe to laugh. She laughs. There are no consequences. William’s trust in her is, evidently, firmer than ever.

  ‘But how could Agnes be unfaithful to you?’ she murmurs. ‘Surely she goes nowhere without your knowledge and permission?’

  William grunts dubiously. ‘Cheesman is sworn to tell me everywhere she goes,’ he says. ‘And so he does, by God.’ His eyes narrow as he reviews his mental ledger of Agnes’s excursions, then blink in annoyance when he comes to one circled in red. ‘I thought at first that her illicit visits to the Catholic chapel in Cricklewood might be … trysts. But Cheesman says she enters and leaves alone. What can she possibly get up to while she’s sitting in a church service?’

  ‘I don’t know; I’ve never been in a church,’ says Sugar. The admission feels raw and risky, a plunge into the dangerous waters of genuine intimacy, an intimacy deeper than genital display.

  ‘Never been …?’ gasps William. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  She smiles sadly, wipes a lock of hair off his upturned face.

  ‘Well, I did have a rather unorthodox childhood, you know, William.’

  ‘But … damn it, I recall when we discussed Bodley and Ashwell’s book — the conversancy you showed with matters of religion …’

  Sugar shuts her eyes tight, and the interior of her skull is a lurid snake-pit of Magdalens and Marys, darkening into chaos.

  ‘My mother’s tutelage, no doubt. Her recitations from the Bible were my bedtime stories, for years and years. And also,’ she sighs, ‘I’ve read an awful lot of books, haven’t I?’

  William reaches up to caress her waist and bosom, with slack and sleepy fingers. When his hand wilts and comes to rest on his own chest, she wonders if he’s fallen asleep in her lap. But no: after a minute’s silence, his deep voice resonates against her thighs.

  ‘She’s inconsistent,’ he says, ‘that’s the problem. Normal one day; mad as a March hare the next. Undependable.’

  Sugar ponders the moral arithmetic of this, then plucks up the nerve to ask:

  ‘What would you do if she were … dependably mad?’

  He hardens his jaw, then, shame-faced, softens it again. ‘Ach, she’s still growing up, I think; she’ll come good with a bit of maturing. She was awfully young when I married her — too young, perhaps. Playing with dolls still … and that’s what her outbursts tend to be: childish. I recall in April there was a puppet show at the Muswell Hill fête. Mr Punch was wielding his stick, beating the stuffing out of his wife as usual. Agnes became very agitated, grabbed my arm and implored me to snatch Mrs Punch away. “Quick, William!” she said. “You’re a rich and important man now: no one would dare stop you.” I gave her a smile, but she was in earnest! Still a child, d’you see?’

  ‘And …is this childishness the worst of it?’ enquires Sugar, remembering Agnes’s body sprawled in the alley, the slack limbs soaking up mud. ‘Nothing else ails her?’

  ‘Oh, Doctor Curlew thinks she’s far too thin, and ought to be sent to a sanatorium and fattened up with beef and buttermilk. “I’ve seen better-fed women in the workhouse,” he says.’

  ‘What do you think?’ It’s a heady thrill, this: probing him for his opinions, not on business matters, but on his private life. And he’s opening up to her! With every word, he’s opening up to her more!

  ‘I can’t deny,’ says William, ‘that at home Agnes appears to subsist on lettuce and apricots. In other people’s houses, though, she eats everything that’s put in front of her, like a good little girl.’ He shrugs, as if to say: childish again.

  ‘Well,’ concludes Sugar, ‘this doctor will have to appreciate that “plump” is out of fashion. Agnes isn’t the only thin lady in London.’

  Thus she invites William to leave the subject, but he’s not ready.

  ‘Indeed not, indeed not,’ he says, ‘but there’s another cause for concern. Agnes’s monthly issue has dried up.’

  An icy chill runs down Sugar’s back, and it’s all she can do not to stiffen. The thought of William — of any man — being so well-acquainted with Agnes’s body is an unexpected shock to her.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  Again he shrugs against her thigh.

  ‘Doctor Curlew says so.’

  Another silence falls, and Sugar fills it with a fantasy of knifing this Doctor Curlew to death in a dark cul-de-sac. He’s a suitably shadowy figure, for she’s never set eyes on him, but his blood runs as red as that of any of the men in The Fall and Rise of Sugar.

  William chuckles suddenly. ‘Never been in a church …!’ he marvels, half asleep. ‘And I thought I knew everything about you.’

  She tur
ns her face aside, astounded to feel warm, tickly tears springing out onto her cheeks. If anything, William’s utter ignorance of who she is should provoke her to shrieks of derisive laughter, but instead she’s moved by sorrow and pity — pity for him, pity for herself, pity for the pair of them cuddled here together. Oh! What a monster he’s caressing …! What terrifying ichor flows through her veins; what hopelessly foul innards she has, poisoned by putrid memories and the bitterness of want! If only she could drive a blade into her heart and let the filth spurt out, let it gush away, hissing, into a crack in the floor, leaving her clean and light. What an innocuous booby William is, with his ruddy cheeks; for all his male arrogance, his philandering instincts, his dog-like cowardice, he’s an innocent compared to her. Privilege has kept him soft inside; a benign childhood has protected him from the burrowing maggots of hatred; she can imagine him kneeling at the side of his bed as a boy, praying ‘God bless Mama and Papa’ under the watchful eye of a kindly nurse.

  Oh God, if he only knew what was inside her …!

  ‘I have a few surprises left for you,’ she says, in her best seductive tone, dabbing her cheeks with her sleeve.

  William raises his head from her lap, suddenly wakeful, his bloodshot eyes wide. ‘Tell me a secret,’ he says, with boyish enthusiasm.

  ‘A secret?’

  ‘Yes, a dark secret.’

  She laughs, fresh tears springing to her eyes, which she hides in the crook of her arm.

  ‘I don’t have any dark secrets,’ she protests, ‘really I don’t. When I said I had a few surprises left for you, I meant–’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ he growls affectionately, sliding his arm under her skirts. ‘But tell me something I didn’t know about you — anything. A thing that no one else in the world knows.’

  Sugar is tortured by the yearning to tell him everything, to expose her oldest and deepest scars, to begin with Mrs Castaway’s little game, when Sugar was still a toddler, of creeping up to the cot and, with a flourish, pulling the sheets off Sugar’s half-frozen body. ‘That’s what God does,’ her mother would say, in the same grossly amplified whisper she used for storytelling. ‘He loves to do that.’ ‘I’m cold, Mama!’ Sugar would cry. And Mrs Castaway would stand in the moonlight, the sheets clutched to her bosom, and she’d cup a hand to her ear. ‘I wonder,’ she’d say, ‘if God heard that. He has trouble hearing female voices, you know … ‘