The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Within the four walls of Agnes’s room, there’s no evidence of the festive season. Indeed, there’s very little evidence of anything whatsoever, as all the clutter of Agnes’s pastimes — indeed, any object that might obstruct Clara’s nursing — has been consigned to storage, leaving scrupulously dusted vacancy in its place. As for the walls, they were bare even before this pitiful affair, for Agnes has never had an easy rapport with pictures. The last print to grace her bedroom was banished when a ladies’ journal decreed that ponies were vulgar; the one before had to be removed when Agnes complained that it was dripping ectoplasm.

  Now Agnes lies sleeping, insensible to everything, even the extraordinary performance of the snowstorm just outside her window, even the approach of her husband. William gently lifts a chair, deposits it near the head of the bed, and lowers himself onto the seat. The air stinks of narcotic syrup, beef tea, mulled egg, and soap — Rackham’s Carnation Cream, if he’s not mistaken. A great deal of soapy water is sloshed about in this room lately; Clara, rather than risk a mishap — a fall, a drowning — in a tub, washes her mistress in bed, then simply exchanges the sodden linen for dry. He knows this, because she’s told him so, only to refuse his offer of a second lady’s-maid with a sniff of injured stoicism.

  Agnes’s feet are healing slowly, he’s given to understand. There may, according to Doctor Curlew, be lasting damage to the left one, causing her to limp. Or perhaps she’ll walk as gracefully as she ever did. It’s difficult to predict, until she’s up and about again.

  ‘Soon,’ he murmurs near her sleeping head, ‘you’ll be in a place where you’ll get better. We don’t know what to do with you anymore, do we, Agnes? You’ve led us a merry dance, yes you have.’

  A wisp of flaxen hair is tickling her nose, making it twitch. He combs it aside with his fingertips.

  ‘’Ank you,’ she responds, from the depths of her anaesthesia.

  Her lips have lost their natural pinkness; they’re as dry and pale as Sugar’s, but glisten with medicinal salve. Her breath smells stale, which disturbs him more than anything: she always had such sweet breath! Can what Curlew says really be true, that women a damn sight more degenerate than Agnes have walked out of Labaube Sanatorium restored to the peach of health?

  ‘You want to be good, don’t you?’ he whispers into Agnes’s ear, smoothing her hair against her delicate scalp. ‘I know you do.’

  ‘Far … farther … Scanlon …’ she whispers in return.

  He lifts the sheets off her shoulders, and folds them down to the foot of the bed. The necessity for Agnes to be forced … no, persuaded, to eat a more robust diet is all too obvious; her arms and legs are terribly wasted. How cruel a dilemma, that when she’s responsible for herself, she starves on purpose, whereas when she’s rendered helpless, she achieves the same effect unconsciously! Whatever his qualms are about the treatment she’ll receive at the hands of strange doctors and nurses, he has to admit that Clara and her porridge-spoon are not equal to the challenge.

  Agnes’s feet are snugly bandaged, two soft hoofs of white cotton. Her hands are bandaged too, tied with a bow at the wrists, to keep her from interfering with her dressings in her sleep.

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ she says, stretching to greet the cooler air.

  Gingerly, William strokes the line of her hip, which is now as sharp as Sugar’s. It doesn’t suit her: she needs to be more rounded there. What looks striking on a tall woman can look worryingly gaunt on a tiny one.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you, on that first night,’ he assures her, stroking her tenderly. ‘I was … made hasty by urgency. The urgency of love.’

  She snuffles amiably, and when he hoists his body onto the bed next to her, she emits a muted, musical ‘Oo’.

  ‘And I thought,’ he continues, his own voice trembling with emotion, ‘that once we …once we were underway, you’d begin to like it.’

  ‘Umf … lift me up … strong men that you are …’

  He hugs her close, from behind, cuddling her bony limbs, her soft breasts.

  ‘You like it now, though, don’t you?’ he asks her earnestly. ‘Mind … you don’t let me fall …’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my dear heart,’ he whispers directly into her ear. ‘I’m going to … embrace you now. You won’t mind that, will you? It won’t hurt. You’ll let me know if I’m hurting you, won’t you? I wouldn’t hurt you for all the world.’

  The noise she utters as he enters her is a strange, lubricious sound, pitched half-way between a gasp and a croon of compliance. He lays his whiskery cheek against her neck.

  ‘Spiders …’ she shudders.

  He moves slowly, more slowly than he’s ever moved inside a woman in his life. The snow against the window turns into sleet, pattering against the glass, casting a marbled shimmer on the bare walls. When his moment of rapture comes, he suppresses, with great effort, his urge to thrust, instead keeping absolutely still while the sperm issues from him in one smooth, uncontracted flow.

  ‘…Num … numbered all my bones …’ mumbles Agnes, as William allows himself a solitary groan of ecstasy.

  A minute later, he is standing by her bed once more, wiping her clean with a handkerchief.

  ‘Clara?’ she whimpers peevishly, one bandaged hand pawing the air for the bedclothes. ‘Cold …!’ (He’s opened the window a crack, just in case the servant’s nose is as sharp in sense as it is in shape.)

  ‘Won’t be long, dear,’ he says, bending to wipe her again. Suddenly, to his dismay, she starts peeing: an amber-yellow, foul-smelling trickle onto the white bed-sheets.

  ‘Dirty … dirty …’ she complains, her distant, dozy voice tinged now with fear and disgust.

  ‘It’s … it’s all right, Agnes,’ he assures her, pulling the sheets over her. ‘Clara will be back very soon. She’ll attend to you.’

  But Agnes is squirming under the bedclothes, groaning and tossing her head. ‘How am I to get home?’ she cries, as her unseeing, demented eyes flash open and she licks her jellied lips. ‘Help me!’

  Sick with grief and regret, William turns from her, shuts the window, and hurries from the bedroom.

  ‘Next time I wake,’ reflects Sophie that evening as she’s being tucked into bed, ‘it will be Christmas.’

  With a forefinger, Sugar taps the child lightly, mock-sternly, on the nose.

  ‘If you don’t go to sleep soon,’ she says, ‘Christmas will come at midnight, and you won’t know what’s what.’

  Oh, how sweet it is, to have won so much of Sophie’s trust that she can raise a hand to her in playful rebuke, without causing a flinch. She pulls the blankets up; Sophie’s chin is still a little damp, and Sugar’s hands still warm and pink, from the bathwater.

  ‘And you know what happens, don’t you,’ Sugar teases, ‘to little girls who are still awake at midnight on Christmas morning?’

  ‘What happens?’ Sophie’s apprehensive now, that she might stay awake despite her best efforts to sleep.

  Sugar hadn’t expected this; her threat was empty rhetoric. She delves into her imagination and, within an instant, is opening her mouth to say this: A horrible ogre bursts into your room, seizes you by the legs, and tears you in two bloody pieces like a raw chicken.

  ‘A horr–’ she begins, her voice rough with malicious glee, before she manages to clamp shut her mouth. Her stomach abruptly revolves inside her, her face flushes blood-red. It has taken her nineteen years to reach this understanding, that she is Mrs Castaway’s daughter — that the brain which nestles in her skull, and the heart which beats in her breast, are replicas of those same organs festering in her mother.

  ‘N-nothing happens,’ she stammers, stroking Sophie’s shoulder with a shaky hand. ‘Nothing at all. And you’ll be asleep before you know it, little one, if only you close your eyes.’

  So saying, she extinguishes Sophie’s light and, still burning with the shame of what she almost did, retires to her own room.

  In Agnes Unwin’s diary, on the morning of h
er wedding, the seventeen-year-old girl appears in high if somewhat frenzied spirits. Certainly, as far as Sugar can tell, Agnes’s fears and doubts about giving herself to William Rackham have fallen — or been pushed — away. Only the ceremony now fills her with trepidation — but trepidation of a thrilled and puppyish kind:

  Oh, why is it, dear Diary, that although there have been a million Weddings in the history of the world, and thus a million opportunities to learn how to make their course run smooth, my Wedding has turned into such a mad scramble! Here I am with only four hours left before the Great Event, half dressed in my Wedding gown, and my hair not even done! Where is that girl? What can she be doing that is more important than my hair, on this Day Of Days! And she has put the orange blossoms on my veil too soon, and they are drying out! She had better find fresh ones, or I shall be cross!!

  But I must stop writing now, in case in my haste to record every precious event, I break a finger-nail, or spill ink all over myself. Imagine that, dear Diary: ink-stained at the Altar!

  Until to-morrow then — or (if I can snatch a moment) perhaps even tonight! — by which time I shall be, no longer Agnes Unwin, but Forever yours,

  Agnes Rackham!!!

  Sugar turns the page, and finds it blank. She turns another: blank again. She riffles through the remainder, and just when she’s convinced that Agnes must have begun a fresh diary to chronicle her married life, she spots a few more entries — undated, clotted, fearsomely small.

  Riddle: I eat less than ever I did before I came to this wretched house, yet I grow fat. Explanation: I am fed by force in my sleep.

  And, on the page following:

  Now I know that it is true. Demon sits on my breast, spooning gruel into my mouth. I turn my head, his spoon follows. His vat of gruel is as big as an ice pail. Open wide, he says, or we shall be here all night.

  More blank pages, then, finally:

  The old men lift the stretcher on which I lie, & carry me through the sun-lit trees to the Hidden Path. I hear the train which delivered me hooting & moving off on its return journey. One of the Nuns, She who has taken me especially under Her wing, is waiting at the Gates, Her hands clapsedunder Her chin. Oh Agnes dear, She says, Are you here again? What is to become of you! But then She smiles.

  I am carried into the Convent, into a warm cell at its very heart, which glows in colours from the stained glass windows. I am lifted off my stretcher & on to a sort of high bed — like a pedestal with a matress on top. The awful pains in my swollen stomach, the giddy biliusness I have been suffering each day, return with a vengeance. It is as if the demon inside me fears the Holy Sister’s healing powers, & seeks to take firmer hold.

  My Holy Sister leans over me; She is many different colours in the light of the stained glass, Her face is buttercup yellow, Her breast is red, Her hands are blue. She places them gently on my belly, and inside me the demon squerms. I feel it pushing and lungeing in rage and terror, but my Sister has a way of causing my belly to open up without injury, permitting the demon to spring out. I glimpse the vile creature only for an instant: it is naked and black, it is made of blood & slime glued together; but immediately upon being brought out into the light, it turns to vapour in my Holy Sister’s hands.

  Falling back in exzaustion, I see my belly shrinking.

  ‘There now’, my Holy Sister says to me with a smile. ‘It is over.’

  Sugar flips to the end of the volume, hoping for more; there isn’t any. But … but there must be! Her curiosity is aroused, she’s gripped by Agnes’s narrative as she never was before, and besides, she’s arrived at the period she most fervently wishes to know about: the early days of William and Agnes’s marriage. Breathing shallowly in anticipation, she fetches, from the pile stacked against her thigh, the next diary in chronological sequence. She’s seen it before. It reveals nothing. She finds the next one. It begins:

  “Season”-al Reflections, by Agnes Rackham

  Ladies, I ask you: Can there be any greater annoyance, than hat pins which are too blunt to penetrate a perfectly ordinary hat? Of course, when I say “ordinary”, I don’t mean to imply that my hats are not “extra-ordinary” in the sense of

  Sugar stops reading and lays the diary down, confused and disappointed. Ought she press on? No, she simply hasn’t the stomach for more of this stuff, especially on the night before Christmas. Besides, it’s late: a quarter to twelve. Overcome suddenly by that peculiar breed of tiredness which waits for a clock’s permission before it strikes, she can barely summon the energy to stow the diaries back under her bed; only the thought of Rose discovering her snoring under a mound of them in the morning prods her to action. Secret safely concealed, Sugar has one last piss in the pot, slips inside the sheets, and blows out the candle.

  In the pitch dark, she lies listening, her face turned towards the window her eyes cannot yet descry. Is it snowing still? That would explain how little street noise she can hear. Or are there no revellers? In Silver Street, Christmas Eve was always a noisy affair, with street musicians competing for festive generosity, a cacophony of accordions, barrel-organs, fiddles, pipes, drums — all woven together in a web of unintelligible chatter and uproarious laughter, a web that was spun to the top floors of the tallest houses. No hope of sleeping amid such a hubbub — not that anyone at Mrs Castaway’s was trying to sleep, busy instead with organ-grinding of an unmusical kind.

  Here in Notting Hill, the sounds are fainter and more cryptic. Are those human voices, or the snortings of a horse in the stable? Is that a fragment of a minstrel’s tune being blown across the grounds from Chepstow Villas, or the squeak of a gate, much nearer by? The wind whimpers under the eaves, fluting across the chimney tops; the rafters creak. Or is that the creaking of a bed, inside the house? And is that whimpering Agnes’s, as she tosses in her poisoned sleep?

  You ought to help her. Go help her. Why don’t you help her? nags Sugar’s conscience, or whatever she’s to call that unruly spirit whose sole delight is to pester her when she craves rest. They’re keeping her doped because she says things they don’t care to hear. How can you let them do it? You promised you would help her.

  This is a low blow, a promise scavenged from the meeting in Bow Street, when Agnes collapsed in the mud, and her guardian angel came to her rescue.

  What happened was …Ipromised to help her get home, no more, she protests.

  Didn’t you say, ‘I’ll be watching you to see that you’re safe’?

  I meant, only to the end of the street.

  Ooooh, you are a slippery, cowardly slut, aren’t you?

  The wind is blowing harder now, cooing and lowing all around the house. A shaft of whiteness plummets through the gloom past Sugar’s window. Agnes in a white night-gown? No, a quantity of snow dislodged from the roof-tiles.

  Why should I care what happens to Agnes? she sulks, turning her face into her pillow. She’s spoilt, and addle-brained, and a bad mother, and … and she’d spit on a prostitute in the street, if spitting were fashionable.

  Her mischievous opponent doesn’t deign to answer; it knows she’s remembering the tremble of Agnes’s shoulders beneath her hands, there in the alley, as she whispered into the poor woman’s ear: ‘Let this be our secret.’

  I’m in William’s house. I could get into terrible trouble.

  The unruly spirit is silenced by this — or so she imagines, for a minute or two. Then, What about Christopher?, it harangues her.

  Sugar balls her fists inside the bedclothes and digs her brow into the pillow. Christopher can take care of himself. Am I supposed to rescue everyone in this damned world?

  Oh, poor baby, is the mocking rejoinder. Poor cowardly slut. Poor whore, poor-whore, poor-hoor, pooor-hoooor …

  Outside in the windswept streets of Notting Hill, someone blows a horn and someone else raises a joyous cheer, but Sugar doesn’t hear them; she’s narrowly escaped learning what really happens on Christmas Eve, to little girls who stay awake too long.

  TWENTY-SEVEN
>
  ‘Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas, one and all!’

  Thus blusters Henry Calder Rackham upon entering his son’s house, as if he were Old Father Christmas himself, or at the very least Charles Dickens bellowing from a rostrum.

  ‘Merry Christmas to you, Father,’ William responds, embarrassed already, not just because of his father’s jovial effusion, but also because of the difficulty the maid is having divesting the old man of his coat. Like Lord Unwin, Henry Calder Rackham appears to have made an abrupt transition from portliness to fat, during the same passage of time in which William has transformed himself from an effete good-for-nothing into a captain of industry.

  ‘Ah, that smell,’ rhapsodises the elder Rackham. ‘I can tell already this visit will prove my undoing!’ And with that, he allows himself to be ushered into his son’s parlour, where he receives a warm welcome from the servants. ‘Hrrmph! Haven’t seen you before!’ he says to the new ones, and ‘Ah!: you’re — No, don’t tell me!’ he says to the old ones, but they take it in good part, and within minutes he’s the ring-leader, commandeering the rituals of fun and sentiment. ‘Where are the crackers? Where are the crackers?’ he demands, rubbing his hands, and lo! the crackers are fetched forth.

  The progress of Time, which had rather slowed down since the opening of the gifts this morning, speeds up once more, as William’s father devotes himself single-mindedly to the playing of parlour games. ‘Splendid! Splendid! Whatever next?’ he cries, as William watches in bemusement, unable to reconcile the festive buffoon with the stubborn old tyrant who made this house such a miserable place for so long.

  Odd twinge of embarrassment notwithstanding, William feels quite tolerant of — even grateful for — his father’s vulgarity today; it serves to keep the Christmas spirit buoyant whenever this terrible business with Agnes might have dragged it down. Everyone here is acutely aware (well, everyone except the likes of Janey) that the mistress of the house lies senseless upstairs, and that the master is sick at heart. He’s done his best not to mope, but every so often the pity of Agnes’s plight attacks him with a vengeance, and a pall of silence threatens to descend over the celebrations. You’d think a bevy of women could keep a house humming amiably for a day! But no: a male is needed, and William is tired of being that male.