The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Inside, the three passengers examine each other as best they can while affecting not to be staring: a tricky feat, given that they are seated with knees almost touching, the male on one seat, the two females opposite.

  William notes how wan and ill-at-ease Sugar appears, how there are pale blue circles under her eyes, how her sensuous mouth twitches with a nervous half-smile, how unflattering her mourning dress is. Never mind: at the photographers it will cease to matter.

  Sugar appreciates that William has, in appearance at least, fully recovered from his injuries. A couple of white scars line his forehead and cheek, and his gloves are slightly oversized, but otherwise he looks as good as new — better even, because he’s lost his paunch during his convalescence, and his face is thinner too, giving him cheekbones where he had none before. Really, it was unfair of her to compare his face to the caricature on the ‘Gorilla Quadrille’; he may not be the handsome fellow his brother was, but he does have a touch of distinction now, courtesy of his suffering. His temper and his stammer are likewise improving, and he’s still sharing his correspondence with her, despite the fact that his fingers have healed sufficiently for him to manage the task alone. So …So there really is no reason to loathe and fear him, is there?

  Sophie’s corporeal form sits still and behaves impeccably, because that’s what children ought to do, but in truth she’s beside herselfwith excitement. Here she is, inside the family carriage for the first time, going to the city for the first time, in the company of her father, with whom she’s never gone out before. The challenge of absorbing all these things is so great she scarcely knows where to begin. Her father’s face impresses her as old and wise, like the face on the Rackham labels, but when he turns towards the window or licks his red lips, he looks like a younger person with a beard stuck on. In the street, gentlemen and ladies stroll, each one of them different, adding up to hundreds and hundreds. A horse and carriage passes on the other side of the road, a polished wooden and metal cabin full of mysterious strangers, pulled by an animal with hoofs. Yet Sophie understands that the two carriages, at the moment of passing, are like mirror-images of each other; to those mysterious strangers, she is the dark mystery, and they are the Sophies. Does her father understand this? Does Miss Sugar?

  ‘You’ve grown so big,’ remarks William, out of the blue. ‘You’ve sh-shot up in no time at all. How have you m-managed it, hmm?’

  Sophie keeps her eyes on her father’s knees: this question is like the ones in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: impossible to answer.

  ‘Has Miss Sugar been keeping you busy?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  Again he is calling her good, just like he did on that day when the lady with the face like the Cheshire Cat was at his side!

  ‘Sophie likes nothing better than learning,’ remarks Miss Sugar.

  ‘Very good,’ says William, clasping and unclasping his hands in his lap. ‘Can you tell me w-where the Bay of Biscay is, Sophie?’

  Sophie freezes. The one and only necessary fact of life, and she hasn’t been prepared for it!

  ‘We haven’t done Spain yet,’ explains her governess. ‘Sophie has been learning all about the colonies.’

  ‘Very good, very good,’ says William, returning his attention to the window. A building they’re passing is adorned with a large painted design advertising Pears’ soap, causing him to frown.

  The photographers’ studio is on the top floor of an address in Conduit Street, not so very far away, as the crow flies, from the house of Mrs Castaway. The bronze plaque says Tovey & Scholefield (A.R.S.A.), Photographers and Artists. Half-way up the gloomy stairs hangs a framed photographic portrait of a callow, cupid-lipped soldier, much retouched, cradling his rifle like a bouquet of flowers. Perished in the Crimea; IMMORTAL in the memory of those who loved him, explains the inscription, before adding, at a discreet remove, INQUIRE WITHIN.

  Within, the Rackhams are met by a tall, mustachioed individual dressed in a frock-coat. ‘Good day, sir, madam,’ he says.

  He and William have plainly met before, and Sugar is left to guess who is Scholefield and who is Tovey — this man who resembles an impresario, or the bird-boned, shirt-sleeved fellow who can be seen, through a crack in the reception-room door, pouring a colourless fluid from a small bottle into a larger one. The walls are crowded with framed photographs of men, women and children, singly and in family assortments, all without fault or blemish, and also one really enormous painting of a plump lady dressed in Regency finery, complete with hounds and a basket overflowing with still-life debris. In one corner, superimposed on the tail-plumes of a dead pheasant, glows the signature E. H. Scholefield, 1859.

  ‘Look, Sophie,’ says Sugar. ‘This picture was painted by this very gentleman who stands before us.’

  ‘Indeed it was,’ says Scholefield. ‘But I forsook my first love — and abundant commissions from ladies just like this one — to champion the Art of photography. For it was my belief that every new Art, if it’s to be an Art, needs a measure of …Artistic midwifery.’ A second too late, he remembers he’s delivering his spiel to a person of the weaker sex. ‘If you’ll forgive the phrase.’

  Without delay, Sugar and Sophie are shown into a small room with a wash-basin, two full-length mirrors, and an ornamental queensware water-closet. The walls bristle with clothes-hooks and hat-pegs. A single, barred window looks out on the rooftop that connects Tovey & Scholefield’s establishment with the dermatologist’s next door.

  The travelling case is opened up and its sumptuously coloured, silky, pillowy cargo is pulled into the light. Sugar helps Sophie out of her mourning and into her prettiest blue dress with the gold brocade buttons. Her hair is re-brushed and the whalebone clip slid into place.

  ‘Turn your back, now, Sophie,’ says Miss Sugar.

  Sophie obeys, but wherever she looks there’s a mirror, reflecting back and forth in an endless rebound. Disturbed at the prospect of seeing Miss Sugar in her underwear, Sophie gazes into her Mama’s travelling case. A crumpled handbill advertising Psycho, the Sensation of the London Season, exhibited exclusively at the Folkestone Pavilion! gives her something to ponder while the body of her governess is disrobed all around her. Over and over she reads the price, the times of exhibition, the disclaimer about ladies of a nervous disposition, while catching unwilling half-glimpses of Miss Sugar’s underwear, the swell of pink flesh above the neckline of her chemise, naked arms wrestling with a flaccid construction of dark green silk.

  Sophie lifts the handbill up to her nose, sniffing it in case it smells of the sea. She fancies it does, but maybe it’s only her imagination.

  Tovey and Scholefield’s studio proper, when Sugar and Sophie emerge into it, is not very large — no bigger, perhaps, than the Rackhams’ dining-room — but it makes ingenious use of three of its walls, dressing them up as backdrops for every conceivable requirement. One wall is a trompe-Vwil landscape for men to pose in front of — forests, mountains, a brooding sky and, as an optional extra, moveable classical pillars. Another wall functions as the rear of a sitting-room, papered in the latest style. The third wall is subdivided into three different backdrops side by side; on the extreme left, a floor-to-ceiling library bookcase from whose shelves the posing client can select a leather-bound volume and pretend to be reading it — as long as he doesn’t stand too far to the right, for then he’ll step across the ‘library’ boundary and find himself framed in front of a cottage window decorated with lace curtains. This country idyll is likewise a very narrow slice of life, scarcely an inch wider than the diameter of an old-style crinoline, and gives way to another scene, that of an infant’s nursery papered with robins and crescent moons.

  It’s in front of this nursery backdrop — evidently the least often used — that most of the studio’s props are to be found: not just the rocking-horse, toy locomotive, miniature writing-desk and high-backed stool that belong to the nursery, but a jumble of other accessories to the oth
er backdrops, like a mountaineer’s walking-staff (for Artists and Philosophers), a large papier-mâché vase glued to a plywood pedestal, various clocks hung on brass stands, two rifles, an enormous ring of keys suspended by a chain around the neck of a bust of Shakespeare, bundles of ostrich feathers, footstools of various sizes, the facade of a grandfather clock, and many other less easily identifiable things. To Sophie’s horrified fascination, there’s even a stuffed, soulful-eyed spaniel which can be made to sit without demur at any master’s feet.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Sugar observes William appraising her and Sophie. He looks slightly ill-at-ease, as if fretting that unforeseen complications may spoil the day’s business, but he doesn’t look disappointed with the outfits; and if he recognises that she’s wearing the same dress she wore when he first met her, he betrays no sign. The hitherto elusive Tovey takes his place behind the camera stilts and casts the hulking mechanism’s thick black cape over his head and shoulders. Thus he remains shrouded for the remainder of the Rackhams’ visit, his buttocks occasionally swinging, wagtail-like, under the light-proof fabric, his feet as deliberately placed as the legs of his tripod.

  The exposures are made in a matter of minutes. Scholefield has dissuaded William from his original intention to have only one picture made; four can be accomplished in a single sitting, and needn’t be paid for or enlarged unless they give complete satisfaction.

  So, William stands in front of the painted skyline and gazes into what Scholefield describes as ‘the distance’, a point which, in the confines of the studio, can be no further than the ventilation grille. Scholefield raises one fist, slowly, and rhapsodises: ‘On the horizon, bursting through the clouds: the sun!’ Rackham peers instinctively, and Tovey seizes the moment.

  Next, William is persuaded to stand in front of the bookcase, holding a copy of Rudimentary Optics splayed open in his hands. ‘Ah yes, that notorious chapter!’ remarks Scholefield, peeking at the text as he gently pushes the book a little closer to the customer’s face. ‘Who would think that a tome as dry as this could contain such saucy revelations!’ William’s glassy expression becomes suddenly keen as he begins to read in earnest, and, again, Tovey doesn’t hesitate to act.

  ‘Ach, my little joke,’ says Scholefield, hanging his head in mock penitence. His manner is growing more flamboyant the longer he has his customers in his command; he might almost be tippling whisky from a hip-flask, or taking furtive sniffs of nitrous oxide.

  Sitting on the sidelines with Sophie awaiting her turn, Sugar wonders if there’s another room to this studio, a secret chamber furnished for pornography. When Tovey and Scholefield are left to themselves at the end of a working day, is it only respectably-clad gentlemen and ladies they develop, or do they also pull naked prostitutes from the malodorous dark-room fluids, and peg them up to dry? What could be more Artistic, after all, than a set of card-sized photographs sold in a package labelled ‘For the Use of Artists Only’?

  ‘And now, your charming little girl,’ announces Scholefield, and with balletic efficiency he clears away the props from in front of the fake nursery, until only the toys remain. After an instant’s hesitation, he removes the locomotive; then, after deliberating slightly longer, he judges that Mr Rackham is not the sort of father who would adore to see his child perched side-saddle on a rocking horse, so he removes that as well. He leads Sophie to a spindly table and shows her how to pose next to it, surveys the scene with a nimble step backwards, and then leaps forward again, to remove the superfluous stool.

  ‘I shall now summon an elephant down from the sky,’ he declares, raising his hands portentously, ‘and balance it on the tip of my nose!’

  Sophie does not raise her chin or open her eyes any wider; she only thinks of the part in Alice’s Adventures where the Cat says, ‘We’re all mad here.’ Is London full of mad photographers and sandwichboard-men who look like the playing-card courtiers of the Queen of Hearts?

  ‘Elephants having failed to come,’ says Scholefield, noting that Tovey has not yet made an exposure, ‘I shall, in disappointment, screw off my own head.’

  This alarming promise, accompanied by a stylised gesture towards its consummation, succeeds only in putting a frown on Sophie’s face.

  ‘The gentleman wants you to lift your chin, Sophie dear,’ says Sugar softly, ‘and keep your eyes open without blinking.’

  Sophie does as she’s told, and Mr Tovey gets what he wants at once.

  For the group photograph, William, Sugar and Sophie are posed in the simulacrum of the perfect sitting-room: Mr Rackham stands in the centre, Miss Rackham stands in front of him and slightly to the left, her head reaching his watch-chain, and the unnamed lady sits on an elegant chair to the right. Together they form a pyramid, more or less, with Mr Rackham’s head at its apex, and the skirts of Miss Rackham and the lady combining at the base.

  ‘Ideal, ideal,’ says Scholefield.

  Sugar sits motionless, her hands demurely folded in her lap, her shoulders ramrod straight, and stares unblinking at Scholefield’s raised finger. The hooded creature that is Tovey and his contraption has its eye open now; hidden chemicals are reacting, at this very instant, to the influx of light and a deepening impression of three carefully arranged human beings. She’s aware of William breathing shallowly above her head. He still hasn’t told her why they’re doing this; she’d assumed he would have told her by now, but he hasn’t. Dare she ask him, or is it one of those subjects that are liable to provoke him to a rage? How strange that an occasion which ought to fill her with hope for their shared future — a family portrait that installs her in the place of his wife — should arouse such foreboding in her.

  What use can he possibly have in mind for this portrait? He can’t display it, so what does he mean to do with it? Moon over it in private? Give it to her as a gift? What in God’s name is she doing here, and why does she feel worse than if she were being made to submit to naked indignities for the Use of Artists only?

  ‘I think,’ says Scholefield, ‘we have quite finished, don’t you, Mr Tovey?’

  To which his partner replies with a grunt.

  Many hours later, back in Notting Hill, when night has fallen and all the excitement is over, the members of the Rackham household retire to bed, each to their own. All the lights in the house are extinguished, even the one in William’s study.

  William snores gently on his pillow, already dreaming. The largest of Pears’ soap factories is ablaze, and he is watching the firemen labour hopelessly to save it. Permeating the dream is the extraordinary odour of burning soap, a smell he’s never smelled in real life, and which, for all its unmistakable uniqueness in the dream, he’ll forget the instant he wakes.

  His daughter is fast asleep too, exhausted from her adventures and the distress of being scolded by Miss Sugar for being fractious and her afterdinner mishap in which she sicked up not just her beef stew but the cake and cocoa she had at Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms as well. The world is an awfully strange place, bigger and more crowded than she could ever have imagined, and full of phenomena even her governess quite clearly doesn’t understand, but her father said she is a good girl, and the Bay of Biscay is in Spain, should he ever ask again. Tomorrow is another day, and she’ll learn her lessons so well that Miss Sugar won’t be in the least cross.

  Sugar lies awake, chamber-pot clutched in her arms, spewing a vile mixture of pennyroyal and brewer’s yeast. Yet, even in the midst of a spasm, when her mouth and nostrils are burning with poison, her physical misery is trifling compared to the sting of the words with which William sent her away from his study tonight: Mind your own business! If it were any affair of yours, don’t you think I would have told you? Who do you think you are?

  She crawls into bed, clutching her belly, afraid to whimper in case the noise should travel through the walls. Her stomach muscles are sore from convulsing; there can’t be anything left in there. Except …

  For the first time since falling pregnant, Sugar imagines the baby
as …a baby. Up until now, she’s avoided seeing it so. It started as nothing more than a substanceless anxiety, an absence of menstruation; then it became a worm in the bud, a parasite which she hoped might be induced to pass out of her. Even when it clung on, she didn’t imagine it as a living creature clinging for dear life; it was a mysterious object, growing and yet inert, a clump of fleshy matter inexplicably expanding in her guts. Now, as she lies in the godforsaken midnight, clutching her abdomen in her hands, she suddenly realises her hands are laid upon a life: she is harbouring a human being.

  What is it like, this baby? Has it a face? Yes, of course it must have a face. Is it a he or a she? Does it have any inkling how Sugar has mothered it so far? Is it contorted with fear, its skin scalded with sulphate of zinc and borax, its mouth gasping for clean nourishment amidst the poisons that swirl in Sugar’s innards? Does it regret the day it was born, even though that day has yet to come?

  Sugar removes her palms from her belly, and lays them on her feverish forehead. She must resist these thoughts. This baby — this creature — this tenacious clump of flesh — cannot be permitted to live. Her own life is at stake; if William finds out she’s in the family way it will be the end, the end of everything. You won’t go back on the streets, will you, Miss Sugar? That’s what Mrs Fox said to her. And I would sooner die is what she promised in reply.

  Sugar covers herself with a sheet in preparation for sleep; the nausea is ebbing and she’s able to drink a sip of water to rinse the pennyroyal and gall from her tongue. Her abdomen is still sore from ribcage to groin, as though she’s subjected rarely-used muscles to a regime of punishing exercise. She lays one palm on her belly; there’s a heartbeat there. Her own heartbeat, of course; it’s the same as the one in her breast and temples. The thing inside her probably hasn’t a heart yet. Has it?