The Crimson petal and the white

EIGHTEEN

Henry Rackham pulls a second time on the bell-cord, one hand fingering the calling card he fears he may have to leave instead of being permitted to visit Mrs Fox in person. Can it really be true that in the brief time since he saw her last she's become mortally ill? The brass plaque on her father's door, which once seemed merely informative, is suddenly suggestive of a universe in which sickness and fatality reign supreme: JAMES CURLEW, PHYSICIAN

The door is opened by the doctor's elderly housemaid. Henry removes his hat and presses it to his chest, unable even to speak.

"Please come in, Mr Rackham."

Ushered into the hallway, he catches sight of Doctor Curlew almost disappearing at the top of the stairs, and can barely resist rudely shaking off the servant as she fusses with his coat.

"Doctor!" he cries, yanking his arms clear of the sleeves.

Curlew halts on the top stair, turns and begins to walk back down, silently, with no acknowledgement of his visitor, but rather as if he has forgotten something.

"Sir," calls Henry. "How… how is Mrs Fox?"'

Curlew comes to a stop well above Henry's head.

"It's confirmed: she has consumption," he remarks emptily. "What else can I say?"'

Henry grasps two struts of the banister in his big hands, and looks up into the doctor's heavy-lidded, red-rimmed eyes.

"Is there nothing…?"' he pleads.

"I've read about… I think they were called … pulmonic wafers?"'

The doctor laughs, more to himself than at Henry.

"All rubbish, Rackham. Trinkets and lolly-water. I daresay your prayers might have more practical effect."

"May I see her?"' entreats Henry.

"I'd do my utmost not to tax her…"

Curlew resumes his ascent, casting the burden of hospitality carelessly downstairs to his housemaid. "Yes, yes, by all means," he says over his shoulder. "As she'll tell you herself, she feels perfectly well." And with that, he's gone.

The servant leads Henry through the austere corridors and Spartan drawing-room of the doctor's house-a house which, in marked contrast to his brother William's, is wholly unfeminised. There is no relief from subfusc utilitarianism until he reaches the French windows that open up onto the garden, where Nature has been permitted to embroider the bare earth ever so slightly. Through the immaculately transparent glass, Henry looks out on a sunlit square of clipped lawn bordered with neat evergreen shrubs and, in the middle of it, the most important person in the world save Jesus Christ.

She reclines in a wicker rocking-chair, fully dressed for company, with a tightly-buttoned bodice, boots rather than slippers, and elaborately coiffed hair-more elaborate, in fact, than usual. Nestled in her lap is an upright and open book, into which she gazes intently. She is more beautiful than ever before.

"Mrs Fox?"'

"Henry!" she cries delightedly, dropping her book on the grass beside her. "How very nice to see you! I was going mad with boredom."

Henry walks out to her, incredulous that Doctor Curlew can so confidently write a death sentence for one who's the very embodiment of life. They don't know everything, these medical men! Couldn't there be some mistake? But Mrs Fox, observing the confusion on his face, mercilessly sets him straight.

"I'm in a bad way, Henry," she says, smiling. "That's why I'm sitting still, for once! This morning I've even had my feet up, which is about the limit of what I can submit to with good grace. Do sit down, Henry: the grass is quite dry."

Henry does as he's told, even though she's mistaken and the seat of his trousers instantly begins to dampen.

"Well now," she carries on, in an odd tone, a mixture of breezy cheer and bitter fatigue. "What other news do I have for you?

You may already have heard that I've been… how can I put it?… delicately expelled from the Rescue Society. It was decided, by my fellow Rescuers, that I'd grown too feeble to perform my duties. There was one day, you see, when the walk from Liverpool Street Station to a house of ill repute exhausted me, and I had to rest on the front steps while the others went inside. I made myself as useful as I could, by having strong words with the spoony-man, but my sisters plainly felt I'd let them down. So, this Tuesday past, they sent me a letter, suggesting I restrict my efforts to corresponding with Parliamentarians. All the Rescuers wish me the speediest of recoveries, in the most florid of terms. In the meantime, they obviously wish me to be bored to death."

Unnerved by the ease with which she allows this obscene word to pass through her lips, Henry can scarcely bring himself to press her for more details.

"Has your father," he ventures, "discussed with you… what exactly it is, or might be, that you… ah… have?"' "Oh Henry, how you pussyfoot, as always!" she chides him affectionately. "I have consumption. Or so I'm told, and I've no reason to doubt it." A glow of fervency is ignited in her eyes, the same glow as when she argues points of faith with him on their walks after church. "Where I differ from the general opinion, including my learned father's, is that I know I'm not destined to die-at least not yet. I have, inside me, a sort of… how can I describe it? A sort of calendar of my days, put there by God, and on each leaf of that calendar is written what errands and appointments I have in His service. I don't claim to know precisely how many pages there are, nor would I wish to know, but I can feel somehow that the calendar is quite thick still, and certainly not the slim portion of pages everyone supposes. So, I've consumption, have I? Very well, I have consumption.

But I shall survive it."

"Oh, brave spirit!" cries Henry, suddenly on his knees, grasping her hand.

"Oh, nonsense," she retorts, but locks her cool fingers into his, squeezing gently. "God means to keep me busy, that's all."

For a minute they are both silent. Their hands are clasped, channelling naked and inarticulate feelings back and forth between them; that which innocent impulse has joined together, propriety cannot yet put asunder. The garden basks in sunshine, and a large black butterfly appears from beyond the high fences around the garden, fluttering over the shrubs in search of a flower. Mrs Fox withdraws her fingers from Henry's with sufficient grace to make clear that no rejection is implied, and rests her hand on her breast.

"Now tell me, Henry," she says, inhaling deeply. "What's new in your life?"' "In my life?"' He blinks, dazed by the heady indulgence of touching her flesh. "I… ah…" But then it all comes back to him, and he finds his tongue. "Quite a lot is new, I'm pleased to say. I've been"-he blushes, casting his eyes to the grass between his knees-"conducting researches into the poor and the wretched, with a view to preparing myself, at last, for …" He blushes deeper, then grins.

"Well, you know what."

"You've read the Mayhew I lent you, then?"' "Yes, but I've done more than that. I…

I've also begun, just in these last few weeks, to conduct conversations with the poor and wretched themselves, in the streets where they live."

"Oh, Henry, have you really?"' Her pride in him could scarcely be more evident if he'd told her he met the Queen and saved her from assassins. "Tell me, tell me, what happened?"'

And so, on his knees before her, he tells everything, almost. Full descriptions of the locales and of his meetings with idle men, urchins and the prostitute (he only omits his one lapse into prurience). Emmeline listens intently, her face aglow, her body restless, for she's uncomfortable, shifting about in the chair as if her very bones are chafing against the wicker. While he speaks, he can't help noticing how thin she has grown. Are those her collar-bones he sees beneath the fabric of her dress? What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones? In his visions of himself as a clergyman Mrs Fox has always been on hand, advising him, inviting him to confess his failings and his sorrows. His ambition is only strong when it wears the armour of her encouragement: stripped of that, it's a soft and vulnerable dream. She must not die!

Uncannily, she chooses this moment to reach out her hand to him and clasp it over his own, saying,

"God grant that we might, in the future, work side by side in this struggle!"

Henry looks into her eyes. Moments before, he was telling her that loose women have no power over him; that in their squalid poverty, he is able to see them as souls and souls only. All true enough, but suddenly he realises, as his hand tingles inside hers, that this high-minded and upright woman, knocked flat on her back by the brutal hand of disease, still inspires in him lusts worthy of the Devil.

"God grant, Mrs Fox," he whispers hoarsely.

"Church Lane, back entrance of Paradise, fankyerverymuch!"

Having delivered a well-dressed lady to this repugnant quarter of the Old City, the cabman utters a snort of sarcasm; his like-minded horse dumps, as a parting gesture of disdain, a mound of hot turd on the cobbles. Resisting the temptation to tick him off, Sugar keeps her mouth shut and pays the fare, then tiptoes towards Mrs Leek's house with the hems of her skirts lifted. What a morass of filth this street is!-the fresh fall of horseshit is the least of its hazards. Did it always stink like this, or has she been living too long in a place where nothing smells but rose-bushes and Rackham toiletries?

She knocks at Mrs Leek's door, hears the Colonel's muffled "Enter!" and lets herself in, as she did so many times during her girlhood. The smell is no better inside, and the view, what with the grisly old man and the ever increasing clutter of grimy junk in the parlour, no more heartening than the squalor out in the street.

"Ah, the concubine!" crows the Colonel maliciously, without any other greeting. "Think yerself blessed by good fortune, eh?"'

Sugar draws a deep breath as she removes her gloves and stuffs them into her reticule.

Already she bitterly regrets bumping into Caroline in New Oxford Street yesterday and promising, in her mad hurry to be released from what threatened to turn into a long conversation, to pay her a visit. What a freakish coincidence, that Caroline should spot her twice in the same year, in a city of several million people-and at just the moment when she was hurrying to Euston Station to spy on the arrival of the Birmingham train! Looking back on it, it would've been better to spend a few more minutes with Caroline in the street, for William wasn't on that damned train anyway, and now there's the risk of him coming back this morning, and knocking at the door of her rooms, while she is here, wasting her time in a bawdy-house that smells of old man's piss!

"Is Caroline free, Colonel

Leek?"' she asks evenly.

Delighted to be the privileged withholder of information, the old man leans back in his wheelchair, and the topmost coils of his scarf fall away from his mouth. He's about to regurgitate something from his festering store of disasters, Sugar can tell.

"Good fortune!" he sneers. "I'll give you good fortune! Yorkshire woman, name of Hobbert, inherited her father's estate in 1852: squashed by a falling archway three days later.

Botanical sketch-maker Edith Clough, chosen out of thousands to accompany Professor Eyde on his expedition to Greenland in 1861: devoured by a big fish at sea. And only November last, Lizzie Sumner, mistress of Lord Price: found in her Marylebone maisonette with her neck-"' "Yes, very tragic, Colonel.

But is Caroline free?"'

"Give her two minutes," growls the old man, and sinks once more into his scarves.

Sugar surreptitiously brushes the seat of the nearest chair with her fingertips, then sits.

Blessed silence descends, as the Colonel slumps in the thickly-veiled sunlight and Sugar stares at the rust-flecked muskets on the wall, but after thirty seconds the Colonel spoils it.

"How's the perfume potentate, then?"'

"You promised not to speak about him to anybody," she snaps. "It was part of our agreement."

"I've said nowt to this lot," he spits, rolling his eyes up towards the rest of the house, that pigeon-warren of rooms he never ascends to, where men perform athletic acts with their young limbs and organs, and three loose women lodge and sleep, and Mrs Leek reads tuppenny books in her den. "How little trust you have, trollop, in a man's word of honour."

Sugar stares down at her fingers. The scaling on her flesh is bad at the moment, painful.

Maybe she'll ask Caroline if she has any bear's grease.

"He's very well, thank you," she says.

"Couldn't be better."

"Slips yer a big cake o' soap every so often, eh?"'

Sugar glances up into his inflamed eyes, wondering if this remark was intended to be grossly bawdy. She hadn't thought libidinous acts were of the slightest interest to Colonel Leek.

"He's as generous as I could wish for," she shrugs.

"Don't spend it all in the one place."

The dull sound of the back door slamming stumbles through the musty air. A satisfied customer has been discharged into the bright world.

"Sugar!" It's Caroline, appearing at the top of the stairs, dressed only in a shift.

At this angle and in this light, the scar from the hat factory is alarmingly livid on her chest.

"Push the Colonel out the way if 'e won't go: 'e's on wheels, aint 'e?"'

Colonel Leek, rather than submit to this indignity, wheels clear of the stairs.

"-found with her neck cut almost in two by a silk scarf," he concludes, as Sugar trots up to her friend.

Having offered Sugar her room's one and only chair, Caroline hesitates to sit on the bed.

Sugar understands the problem at once, and offers to help change the sheets.

"There's no clean linen," says Caroline,

"but we can 'ang this one up for a bit, so's the air can get to it."

Together they pull the sheet from the bed and try to drape its wettest parts in front of the open window. As soon as they've managed it, the sun shines twice as bright.

"I'm in luck today, eh?"' grins

Caroline.

Sugar smiles back, embarrassed. In

Priory Close, she has a much simpler solution to this problem: every week, when no one's looking, she carries a large parcel of her soiled sheets through the gates of a small park and, shortly afterwards, emerges without it. Then she goes to Peter Robinson's and buys new bed-linen.

Well, what's she to do without a washerwoman? A vivid picture of Christopher, his small red arms ringed with soap-suds, flares in her brain …

"Are you all right, Shush?"'

Sugar composes her face. "A slight headache," she says. "The sun's awfully bright."

How long have Caroline's window-panes been so appallingly begrimed by soot? Surely they weren't so dirty last time? Did the room always smell this way?

"Beggin' yer pardon, Shush. I ain't done me ablutions yet."

Caroline carries her ceramic bowl to the far side of the bed, more or less out of sight, as a concession to her guest. She crouches down, and busies herself with her contraceptive ritual: the pouring of the water, the unscrewing of the phials.

Sugar feels a chill as she watches her friend unabashedly hike up her rumpled shift, one hand already gripping the plunger with its old rag head, her buttocks plumper than Sugar remembers, dimpled and smeared with semen.

"Ach, it's a bother, ain't it?"' mutters Caroline, squatting to her task.

"Mm," says Sugar, looking away. She herself has not performed this ritual for some time-since moving to Priory Close, in fact.

It's not practical, when William stays the whole night, and even when he doesn't stay… well, she takes long, long baths. Submerged in all that warm, clean water, her legs drifting gently apart underneath a white blanket of aromatic foam, surely she's as thoroughly cleansed as it's possible to be?

"Almost finished," says Caroline.

"No hurry," says Sugar, wondering if William is knocking at the door of their love-nest this very minute. She watches the bed-sheet billow placidly in the warm breeze, its glistening shapes already fading to snail-crusts.

God, these sheets are filthy! Sugar is stung with guilt, that she discards scarcely used sheets in her local park every week, while Caroline has to toil and sleep on these old rags!

Here are some almost-new sheets for you, Caddie -they only need to be washed… No, it's out of the question.

Caroline walks to the window, carrying her heavy bowl. From the waist up, she disappears behind the billowing sheet, ghost-like.

"Mind yet 'eads," she murmurs impishly, and sends the slops trickling illicitly down the back of the building.

"I must tell you," she says a few minutes later, when she's settled on the bare mattress, half-dressed now and combing her hair, "I must tell you about me newest regular-Well, four times now I've seen 'im. You-'d like 'im, Shush. Very well spoken 'e is."

And she begins to tell the story so far of her meetings with the sombre, serious man she's nicknamed "The Parson". It's a dirt-common tale, nothing remotely novel in the world of prostitution. Sugar can barely disguise her impatience; she's convinced she knows how this story ends.

"And then he takes you to bed, yes?"' she suggests, to hurry Caddie up.

"No!" cries Caroline. "That's the queer part!" She wiggles her naked feet in suppressed mischief. Dirty feet they are too, thinks Sugar. How can anyone expect ever to make an escape from St Giles with feet as dirty as that?

"Perhaps he's queerer than you think," she sighs.

"Nah, 'e's no marjery, I can tell!" laughs Caroline. "I did ask 'im, only last week, if it would be such a terrible thing if 'e took me to bed-just the once-so as 'e could see if 'e liked it, or at least see what the fuss was about for other people." She squints with the effort of recalling precisely her Parson's reply. "Standing there at the window 'e was, same as always, never looking at me once, and 'e told me… what was it?… 'e told me that if all men like 'imself gave in to temptation, there would always be poor fallen widows like me, always starvin' children like me own boy was, always wicked landlords and murderers, because the Lord God was not loved enough by those as ought to know better."

"So what did you say?"' asks Sugar, her attention wandering over the innumerable taints of poverty in Caroline's room: the skirting-boards too rotten to paint, the walls too buckled to paper, the floorboards too worm-eaten to polish: nothing here could be beautified by anything but fire and a wholly new start.

"I said I didn't see 'ow men like 'imself could stop women like me becoming poor fallen widows, or children from starvin', except by marryin' and pervidin' for 'em."

"So has he offered to marry and provide for you?"' "Nearly!" laughs Caroline. "Second time I saw 'im, 'e offered to get me honest work. I asked 'im if it would be factory work, and 'e said yes, and I told 'im factory work wasn't wanted. Well, I thought that was the end of that, but last week 'e was on about it again. Said 'e'd made enquiries, and 'e could get me some work that wasn't in a factory, but in a kind of store. If I was willin', 'e could arrange it with just a word in the right person's ear, and if I doubted the truth of it, the name of the concern was Rackham's Perfumeries, what I must 'ave 'eard of."

Sugar jerks like a startled cat, but fortunately Caroline has moved to the window, idly stroking the sheet. "And what did you say then?"' "I said that any work 'e could get me would wear me out, wear me to death, for much less than a shillin' a day. I said that for a poor woman, all "honest" work is as near to bein' killed slow as makes no difference."

Abruptly she laughs, and fluffs out her newly combed hair with a few flicks of her hands.

"Ah, Sugar," she says, spreading her arms wide to indicate her room and all it represents. "What line of work but this pervides the needs of life, for 'ardly no toil, and then enough rest and sleep into the bargain?"'

And fine clothes and jewellery, thinks

Sugar. And leatherbound books and silver-framed prints and cab-rides at the wave of a glove and visits to the opera and an Ardent bath and a place of my own. She looks into Caroline's face and wonders, What am I doing here? Why am I welcome? Why do you smile at me so?

"I have to go," she says. "Do you want some money?"' Well, no, she doesn't say that-not the part about money. She only says, "I have to go."

"Oh! What a shame!"

Yes, a shame. Shame. Shame. "Do you want some money?"' Say it: "Do you want some money?"' "I-I've left my place in an awful mess. I came straight here, you see."

Say it, you coward. "Do you want some money?"' Five simple words. Stashed in your purse you have far more than Caddie will earn in a month. So say it, you coward… you louse… you whore!

But Caroline smiles, embraces her friend, and Sugar leaves without giving her anything but a kiss.

In the cab on her way back to Priory Close ("and there's an extra shilling for you if you're quick about it") Sugar stews in her iniquity. The soles of her shoes stink; she longs to wipe them on the lush green grass in the park where she leaves the bed-sheets each week.

The parcel's always gone when she next comes-doesn't that mean that poor folk are finding it?

Or if it's a park warden who finds it, those sheets will surely be donated to poor folk eventually? Christ, with all the do-gooders that infest London, surely some of them will have this sort of thing in hand? Coward. Whore.

When Sugar was poor, she always fancied that if she ever became rich, she'd help all the poor women in her profession, or at least all those she knew personally. Daydreaming in her room at Mrs Castaway's, elbows resting on the pages of her novel, she would imagine calling on one of her old friends, bringing along a supply of warm winter blankets or meat pies. How easy it would be to do such things without the stench of charity! She'd brandish her presents not in the way that a hoity-toity benefactress distributes kindness to inferiors, but rather with robust glee, the way one urchin displays to another an audaciously ill-gotten gain.

But now that she has the wherewithal to fulfil those fantasies, the stench of charity is as real as the horse-shit on her shoes.

Safely back in her own rooms, Sugar prepares for William's return. Then, as the afternoon drags on and he doesn't appear, she loiters into the study and, pricked by self-reproach, pulls her novel out of its hiding-place. Breathing deeply, she deposits the ragged burden on the writing-desk and seats herself behind it.

The light is falling now in such a way that the glass of the French windows is almost a mirror.

In amongst the greenery of her garden hovers her own face, perched on an insubstantial body that wafts out of the ground like smoke. The dark leaves of the rose-bushes impose a pattern on the skin of that face; her hair, motionless in reality, swirls and flickers with every gust of wind outside; phantom azaleas shiver in her bosom.

The Fall and Rise of Sugar. So says her story's title, familiar as a scar.

She recalls her visit to the lavender fields in Mitcham. How the lowly Rackham workers ogled her as she walked near! In their eyes she was a lady paying a visit on the toiling poor; there was no sign of recognition, only that peculiar mixture of feline resentment and canine respect. Each one of those workers, as they shrivelled meekly away from the sweep of her skirts, was convinced she couldn't possibly know what it's like to lie shivering under a blanket that's too thin for the season, or have shins bloody with flea-bites, or hair infested with lice.

"But I do know these things!" protests Sugar, and indeed the pages that lie before her on the ivory-handled writing-table were conceived in poverty, and are full of it. Wasn't her childhood every bit as hopeless as the childhood of anyone toiling for Rackham Perfumeries?

Granted, her lot is better than theirs now, but that's irrelevant: theirs could improve too, if only they were clever enough… Yet, on that day in the lavender fields, how hopelessly, how enviously they stared at the fine lady walking beside their employer!

"But I am their voice!" she protests again, and hears, in the intimate acoustic of her silent study, a subtle difference in the way her vowels sound today, compared to how they sounded before the Season. Or were they always as dulcet as this?

Tell us a story, Shush, in that fancy voice of yours, that's what the girls in Church Lane used to say, half-teasing, half-admiring. What sort of story? she'd ask, and they'd always reply, Something with revenge in it. And bad words. Bad words sound funny when you say them, Sugar. But how many of those girls could read a book? And if she told the lavender workers that she once lived in a London slum, how many of them would believe her, rather than spit on the ground?

No, like all the would-be champions of the poor throughout human history, Sugar must confront a humiliating truth: the downtrodden may yearn to be heard, but if a voice from a more privileged sphere speaks on their behalf, they'll roll their eyes and jeer at the voice's accent.

Sugar chews her lips fretfully. Surely her miserable origins count for something? She reminds herself that if William should decide to cast her out of this luxurious nest, she'd be homeless and without income, in direr straits even than the workers in the lavender fields. And yet … And yet she can't banish from her mind the wrinkled, ragged men and women bowing to her, shuffling away backwards; the uneasy murmurs of "'Oo's that? 'Oo's that?"' Sugar stares at the reflection in the French windows, the flickering head and shoulders augmented with leaves and flowers. Who am I?

My name is Sugar. So says her manuscript, shortly after the introductory tirade against men. She knows all the lines by heart, having re-written and re-read them countless times.

My name is Sugar-or if it isn't, I know no better. I am what you would call a Fallen Woman…

Rather than see the embarrassingly pompous sentence: Vile man, eternal Adam, I indict you! that lies in wait at the end of the paragraph, she flips the page, then the next, and the next. With sinking spirits, she leafs through the densely-inked pages. She'd expected to meet herself here, because this namesake of hers shares her face and body, right down to the freckles on her breasts. But in the yellowed manuscript she sees only words and punctuation marks; hieroglyphs which, although she remembers watching her own hand write them-even remembers the ink drying on particular blotted letters-have lost their meaning.

These melodramatic murders: what do they achieve? All these straw men meeting grisly ends: what flesh-and-blood woman is helped by it?

She could ditch the plot, maybe, and substitute a less lurid one. She could aim to tread a middle ground between this gush of bile, and the polite, expurgated fictions of James Anthony Fronde, Felicia Skene, Wilkie Collins and other authors who've timidly suggested that prostitutes, if sufficiently deserving, should perhaps be excused hellfire. With a new century only a generation away, surely the time is ripe for a stronger message than that? Look at this stack of papers-her life's work-there must be hundreds of things worth salvaging!

But as she skims the pile, she doubts it.

Permeating almost every line, souring every remark, tainting every conviction, is prejudice and ignorance, and something worse: blind hatred for anything fine and pure.

I watched the Fine Ladies parading out of the Opera House. (so wrote the Sugar of three years ago, a mere child of sixteen, cloistered in her upstairs room at Mrs Castaway's, in the grey morning hours after the customers had gone home and everyone else was asleep). What shams they were! Everything about them was false.

False were their pretenses of rapture at the music; false were their greetings to each other; false their accents and their voices.

How vainly they pretended that they were not Women at all, but some other, higher form of Creature! Their ball-gowns were designed to give the impression that they did not walk on two fleshy legs, but rather glided on a cloud.

"Oh, no," they seemed to say. "I do not have legs and a cunt between them, I float on Air.

Nor have I breasts, only a delicate curve to give shape to my bodice. If you want anything so gross as breasts, go see the udders of wet-nurses. As for legs, and a cunt between them, if you want those, you will have to go to a Whore. We are Perfect Creatures, Rare Spirits, and we trade only in the noblest and finest things in Life. Namely, Slave Labour of poor seamstresses, Torture of our servants, Contempt for those who scrub our chamber pots clean of our exalted maidenly shit, and an endless round of silly, hollow, meaningless pursuits that have no There the page ends, and Sugar hasn't the heart to turn it and read further. Instead she shuts the manuscript and rests her elbow on it, chin sunk into her palm. Still fresh in her mind is the night she went to hear the Requiem by Signor Verdi. No doubt there were ladies in the audience for whom it was nothing more than an opportunity to flaunt their finery and chatter afterwards, but there were others who emerged from the auditorium in a trance, quite unaware of their bodily selves. Sugar knows: she saw it on their faces! They stood reverent, as if they were still listening to the music; and, when prompted to walk, they walked like sleepers to an adagio rhythm still echoing in their heads.

Sugar met the gaze of one such lady, and they both smiled-oh, such a guileless, open-hearted smile!-upon seeing the love of music reflected in each other's eyes.

Years ago, even months ago, if she'd been handed the iconoclast's mallet, she'd gladly have smashed the opera houses to the ground; she'd have sent all the fine ladies fleeing from their burning homes straight into the embrace of poverty. Now she wonders… this spiteful vision of pampered ladies growing filthy and haggard in factories and sweater's dens alongside their coarse sisters-what sort of justice does it strike a blow for? Why can't it be the factories that are smashed to the ground, the sweater's dens that are consumed in flames, rather than the opera houses and the fine homes? Why should the people living on a higher plane be dragged down to a lower, rather than those on a lower rising to a higher? Is it really such an unforgivable affectation to forget one's body, one's flesh, as a lady might do, and exist merely for thought and feeling? Is a woman like Agnes really blameworthy for failing to imagine there could exist such a thing as a cloth-wrapped plunger for swabbing a stranger's semen from the… the cunny? (the word "cunt", even in the privacy of her mind, seems unmentionably crude.) One more time, she opens her precious manuscript, at random, hoping against hope to find something she can be proud of.

"I'll tell you what I mean to do," I said to the man, as he struggled feebly against his bonds. "This cock that you are so proud of: I shall make it big and stiff, the way you like it best.

Then, when it is at its height, I shall take this strand of sharp steel wire, and tie it around the shaft. Because I am going to give you a little present, yes I am!"

She groans and closes up the pages. No one in the world will ever want to read this stuff, and no one ever shall.

Feeling a wave of self-pity rising inside her, she lets it break, and buries her face in her hands. It's already afternoon, William hasn't come, there are tiny blue birds twittering in her garden, innocent beautiful things that put to shame all the poisonous ugliness in her despicable story… Christ, she must be about to have her monthly courses, to be thinking this way. When chirruping blue tits seem like agents of righteous chastisement, it's time to bring out the chauffoirs…

The sound of the bell startles her so violently that her elbows jerk forward and send her novel flying. Its pages scatter all over the study, and she pounces on them to gather the mess together again, crawling back and forth across the floor. She barely has enough time to dump the manuscript back in the wardrobe and kick the door shut on it before William lets himself in at the front-for, of course, he has a key.

"William!" she calls, in undisguised relief. "It's me! I mean, I'm here!"

From the first embrace, in the hallway by the coat-stand, she can tell that her returning Ulysses is not in a lustful mood. Oh, he's very happy to see her and be given a hero's welcome, but there's also a reticence in his stance as she presses her body against his, a subtle evasion of any reunion between Mons Veneris and Mons Pubis. Instantly, Sugar softens her posture, loosens her arms, and strokes his whiskery cheek.

"How dreadfully tired you look!" she observes, in a tone of lavish commiseration such as might be warranted by multiple spear-wounds or at least a very nasty cat-scratch. "Have you slept at all since I last saw you?"' "Precious little," admits William.

"The streets around my guest-house were crowded with dipsomaniacs singing at the tops of their voices, all night long. And last night, I was worrying over Agnes."

Sugar smiles and leans her head sideways in empathy, wondering if she should bite on this rare mention of Mrs Rackham-or whether William will bite her if she does. While she wonders, she escorts him companionably into… which room? The sitting-room, for now.

Yes, she's decided: both Agnes and the bedroom can wait until his ruffled spirits have been well and truly smoothed.

"Here," she says, installing him on the ottoman and pouring him a brandy. "Something to rinse the taste of Birmingham from your mouth."

He slumps in gratitude, unbuttons his bulging waistcoat, tugs at his cravat. He hadn't realised, until these attentions were lavished on him, that they're precisely what he's been longing for since his return home yesterday. The arm's-length efficiency of his own housemaids, the uncomprehending indifference of his distracted wife: these were a poor welcome, and have left him hungry for richer fare.

"I'm glad someone's pleased to see me," he says, tilting his head back and licking the brandy on his lips.

"Always, William," she says, laying the palm of her hand on his perspiring brow. "But tell me, did you buy the boxing factory?"'

He groans and shakes his head.

Sitting beside him on the ottoman, Sugar experiences a perfectly timed visitation from the Muse. "Let me guess" (she mimics a gruff-voiced, toadying scoundrel of the Northern manufacturing class): "Nowt wrong 'ere, Mr Rackham, that a good engineer and a dollop of mortar wouldn't fix, hmm?"'

William hesitates for an instant, then hoots with laughter. "Precisely." Her crude stab at a Birmingham accent was closer to Yorkshire, but otherwise she's devilishly accurate. What a superb little machine her brain is! The muscles of his back and neck relax, as the realisation sinks in that he's absolved of explaining his decision about the factory: she understands-as always, she understands.

"Well, the Season's almost over now, thank God," he mutters, knocking back the last of his brandy. "The dog days are upon us. No more dinner parties, no more theatre, and just one more wretched Musical Evening…"

"I thought you'd excused yourself from everything already …?"' "Well, yes, almost everything."

"… because you believed Agnes was better."

He stares deep into his glass, frowning.

"She's been fairly good, I must say," he sighs, "at least in public. Better than last Season, at any rate. Although she could hardly fail to be better…" Conscious of how faint this praise is, he strives to brighten his tone. "She's a highly-strung thing, but I'm sure she's no worse than many." He winces -he hadn't meant to sound so ungallant.

"But not as good as you hoped she'd be?"' suggests Sugar.

He nods equivocally, a loyal husband under duress. "At least she's stopped prattling about being watched over by a guardian angel…

Although whenever we go out, she's always casting glances over her shoulder…" He slumps further into the ottoman, resting his own shoulder on Sugar's thigh. "But I've ceased to challenge her; she only gets wound up if I do. Let her be chaperoned by ghosts, I say, if that's what's needed to keep her in order…"

"And she is in order?"'

He's silent for a minute, as she strokes his head, and the coals sizzle and adjust their positions in the hearth.

"Sometimes," he says, "I ask myself if

Agnes is faithful to me. The way she's continually peering into the crowds, hoping, I'd swear, to catch sight of a particular person … Have I a rival to contend with, I wonder, on top of everything else?"'

Sugar smiles, heavy-hearted, feeling dragged down by the syrupy weight of deception, like a woman wading through deepening waters in fast-swelling skirts and petticoats.

"Mightn't she just be keeping an eye out for her guardian angel?"' she suggests scampishly.

"Hmm." William lounges against her touch, unconvinced. "I was at a musical evening last week, and in the middle of a Rossini song, Agnes swooned in her chair. It was for an instant only, then she roused and whispered,

"Yes, bless you, lift me up-your arms are so strong!" "Whose arms, dear?" I ask her.

"Shush, dear, the lady's still singing," she says."

Sugar feels like laughing, wonders if it's safe to laugh. She laughs. There are no consequences. William's trust in her is, evidently, firmer than ever.

"But how could Agnes be unfaithful to you?"' she murmurs. "Surely she goes nowhere without your knowledge and permission?"'

William grunts dubiously. "Cheesman is sworn to tell me everywhere she goes," he says. "And so he does, by God." His eyes narrow as he reviews his mental ledger of Agnes's excursions, then blink in annoyance when he comes to one circled in red. "I thought at first that her illicit visits to the Catholic chapel in Cricklewood might be… trysts. But Cheesman says she enters and leaves alone. What can she possibly get up to while she's sitting in a church service?"' "I don't know; I've never been in a church," says Sugar. The admission feels raw and risky, a plunge into the dangerous waters of genuine intimacy, an intimacy deeper than genital display.

"Never been…?"' gasps William.

"You can't be serious."

She smiles sadly, wipes a lock of hair off his upturned face.

"Well, I did have a rather unorthodox childhood, you know, William."

"But… damn it, I recall when we discussed Bodley and Ashwell's book -the conversancy you showed with matters of religion …"

Sugar shuts her eyes tight, and the interior of her skull is a lurid snakepit of Magdalens and Marys, darkening into chaos.

"My mother's tutelage, no doubt. Her recitations from the Bible were my bedtime stories, for years and years. And also," she sighs, "I've read an awful lot of books, haven't I?"

William reaches up to caress her waist and bosom, with slack and sleepy fingers. When his hand wilts and comes to rest on his own chest, she wonders if he's fallen asleep in her lap.

But no: after a minute's silence, his deep voice resonates against her thighs.

"She's inconsistent," he says, "that's the problem. Normal one day; mad as a March hare the next. Undependable."

Sugar ponders the moral arithmetic of this, then plucks up the nerve to ask:

"What would you do if she were… dependably mad?"'

He hardens his jaw, then, shame-faced, softens it again. "Ach, she's still growing up, I think; she'll come good with a bit of maturing. She was awfully young when I married her-too young, perhaps. Playing with dolls still… and that's what her outbursts tend to be: childish. I recall in April there was a puppet show at the Muswell Hill f@ete. Mr Punch was wielding his stick, beating the stuffing out of his wife as usual.

Agnes became very agitated, grabbed my arm and implored me to snatch Mrs Punch away.

"Quick, William!" she said. "You're a rich and important man now: no one would dare stop you."

I gave her a smile, but she was in earnest! Still a child, d'you see?"' "And… is this childishness the worst of it?"' enquires Sugar, remembering Agnes's body sprawled in the alley, the slack limbs soaking up mud. "Nothing else ails her?"' "Oh, Doctor Curlew thinks she's far too thin, and ought to be sent to a sanatorium and fattened up with beef and buttermilk. "I've seen better-fed women in the workhouse," he says."

"What do you think?"' It's a heady thrill, this: probing him for his opinions, not on business matters, but on his private life. And he's opening up to her! With every word, he's opening up to her more!

"I can't deny," says William, "that at home Agnes appears to subsist on lettuce and apricots. In other people's houses, though, she eats everything that's put in front of her, like a good little girl." He shrugs, as if to say: childish again.

"Well," concludes Sugar, "this doctor will have to appreciate that "plump" is out of fashion. Agnes isn't the only thin lady in London."

Thus she invites William to leave the subject, but he's not ready.

"Indeed not, indeed not," he says, "but there's another cause for concern. Agnes's monthly issue has dried up."

An icy chill runs down Sugar's back, and it's all she can do not to stiffen. The thought of William-of any man-being so well-acquainted with Agnes's body is an unexpected shock to her.

"How do you know this?"'

Again he shrugs against her thigh.

"Doctor Curlew says so."

Another silence falls, and Sugar fills it with a fantasy of knifing this Doctor Curlew to death in a dark cul-de-sac. He's a suitably shadowy figure, for she's never set eyes on him, but his blood runs as red as that of any of the men in The Fall and Rise of Sugar.

William chuckles suddenly. "Never been in a church…!" he marvels, half asleep. "And I thought I knew everything about you."

She turns her face aside, astounded to feel warm, tickly tears springing out onto her cheeks. If anything, William's utter ignorance of who she is should provoke her to shrieks of derisive laughter, but instead she's moved by sorrow and pity-pity for him, pity for herself, pity for the pair of them cuddled here together.

Oh! What a monster he's caressing…!

What terrifying ichor flows through her veins; what hopelessly foul innards she has, poisoned by putrid memories and the bitterness of want!

If only she could drive a blade into her heart and let the filth spurt out, let it gush away, hissing, into a crack in the floor, leaving her clean and light. What an innocuous booby William is, with his ruddy cheeks; for all his male arrogance, his philandering instincts, his dog-like cowardice, he's an innocent compared to her. Privilege has kept him soft inside; a benign childhood has protected him from the burrowing maggots of hatred; she can imagine him kneeling at the side of his bed as a boy, praying "God bless Mama and Papa" under the watchful eye of a kindly nurse.

Oh God, if he only knew what was inside her…!

"I have a few surprises left for you," she says, in her best seductive tone, dabbing her cheeks with her sleeve.

William raises his head from her lap, suddenly wakeful, his bloodshot eyes wide.

"Tell me a secret," he says, with boyish enthusiasm.

"A secret?"'

"Yes, a dark secret."

She laughs, fresh tears springing to her eyes, which she hides in the crook of her arm.

"I don't have any dark secrets," she protests, "really I don't. When I said I had a few surprises left for you, I meant-"' "I know what you meant," he growls affectionately, sliding his arm under her skirts.

"But tell me something I didn't know about you-anything. A thing that no one else in the world knows."

Sugar is tortured by the yearning to tell him everything, to expose her oldest and deepest scars, to begin with Mrs Castaway's little game, when Sugar was still a toddler, of creeping up to the cot and, with a flourish, pulling the sheets off Sugar's half-frozen body. "That's what God does," her mother would say, in the same grossly amplified whisper she used for storytelling.

"He loves to do that." "I'm cold,

Mama!" Sugar would cry. And Mrs Castaway would stand in the moonlight, the sheets clutched to her bosom, and she'd cup a hand to her ear. "I wonder," she'd say, "if God heard that. He has trouble hearing female voices, you know…"

William is nuzzling his face against her belly, murmuring encouragement to her, waiting to be given his secret.

"I… I…" she agonises. "I can shoot water from my sex."

He stares up at her, startled. "What?"'

She giggles, biting her lip to keep hysteria in check. "I'll show you. It's a special talent I have. A useless talent…" To his open-mouthed stupefaction, she leaps up, fetches a glass of lukewarm water from the bathroom, and throws herself down on the floor before him. Without any erotic niceties, she hitches up her skirts, yanks off her pantalettes, and flings her legs over her head, the sides of her knees almost touching her ears. Her cunt opens wide like a nestling's mouth, and with an unsteady hand she sloshes water into it, half a glassful.

"God almighty!" exclaims William as she repositions her feet on the carpet and, crawling crabwise, sprays a thin jet of water through the air. It splashes against the ottoman, inches from his trousers.

"Next one will get you," threatens Sugar wheezily, adjusting her aim, but she waits until he's ducked aside before squirting the next jet.

"It's not possible!" laughs Rackham.

"Stand still, scaramouch!" she cries, and releases the final spout, the highest of them all.

Then Rackham falls on top of her, pinioning her hands with his own, one knee lightly pressed against her panting stomach.

"Is it all out now?"' he demands, and kisses her on the mouth.

"Yes," she says. "You're safe."

Whereupon they realign their bodies, so that he can settle in between her legs.

"And you?"' says Sugar, as she helps him with his clothes. "Do you have a secret for me?"'

He grins apologetically as his manhood is pulled free of its swaddling.

"What could possibly compare with yours?"' he says, and that is the end of the subject.

Far away, in a squalid bedroom in a damp and grimy house, a prostitute, surprised by an unexpected visitor, holds out her palm and is given three shillings.

"More questions, sir?"' she winks, but her voice trembles ever-so-slightly: she can sense from her man's contorted face that he's come for something different this time.

He walks, rigid as a cripple, to her bed, and sits heavily on the edge. A square of light from the window shines on the spot directly beside him, leaving him in shadow.

"The woman I love," he announces, in a low voice hoarse with passion, "is dying."

Caroline nods slowly, licking her lips, uncertain how else to respond; ever since the death of her own child, the demise of other human beings has meant less to her than it should.

"That's a shame," she says, clutching the coins tight in her hand, to prevent them from jingling, as a gesture of respect. "A-a terrible shame."

"Listen to me."

"I-I 'eard you, sir. The woman you love…"

"No," he croaks, staring at the floor,

"listen to me."

And, as his head sinks towards his chest, his shoulders begin to shake. He clasps his hands together, prayer-style, and squeezes until the flesh goes crimson and white. From his strangled throat come words too soft, and too distorted by sobs, to understand.

Awkwardly, Caroline edges closer to him and, as his weeping grows more convulsive, sits next to him on the bed. The ancient mattress sags, and their bodies meet gently at the hip, but he doesn't seem to notice. She leans forward, unconsciously aping his posture, and listens for all she's worth.

"God damn God," weeps Henry, giving the obscenity clearer diction, and greater vehemence, as he repeats it. "God damn God!"

Knowing she's heard him now, he loses what little self-control he had left. Within seconds he's bawling like a donkey in a knacker's yard, his body shuddering, his hands still clasped with such force that the bones beneath must surely snap into splinters.

"Go-o-od da-a-amn Go-o-o-o-od!"

Henry continues to roar as, around his back, shyly and fearfully (for who knows what violence a man in despair may do?) Caroline lays one comforting arm.