The Crimson petal and the white by Michel Faber

PART 3

The Private Rooms and the

Public Haunts

Approaching the city by an unfamiliar route, her vision clouded by morning fog and the steam snorting up from the cab-horse's mouth, the elegant young woman feels as though she's never been here before.

She'd thought she knew these streets like the back of her hand but, admittedly, even her own hands are a little strange to her, tightly enclosed in a virgin pair of the whitest dogskin gloves.

The Season has almost begun, and more and more of the Best People are leaving their country seats for London; Oxford Street is clogging up with human traffic, so the cab-man has veered off into the smaller streets, nimbly negotiating the intricacies of the social maze. One minute the elegant young woman is being pulled past elegant young houses built for the nouveaux riches, the next she's craning her head at older, grander terraces owned by the old and grand, the next she's rattling past ancient tenements which once housed peers and politicians but now, in overcrowded squalor, house a vast troop of serfs. Hollow-eyed men and women stare from every mews and stairwell, half-starved from the long wait for the Season, hungry for the work that it will bring. They can barely wait to start sweeping horse-shit from the path of advancing ladies, and taking in young gentlemen's washing.

At last the cab-man steers his horse into Great Marlborough Street and everything looks suddenly familiar.

"This will do!" cries the young lady.

The cab-man reins the horse in.

"Didn't you say Silver Street, miss?"' "Yes, but this will do," repeats Sugar. Her courage is failing, and she needs more time before facing Mrs Castaway's. "I feel a little giddy-a walk will do me good."

The cab-man eyes her slyly as she alights. Her easy candour with him counts against her; she cannot be what he at first took her to be.

"Watch yer step, miss," he grins.

She smiles back as she hands him the fare, a saucy quip on the tip of her tongue-why not share, to the full, this moment of recognition, rogue to rogue? But no, she might meet him again one day, with William in tow.

"I sh'll take care," she says primly, and turns on her heel.

The sun has shed its cover of clouds by now, beaming all over the West End. The chilly air turns mild, but Sugar shivers beneath her dress and coat, for her camisole and pantalettes, clumsily washed in the bath-tub and dried in front of the fire, are still damp. Also, she had a mishap ironing one of the bed-sheets and burned a hole in it; she'll have to judge if her allowance (the first envelope from Rackham's banker arrived in this morning's post) is enough to defray such mishaps. He's given her an awful lot of money-enough to get a less elegant-looking woman instantly arrested, unless she took the bank-notes to a fence for conversion into coin-but maybe he won't send her so much in future, and this is just to get her started. Perhaps, to spare herself the embarrassment of asking Rackham for a laundry maid after all, she could buy herself new sheets and underclothes every week! The thought is seductive-and shameful.

Carnaby Street is littered with beggars, many of them children. Some clutch worthless posies or punnets of watercress; others make no pretences, extending grubby palms and naked forearms that are bruised and blood-scabbed. Sugar knows all the tricks: the putrid shank of meat hidden inside a raggedy shirt, seeping pitifully through; the fake sores created with oatmeal, vinegar and berry juice; the soot-shadows under the eyes. She also knows that human misery is only too real, and there are drunken parents waiting to beat a child who fetches too little money home.

"Ha'penny, miss, ha'penny," pleads a stunted girl in mud-coloured clothes and oversized bonnet. But Sugar has no small change, only a couple of new shillings and Rackham's bank-notes. She hesitates, fingers pinched and clumsy inside her new gloves; she keeps walking; the moment is gone.

At Mrs Castaway's, she lets herself in the back way. Although it seems wrong to sneak into the house like a thief, it seems equally wrong to knock at the front door without a customer at her side. If only the house could be magically emptied of people for the duration of her visit!

But she knows that her mother scarcely ever leaves the parlour, that Katy is too ill to go out, and that Amy sleeps till midday.

Sugar creeps up the stairs to her room. The house smells the same: musty and overbearing, a stale accumulation of bandaged water pipes and cosmetic repairs to the crumbling plaster, of cigar smoke and alcohol sweat, of soap and candle-fat and perfume.

In her bedroom, a surprise. Four large wooden crates, sitting ready to be filled, lids leaning up against them, generously hemmed with tacks. Rackham really has thought of everything.

"A big giant brought 'em," says Christopher from the doorway, his childish voice making Sugar jerk. "Said 'e'd come back for 'em when 'e got the word."

Sugar turns to face the boy. He has shoes on and his hair is combed, but otherwise he's just as she would expect to see him, standing in her doorway with his bare arms ruddy and swollen, ready for the day's load of dirty linen.

"Hello, Christopher."

"Carried 'em on one shoulder, 'e did, 'eld wiv one finger. Like they was straw baskets." Plainly, it's important to the boy not to be dragged into awkward adult complications. Sugar's abrupt disappearance from his life is nothing to get excited about; not compared to the amazing strength of the giant stranger who carried big wooden crates with one finger. Christopher looks straight at her like the African explorer-man on the tea-tin staring down the savages; if Sugar took him for the sort of fellow that gets attached to anyone, she's got another think coming.

Sugar chews her lips miserably as the seconds pass and Christopher shows no sign of moving.

"Good boxes, them," he comments, as if in his young life he's had to master carpentry along with everything else. "Good wood."

Turning her back to him to hide her distress, Sugar begins to pack. Her novel, she finds, is safe and sound, apparently untouched during her absence. She fetches it to her breast, transfers it as quickly as she can to the bottom of the nearest crate. Still the boy's eyes grow large at the sight of all that scribbled paper.

"Didn't you never send them letters?"' he asks.

"Plenty of time yet," sighs Sugar.

Next she loads her books in-the proper, printed books written by other people. Richardson, Balzac, Hugo, Eug@ene Sue, Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Pratt. A Manila folder containing cuttings from newspapers. Handfuls of penny dreadfuls with lurid covers: swooning or dead women, furtive-looking men, roof-tops and sewers.

Pamphlets on venereal disease, on the shapes and measures of the criminal brain, on the feminine virtues, on preventing skin discoloration and other marks of age. Pornography, in verse and prose. A volume of Poe clearly stamped on the flyleaf, Property of W. H.

Smith's Subscription Library, with a stern warning that all books containing maps or pictures will be carefully checked to be sure they are "perfect in number and condition". A New Testament given to Katy Lester by the Rescue Society. A slim volume, Modern Irish Poets, 1873 (unread, the gift of a customer from Cork). And on and on, half a crate full.

"'Ave you read all them?"'

Sugar begins to toss shoes and boots on top. "No, Christopher."

"Got more time for readin' in the new place?"' "I hope so."

The ingredients for her douche she wraps in a towel and tucks under the slate-grey boots that need new soles and eyelets. There's no point taking the douche bowl now that she has her own bath-tub.

"Good bowl, that."

"I don't need it, Christopher."

He watches as she fills the second crate, a long oblong one that looks like an unvarnished coffin. It's ideal for Sugar's dresses-as Rackham no doubt anticipated. One by one, she lays the long garments into it, arranging the layers so that the shapely bodices and bulbous bustles pile up in equal measure. The dark green dress, the one she was wearing on the rainy night she met William, has, she notes, subtle dustings of mildew on the pleats.

The dresses fill two and a half crates; the hats and bonnets account for most of the remaining space. Bending down to cram the hat-boxes closer together, Sugar senses another presence in the doorway.

"So, what's he like, this Mr Hunt of yours?"'

Amy has stepped across the threshold, obscuring Christopher behind her skirts. She's only half-dressed, indifferent to her shock of uncombed hair and the dark-areola'd breasts hanging loose inside her chemise. As always, that maternal bosom serves only to emphasise how completely she ignores her son, the unwanted product of her womb.

"No worse than most," Sugar replies, but the crates lean heavy against the claim. "Very generous, as you see," she's forced to add.

"As I see," says Amy, unsmiling.

Sugar tries to think of a topic of conversation that might interest a prostitute whose specialties are foul language and dripping molten candle-fat onto the genitals of respectable men, but her brains are crammed with what she's learned in bed with William. The analogy of odours as keys of an instrument? The difference between simple and compound perfumes? Did you know, Amy, that from the odours available to us, we may produce, if we combine them correctly, the smell of almost any flower, except jasmine?

"So how has everyone been?"' sighs Sugar.

"Just as usual," Amy replies.

"Katy's hangin' on, not dead yet. Me,

I keep scum off the streets."

"Any plans?"'

"Plans?"'

"For this room."

"Her Downstairs is after Jennifer

Pearce."

"Jennifer Pearce? From Mrs Wallace's house?"' "What I said."

Sugar breathes deeply, longing for rescue.

Conversations with Amy have never been easy, but this one is exceptional. Sweat is breaking out under her fringe, and she's tempted to plead a dizzy turn and flee downstairs.

"Well," says Amy suddenly, "I'd better tart myself up for my own admirers. Today could be the day I meet my Prince, eh?"' And she slouches out, knocking Christopher off-balance like a skittle.

Sugar sags where she stands, leaning her palms on the rim of a crate in fatigue.

"You know, Christopher," she confesses to the boy, "this isn't easy for me."

"I'll do it for yer, then," he says, and walks to her side, immediately laying hold of a spiky wooden lid. "The man left 'is 'ammer, and the nails is all in." Keen, he hefts the lid onto its matching crate, almost impaling Sugar's knuckles in the process.

"Yes… yes, you do that… thank you," she says, stepping back, sick with inability to touch him, to kiss him, to ruffle his hair or stroke his cheek; sick with shame at the way she backs out towards the door and steps out on the landing -that same spot where, so many times, he has set down the pail of hot water for her. "Mind your fingers, now…!"

And, to the sound of his happy hammering, she retreats below.

Hesitating at the back door of the house of ill repute known as Mrs Castaway's, Sugar gives herself permission to leave forever without saying any more goodbyes. Nothing happens; the hesitation is unbroken. Next, she tries to force herself to leave. Again, failure. Force is a language she understands, but only when it comes from without. She turns towards the parlour.

Her mother is ensconced in the usual spot, busy at her usual pursuit: the pasting of paper saints into scrapbooks. Sugar is unsurprised, yet disheartened, to find her at it again, scissors snickering in her bony claws, pot of paste at the ready. Her back is curved, the spine wilting over the table, the crimson bosom sagging, almost touching the low mound of images, a jumble of haloed maidens in shades of engraved grey, or pink and blue.

"No end to my labours," she sighs to herself, or perhaps as a way of acknowledging Sugar's approach.

Sugar feels her brow spasm in annoyance.

She knows only too well the lengths her mother goes to in order to ensure the endlessness of her labours; a small fortune per month is spent on books, journals, prints and holy cards, dispatched from all corners of the globe.

Religious publishers from

Pennsylvania to Rome are no doubt positive that the world's devoutest Christian is to be found right here in Silver Street, London.

"We-every-ell now," croons Mrs Castaway, focusing her bloodshot eyes on a fresh Magdalen from the Bible Society of Madrid. "Your cup rather runneth over, wouldn't you say?"'

Sugar ignores the barb. The old woman can't help it, this harping on the soft fortune of the young, contrasted with her own lamentable fate. God himself could fall down on one knee before Mrs Castaway and propose, and she would dismiss it as a pitiful compensation for what she's suffered;

Sugar could be burnt to death in a house fire, and Mrs Castaway would probably call her lucky, to have so much valuable property sacrificed just for her.

Sugar takes a long breath, glances at Katy Lester's 'cello case leaning against the empty armchair by the hearth.

"Katy never seems to get up anymore," she remarks, her voice raised slightly to compete with Christopher's ceaseless banging upstairs.

"She was up yesterday, dear," murmurs

Mrs Castaway, deftly wielding her scissors to create another human-shaped snipsel. "Played most attractively, I thought."

"Is she still… working…?"'

Mrs Castaway lays the snipsel on an already crowded page of her scrapbook, experimenting with where it should go. She has complicated principles determining where the saints can be pasted; overlaps are permissible, but only to disguise incomplete bodies… This new weeping beauty could be glued so as to cover another's missing right hand, and then the narrow wedge of space remaining could be filled with… where's that tiny wee one, from the French calendar…?

"Mother, is Katy still working?"' repeats Sugar, louder this time.

"Oh… Forgive me, dear. Yes, yes, of course she is." Mrs Castaway stirs the glue-pot pensively. "You know, the closer to death she comes, the more popular she is. I've had to turn callers away, can you imagine? Even extortionate fees don't seem to deter them." Her eyes go misty, reflecting the perversity of an imperfect world, and her own regret that she's too old to take full advantage of it. "Sanatoriums could make a fortune, if only they knew."

The hammering from upstairs suddenly ceases, and silence falls. Nineteen years have passed since Mrs Castaway and Sugar embarked on their life together in the creaking warren of Church Lane; six years have passed since the howling night Mrs Castaway (then in much shabbier garb in the candle-flickering gloom of the old house) tiptoed up to Sugar's bed and told her she needn't shiver anymore: a kind gentleman had come to keep her warm. Ever since then, there has been something of the nightmare about Mrs Castaway, and her humanity has grown obscure. Sugar strains to recall a Mrs Castaway much farther removed in time, a mother less vinegary and more nourishing, a historical figure called simply "Mother" who tucked her in at night and never mentioned where money came from. And all the while, the Mrs Castaway of here and now stirs her glue-pot, every so often removing the brush and anointing her scrapbook with a gob of adhesive gruel.

"I hear…" says Sugar, almost choking,

"I hear from Amy you're considering Jennifer Pearce as my replacement."

"Nobody could replace you, dear," the old woman smiles, her teeth flecked with scarlet.

Sugar winces; tries to disguise the wince with a twitch of her nose.

"I didn't think men were to Miss Pearce's taste."

Mrs Castaway shrugs. "Men are not to anyone's taste, dear. Still, they rule the world and we must all fall on our knees before them, hmm?"'

Sugar's arms have begun to itch, her forearms and wrists especially. Suppressing the temptation to pounce on them and scratch them raw, she tries to steer the conversation back to Jennifer Pearce.

"She's well known in flagellating circles, Mother. It makes me wonder if… if you're planning to change the character of the place."

Mrs Castaway hunches over her handiwork, pushing the shoulder of the latest Magdalen a little closer to the hip of the adjacent saint while the glue is still viscid enough.

"Nothing stays the same forever, dear," she mutters. "Old ducks like me and Mrs Wallace, we're…" she looks up, eyes wide and theatrical, "we are hawkers in the marketplace of passion, and we must find whatever niche is not already filled."

Sugar seizes herself by the forearms, squeezes tight. Why did you do it? she thinks.

To your own daughter? Why? It's a question she's never dared ask. She opens her mouth to speak.

"Which-what was the arrangement?"' she says.

"Between you and More-Mr Hunt, I mean?"' "Come now, Sugar," chides Mrs Castaway. "You're young and have your whole life ahead of you. You don't want to bother your pretty head with business. Leave that to the men.

And to shrivelled old relics like me."

Is that a glint of supplication in the old woman's shiny pink eyes? A glimmer of fear?

Sugar is too despondent, and maddened by the itch, to pursue her further.

"I must go, Mother," she says.

"Of course, dear, of course. Nothing to hold you here, is there? Onward and upward with Mr Hunt!" And again she bares her crimson-flecked teeth in a mirthless crescent of farewell.

A few minutes later, outside in Regent Street, Sugar tears off her gloves, pushes her tight sleeves up to the elbows and scratches furiously at her forearms until her skin is the texture of grated ginger-root. Only the fear of William Rackham's displeasure inhibits her from drawing blood.

"God damn God," she whimpers, while smartly-dressed passers-by edge uneasily away from her, "and all His horrible filthy Creation."

Back in her rooms, her very own rooms in Marylebone, Sugar lies in the bath, almost wholly submerged in a coverlet of aromatic suds. The humid cubicle of air around her is vague with steam, the mustard colour of the walls softened to egg yellow. Dozens of little R's, on the bottles and jars and pots all about, twinkle through the lavender-scented mist.

Thirteen, she thinks. I was thirteen.

Below the water, her arms sting and prickle, a much preferable sensation to the itching. In one hand she clutches a sponge, bringing it up to her cheeks every time the tears tickle too much.

You understand, Mrs Castaway told her long ago, that if we are to have a happy and harmonious house here, I can't treat you any differently from my other girls. We are in this together. In what, Mother?

Sugar shuts her eyes tight and squeezes the sponge against them. Once upon a time this little sponge was alive and swam in the sea. Was it softer then, or hard and fleshy? She knows nothing about sponges, has never been to the sea, has never been outside London. What's to become of her? Will William tire of her and flush her back onto the streets?

He hasn't been to visit her since he installed her in these rooms, days and days ago.

Frightfully busy, he said he would be… But how busy can he be, not to find time for his Sugar?

Maybe he's tired of her already. If so, how long can she cling to this little nest? The rooms are paid for and her allowance is set to come directly from the bank, so there's nothing to fear except William himself. Maybe he'll lack the stomach to evict her? Maybe she can stay here for years provided she keeps very, very quiet… Maybe he'll pay a murderer to slit her throat…

Sugar laughs despite herself. What time of month is it? Likely as not she's brewing the curse, to be thinking thoughts as daft as these.

How much foam one little bottle of

Rackham's Lair de Lavage makes! She must compliment William on it the next time he comes. Will he believe her, though, if she's sincere? How is she to tell him she admires something of his, if she really does admire it?

What tone of voice could she use?

"Your bath lotion is a wonderful thing,

William," she says, in the privacy of her misty bower. Her words ring false, false as whores' kisses.

"Your bath lotion is superb." She frowns, scoops a handful of froth from the surface of the water. She attempts to toss the trembling bubbles into the air, but they cling to her palm.

"I love your bath lotion," she croons.

But the word love rings falser than all the others put together.

For days, Sugar waits for William to come. He doesn't come. Why doesn't he come? How many of a man's waking hours can possibly be swallowed up by an already established, successful concern? Surely it's a simple matter of writing the occasional letter?

Surely William doesn't have to oversee every tiny flower and approve its rate of growth?

On the night when she was first given these rooms, she felt as if she'd been allotted a little corner of Paradise. The slate was wiped clean, and she was determined to savour everything in her new life-the solitude, the silence, the freedom from filth, the fresh air, her little garden, walks in leafy Priory Close, meals in the best hotels. She would write her novel to a thrilling conclusion while birds sang in the trees.

But, almost at once, the halo began to fade from her luxurious sanctum, and by the fifth day, it's pale indeed. The quiet of this place unnerves her: each morning she wakes, much earlier than she ever did in Silver Street, to the sepulchral stillness of suburbia, invisibly surrounded by neighbours who might as well be dead. Her little garden, by daylight, is a shady, half-subterranean affair, fenced all around by iron spikes. Peeping above the rose-bushes, she has a mole's-eye view of the stony rim of a footpath along which nobody ever seems to walk, whatever the time of day. Oh, one morning she did hear voices, deep male voices, and she dashed to the window to listen, but the speakers were from a foreign country.

Every dawn she washes and dresses, then has nothing to do: the books with which William has furnished the bookcases-technical tomes about maceration and enfleurage and distillation, merely to fill up the shelves-mean nothing to her…

She'll write her novel, of course, when the crates arrive. When will they arrive? When William Rackham gives the word. In the meantime, she spends a remarkable amount of her time in the bath.

The opportunity to take her meals in the hotels of Marylebone, so precious to her at first, has fallen far short of Sugar's expectations. For one thing, every time she leaves the house, she fears that William will come visiting at the very moment she sits down to breakfast or luncheon. Besides, the food in the Warwick and the Aldsworth is really nothing special, and they don't have the cakes she likes, only oatcakes, which are no damn use at all. Also, she's convinced the attendants in the Warwick look at her queerly, and whisper amongst themselves when she pretends to be engrossed in her omelette or her kippers. As for the Aldsworth, oh God, the expression on that waiter's face when she asked for extra cream!

How was she to know only a whore would ask for extra cream! She can't go back there, no she can't-not unless William himself escorts her …

What in God's name is keeping him? Perhaps he tried to visit on the day she went to Mrs Castaway's-an excursion she put off as long as she could, for fear of just that thing. Perhaps, what with meals and going out to the local shops to buy chocolates, spa water, and new bed-sheets, she has missed him half a dozen times already!

Finally, mercifully, on the morning of the sixth day… no, William doesn't come, but something else does: the curse. And, damned nuisance though the bleeding is, Sugar feels much better in her spirits: a dark cloud lifts from her prospects and she can see her way forward at last.

All she need do is make it impossible for Rackham to discard her, before he even begins to think of doing so. She must weave herself inextricably into the pattern of his life, so that he comes to regard her not as a mere dalliance, but as a friend, as precious as a sibling. Of course, to earn such a place in his life, she must know everything, everything about William Rackham; she must know him better than his wife knows him, better than he knows himself.

How to begin? Well, waiting for him in the empty silence of her rooms is emphatically not the answer: it merely tempts Fate to sweep her into the gutter. She must act, and act at once!

In the spectral glow of another overcast mid-morning, with a storm predicted, Agnes Rackham stands at her bedroom window, blinking hard. The apparition has vanished. It will return. But for now it's gone.

Not since her childhood visions of her favourite saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, has she felt this way. It all went wrong after that terrible day when Lord Unwin told her he was her father now, and there'd be no more Virgin Marys, no more crucifixes, no more rosaries and no more Confessions for her. How fervently she prayed then, for the strength to preserve the flame of her faith against the huffing and puffing of this big bad Protestant wolf. Alas, at ten years old she was poorly equipped to fight like a martyour. Any resistance to her step-father's edicts was crushed by a new nurse from the Anglican camp, and there was no help from Mother, who seemed wholly under her new husband's evil spell. Agnes's desperate calls to Saint Teresa, which once were intimate conversations, soon sounded like the lonesome whisperings of a child frightened of the dark.

Now, thirteen years later, it looks as though something divine and mysterious is afoot once more.

Miracles are in the air.

She wanders through the upper floors of the Rackham house, entering each room except the Ones Into Which She Must Never G. The servants are all downstairs working, so their rooms are conveniently vacant: Agnes enters them one by one and stands at their tiny windows, looking out into the Rackham grounds from half a dozen vantage points. Letty's window, in particular, has a nice view of the mews behind Chepstow Villas.

The apparition doesn't manifest, though.

Dreamily, Agnes returns to her own bedroom. And there, out of her own window, in the side lane not fifty yards away, she sees it again! Yes! Yes! A woman in white, standing sentinel, gazing directly at the Rackham house through the wrought-iron railings. This time, before the apparition has a chance to disappear into the ether, Agnes raises her hand and waves.

For several seconds, the woman in white stands motionless and unresponsive, but Agnes waves on and on, energetically wiggling her hand like a toy rattle on her flimsy wrist. Finally, the woman in white waves back, with a gesture so delicate and hesitant she might never have waved at a human being before. A boom of thunder penetrates the clouds. The woman in white melts away into the trees.

By lunchtime, Agnes's excitement has scarcely abated; extreme joy pulses in her wrists and her temples. The elements outside are wild in sympathy, sending lashings of rain against the windows and whoops of wind down the chimneys, urging her to whirl freely with arms flung wide. Yet she knows she must control herself and be demure, she must act as though the world is just the same today as it was yesterday, for her husband is a man and if there's one thing men despise it's happiness in its raw state. So, chairs scrape and dishes clink as she and William seat themselves in their appointed places at the dining-room table, murmuring thanks for what they are about to receive. Precious little light gets through the storm's watery shimmer and, though Letty has parted the curtains as far as they will go, it isn't enough, and finally a trinity of flaming candles must be set down between the Rackhams to clarify their radically different meals.

"I have a guardian angel, dear," says Agnes as soon as the servants have finished serving up-before she's even speared her first cube of cold pigeon breast out of its nest of lettuce and artichoke bottoms.

"A what, dear?"' William is even more preoccupied than usual, having been (he keeps declaring to anyone in range) up to his ears in work.

"A guardian angel," affirms Agnes, glowing with pleasure.

William looks up from his own plate, piled high with hot pigeon pie and buttered potato waffles.

"You're referring to Clara?"' he guesses, really in no mood for playful feminine effusions when he has the problem of Hopsom and Co. to solve.

"You don't understand, dear," insists Agnes, leaning forward, radiant, her food quite forgotten in the urgency of sharing her vision. "I have a real guardian angel. A divine spirit.

She is watching over our house-over us-every instant."

The corners of William's mouth twitch in a grimace of disappointment which he manfully attempts to convert into a smile. He'd been under the impression Agnes was much improved, after the fiasco on the kitchen floor and two days fast asleep on Curlew's horse dope.

"Well," he sighs, "I hope she doesn't come in and steal the new cutlery."

There is a pause while William cuts his pie and concentrates on conveying it to his mouth without soiling his now luxuriant beard. Thus occupied, he fails to notice that the atmosphere in the room has undergone a chemical change every bit as remarkable as the transition from crushed flower-petals to oily perfume pomade.

"I think she's probably from the Convent of Health," Agnes declares tremulously, pushing her all-but-undisturbed plate aside, napkin clenched in one white fist.

"The Convent of Health?"' William looks up, chewing. In the distorting light of the new silver candelabrum (perhaps fractionally too big for their dining table?), his wife's eyes appear to be unequal in size-the right slightly rounder and shinier than the left.

"You know," she says, "the place I go when I'm asleep."

"I-I confess I wasn't aware where you've been going," he says, grinning uneasily,

"when you're asleep."

"The nuns there are really angels,"

Agnes remarks, as if to lay an old misconception to rest. "I've suspected that for a long time."

"Aggie…" says William, in a gently warning tone. "Perhaps a different subject now?"' "She waved to me," persists Agnes, trembling with indignation. "I waved to her, and she waved back."

William slaps his knife and fork onto the table and fixes her with his sternest paternal stare: his tolerance is near its limit.

"Does she have wings, this guardian angel?"' he enquires sarcastically.

"Of course she has wings," Agnes hisses back. "What do you take me for?"'

But, in his eyes, she can see the answer. "You don't believe me, do you, William?"' "No, dear," he sighs, "I don't believe you."

The pulse in her temples is clearly visible now, like an insect trapped between translucent flesh and swelling skull.

"You don't believe in anything, do you?"' she says, in a low, ugly voice he's never heard from her before.

"I-I beg your pardon, dear?"' he stammers.

"You believe in nothing," she says, glaring at him through the candle-flame, her voice harsher with each successive syllable, all trace of its lilting musicality lost in a snarl of disgust.

"Nothing except William Rackham."

She bares her perfect teeth. "What a fraud you are, what a fool."

"I beg your pardon, dear!?"' He's too astonished to be angry; in truth, he is afraid, for this new voice of hers is as strange and shocking in her rosebud mouth as the growl of a dog, or a Pentecostal torrent of tongues.

"Beg all you like-fool," she spits.

"You make me sick."

He springs to his feet, scattering food and cutlery everywhere. The candelabrum topples with a crash of flame, molten wax and silver, provoking from him a bellow of alarm as he pounces on the candles, dousing them with a smack of his palm.

By the time he's reassured that there isn't going to be an inferno, Agnes is already on the floor, lying not in her usual swoon of decorous recline, but in a twisted rag-doll sprawl of slack limbs and exposed petticoats, as if a crack marksman has just shot her through the spine.

In the shadowy porch of 22 Priory Close, in response to his first pull on the bell, the door swings open and William Rackham is welcomed inside. For a moment he's dazzled, failing to recognise the white-clad woman before him; Sugar's hair hangs newly washed and dark against the snowy silk of her bodice, and her normally pale cheeks are blushing. He has caught her unawares, in fragrant disarray, preparing herself for him.

"Come in, come in," she implores, for the fierce rain at his back is slanted almost horizontal, pelting past him into the hall.

"High time I stopped this foolishness and got a coachman," he mutters as she ushers him inside. "This is intolerable…" He shies in surprise as she jumps to his aid, cooing nurturingly, laying her hands on his shoulders to help him remove his waterlogged ulster.

"New dress?"' he says.

"Yes," she admits, blushing deeper still.

"I bought it with the money you sent." Her attempt to hang his coat on the coat-stand fails instantly, as the sodden garment topples the dainty pole. She catches it in her arms as the metal clatters to the floor. "I didn't mean to be extravagant," she frets, lifting the coat above her head, and hooking its furry collar over a light fitting. "It's just that my old clothes haven't come yet."

Rackham smacks his forehead with the heel of his hand.

"Ach! Forgive me!" he groans.

"I've been up to my ears in work."

"William, your hand…" She grasps it, turning the palm up to reveal scalds and fresh blisters. "Oooh, how awful for you …" And, tenderly, she kisses the burns with her soft dry lips.

"It's nothing," he says. "A mishap with some candles. But how could I have left you in this state for so long… I'll get those crates sent first thing tomorrow. If you knew what I've had on my mind…!"

With a wet thud, his ulster falls again.

"Damn it all!" he explodes. "I should've bought you a decent coat-stand. Damn Jew said it was sturdier than it looked.

Flimsy rubbish!" He kicks the recumbent sculpture where it lies, triggering a buzz of vibrating brass.

"No matter, no matter," Sugar hastily reassures him, scooping the coat off the floor and bearing it into the sitting-room. A fire is blazing in the hearth; the straight-backed chair from the writing-desk makes a good drying frame, she's found.

Rackham follows on, embarrassed that this exquisite creature in white silk should be doing work more suited to a shapeless drudge in calico and black. How lovely she is! He wants to seize hold of her and… and… well, to be honest, he doesn't want to do anything to her tonight.

Rather, he wishes she would gather his head to her breast-her fully-clothed, silky white breast -and merely, gently, stroke his hair.

"I'm a poor excuse for a benefactor," he sighs, as she arranges his coat on the makeshift rack. "I leave you stranded without fresh clothes, for days. Then I shamble through your door, as though I've just been dredged from the Thames-and within moments I'm making an ass of myself, kicking the place down…"

Sugar straightens, looks her Rackham square in the eyes for the first time since his arrival.

There's something wrong, she realises now: something weightier than rickety coat-stands or a spate of bad weather. His contorted face, his stooping posture… He might almost be the William Rackham she met in The Fireside on that first night, hunched and mistrustful like a recently whipped dog-except that tonight he smells of less easily definable desires.

"Something is troubling you," she says, in her softest, most respectful voice. "You aren't a man to concern himself with trifles."

"Ach, it's nothing, nothing," he replies, eyes downcast. (how perceptive she is! Is his very soul naked to her gaze?) "Business?"'

He sits heavily in an armchair, blinking dazedly at the glass of brandy hovering before him-exactly what he wanted. He accepts it from her hand, and she glides backwards to the other armchair.

"Business, yes," he says.

He begins with a heavy heart, sighing deeply in expectation of having to explain the most fundamental principles. But, to his amazement, she needs no such thing; she understands! Within minutes he and Sugar are discussing the Hopsom dilemma -in detail-quite as if she were a business ally.

"But how can you know all this?"' he interjects at one point.

"I've made a start on the books you put on my shelves," she grins. (yes, indeed she has: screeds of closely-printed tedium, made bearable only by the anticipation of an opportunity like this one.) Rackham shakes his head in awe. "Am I … dreaming you?"'

She stretches slightly in her seat and breathes deep, allowing her bosom to swell into view.

"Oh, I'm very real," she reminds him.

And to the dilemma of Hopsom and Co. they promptly return. Sugar manages her side of the discussion better than she could have hoped, but then everything William knows of perfumery seems to have been cribbed from books and nothing from experience. Anyhow, the underlying principles of commerce are so simple, even an imbecile could understand them: convince your customers you're generous when in fact you're forcing them to pay dear for what you have produced cheap. Conversation with a boring man likewise has its underlying principles. Principle One: humbly apologise for your ignorance, even when you know what he's about to explain. Principle Two: at the point when he grows weary of explaining, appear to grasp everything in an instant.

"I'm not a businessman by nature, I'm more of an artist," William says, with a stoical sigh. "But in the end, that may be all to the good.

The born businessman is unadventurous, fearful of changing the way things are, if they're ticking along. The born artist is prepared to dare." Softly bleating these words, he strikes her as the last person to dare anything.

What's wrong with him tonight? At least he's swallowing the brandy…

The problem with Hopsom, after all her gentle probings and reassurances, at last comes out in the open. And what a puny little problem it is! The company is a minor manufacturer of toiletries, dwarfed by Rackham's as Rackham's is dwarfed by Pears. Until now, it has not sold lavender in any form, but William was recently approached by Mr Hopsom, with a view to the leasing of some of Rackham's lavender-producing farmland, if there's any to spare. William promised to consider it, but no sooner was Hopsom out the door than he conceived a notion much more radical than the mere leasing of land. Instead, why shouldn't Rackham supply Hopsom with lavender in its fully refined forms-soaps, waters, oils, talcums and so on-at a price much lower than what it would cost Hopsom to produce the same items in his own much smaller factories?

Hopsom could then sell them under the Hopsom name.

And what, asks Sugar, would be the advantage to Rackham of such an arrangement? Why, it would solve the problem of what to do with crops and manufactures that turn out… how shall we say it?… less than perfect. Every year an unconscionable amount of harvested lavender is thrown away, which might just as well be refined for what it's worth. Also it seems a waste to discard finished products (soaps and so forth) that are a mite misshapen, or have pock-marks or streaks of undissolved colour.

Not that the lavender produce passed on to Hopsom would necessarily be inferior; to the contrary, every effort would be made, as always, to ensure that all crops were perfect, and every manufacture flawless. It might well be that, nine times out of ten, there would be no difference anyone could tell between (for example) the lavender water bearing Hopsom's label and that which bore Rackham's.

Ah, but… ah, but… What of that one-in-ten eventuality? What if (just for the sake of argument) Hopsom's found itself in receipt of a quantity of substandard perfume, or if a newly-delivered crate of soaps should contain, by an accident of bad luck, a disproportionate number of visibly deformed specimens? What if (to speak plainly) Mr Hopsom should consider himself short-changed, and complain? Indeed, what if (driven-just for the sake of argument-by a perverse ingratitude for the generous terms on which his company had been given the goods) he tried to drag Rackham's name through the mud?

"You needn't worry any more, William:

I have your answer," says Sugar.

"There cannot.be a satisfactory answer," he moans, accepting his fourth glass of brandy.

"Everything depends on chance…"

"Not at all, not at all," she placates him. "This Mr Hopsom: do you happen to know if his Christian name is Matthew?"' "Matthew, yes," says William, frowning with the effort of imagining where, in his cast-off books, she could possibly have gleaned such a fact.

"Known to some as "Horsey" Hopsom?"'

"Why… yes."

Sugar chuckles wickedly, and swoops across the room to kneel at his feet.

"Then if Mr Hopsom ever causes you any bother," she says, propping her thin white arms on one dark trouser-leg, "I suggest you whisper two short words in his ear." And, leaning closer still to him, slapping his thigh in a gentle pantomime of rhythmic chastisement, she whispers, "Amy Howlett."

William looks into her bright eyes with a mixture of mistrust and wonderment for several seconds, then laughs out loud.

"By God," he cries. "This really is the limit!"

"Not at all," murmurs Sugar, nuzzling her cheek into his lap. "There are no limits to the heights that can be attained by a man like you …"

She moves her palm onto the spot where his sex should, by now, be swelling to erection, but it seems she's misjudged him. The conversation has gone surpassingly well: the Hopsom's problem is solved: and yet… and yet Rackham fidgets under her touch, awkward and unready.

"Dear William," she commiserates, falling back, clasping her hands demurely in the lap of her own billowing skirts. "You are still troubled. Yes you are: I can tell. What on earth can be the matter? What terrible thing has upset you so?"'

For a full twenty seconds he stares at her, dark-browed and wavering. Has she dared too much? He coughs, to clear his throat for whatever words may come.

"My wife," he says, "is a madwoman."

Sugar cocks her head, in a mute gesture of aghastness, after considering and rejecting such declarations as "Really?"', "Well, fancy that!" and "How dreadful!" All her working life, men have been telling her their wives are mad, and still she hasn't hit upon a serviceable way of responding.

"She was a sweet, kind-hearted girl when we first married," he laments, "a credit to anyone. She had some odd ways, but who hasn't? I couldn't have known she'd become a candidate for an asylum; that, in my own home, she would…" He stops short, closes his eyes in pain. "There was no happier girl when I first met her. Now she despises me."

"What a tragedy," breathes Sugar, venturing, hesitantly, to lay a condoling hand on his knee. It is accepted. "I imagine she'd love you still, if only she could."

"The maddening thing… I mean, the thing that puzzles me most, is that she changes from day to day. Some days she's as normal as you or I, then suddenly she'll do or say something wholly outrageous."

"Like…?"' Sugar's voice is small and unobtrusive.

"She believes she travels to a Catholic convent in her sleep. She believes she's being watched by angels. They wave to her, she says."

Sugar lays her hot cheek against his waist, embracing him companionably, hoping the flush will fade before she has to show her face again. Caught spying outside the Rackham house, what else could she have done, when Mrs Rackham waved at her, but wave back?

"Only last week she disgraced herself with a servant on the floor of our kitchen,"

William continues miserably. "The doctor had to come. He thinks I'm mad to keep her … He has no idea what a darling she used to be! Nowadays, Agnes spends half her life asleep-doped with potions, or simply lazy. I don't know anymore, it's beyond me …"

Sugar strokes his knee, regularly and unsensually, the way she might stroke the head of a pet. Inside her pantalettes she feels a trickle of blood, but it appears tonight will not be the night when William Rackham's attitude to the bleeding of women is revealed.

"How long has… Agnes been this bad?"' she asks.

"Ach! Who knows what she's been hiding in her head since before she knew me! But… I'd have to say that her madness was less…" (he clenches and unclenches his injured fist, grasping for the right word) "… full-flowered, before the child."

"Oh?"' Again, Sugar's voice is weightless, a mouse's tread. "You have a child?"' "Just one, yes," William sighs. "A daughter, unfortunately."

A sharp twitch of indignation, too instantaneous for her to suppress, passes through Sugar's cheek directly against William's stomach; she hopes his clothing diffuses it. How strange, that she's learnt to listen to all sorts of vile masculine harangues with perfect composure-diatribes against the female sex in general, her body as a cesspool of filth, her cunt as the mouth of Hell-but, every so often, a mild remark about the uselessness of a female child provokes her to fury. Teeth clenched, she holds her man tighter, to exorcise the anger in a vehement show of affection.

"I suppose," she says, to break the silence that's fallen, "your wife's illness has lost her all her friends?"'

He sinks lower in the armchair, relaxing into her embrace. "Well you know, that's the odd thing … I'd have thought so, but apparently it hasn't. The Season's round the corner, and invitations have poured in. Amazing, considering what she got up to last time she took part…"

"What did she get up to?"'

"Oh… All sorts of things. Laughed when there was nothing to laugh about, didn't laugh when there was. Shouted nonsense, warned people against invisible dangers. Crawled under a dinner table once, complaining the meat had blood in it.

Fainted more times than I can remember. Oh God, the number of times I had to have her carted off…!" She feels him shake his head.

"And yet, here she is, forgiven. That's

Society for you!"

She rubs her ear against his stomach. He has, by the sound of the gurglings within, eaten nothing: all the quicker will the drink loosen his tongue.

"Have you considered," she says, "the possibility that the invitations have poured in on your account?"' "My account?"' He heaves a sigh that lifts her head a full three inches. "I've never been one for balls and picnics and dinner parties. I'd rather make my own amusement. In any case, I'm monstrously busy this year, and can't think where I'm going to find the time."

"Yes, but don't you think there'll be people who've been watching your… your extraordinary rise? You've become a very great man, William, very swiftly. Great men are wanted everywhere. These invitations… well, people can't very well invite you and not your wife, can they?"'

William lays his arm down the length of her back, his hand nestling on the swell of her bustle. She's convinced him, she can tell.

"What a simpleton I am…" he muses, his voice rich with brandy and tranquillised anxiety. "Not to have appreciated how things have changed…"

"You must be mindful of who your true friends are," Sugar advises him, as she begins once more to caress the lap of his trousers. "The richer you become, the more people will stop at nothing to curry favour with you."

He groans, and guides her head towards his lap.

Afterwards, when his hard-won cockstand has shrivelled to a stub, Sugar presses on, in the hope of getting more out of him.

"How I've yearned for that divine taste," she gloats, to prevent his bolstered spirits sagging likewise. "You were gone so long! Didn't you have a thought to spare for your little concubine, stranded here without fresh clothes for days, starving for you?"' "I've been up to my ears…" But she laughs and butts in on his apology, kissing his ears with comical rapidity, a flurry of impish kisses to let him know he hasn't hurt her feelings at all. He snortles, ticklish, his double chin visible through his beard as he cringes.

"Being at the helm of a business is more time-consuming than I could have imagined. The Hopsom affair was only one of the things on my plate in the last few days. And the coming weeks are scarcely less busy. Soon I'll have to go to my lavender fields in Mitcham, and sort out why there's-"' "Lavender fields?"' she interjects excitedly.

"Yes…"

"Where the lavender actually grows?"'

"Well, yes, of course…"

"Oh, William! How I'd love to see such a sight! Do you know I've never seen anything growing except what's in the parks of London?"' She drops onto her haunches, as low to the floor as possible, so he can gaze down on her enraptured face. "A field full of lavender! To you it may be the most ordinary thing in the world, but for your little Sugar it's like a fairy story! Oh, William, couldn't you take me?"'

He squirms, smiling and frowning at the same time. Misgivings struggle to manifest in a brain soggy with alcohol and sensual satiation.

"Nothing would give me more pleasure, sweet thing that you are…" he slurs. "But think of the risk of scandal: you, an unknown young woman, walking alone with me in my fields, for all the workers to see…"

"But isn't this place on the other side of England?"' "Mitcham? It's down in Surrey, dear …" He grins, to see the undiminished ignorance in her face. "Quite close enough for gossip."

"I needn't be alone, then!" she declares eagerly. "I could be escorted by another man.

O-or rather-"' she notes the flicker of mistrust in his brow "-.I could escort someone else: a-an old man. Yes, yes: I know just the person, a lame old man I could pass off as my grandfather. He's deaf and blind-well, almost. He'd be no trouble. I could just… wheel him along with us, like a baby in a perambulator."

Rackham blinks at her in a goggle of incredulity.

"You're not in earnest, surely?"' "I've never been more serious!" she cries.

"Oh, William, say you will!"

He lurches to his feet, laughing at his own clumsiness, at the delirious absurdity of a brandy-tinted universe.

"I mustn't fall asleep here," he mumbles, fastening his trousers. "Hopsom is coming to see me in the morning…"

"Say yes, William," pleads

Sugar, helping him tuck his shirt in.

"To me, I mean."

"I'll have to think about it," he says, swaying in front of the chair that holds his ulster, still faintly steaming. "When I'm not so drunk!"

And he hoists his coat by the collar, allowing her to help him wriggle his arms into its obstinate sleeves. The garment is heavy, searingly hot on the outside, humid on the inside, with a peculiar smell; William and Sugar giggle, foreheads together, at the sheer unpleasantness of it.

"I love you!" he laughs, and she embraces him tight, pressing her cheek against his bristly jaw.

Outside, the storm has passed. Night has composed itself over Priory Close, stilling the rain, snuffing the wind. The black sky glitters with stars, the slick streets shine like silver in the lamp-light. The full moon, siren to all lunatics from the rookeries of Shoreditch to the regal bed-chambers of Westminster, winks on the chimneyed horizon.

"Watch your step, dear heart!" calls Sugar from the glowing vestibule of this, his home away from home.

Chepstow Villas, once William's cab has jingled off, is silent as a churchyard, and the Rackham house looms tall as a monument-a grand pretentious gravestone for an illustrious family that reached the end of its line. William shivers, with cold and with annoyance at the amplified creak of his front gate as he pushes through. He is half-sober now, in a most lugubrious mood, dispirited by the cheerless welcome of his own abode. Even the dog that likes to haunt the front gates has retired, and the path through the austerely shorn grounds glows eerie in the moonlight. A glimpse of the empty coach-house, half-hidden and sinister under the trees, reminds him of yet another item on his long list of things to be done.

He rings the doorbell once, but, conceding the lateness of the hour, he fumbles for his key. Feeble light filters through the ornamental window above the architrave-just enough to cast a shadow over his fingers as he bends his head closer to his damned elusive pockets. (lord Almighty! If his company manufactured clothing instead of perfumes, there'd be some changes made!) Just as he's found the key and is on the point of inserting it successfully in the key-hole, the door swings open, and he's greeted by a puffy-eyed Letty, woken no doubt from vertical slumber. Even in the light of the single candle she holds, he can see her left cheek is red and wrinkled from the sleeve of her uniform; no doubt she observes equally well his swollen red nose and sweaty brow.

"Where's Clara?"' he says, when she has helped him off with his coat. (her hands are stronger than Sugar's, yet less effective.) "Gone to bed, Mr Rackham."

"Good. You do the same, Letty." He has one more responsibility to discharge before he goes to bed, and it will be a damn sight easier with Clara out of the way.

"Thank you, Mr Rackham."

He watches her ascend the stairs, waits for her to be stowed in her attic hutch. Then he follows on behind, straight to Agnes's bedroom.

The chamber, when he enters it, is airless and oppressive-like a sealed glass jar, he thinks. When he first courted Agnes, she ran girlishly across the green lawns of Regent's Park, a flurry of bright skirts in the breeze; now her terrain is this thickly curtained sepulchre. He sniffs warily; were he not already so brandied, he might detect the scent of rubbing alcohol spilled on the carpet by a novice doctor attempting to saturate a cotton swab.

Walking towards the bed, candle held high, William sees his wife's face half-buried in the over-sized, over-plumped pillows. Her lips convulse feebly as she registers his approach; her insubstantial eyelashes flutter.

"Clara?"' she whimpers.

"It's me. William."

Agnes's eyes flip half-open, exposing sightless whites in which her revolving china-blue irises appear and disappear like fish. Plainly, she's doped half-way to fairyland, levitating through the labyrinths of whatever convents or castles she likes to frequent.

"Where's Clara?"'

"She's just outside the door," he lies.

How she fears to be alone with him! How she loathes his touch! His pity for her is so strong he yearns to wave a magic wand over her and banish her frailties forever; his resentment is equally strong, so that if he indeed held a wand, he might just as likely bring it crashing down on her head, exploding her pathetic egg-shell skull.

"How are you feeling now, dear?"'

She turns her face in his direction; her eyes focus for a second, then close wearily.

"Like a lost bonnet floating along a dark river," she murmurs. The old music is back in her voice: what a beautiful voice she has, even when it's talking nonsense.

"Do you remember what you said to me?"' he says, holding the candle closer, "before you fell into a faint?"' "No, dear," she sighs, turning her face away, burrowing nose-first into a warm white depression already filled with her own hair.

"Was it very bad?"'

"Yes, it was very bad."

"I'm sorry, William, so awfully sorry." Her voice is muffled by her cottony nest. "Can you ever forgive me?"' "In sickness and in health, Aggie: that's the vow I made."

For another minute or two he stands there, her apology travelling slowly down his gullet like a shot of brandy, warming his insides by degrees.

Then, accepting it as the best outcome he can hope for, he turns, at last, to leave.

"William?"'

"Mmm?"'

Her face has surfaced again, glistening with tears now, frightened in the candlelight.

"Am I still your little girl?"'

He grunts in pain from this wholly unexpected blow to his plexus of nostalgia. Droplets of scalding candle-fat patter onto an already blistered hand as his fists and eyes clench in unison.

"Go to sleep, Precious," he advises her hoarsely, walking backwards out of the door.

"Tomorrow is a brand-new day."