The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Caroline — tactful soul that she is — has declared how very much she enjoys Sugar’s ‘fancy rigging’, but how can she, when she’s condemned to wear such dreary unfashionable things? And what about Caddie’s grubby bare feet, dangling over the side of the bed? Are they like an animal’s, impervious to the elements? Sugar raises the beaker to her lips but doesn’t drink from it, preferring to feel its steam on her face and to nurse her palms against the hot earthenware.

  ‘Your ‘ands ain’t that cold, are they?’

  Embarrassed, Sugar laughs and takes an unwanted sip of the inferior brew.

  ‘Cold hands, warm heart,’ she says, blushing invisibly underneath a layer of Rackham’s Poudre Juvenile. She knows very well why she feels so cold: it’s that she’s grown accustomed to having a generous supply of warmth from morning to night. She thinks nothing nowadays of having a fire blazing in every room, until the windows twinkle with steam and the rich hearth smell has penetrated every nook and cranny. Once a week –twice a week, lately — a man comes to her door with a sack of dry wood, and so distanced is she from penury that she can’t even recall what coin she gives him.

  ‘’Ow’s your Mr ‘Unt?’ enquires Caroline, rummaging around for a hairbrush.

  ‘Mm? Oh, good. As good as he can be.’

  ‘The Colonel was in a wonderful humour, for days after meetin’ ‘im.’

  ‘Yes, so I heard from Mrs Leek just now. It’s strange; he gave me the impression he detested the whole experience.’

  ‘’E would tell you that,’ Caddie sniffs, happy to find an ugly boxwood brush that’s furry with old hair. ‘Singin’, ‘e was, as soon as ‘e was back.’

  The exhibition of Colonel Leek singing is too grotesque for Sugar to imagine, but no matter: she’s glad she can use him again. Maybe this time she’ll get him drunk before he reaches the fields, in case that improves his performance.

  Caroline is carrying on with her toilet, examining the face reflected in her dresser mirror.

  ‘I’m gettin’ old, Shush,’ she remarks off-handedly, almost cheerfully, as she squints to find the natural parting in her hair.

  ‘Happens to us all,’ says Sugar. On her lips, it sounds like an arrant lie.

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been at it longer than you.’ And with that, Caroline bows her head low and brushes her hair down over her knees. Through the swaying brunette curtain, she speaks softly.

  ‘You know Katy Lester’s dead, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ says Sugar, taking a swig of cocoa. A lump of icy shame forms in her stomach even as the warm liquid passes down her gullet. She tries to tell herself that she has spared a thought for Kate every day — well, almost every day — since leaving Mrs Castaway’s. But thoughts are no substitute for what she was once so well-known for: sitting all night with dying whores, hand in hand, as long as it took. Despite her uneasy intuition, these last months, that Kate’s time must be very near, she couldn’t bring herself to visit Mrs Castaway’s again, and now it’s too late. Would she sit all night with Caroline, if Caroline was dying, and there was a chance to lie with William instead? Probably not.

  ‘When did she die?’ she enquires, as the guilt grows in her guts.

  ‘Can’t say,’ says Caroline, still brushing, brushing. ‘I lose count of days, when there’s more than a few. A long time ago.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Mrs Leek.’

  Sugar feels sweat permeating her tight sleeves and bodice as she strains to think of another question – any question; something that would prove, with a few well-chosen words, the depth and the sincerity of her feelings for Kate — but there is nothing she’s particularly curious to know. Nothing, except:

  ‘What became of her ‘cello?’

  ‘’Er what?’ Caroline lifts her head and parts her hair, slick from its attentions and the need for a wash.

  ‘A musical instrument Kate used to play,’ Sugar explains.

  ‘I expect they burnt it,’ says Caroline matter-of-factly. ‘They burnt everyfink she ever touched, Mrs Leek said, to clean the ‘ouse of disease.’

  A whole life gone, like a piss in an alley, weeps a voice in Sugar’s head. Eels’ll eat my eyes, and no one will even know I’ve lived.

  ‘Any other news of …of the old place?’ she says.

  Caroline is pinning her hair up now, in a rather slapdash fashion, without a mirror. An oily wisp swings loose, provoking Sugar to rude fantasies of seizing her friend by the shoulders and forcing her to begin again.

  ‘Jennifer Pearce is doin’ well,’ says Caddie. ‘Second in command, as Mrs Leek puts it. And there’s a new girl — I forget ‘er name. But it’s a different kind of establishment now. Not so much of the usual, if you get my meanin’. More what you’d call a whippin’ den.’

  Sugar winces, surprised by how much this bit of news disturbs her. Prostitution is prostitution, whatever the bodies do to one another, surely? Yet the prospect of Mrs Castaway’s familiar walls reverberating with screams of pain rather than grunts of pleasure has, for Sugar, the peculiar effect of casting a halo of nostalgia over carnal transactions she once regarded as loathsome. At one stroke, a man paying a woman a few shillings to relieve himself between her legs has acquired a melancholy innocence.

  ‘I didn’t think Mother would dare compete with Mrs Sanford in Circus Road,’ she says.

  ‘Ah, but ain’t you ‘eard? Mrs Sanford’s givin’ up the game. An old flame wants to put ‘er out to pasture in ‘is country ‘ouse. She’ll be waited on ‘and ‘n’ foot there, she’ll ‘ave ‘orses, and all she’ll ‘ave to do is whip ‘im with a silk sash, on days when ‘is gout’s not too bad.’

  Sugar smiles, but her heart’s not in it; she sees before her a vision of poor little Christopher standing outside her old bedroom, his spindly arms red and soapy from the bucket he’s carried up, while inside, a strange woman lashes the bloody back of a squealing fat man on all fours.

  ‘What’s … what’s new in your life?’ she says.

  Caroline peers up at the mottled ceiling for inspiration, and rocks to and fro on the bed.

  ‘Aaahhmm,’ she ponders, a faint grin spreading across her lips as she reviews the men she’s known recently. ‘Well … I ain’t seen my ‘andsome parson for ever such a long time: I ‘ope ‘e ain’t given me up as too wicked for savin’.’

  Sugar looks down into the yellow lap of her skirts for a moment, while she decides whether or not to speak. Her knowledge of Henry’s demise is burning a hole in her heart; if she could pass it on to Caroline, the burning might stop.

  ‘I’m sorry, Caddie,’ she says, once she’s made up her mind. ‘But you won’t be seeing your parson again.’

  ‘Why not?’ laughs Caroline. ‘Stolen ‘im from me, ‘ave you?’ But she’s canny enough to smell the truth coming, and her hands clench in apprehension.

  ‘He’s dead, Caddie.’

  ‘Ah, no, fuck me, God damn it!’ exclaims Caroline, punching her knees. ‘Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.’ Coming from her mouth, it’s the bitterest cry of pain and regret, a chant of anguish. She falls back on the bed, breathing hard, her fists trembling against the sheets.

  After a few seconds, though, she sighs, unclenches her fists, and folds her hands loosely over her stomach. Recovering from nasty shocks in two shakes of a dog’s tail is a faculty she’s had to hone over years of tragedy.

  ‘’Ow do you know ‘e’s dead?’ she says, in a dull tone.

  ‘I … knew who he was, that’s all,’ says Sugar. The violence of Caroline’s response to Henry’s fate has rather unnerved her; she’d expected curiosity, nothing more.

  So oo was e?

  ‘Does it really matter, Caddie? Except for his name, you knew him much better than I. I never even met him.’

  Caroline sits up, flushed and puffy in the cheeks, but dry-eyed.

  ‘’E was a decent man,’ she declares.

  ‘I’m sorry to have told you he’s dead,’ says Sugar. ‘I didn’t know he mea
nt so much to you.’

  Caroline shrugs, self-conscious about being caught with tender feelings for a customer.

  ‘Ach,’ she says. ‘There ain’t nuffink in this world but men and women, is there? So you got to care about ‘em, ain’t you, else what you got to care about?’ She rises from the bed, and walks over to the window, standing at the sill where Henry used to stand, looking at the rooftops of Church Lane. ‘Yes, ‘e was a decent man. But I s’pose the vicar already said that at the funeral. Or did they bury ‘im under a road with a stake in ‘is ‘eart? That’s what they did to me grandmother’s brother, when ‘e did away with ‘imself.’

  ‘I don’t think it was suicide, Caddie. He fell asleep in his sitting-room, with a lot of papers near the hearth, and the house caught fire. Or maybe he arranged it to appear that way on purpose, to save bother for his family.’

  ‘Not as silly as ‘e looked, then.’ Caroline leans forward into the window, squints up at the darkening sky. ‘Me poor ‘andsome li’l baby pastor. ‘E meant no ‘arm to anyone. Why can’t those as mean ‘arm, kill themselves, and those as don’t, live forever, eh? That’s my idea of ‘Eaven.’

  ‘I have to go,’ says Sugar.

  ‘Oh, no, stay a bit longer,’ protests Caddie. ‘I’m about to light some candles.’ She notes Sugar’s stiff posture, the hands still clasped around the beaker, the huddle of yellow skirts in the gloom. ‘Maybe even light a fire.’

  ‘Please, not for my sake,’ says Sugar, eyeing the meagre pile of fuel in the wicker basket. ‘It’s a waste of wood if …if you’re going out directly.’

  But Caroline is squatting at the hearth already, stocking it with quick and practised hands. ‘I’ve got me customers to fink of,’ she says. ‘Can’t ‘ave ‘em runnin’ away, sayin’ the room’s too cold, can I? That gets the Colonel paid, but it don’t pay me.’

  ‘As long as it’s not on my account,’ says Sugar, immediately regretting this mercenary turn of phrase, and hoping only that Caroline is too obtuse to notice. Irritable, wishing she’d made her escape sooner, she hides the beaker of cocoa under the chair. (Well, it’s gone cold now: why should she force herself to drink cold cocoa — cold nasty cocoa? Honestly, it tastes like rat poison …)

  But her humiliation isn’t over yet. Caroline’s skill in lighting the fire sets a chastening example, reminding Sugar of her own method: to sacrifice great quantities of kindling, handful after handful of delicate dry virgin wood, until sheer attrition sets the larger chocks aflame. Caroline builds a frugal edifice, with tattooed slivers of packing crate and splinters of old furniture, and with a single lucifer makes it crackle and fizz into life. With her back still to Sugar, she resumes their conversation.

  ‘So, what’s it like to be old man Rackham’s mistress, then?’

  Sugar flushes hot red to the roots of her hair. Betrayed! But by whom? The Colonel, probably … His vow is worth nothing, the old pig …

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I’m not daft, Shush,’ says Caroline wryly, still coaxing the flames through the wood. ‘You told me you was kept by a rich man; and then my poor parson said ‘e could find me work with Rackham’s; and today you tell me you knew my parson too … And o’course I know one of the Rackhams got burnt to death in ‘is house not long ago … ‘

  ‘But how did you know that?’ persists Sugar. Caroline’s not a reader, and the sky over Church Lane is so palled-over with foulness that the whole of Notting Hill could burn down without anyone here noticing the smoke.

  ‘Some misfortunes,’ sighs Caroline, ‘I can’t ‘elp but ‘ear about.’ She points theatrically downwards, through the floor, through the woodwormy honeycomb of Mrs Leek’s house to the parlour where the Colonel sits with his newspapers.

  ‘But why do you call my …my companion “Old Man Rackham”?’

  ‘Well, ‘e’s ancient, ain’t ‘e? Me own mother ‘ad some Rackham’s perfume, as I recall, for special occasions.’ She narrows her eyes at a memory as distant as the moon. ‘“One bottle lasts a year”!’

  ‘No, no,’ says Sugar, (making a mental note to advise William to expunge that vulgar motto from Rackham advertising) ‘it’s not the father, but the son I’m … kept by. The surviving son, that is. He took the reins of the business only this year.’

  ‘And ‘ow does ‘e treat yer?’

  ‘Well …’ Sugar gestures at the abundant skirts of her expensive finery. ‘As you can see …’

  ‘Clothes don’t mean nuffink,’ shrugs Caroline. ‘’E might beat you with a poker, or make you lick ‘is shoes.’

  ‘No, no,’ says Sugar hastily. ‘I–I’ve no complaints.’ Nagged all of a sudden by the need to empty her bladder, she yearns to be gone (she’ll piss outside, not in here!). But Caroline, God bless her, hasn’t finished yet.

  ‘Oh, Shush: what mighty good luck!’

  Sugar squirms in her seat. ‘I wish every woman’s luck could be the same.’

  ‘Don’t I wish it too!’ Caroline laughs. ‘But a woman needs graces and ‘complishments to rope in that sort of fortune. Sluts like me, now …we ain’t got what it takes to please a gentleman — except on ‘ere’ (she pats the bed-sheets) ‘for a short spell.’ Her eyes go slightly crossed with pleasure, as she realises she’s thought of something genuinely clever to say. ‘That’s the word for it, ain’t it Shush: a spell, like a magic spell. If I can catch ‘em while their cock’s stiff, they’re in me power. Me voice sounds to ‘em like music, me walk is like an angel on the clouds, me bosom makes ‘em fink of their own dear Nurse, and they looks deep into me eyes like they can see Paradise through ‘em. But as soon as their cock goes soft…’ She snorts, miming the end of passion with one limp-wristed hand. ‘My, but don’t they take offence at me coarse tongue! And me slattern’s walk! And me saggy dugs! And when they looks a second time at me face, don’t they just see the grubbiest little trollop they ever made the mistake of touchin’ without gloves on!’ Caroline grins in cheerful defiance, and looks to her friend for the same; instead she’s startled to witness Sugar covering her face with her hands and bursting into tears.

  ‘Shush!’ she exclaims in bewilderment, rushing to Sugar’s side and laying one arm over the girl’s convulsing back. ‘What’s the matter, what’ve I said?’

  ‘I’m no longer your friend!’ sobs Sugar, the words muffled inside her palms. ‘I’ve become a stranger to you, and I hate this place, I hate it. Oh, Caddie, how can you stand to see me? You’re poor; I live in luxury. You’re trapped; I’m free. You’re open-hearted; I’m full of secrets. I’m so full of schemes and plots, nothing interests me if it doesn’t concern the Rackhams. Every word I speak I look up and down twice before it leaves my mouth. Nothing I say comes from my heart…’ Her palms roll into fists and she knuckles her rage into her wet cheeks. ‘Even these tears are false. I choose to shed them, to make myself feel better. I’m false! False! False to the bone!’

  ‘Enough, girl,’ soothes Caroline, gathering Sugar’s head and shoulders against her breast. ‘Enough. We are what we are. What you can’t feel … well, it’s lost, it’s gone, and that’s all there is to it. Cryin’ don’t bring back maidenheads.’

  But Sugar weeps on and on. It’s the first time since she was a child — a very young child, before her mother began to wear red and call herself Mrs Castaway — that she’s wept like this on the bosom of a female.

  ‘Oh Caddie,’ she snivels. ‘You’re better than I deserve.’

  ‘But still not good enough, eh?’ teases the older woman, poking her sharply in the ribs. ‘See? I can read yer thoughts, girl, read ‘em right through yer skull. And I ‘ave to say, without no lie’ — she pauses for effect – ‘I’ve read worse.’

  In the darkening room, as the warmth from the fire begins to spread, the two of them keep hold of one another, for as long as it takes Sugar to regain her composure, and Caroline to get a sore back from bending.

  ‘Ugh!’ says the older woman in mock-complaint, removing her arm from the younger. ‘Yo
u’ve done me back in, you ‘ave. Worse than a man that wants it wiv me arse ‘n’ legs in the air.’

  ‘I–I really must go,’ says Sugar, the ache in her bladder returning with a vengeance. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘So it is, so it is. Now, where’s me shoes?’ Caroline fetches her boots out from under the bed, innocently flashing Sugar a teasing glimpse of a chamber-pot. She slaps the dirt from her feet, and pulls her boots on. ‘But one more question,’ she says, as she begins to button them up. ‘I’m always finkin’ to ask you this just after you’re away. That time I saw you in that paper shop in Greek Street — remember? And you were buyin’ all that writin’ paper. ‘Undreds ‘n’ ‘undreds ‘n’ ‘undreds of sheets. Now, what was that all about?’

  Sugar dabs her eyes, tender from weeping. She could weep all over again, with a touch more provocation. ‘Did I never tell you? I’m …I was… writing a book.’

  ‘A book?’ echoes Caroline incredulously. ‘God’s oath? A real book, like … like …’ (she looks all around the room, but there’s not a book to be seen, save for the tobacco-tin-sized New Testament her parson once gave her, now blocking a mouse-hole in the skirting-board) ‘like the ones in bookshops?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighs Sugar. ‘Like the ones in bookshops.’ ‘And what ‘appened: did you finish it?’

  ‘No.’ That’s all Sugar has the will to say, but she can see in Caroline’s expression that it’s not enough. ‘But…’ she improvises, ‘I’m going to start a new one soon. A better one, I hope.’

  ‘Will I be in it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ says Sugar miserably. ‘I’m only thinking about it. Caddie, I need to …use your pot.’ ‘Under the bed, my dear.’