The Crimson Petal and the White

A Novel

Michel Faber

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780547538471
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

A teenage prostitute ascends through the many layers of Victorian London society in this highly acclaimed "big, sexy, bravura a novel" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times ). London, 1870s. At the heart of this panoramic narrative is a young woman's struggle to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society begins with the egotistical perfume magnate William Rackham. Infatuated with Sugar, William's patronage brings her into the circles of his family and milieu: his wife who barely overcomes chronic hysteria to make her appearances during "the Season"; his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, left to the care of minions; his pious brother, foiled in his devotional calling by his lust for the Widow Fox; as well as preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions. Twenty years in its conception, research, and writing, The Crimson Petal and the White is teeming with life, rich in texture and incident, with breathtakingly real characters. "Cocky and brilliant, amused and angry, [Faber] is rightfully earning comparisons to observer extraordinaire Charles Dickens.... It's hopeless to resist" ( Entertainment Weekly ).

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Twenty-Five

‘But we’ve discussed everyone except you, William,’ says Lady Bridgelow, as they stroll side by side on the glistening footpath. ‘Your life is becoming shrouded in mystery, and I am so curious!’

William chuckles, momentarily relishing his status as enigma. But he wouldn’t wish to keep Constance (as Lady Bridgelow insists he should refer to her) uninformed for long. She is, after all, his best friend—well, certainly of those with whom he can nowadays be seen in public.

The morning drizzle has cleared up, making way for a Sunday afternoon of exceptional mildness. Pale though the sun is, there’s real warmth in it, as it lights up the tiles of Notting Hill’s rooftops and brings a corona of brilliance to the church spire. William is glad he came out today; with weather like this, his resolution to be seen in church more regularly promises to be quite painless.

‘Did you find a governess for your daughter?’ enquires Lady Bridgelow.

‘Yes, yes, I did, thank you.’

‘Because I know of an excellent girl available very soon—frightfully clever, placid as a lamb, father just gone bankrupt . . .’

‘No, no, I’m sure the one I’ve employed is perfectly adequate.’

Lady Bridgelow frowns slightly at this reminder of yet another unknown quantity in her friend’s life.

‘She’s not a Rescue Society girl, is she?’

William feels his cheeks and neck growing pink, and is grateful for his ever-more-plenteous beard and high collar.

‘Certainly not: what makes you think that?’

Lady Bridgelow casts a backwards glance over the ermine stole wrapped around her neck, as though absolute privacy is required for what she’s about to divulge.

‘Well, you’ve heard that Mrs Fox has returned to her old . . . profession, haven’t you? And working harder than ever, I’m told. Striving to convince ladies with any sort of servant problem at all, that one of these . . . reformed specimens is the solution. She knows better than to approach me; I had a Rescue Society girl in my kitchen, and was obliged to dismiss her after four months.’

‘Oh?’ Stability has finally returned to William’s own household, at considerable cost in money and brain-racking; he hates the thought of anything going awry. ‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing I can mention in polite company,’ smirks Lady Bridgelow, miming, with a subtle sweep of her kid-gloved fingers through the air in front of her silky abdomen, a swollen arc.

‘Am I polite company, Constance?’

She smiles. ‘You are . . . sui generis, William. I feel I could discuss any subject with you.’

‘Oh, I hope you could.’

Emboldened, she presses on: ‘Such a shame you couldn’t attend the launch of Philip and Edward’s new book. Did you know I was one of only five ladies there? Or four ladies, actually: Mrs Burnand was fetched out of the hall by her furious husband, in front of everyone!’

William gives her a grin, but is a little pained, wondering if he was justified in taking umbrage at the heavy-handed way his old friends scrawled the injunction ‘sans femme’ on his own invitation.

‘Well, Bodley and Ashwell’s book is close to the bone,’ he sighs. ‘And I’m not wholly convinced by their statistics. If there were as many prostitutes in London as they claim, we’d be tripping over them . . .’

‘Yes, yes, but let me tell you: Mrs Fox was there at the launch. She stood up from the crowd and commended the authors for helping to bring the problem to wider public notice—then scolded them for insufficient seriousness! “There is nothing to laugh about when a woman falls!” she said—and of course, everyone roared.’

‘Poor Mrs Fox. “Forgive her, Lord, for she knows not what she says” . . .’

Lady Bridgelow chuckles, a surprisingly earthy sound. ‘Ah, but one mustn’t be unkind about other people’s indiscretions, must one?’ she says. ‘I was speaking with Philip and Edward afterwards, and they mentioned how very concerned they are about your poor Agnes . . .’

William stiffens as he walks.

‘Their concern’s appreciated,’ he says, ‘but happily unnecessary. Agnes has quite recovered.’

‘Not in church with us this morning, though . . . ?’ murmurs Lady Bridgelow.

‘No.’

‘But possibly attending Catholic Mass in Cricklewood?’

‘Possibly.’ William knows very well she is. His wife’s belief that she and her coachman share ‘a little secret’ is a pitiable delusion. ‘She’ll grow out of it, I trust.’

Lady Bridgelow heaves a deep, elegiac sigh, and her eyes mist over. ‘Aahh, trust,’ she echoes sadly, hinting at the slings and arrows she’s had to endure in her life so far. Melancholy suits her face, lending her that faraway look that’s come into vogue lately. However, she can’t be glum for long, and bounces back with:

‘Do you have anything extra-ordinary planned for Christmas?’

‘Just the usual, I’m afraid,’ says William. ‘I really am a very boring fellow nowadays. I sleep, I eat breakfast, I conquer another part of the British Empire with my manufactures, I have dinner, and I go to bed. Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone besides my banker should take the slightest bit of interest in me . . .’

‘Oh but no, you must make room for me, too, William,’ she demurs. ‘Every great businessman needs a female friend. Especially if what he manufactures is of such value to females, hmm?’

William struggles to keep his face composed, almost irresistibly tempted to beam. It hadn’t occurred to him that Lady Bridgelow would ever use Rackham’s. The new catalogues and placards must be having the desired effect . . .

‘As for me,’ says Lady Bridgelow, ‘I’ve achieved something of a coup for my next party, haven’t I? Both Lord and Lady Unwin, together in the same country, at the same dinner table!’

‘Yes, how did you manage it?’

‘If truth be told, sheer swiftness! I popped the question before anyone else had recovered from the surprise of Lord Unwin’s return. I certainly can’t claim my charms brought him back here; I think his wife decided they should celebrate Christmas in England en famille, and ordered him to put in an appearance—or else.’

William has trouble imagining Lord Unwin being coerced in this way. ‘I’d have thought it would take more than that.’

‘Ah well, you must remember his current wife is not the submissive creature Agnes’s mother was. And, of course, he has children of his own now. That is, of his own blood.’

William responds with an empty hum; he’s never met the current Lady Unwin. Not that the Rackhams haven’t been invited to her house several times, but these invitations, in Agnes’s view, might as well have issued from Beelzebub, and she invariably responded with a Regret Not Able To Attend.

(‘I’m sure she means you well, dear,’ William would counsel her, but Agnes has never forgiven her step-father’s remarriage. The least he could have done was mourn, for the rest of his life, the saintly Violet Pigott, who ‘sacrificed her soul’ to please him! Instead, the hoary beast rushed to marry this . . . this thing)

‘I must admit,’ says William, ‘I’m apprehensive about meeting the old man after all this time. When I petitioned him for Agnes’s hand, I may’ve led him to expect that she’d be kept in grander style than . . . Well, you know the story of my fortunes, Constance. I always wondered if he thought badly of me . . .’

‘Oh no, he’s an old pussycat,’ Lady Bridgelow affirms, as they approach the corner of Chepstow Villas. ‘He and my poor Albert were friends, you know, and he did his best to dissuade Albert from all those imprudent . . . Well, you know the story of my fortunes, too. And when Albert died, Lord Unwin wrote me the sweetest letter. Not an unkind word in it. And Albert did some foolish, foolish things, I assure you! He wasn’t clever like you . . .’

Lady Bridgelow suddenly hushes in mid-flow: she and William no longer have the footpath to themselves. A tall scrawny woman in a plain black dress, with gangly arms and red hair that badly needs cutting, is advancing with a roly-poly child at her side.

‘How do you do, Miss Sugar,’ William hails her, cool but cordial.

‘Very well, thank you, sir,’ replies the scrawny woman. Her lips, deplorably, are flaked with dead skin, although she has comely enough eyes. Her demeanour is as dejected as one expects from a governess.

‘A rather brighter day today,’ remarks William, ‘than some we’ve had lately.’

‘Yes,’ agrees the governess, ‘to be sure.’ She reaches awkwardly for her pupil’s hand, and grasps it. took Sophie out of doors because she’s so very pale . . .’

‘A lady can never be too pale nowadays,’ says Lady Bridgelow. ‘Rosy complexions seem to be a thing of the past, don’t they, William?’

Neither she nor William lower their attention to Sophie’s level. Their gazes and their words pass through the air in a straight line to Miss Sugar, well above the child’s head.

‘I am finding Sophie,’ says the governess, transparently at a loss for any sophisticated conversation, ‘a most obedient and . . . um . . . hard-working little girl.’

‘How very agreeable for you,’ says Lady Bridgelow.

‘Very good, Sophie,’ condescends William, meeting his daughter’s wide blue eyes for the merest instant before moving on.

Back at the house, in the suffocating warmth of the nursery, Sugar can barely control herself. Her body wants to tremble—to shake—with indignation, on her own behalf, and Sophie’s. All her sinews and nerves are tingling with the undischarged desire to propel her body through the air, a whirling fury of claws and feet to tear that smug little bitch apart.

‘Who was that lady, Sophie?’ she asks evenly, after a very deep breath.

Sophie is playing with the wooden animals of her toy Noah’s ark—still her favourite Sunday activity, despite the permission Miss Sugar has given her to do whatever she pleases on the Sabbath. She shows no sign of anguish at how shabbily she’s just been treated by her father and his companion; her cheeks are a little flushed, true, but the unaccustomed exercise and the blazing fire accounts for that.

‘I don’t know, Miss.’

‘How often does she visit your father?’

Sophie looks up from shepherding the giraffes, her brow knotting in bafflement. A historical question about the succession of Mesopotamian monarchs would be an easier challenge than this.

‘But you’ve seen her before?’ pursues Sugar, her voice tightening.

Sophie ponders for a while. ‘Sometimes I hear the servants ’nounce her,’ she says.

Sugar lapses into a sulk. For the first time in months, she itches for pen and paper, to write a fiction of revenge like the ones in her novel. Only this time, the victim wouldn’t be a man, but a horrid little pug-dog of a woman, bound with twine at her wrists and ankles.

“Have pity! Have pity!” she yammered, as she felt a sharp object probing the tightly-clenched hole between her buttocks—a cold, leathery protuberance bristling with hair.

“What’s that? What’s that?” she cried in terror.

“Don’t you recognise it? It’s the snout of a stoat,” replied Sugar, twisting the sharp head of the ermine stole in her fist. “The poor creature is sure to be happier up your arse than around your neck . . .”

‘Did you hear,’ pipes up Sophie, ‘what my father said, Miss? He said I am a good girl.’

Sugar is jolted from her fantasy of revenge, and is confused to see a happy smile on the child’s face, a sheen of pride in her eyes.

‘He didn’t say that,’ she snaps, before she can stop herself.

Sophie’s look of contentment evaporates, and her brow creases—a change that serves only to emphasise her resemblance to William. She turns her head away, taking refuge in the less dangerous world of her playthings. Held erect in her tiny hand, Noah begins to ascend the gangplank of the Ark with slow, dignified hops.

‘But my dear Rackham, if you’ll forgive me saying so: you are still evading the subject.’

‘Am I?’ says William. It’s Monday morning, and he’s entertaining a guest in his smoking-room. Cigars are already lit, and William uncorks the port-bottle with a thwipp. ‘Perhaps we aren’t agreed,’ he says, ‘on what the subject is. I am asking you for advice on how to hasten my wife’s progress back to full health, here in her own home. You seem intent on cataloguing the merits and demerits of madhouses from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth.’

Doctor Curlew grunts. His effusion of information was only natural, provoked by Rackham’s pretence to know something about lunatic asylums that he doesn’t. In fact, Doctor Curlew has probably spent more time in mad-houses than any sane man; as a young physician, in the years before he decided that surgery was not his forte, he performed many operations on asylum inmates, and learned a great deal besides scalpelling techniques. He knows the good asylums from the bad; knows which of them are nothing but glorified prisons, or boarding-houses with medical pretensions—or, at the other end of the scale, first-class hospitals devoted to the increase of knowledge and the full recovery of the patient. He has observed many times that hysterical ladies, so degraded as to be no use to man or beast, may effect miraculous recoveries once removed from the circle of indulgent fuss-pots on whom their illness feeds.

Knowing all this, Doctor Curlew can predict with authority that, in her own house, Agnes Rackham is doomed. What hope for recovery has she, when she not only has a permissive husband, but is pampered by obsequious and gullible servants?

‘There’s no virtue, Rackham,’ he says, ‘in keeping a sick person at home. No one blames a man for sending his wife to a hospital when she breaks a leg or gets smallpox. This is no different, I tell you.’

William sips unhappily at his port. ‘I do wonder,’ he muses, ‘if there isn’t something physically the matter with her . . .’

‘I’ve investigated her inside out. There’s nothing wrong that won’t correct itself if she’s properly handled.’

‘Sometimes, when she’s behaving very badly, just before she collapses, I could swear one eye is bigger than the other . . .’

‘Humphh. I imagine she’s having trouble looking you straight ...