The Crimson petal and the white

TWENTY

"So, how was the seaside?"' enquires Lady Bridgelow, noiselessly replacing her tea-cup in its saucer. "I didn't go this year: every resort has been invaded by riff-raff. Ah, thank you, Rose."

Rose, the Rackhams' new parlour-maid, is pouring more tea, straight into Mrs Bridgelow's cup from above. The servant's hand is steady as she holds the heavy pot aloft, her wrist ruddy-fleshed against the white cuff, and smelling of carbolic: Lady Bridgelow approves of that.

It's a bright, chilly afternoon early in September, several weeks after William brought home from Folkestone Sands a wife who was thinner and ten times more peculiar than when she was dispatched, and who is, at this very moment, hiding upstairs, resolutely "not in" to visitors.

To be fair, though, it's not only Agnes Rackham that's queer lately: the weather, having turned warm unseasonably early this year, has been just as unseasonably cold since the end of August, as if to retract an undeserved generosity. Most days, radiant morning sunshine has paled to grey by noon, and nippy breezes hint at what the elements may have in mind. Leaves are falling by the cart-load from the trees, nights are drawing in, and all over England landscape painters are retreating from the overcast countryside in disgust. Those of William's business acquaintances who own orchards have been forced to organise early harvests, for the fruit hangs precariously, virtually falling into the reapers' hands, while even an hour's delay finds it bruised and rotting on the ground. Thank God the lavender's already harvested. Sugar was disappointed not to see it being done, but there are only so many things a man can arrange when he has the Season and a volatile wife to juggle. The bonfire of the fifth-year plants at the end of October-he'll take her to see that, she has his word.

At the Rackham residence in Notting Hill, servants above and below stairs are preparing for an autumn which may, if it pleases, treat England roughly: the thick curtains have been taken out of mothballs; the pantry is chock-full of tinned lobsters, sardines, salmon, turtle and so on; fruits and vegetables have been squirrelled away in the underground store-house; the chimneys have been scoured; Janey has caught an inconvenient disease from cleaning the ovens; Cheesman has inspected the roof and doors of the carriage for possible leaks; and Letty and Rose have removed the summer decorations from the fireplaces and substituted dry logs. Shears, muttering and fussing from dawn to dusk, is best avoided.

Lady Bridgelow, too, has accepted that summer has flown, and has adapted her apparel accordingly, looking a little older-though not much older -than her twenty-nine years; she is well rugged up in a serge coat-dress, to ensure that her health remains (as she likes to describe it) "uninterrupted". William is tubby with clothing, as well as the extra fat he's accumulated during the Season. His by now thick and square-barbered beard hangs over his cravat, and he wears a woollen waistcoat, heavy tweed trousers, and a tweed coat which he's tried unobtrusively to unbutton but can't wrestle with any more in front of his visitor.

"I can't speak for the other seaside resorts," he says, in reply to her question.

"But Folkestone has become a circus, from what I saw. It's the fault of the railways, of course."

"Ah, well, that's modern times," says Lady Bridgelow philosophically, breaking a sugared biscuit in half. "Those of us who have our own carriages will simply have to seek out a paradise that the common herd haven't yet discovered." Whereupon she consumes her sweet morsel with deft rapidity, so as not to let her turn to speak go by. "I've never been able to understand the lure of the seaside, anyway-except for convalescents."

"Yes, quite," says William, handing his empty tea-cup up to Rose.

"How is your wife?"' commiserates Lady

Bridgelow over the rim of her full one.

"Oh, I'm sure it's nothing serious," he sighs. "She's caught a chill, I suspect."

"She's much missed at church," Lady

Bridgelow assures him.

William smiles, pained. It's common knowledge now that Agnes attends Catholic Mass almost every Sunday, and yet he hasn't the heart to forbid it. Deplorable though her apostasy is, and embarrassing though it is for him to sense his neighbours' disapproval, he wants Agnes to be happy, and she's never happier than when she's permitted to ride off to Cricklewood and be a little Papist.

How he'd hoped she would come back from the seaside plumper and more sensible! But she stayed only eight days of the fortnight he paid for and, instead of travelling quietly back to London on the train with Clara, she sent him a postcard complaining that the hotel had Americans in it, and the drinking water was full of organisms, and he must come and fetch her at once. In the name of all that is Holy, I beg of you, Please!, she signed the postcard, an otherwise cheerful picture of a donkey with a conical seashell fixed to its head, inscribed Unicorn, Folkestone Sands. Mortified at the thought of the postman reading another such missive, William travelled to Folkestone with all speed, only to find there a perfectly composed, apparently contented Agnes who treated him like an unexpected guest whom she was too gracious to turn away.

"How has she been?"' he enquired surreptitiously of Clara, as he and the servant stood watching Agnes's absurd suitcases being humped out of the hotel by grunting porters.

"I've no complaints, sir," Clara replied, with a face on her like someone who's just spent a week in a pillory, pelted ceaselessly with rotten fruit.

On her return home, Agnes lost no time making it clear that the seaside had failed utterly to work its salubrious magic on her, at least not in the way that Doctor Curlew had hoped. No sooner were the souvenirs of Folkestone unpacked than Agnes concocted a new caprice-a foolish ritual which, regrettably, has already become a firm habit. Each morning, before breakfast, she attempts to launch a clockwork flying toy from the sill of her bedroom window. That the clicking automaton falls like a stone, and that its beak has broken off and its left wing is splintered, have failed to discourage Agnes from her ritual. Each morning, after breakfast, Shears finds the thing buried up to its neck in his newly-turned earth, or entangled in a bush, and he delivers it back into the house without a word. (well may he keep silent!-his protests did him no good at all during the Season, when Mrs Rackham denuded his rose-bushes in order to make a "red carpet" of flower petals for her dinner guests.) "Poor woman," clucks Lady Bridgelow. "I do pity her so. We who have uninterrupted health ought to be more thankful for our good fortune. Certainly my husband always urged me to be thankful for it, when he was alive."

At this her eyes glaze over, and she allows her head to sink back against the antimacassar, as if she were gazing at a ghostly vision of her husband.

"Aahh… poor Albert," she sighs, allowing Rose to serve her a slice of ginger cake. "How lonely it sometimes is without him … especially when I know I've so much of my life to live yet…"

Then with a sudden movement, she's erect once more, clear-eyed and firm-chinned. "Still, I mustn't pine, must I? I've my son, after all, in whom Albert lives on. Such a wonderful close resemblance, too! You know, I wonder… If the poor man were still here… and if I bore him a second son tomorrow, would the boy resemble the father just as astoundingly? You know, I suspect so!… But you must excuse my prattling. I can only plead that you'll be liable to the same foolishness by and by, when you've a son of your own." She pats her knees as if they are lapdogs to be roused from slumber. "Well now, I've kept you far too long from your affairs. Please forgive me."

"No, no," says William, as she rises to leave. "It was a pleasure, a pleasure."

He speaks sincerely: she's always welcome in his parlour, and he's sorry to escort her out of it. She's not a bit like other titled people he's met: for all her lofty connections, there's something appealingly impish about her, which he fancies he sees even in the way she trots down his front steps and contrives, before her coachman can clamber down from his perch, to hop unassisted into her carriage. Once more she waves, as she gathers her skirts into the cabin, and then she's gone.

The most agreeable thing about her, William decides, as he watches her coach trundle down the carriage-way, is how openly she associates with him, even under the eyes of her own exalted set. She's never held it against him that he has what she delicately calls a "concern"; indeed she often says that the future belongs to industry. He only wishes she wouldn't be so solicitous after Agnes-especially since, to his chagrin, this generosity of heart is not reciprocated.

"I trust her no farther than I can throw her," Agnes only recently declared, during one of her ever-more-frequent lapses of inhibition. (a drastic insult, this, given the flimsiness of Agnes's arms.) The fact that she denied all knowledge of the remark later, when her fit was past, is neither here nor there.

But Agnes will get better, he's sure she will-almost sure. After all, apart from the usual "wooden bird" incident this morning, nothing unfortunate has happened today, has it? and it's almost midday…

William stands in the receiving hall, pensive now that his visitor has departed and the house is quiet again. Whenever she calls upon him, Lady Bridgelow brings with her a hum of benign normalcy that fades, alas, as soon as she steps out of the door, leaving the air once again volatile with uncertainty. Yes, the place is silent, but what does that silence mean? Is Agnes sewing quietly upstairs, or hatching another outburst? Is she snoozing the sleep of the innocent, or sprawled in a delirious swoon?

William listens uneasily, holding his breath at the foot of the stairs.

Within seconds, his questions are unexpectedly answered: from very nearby, as prettily as any man could want, comes the sound of nimble fingers fondling the keys of a piano. Agnes Rackham is musical today! The house brightens at once, becoming a home to all those who dwell in it. William unclenches his fists, and smiles.

Curlew can speak the word "asylum" as often as he likes: William Rackham doesn't admit defeat so easily! And besides, what about husbandly compassion? William is aware that from October onwards, there'll be an engraving of his likeness stamped on every item of Rackham produce (a fine idea of Sugar's) and, for this purpose, he has chosen a photograph that shows him in a kindly, even fatherly light. What would the ladies who buy Rackham's toiletries think, if they learned that the man responsible for their sweet-smelling indulgences, and who seeks to disseminate his benign face into every household in the land, had condemned his own wife to a mad-house? No, Agnes deserves another chance-in fact, a hundred, a thousand other chances! She's his wife, damn it, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health.

"Call Cheesman," he tells Letty, during those precious minutes while the piano melody is still charming, before its obsessive arpeggios start to grate. "I'm going out."

Henry Rackham, mere seconds after his paroxysm has passed, and before the bitter reflux of remorse has fully returned him to his senses, lurches in surprise at the sound of his front door being knocked upon. Who the devil…? Nobody visits him, nobody!

It must be some mistake.

Hastily, he cleans himself and does his best to look decent, though in his hurry he can't find his slippers and, badgered by the persistent knocking, he shambles to the door in socks.

On the footpath near his doorstep, when he opens up, is a baffling vision of female beauty: two fresh-faced young women, twins perhaps, barely out of girlhood, dressed identically in grey with pink bonnets and paletots. They stand behind a hooded carriage resembling a flower-barrow or an outsize perambulator, but with neither flowers nor babies in it.

"Please, sir," says one. "We're here on behalf of the freezing, starving women and children of Skye."

Henry gapes at them uncomprehendingly, as a chilly breeze whips into his house and alerts him, too late, to the unsavoury excess of sweat on his forehead.

"The Isle of Skye, sir," explains the other girl, in a lilting tone indistinguishable from her sister's. "In Scotland. Many families have been forced off their land, sir, and are liable to perish this coming winter, which threatens to be a bad one. Have you any clothes you don't need?"'

Henry blinks like an idiot, already blushing in the foreknowledge that whatever he says, he's doomed to say with a stammer.

"I-I've given all my us-unwanted clothes to… ah… a lady who's a-active in a number of charities." The girls regard him with mild incredulity, as though they're well accustomed to being fobbed off with fictions of this kind but too well-bred to challenge them. "Mrs Emmeline Fox," he adds miserably, in case the name might illuminate everything.

"Last winter," says the first girl, "the island folk were reduced to eating dulse."

"Seaweed, sir," glosses the second, observing his bafflement.

The first girl expands her pretty bosom with a deep breath, and opens her mouth to speak again, but this is as much as Henry can stand.

"Will you accept money?"' he asks hoarsely, as his cat ventures onto the scene, butting her head against his ankles, calling attention to his unshod feet.

The twins look at each other as if this proposition has never been made to them before and they're at a perfect loss how they could possibly respond.

"We wouldn't dream of pressing on you, sir …" says one, casting her gaze to the footpath, but Henry seizes on this as consent, and rummages in his trouser pockets.

"Here," he says, pulling out a palmful of coins, along with the pulverised remains of newspaper clippings and forgotten postage stamps. "Is two shillings enough, do you think?"' He winces at the memory of what else this same sum can buy. "No, take three." He weeds out the bright shillings from the chaff of farthings, pennies and debris.

"Thank you, sir," say the girls in unison, as the nearest reaches out her gloved hand.

"We shan't trouble you again, sir."

"No trouble at all," he says and, to his great relief, they trundle their barrow away, their bustles bobbing in accord.

Henry shuts the door and returns to his warm front room, the only comfortable room in his house. On the floor by the hearth lies a handkerchief, screwed up into a ball. He knows without unwrapping it-for he threw it down only minutes ago-that it is glutinous with the slime of his own seed.

Heavily, he sits once more in his armchair, cold in his hands and feet, feverish in his head, itchy in his groin; indeed, his whole body is a cumbersome mismatch of flesh, enclosing, in an unwelcome embrace, a soul that's clammy with pollution. To crown his shame, Puss pads into the room and heads straight for the soiled handkerchief, sniffing at it curiously.

"Whoosht," he scolds, waving one woollen-socked foot at her. "That's dirty."

He retrieves the handkerchief from under her nose, and crushes it anew in his fist. The challenge of washing it is too daunting; he's willing to make the effort when it's his night-shirt that's soiled (one of the reasons why he won't employ a washerwoman), but this cheap square of fabric seems hardly worth the humiliation it would cost him to fill his metal tub and stand there scraping at gobs of his tenacious seed with soapy fingernails. What do other self-abusers do?

Simply hand their slimy things into the care of female servants, who must surely despise their masters ever after? Or is incontinence a rare event in the lives of stronger-willed men?

Miserably ashamed of wasting good cotton when there are so many poor folk shivering for lack of patches on their clothes (in London, never mind the Isle of Skye!), Henry tosses the handkerchief into the fireplace. Landing squarely in the centre of the glowing coals, it sizzles and blackens, then unfurls into bright flames.

Mrs Fox is dying, and he cannot help her.

This thought returns to plague him constantly, in his hours of gloomiest despair, in his moments of unthinking light-heartedness, in his sleep and in his waking. Mrs Fox is dying, and he cannot cure her, cannot amuse her, cannot relieve her. All day long she lies on a chaise in her father's garden, or, when the weather is too wild, on the same chaise just inside the windows of the dismal drawing-room, staring out at the barely perceptible impression she's left on the lawn. She's in no pain to speak of, only bored senseless, she assures Henry, in between excruciating bouts of coughing. Does she want any beef tea, he enquires? No, she does not want any beef tea; nor would he, if he tasted the stuff.

What she longs for is to go walking, walking in the sun; but the sun is fugitive, and even when it breaks through the clouds and shines gloriously for a spell, Mrs Fox begs him to be patient while she gathers her breath, and the opportunity passes. In truth, she cannot walk any longer, and he cannot carry her. Once-once only-he shyly suggested a wheelchair, and she refused, with a sharper tongue than she ever revealed to him before. If he weren't so loath to offend her, he could accuse her of the sin of pride.

And yet she looks at him so imploringly, her eyes grown large in her bone-white face, her mouth dry and swollen. Sometimes she falls silent in the middle of a sentence, and gazes at him for a full minute at a stretch, only breathing, a pulse beating in her neck and the bluish veins of her temples. The power to defeat Death is in your hands, she seems to be saying, so why are you letting Him take me?

"A-are you all right, Mrs Fox?"' he then asks, or some such doltish question.

"No, of course I'm not all right,

Henry," she sighs, releasing him from her awful, trusting stare with a blink of her paper-thin eyelids.

On the rare days when she's stronger, she uses that strength to drive him from her side. Yesterday was such a day, with Mrs Fox flushed and restless, her eyes bloodshot, her mood erratic. For an hour she seemed to have fallen asleep, her lips forming words soundlessly, her breast barely moving.

Then she came to the surface with a start, raised herself up on her elbows and challenged him:

"Oh Henry, you dear man, haven't you left yet? What is the good of it, you sitting here all afternoon… staring at the palings of my father's back fence… You've counted them often enough, surely." Her tone was an odd and perturbing thing, difficult to read, poised on a knife-edge between companionable teasing and stark anguish.

"I… I can stay a little longer," he replied, staring straight ahead.

"You must keep busy with your own life,

Henry," she urged him, "and not fritter it away at the side of a dozing woman. I haven't forgotten how much you dread idleness! And I'll be well again one day-but not tomorrow or next week. But I shall get better-you believe me, don't you, Henry?"' "God willing…" he mumbled.

"But tell me, Henry," she continued fervidly. "Your calling… What have you done about your calling?"'

It was then that he wished he had left, before this moment.

"I-I'm having doubts," he said, superstitiously afraid that she could hear, as clearly as he, the echo of the words God damn God! bellowing inside his skull. "I don't think I'm suited to be a clergyman, after all."

"Nonsense, Henry," she cried, seizing hold of his arm to make him look at her face.

"You would make the best… the kindest, sincerest, truthfulest, have-handsomest…" She giggled sheepishly, expelling a bright tendril of bloody mucus from her nose.

Shocked by the indecorous discharge, he fixed his eyes upon the fence once more, and struggled to make his confession. "I-I've been… My faith has been…"

"No, Henry," she wept, her breath whistling in distress. "Don't! I don't want to hear it! God is bigger… than one small woman's illness. Promise me, Henry… promise me… promise me you won't give up… your mission."

To which, coward that he was, spineless scoundrel that he was, Godforsaken Godforsaker that he was, he gave the only answer he could give: the answer she wanted to hear.

"Ah, my sweet one… I wish we lived together in the same house."

Sugar's heart leaps as the words vibrate through her breastbone and William nuzzles his whiskery cheek against her bosom. She hadn't thought such a sentiment from a man could ever make her giddy with joy, especially coming from a portly fellow with irksomely ticklish whiskers, but her heart pounds embarrassingly hard, directly against his ear.

"These rooms of mine are very smart and comfortable," she says, dying for him to contradict her. "And private."

He sighs, tracing his forefinger along the tiger-striped patterns of dry skin on her thigh. "I know, I know…" Tenderly, his hand comes to rest in the lush delta between her legs. (he does this sort of thing a lot lately: stroking and petting her flesh even when his own appetite is sated. One day soon, if she can work up the courage, she'll take his hand and instruct him further.) "And yet," he laments, "so often I have matters I dearly wish to discuss with you and, try as I might to clear a path through my responsibilities, I can't get away from the house."

She fondles his hair, massaging the Macassar oil into the cracked skin of her palm.

"We've discussed everything now, though, haven't we?"' she says. "The shape of the R on the new soaps; the bonfire of the fifthyear plants -I'll arrange to bring the Colonel again; what to do about Lemercier's lilac orchards; winkling your father's senile old cronies out of the London office…"

All the while, she's thinking, Tell me how much you love me, tell me.

"Yes, yes," he says, "but there's more that keeps me from your side." With an irritable groan he removes his head from her bosom, and rubs his face with his hands. "Ach, it's a curious thing, but I find that managing a business empire, for all its intrigues, is a damn sight less complicated than managing a family."

Sugar pulls the sheets up to her navel.

"Agnes is bad, then?"'

"I wasn't even thinking of Agnes," he murmurs wearily, as though his family is an impossible multitude, each requiring constant unwavering attention.

"The… child?"' Come on, give it to me, she thinks. Speak the name of your own daughter, why can't you?

"Yes, there is a problem with the child,"

William declares. "A damned inconvenient problem. Beatrice, her nurse, has let it be known that my daughter has, in her humble opinion, reached the age where a nursemaid is no longer enough." He contorts his face into a burlesque of female sycophancy, and whines in imitation of the nurse, "I haven't the knowledge, Mr Rackham. Miss Sophie needs a governess, Mr Rackham." Of course, the fact that Mrs Barrett has just had a baby, and wants a nursemaid for it, and is blabbering to everyone that money's no object, can have nothing to do with Beatrice twitching for my blessing to leave, can it?"' "So… How old is Sophie?"' asks Sugar, letting the sheets fall from her glistening bosom, to take his mind off her prying tongue.

"Ach, she's only five!" scoffs

William. "No, let me think: six.

Yes, six; she had her sixth birthday while Agnes was away at the seaside. Now, Sugar, I ask you: do you think an infant of six needs a professional teacher?"'

Sugar's mind conjures up a memory of herself at six, sitting next to her mother's skirts on a stool, her left foot bandaged after a rat bite, studying a ragged copy of a viciously gruesome Gothic novel called The Monk, understanding scarcely anything.

"I can't say, William. I received rigorous instruction when I'd barely left my cradle, but I had…" (she winces at the memory of reading aloud to Mrs Castaway and being mocked for mispronouncing words she was too young for) "an exceptional childhood."

"Hmm." This answer is not the one William was after, and he changes the subject.

"My brother Henry, too," he sighs heavily, "is a constant source of worry to me."

"Oh?"' "He's taking the decline of a friend very hard."

"What friend?"'

"A very…" (he searches for an adjective which, in deference to Mrs Fox's condition, is not too unflattering) "worthy woman called Emmeline Fox. She was a leading light in the Rescue Society, before she got consumption."

Sugar wonders if she should feign ignorance of the Rescue Society, whose representatives visited Silver Street from time to time, and were always made welcome by Mrs Castaway, and even treated to a 'cello performance by Katy Lester-before being subjected to sarcasm and ridicule, and sent away in tears.

"The Rescue Society?"' she echoes.

"A body of do-gooders. They reform prostitutes."

"Really?"' Unobtrusively, she retrieves her shift from the floor, and begins to dress. "With what success?"' "I've no idea," shrugs William.

"They teach street girls to be…

I don't know… seamstresses and so forth.

Lady Bridgelow got her cook's helper through the Society, I believe. The girl's terribly grateful and eager to please, and Lady Bridgelow says you'd never suspect, to look at her." (sugar can't dress further, as William is sitting on her pantalettes.) "I did consider," he muses, "when I was looking for a new parlour-maid, getting one through the Rescue Society, but I'm glad I didn't now. Rose is worth her weight in gold."

Tentatively, Sugar pushes William, to shift him off her pantalettes, which he does without demur. Emboldened, she decides to take a much bigger risk.

"And your brother," she enquires, "is he in this Rescue Society too?"' "No, no," says William. "It's for women only."

"Some similar society, perhaps?"'

"No… Why do you ask?"'

Sugar takes a deep breath, apprehensive not about betraying Caroline's confidence but about falling foul of William's prejudices.

"I have an acquaintance," she begins carefully, "who I see from time to time, when I'm … buying fruit. She's a prostitute …" (is that a frown on William's face? Has she misjudged his trust in her?

Nothing for it now but to push on.) "The last time we met, she told me a strange and singular story…"

And so, Sugar relates Caroline's tale of the pious would-be reformer who pays two shillings for conversation. William listens patiently, until she comes to the part where the fellow offers the prostitute honest employment in the Rackham factories, which provokes a gasp of recognition from him. When she's finished, he shakes his head in amazement.

"Lord God almighty…!" he mutters.

"Could it be? Could it be Henry? I suppose it can't be anyone else… I distinctly remember him asking if I'd be averse to employing a poor woman without a letter of recommendation… Lord almighty…" And suddenly he laughs. "The saucy devil! So he is a man after all!"

Sugar is pricked by remorse, though she's unsure whom-Henry or Caroline-she has betrayed. "Oh, but he doesn't lay a hand on her," she hastens to declare.

William snorts, his head tilted in pity at the credulity of women. "Maybe not on that one, you goose," he says, "on that occasion.

But who can say how many other whores he visits?"'

Sugar is silent. In the midst of her shame she feels a thrill of pleasure, at hearing him call her "goose" in such an affectionate, fatherly way.

"Who would have thought it!" William is still muttering and chuckling. "My pious brother Henry! My holier-than-thou brother Henry!

Ha ha! You know, I must admit, I've never liked him so much as at this moment. God bless him!" And he reaches out for Sugar and kisses her gratefully on the cheek-for what, she can't decide.

"You won't… mock him, will you?"' she entreats, stroking his shoulders uneasily.

"My own brother?"' he chides her, with a cryptic smile. "When he's in the state he is now? Heaven forbid. I'll be the soul of discretion."

"When are you likely to see him next?"' she says, in the hope that the passing of weeks or months may erode the details of her disclosure from his mind.

"Tonight," says William. "At dinner."

That evening, in order to dispel the gloom that Henry customarily brings into the house, William has arranged for the dining-table to be lit with twice the usual number of candles, and festooned with gay flowers. Seen from just outside the door, the effect is (if he does say so himself) invincibly cheery. And, although the dungeon-like segregation of the kitchen is designed not to permit any smells of cooking to escape, William's nose-grown so sensitive over the past few months that he can distinguish between Lavandula delphinensis and Lavandula latifolia-detects a superlative meal in the making. He'll do his damnedest to banish misery, by God.

Contrary to her custom, Agnes has announced she'll join the brothers for dinner. A disquieting prospect? Not at all, William tells himself: Agnes has always had a soft spot for Henry, and she's in a delightful mood this evening, giggling and singing as she supervises the hanging of the winter curtains.

"I know it's a tall order in the circumstances, but let's not mention Mrs Fox, shall we?"' he suggests, as the minutes tick towards Henry's expected arrival.

"I'll pretend the Season's still in full swing, dear," Agnes winks at him, almost coquettishly, "and say absolutely nothing about anything."

Only a little late, Henry makes his flustered appearance, and has no sooner been divested of his rain-spattered hat and coat than William claps a fraternal arm around his shoulders and leads him straight to the dining room.

There, Henry is confronted with a vision of Elysian abundance: warmth, illumination, roses everywhere, napkins splayed like peacocks' tails, and a pretty new maid lowering a tureen of golden soup onto the table. Already seated, smiling up at him through a gaudy halo of flowers and silver cutlery, is Mrs Rackham, dressed in colours of peach and cream.

"My apologies," says Henry. "I was… ah…"

"Sit down, Henry, sit down,"

William gestures magnanimously.

"We're not clock-watchers here."

"I almost didn't come," says Henry, blinking in the effulgence.

"Then we're all the gladder that you did," beams Agnes.

It's not until Henry has been seated in front of the filled wine-glass, gleaming plates, snow-white serviettes, and candelabrum, all of which combine to cast a bright light on his face, that William realises how shabby his brother looks. Henry's hair, urgently in need of barbering, is tucked behind his ears, except for one lock that swings to and fro across his sweaty brow. Neither soap nor oil seem to have been applied for some time. William next takes stock of Henry's clothes, which have a rumpled, baggy look about them, as though he's been crawling around like Nebuchadnezzar, or become a great deal thinner, or both. One of the pins on his shirtcollar, made visible by a skew-whiff cravat, glints irritatingly in the candle-light, making William want to reach over and adjust it.

Instead, the dinner begins.

Henry spoons the duckling consomm`e into his mouth without so much as looking at it, preferring to stare, with bloodshot eyes, into an invisible mirror of torment hanging somewhere to the left of William's shoulder.

"I shouldn't be eating, gorging myself like this," he remarks, to no one in particular, as he spoons on like an automaton. "There are folk in Scotland subsisting on seaweed."

"Oh, but there's really no fat in this soup at all," Agnes assures him. "It's ever so well strained." An awkward silence threatens to ensue, punctured only by the sound of Henry slurping. Is this, thinks Agnes, the real reason why he wasn't invited anywhere during the Season? "As for seaweed," she continues, struck by inspiration, "we were served some, weren't we William, at Mrs Alderton's, in a sauce? With scallops and swordfish. Most peculiar taste, the nibble I had. I was so glad it was served @a la Russe, or I'd've had to slip a plateful of it under the table."

William frowns, suddenly recalling his embarrassment at Mrs Cuthbert's dinner party two years ago, when that lady's dog threw itself under the white damask tablecloth, very near Agnes's place, and began golloping loudly.

"Society is closed to me," Henry declares lugubriously, as his soup bowl is spirited away by a servant. "I don't mean balls and dinner parties, I mean Society-our society-the community of souls we're all supposed to be a part of. There is nothing I can do for anyone, no part for me to play."

"Oh dear," says Agnes, regarding her brother-in-law with wide sympathetic eyes as the main course is carried into the room. "But weren't you hoping to become a clergyman?"' "Hoping!" cries Henry, in a scathing tone devoid of hope.

"You'd be awfully good at it, I'm sure," Agnes persists.

Henry's jaw sets rigid, just in time for a sizzling thigh of braised grouse to be forked onto his plate.

"Better than that tiresome Doctor

Crane," Agnes adds. "Honestly, I don't know why I bother nowadays. He's always warning me against things I haven't the least notion of doing…"

And so the evening goes on, forkful by forkful, with Agnes shouldering the greatest burden of conversation (fortified by frequent sips of red wine), while William gazes in growing dismay at the pathetic figure his brother has become.

Over and over, Henry alludes-when he can bestir himself to speak at all-to the gross futility of all endeavour, at least where his own worthless person is concerned. His voice is erratic, dropping to a mumble at times, then swelling with bitter vehemence, or even sarcasm -shockingly unlike him. All the while, his big hands are busy cutting the grouse into smaller and smaller pieces which, to William's annoyance, he then mashes into the vegetables and leaves uneaten.

"You are kinder than I deserve," he sighs, in response to yet more warm encouragement from his hostess. "You and… and Mrs Fox see me in a very different light from what I know to be true…"

Agnes shoots a glance at William, her bright eyes pleading permission to mention the forbidden woman. He writes restraint over and over on his wrinkled brow, but she's unable to read the lines, and immediately exclaims: "Mrs Fox is quite right, Henry: quite right! You're a man of rare sincerity, in matters of faith: I know it! I've a special intuition about these things; I can see an aura around people's heads-no, don't frown at me, William. It's true! Faith shines out of people like… like the haze around a gas-lamp.

No, William, it's true." She leans across the table towards Henry, her bosom almost touching her uneaten food, her face disconcertingly close to a flaming candelabrum, and engages him mock-conspiratorially. "Look at your brother over there, shushing me furiously.

He hasn't a God-fearing bone in his-"'

She stops short, and smiles demurely. "But honestly, Henry, you mustn't think so ill of yourself. You're more devout than anybody I know."

Henry squirms in embarrassment.

"Please," he says, "I'm sure your food is getting cold."

Agnes ignores this; she's in her own home and can eat as little as she pleases-which is very little indeed. "Once upon a time," she pursues,

"William told me a story. He said that when you were a boy, you heard a sermon which insisted that nowadays, in modern times, God speaks only through the Scriptures, not directly into our ears.

William said you were so angry about this sermon that you starved yourself, and denied yourself sleep, just like the prophets of old, only to hear God speak!"

She clasps her tiny hands, and smiles, and nods, thus wordlessly letting him know that she has done the same, and felt, as reward, the breath of the divine whisper on the back of her neck.

Henry fixes his brother with a glare of anguish.

"We are all of us foolish when we're young," offers William, perspiring freely, and wishing something or someone would breeze into the room and cause half of these damn candles to expire at once. "I myself recall saying, when I was a lad, that only men without an ounce of imagination or feeling could possibly become businessmen …"

This manful confession fails to impress Agnes, who has pushed her plates out of her way, and now leans on the tablecloth, the better to continue her heart-to-heart with Henry.

"I like you, Henry," she says, slurring the words ever-so-slightly. "I've always liked you.

You should have been a Catholic. Have you ever considered becoming a Catholic, Henry?"'

Mortified, Henry can do nothing but churn his fruit mousse into a browny-yellow porridge with his spoon.

"A change is as good as a holiday,"

Agnes assures him, taking another sip of wine. "Or even better. I had a holiday not long ago, and I wasn't happy at all …"

At this, William grunts in disapproval and, deciding that intervention can be postponed no longer, reaches across the table to shift aside the candelabrum that separates him from his wife.

"Perhaps you've had enough wine, dear?"' he suggests, in a firm voice.

"Not at all," says Agnes, half-fractious, half-winsome. "That salty grouse has made me thirsty." And she pecks another sip from the edge of her glass, kissing the red liquid with her rosebud lips.

"We have water on the table, dear, in that decanter," William reminds her.

"Thank you dear…" she says, but she never wavers from staring at Henry, smiling and nodding as if to say, Yes, yes, it's all right, I understand everything, you needn't hold back with me.

"I hear, on the grapevine," remarks William rather desperately, "that Doctor Crane is considering buying the house that was formerly lived in by… ah… what was their name?"'

Agnes chimes in, not with the missing name, but with another defamation of the minister.

"I do hate to go to church and be scolded, don't you?"' she asks Henry, pouting. "What is one a grown-up for, with all its nasty disenchantments, if not to make up one's own mind?"'

And so it goes on, for another five or ten long, long minutes, while mute servants clear away the dishes, leaving only the wine and the three ill-matched Rackhams. Finally Agnes flags, her head slumping down towards the crook of her elbow, her cheek almost brushing the fabric of her sleeve. The progress of her brow towards her forearm is slow but sure.

"Are you falling asleep, my dear?"' says William.

"Resting my eyes," she murmurs.

"Wouldn't you prefer to rest them on a pillow?"'

He makes the suggestion with not much hope that the words will reach her; or, if they do, he's half-expecting a peevish rebuff. Instead, she slowly turns her face up to him, her china-blue eyes fluttering closed, and says,

"Ye-every-es… I'd like that…"

Nonplussed, William pushes his chair back from the table and folds his napkin in his lap.

"Shall I… shall I ring for Clara to accompany you?"'

Agnes abruptly shores herself up in her seat, blinks once or twice, and bestows upon William a smile of perfect condescension.

"I don't need Clara to put me to bed, silly," she ribs him, rising unsteadily to her feet. "What's she to do, carry me up the stairs?"' Whereupon, pausing only to say goodnight to her guest, Mrs Rackham steps gracefully back from the table, turns on her heel and, with scarcely a sway, pads out of the room.

"Well, I'll be damned…" mutters William, too flabbergasted to bite his tongue on the blasphemy. In the event, his pious brother seems not to have noticed.

"She is dying, Bill," Henry says, staring hard into space.

"What?"' says William, rather taken aback by this suggestion. "She's a touch the worse for drink, that's all…"

"Mrs Fox," says Henry, summoning up, from the depths of his torment, a voice such as might be expected from him in a public debate.

"She's dying. Dying. The life is bleeding out of her, each day, before my very eyes… And soon -next week, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, for we cannot know the day or hour, can we?-I shall knock at her father's door, and a servant will tell me she's dead." Each word is spoken with sour clarity, each word is like a pinch of the fingers extinguishing a feeble flame of hope.

"Steady on, steady on," sighs William, feeling suddenly exhausted now that Agnes has removed herself from the fray.

"Yes, death will come like a thief in the night, won't he?"' Henry sneers, continuing his debate with an invisible apologist. "That's how Scripture tells us Christ will come, isn't it?"' He seizes his wine-glass and downs the contents at a gulp, grimacing scornfully.

"Tales to excite little boys and girls.

Trinkets and lolly-water…"

William strives, with all his fast-dwindling forbearance, to keep an outburst of exasperation in check.

"You speak as if the poor woman's in the grave already: she's not dead yet!" he says.

"And while she lives, she's a human being, with needs and wishes that may yet be fulfilled."

"There's nothing-"'

"For pity's sake, Henry! Stop reciting this same verse over and over! We are talking of a woman who's… preparing to say farewell to this earthly life, and you have been her dearest friend. Are you telling me there's nothing you could do that would make the slightest difference to her feelings?"'

This, at last, seems to penetrate Henry's black shell of grief.

"She… she stares into my soul, Bill," he whispers, haunted by the memory.

"Her eyes… Her imploring eyes…

What does she want from me? What does she want?"' "God almighty!" explodes William, able to endure it no longer. "How can you be so stupid? She wants a fucking!" He rears up from his chair and shoves his face close to Henry's. "Take her to bed, you fool: she's waiting for you! Marry her tomorrow! Marry her tonight, if you can wake a clergyman!" With every second, his excitement increases, inflamed by his brother's look of righteous outrage. "You miserable prig! Don't you know that fucking is a pleasure, and women feel it too? Your Mrs Fox can't fail to have noticed that in her labours for the Rescue Society. Why not let her feel that pleasure just once herself, before she dies!"

With a crash of wine-glasses and a quiver of candle-flames Henry jumps to his feet, his face white with fury, his huge fists clenched.

"You will permit me to leave," he whispers fiercely.

"Yes, leave!" yells William, with an exaggerated gesture towards the door. "Go back to your shabby little house and dream that the world is nobler and purer than it really is. But Henry, you're an ass and a hypocrite." (the words are gushing out of him now, released from years of self-restraint.) "The man hasn't been born," he rails, "who isn't wild to know what's between a woman's legs. All the Patriarchs and Ecclesiastics who sing the praises of cha/y and abstinence: chasing cunt, the lot of 'em! And why not? Why indulge in self-abuse when there are women in the world to save us from it? I've had dozens, hundreds of whores; if I've a cockstand, I need only snap my fingers, and within the hour I'm satisfied. And as for you, brother, looking as if you couldn't tell a prostitute from a prayer-cushion: don't think I don't know what you get up to. Oh yes, your… your escapades, your so-called "conversations", are the talk of whores all over London!"

With a guttural cry, Henry rushes from the room, flinging the door so wide that it rebounds juddering from the wall. William stumbles out in weary pursuit and, seeing that his brother is already half-way across the tiled floor of the receiving hall, calls after him:

"Forget about being a saint, Henry! Show her you're a man!"

Whereupon, feeling he's said enough, he steps back into the dining-room, and leans his back against the nearest wall, breathing hard. Faintly he can hear an altercation at the front door: Letty pleading with Mr Rackham to let her help him with his coat, and Henry carrying on like a baited bear: then the whole house seems to shake with the impact of the door slamming shut.

"Ah, well," croaks William (for he has yelled himself hoarse), "it's all said now.

We shall see what we shall see."

His heart is beating hard-provoked, no doubt, by the sight of his brother's clenched fists and look of fury, a fearsome combination William hasn't had to face since his brother was a child.

He shambles to the dining-room table, fetches up a glass and fills it from the almost empty wine bottle. Then, having drunk the restorative potion to the dregs, he makes his way upstairs, mounting the steps with an increasingly resolute tread, heading not for his own bedroom but Agnes's.

By God, he's had enough of other people's prudish quirks and sickly evasions. It's high time, he's decided, to father a son.

In the small hours of the morning, Henry sits in front of his fireplace, feeding into the flames everything he has written for the past ten years or more: all the thoughts and opinions he'd hoped one day to broadcast from the pulpit of his own church.

What a preposterous glut of paper and ink he has amassed, loose leaves and envelopes and journals with spines and notebooks sewn with string, all neatly filled with his blockish, inelegant handwriting, all annotated with symbols in his own private code, signifying such things as further study needed or but is this really true? or expand. The saddest hieroglyph of all, found in the margins of almost every scrap of manuscript from the last three years, is an inverted triangle, suggestive of a fox's head, meaning: Ask opinion of Mrs Fox. Page after page, Henry burns the evidence of his vanity.

Puss purrs at his feet, wholly approving of this game, which is making her fur so warm that it almost glows. Coal is pleasant enough, and slow to be consumed, but paper is incomparably better, if a man can only be encouraged to keep it coming.

Henry is busy now with a fat ledger, a cast-off (along with a dozen more such) from his father, during a "spring cleaning" of the Rackham offices in 1869. "It pains me to see good paper destroyed," he remembers telling the old man. "I can put these to another use."

Vanity! And what's this? Rejoice, and be Exceeding Glad, says the inscription on the cover: one of the many titles he daydreamed for his first published collection of sermons. Again, vanity! With a scowl of anguish, he rips the cardboard from the spine, and throws it into the flames.

The heat flares fierce, and he leans back in his chair, closing his eyes until it abates.

He is weary, terribly weary, and tempted to sleep. Sleep would come so easefully to him, if only he kept his eyes closed for another few moments. But no, he'll not sleep.

Everything must be destroyed.

Before he can resume his task, however, he's jolted almost out of his skin by a knock at the front door. Who the devil…? He glances at the clock on the mantelpiece: it's exactly midnight; time for all good folk to be in bed, even zealous lassies galvanised by the plight of the islanders of Skye. Yet the knocking goes on, soft but insistent, luring him out into the unlit hallway. Could this caller be some vile cut-throat, come to kill him and pillage his house for the few antiquated valuables that are in it? Well, come on, then.

Standing at the door in his socks, Henry opens it a crack, and peers out into the dark. There on the footpath near his doorstep, cloaked from head to toe in a voluminous cape and hood, stands Mrs Fox.

"Do let me in, Henry," she says affably, as if there's nothing odd about the situation, other than that he is being ungentlemanly enough to keep a lady waiting in the cold.

Dumbfounded, he steps backwards, and she slips into the vestibule, pulling the hood off her head. Her hair thus revealed is loose, free of combs and pins, and more abundant than he'd ever thought it was.

"Go back into the warm room, you silly man," she scolds him gently, walking straight there without waiting on formalities. "It's raw weather, and you're not dressed."

Indeed, when he looks down at himself, he can't deny he's in his nightshirt.

"What… what brings you here?"' he stammers, following her into the light. "I…

I can hardly believe… I thought…"

She stands behind his vacant armchair, her hands laid on the anti-macassar. Her face has lost its ghastly pallor, her cheeks are no longer sunken, her lips are moist and roseate.

"They're all wrong, Henry," she says, her voice warm and full, wholly cured of its consumptive wheeze. "All tragically mistaken."

He stands gaping, his arms hanging paralysed at his sides, the hairs on the nape of his neck all a'prickle. Puss, still curled up by the hearth, looks up at him in languid disdain, as if to say, Don't put on so!

"Heaven isn't a vacuum, or a great fog of ether, with ghostly spirits floating all about,"

Mrs Fox continues, lifting her hands from his chair to mime, with an impish wiggle of her fingers, the effete flutter of wings. "It's as real and tangible as the streets of London, full of vigorous endeavour and the spark of life.

I can't wait for you to see it-it will open your eyes, Henry, open your eyes."

He blinks, his breath taken by the reality and tangibility of her, the sharply familiar shape of her face and the look on it: that disarming stare, half-innocent, half-argumentative, which has always accompanied her most heretical statements.

How often has she made him feel like this: shocked at how blithely she flirts with blasphemy; worried that her views will attract the wrath of the powers that be; but enchanted by the glimpse she shows him of what, all of a sudden, is revealed as the most elementary truth. He moves towards her, as he has moved towards her so many times before-to caution her, restrain her with the frown of his orthodoxy, while at the same time exhilarated by the desire to see things exactly as she does.

"And I was right, Henry," she goes on, nodding as he approaches. "The people in Heaven feel nothing except love. The most wonderful … endless… perfect… Love."

He sits-falls, almost-into his chair, looking up at her face in awe and puzzlement. She unclasps the cloak at her neck, and lets it fall to the floor. Her naked shoulders shine like marble; the undersides of her exquisite breasts brush against the top of his chair as she bends down to kiss him. Her face has never looked like this in his dreams: every eyebrow-hair sharp, the pores on the sides of her nose large as life, the whites of her eyes slightly bloodshot, as if she has been weeping but feels better now. Tenderly she lays her hand on his cheek; purposefully she hooks her fingers under his jaw and guides him towards her lips.

"Mrs Fox… for all the world, I wouldn't …" he tries to protest, but she can read his mind.

"There's no marriage in Heaven, Henry," she whispers down to him, leaning further and further over his chair, so that her hair falls onto his chest, and her breath is warm against his brow.

"Mark, chapter twelve, verse twenty-five."

She's tugging the night-shirt up from his knees, but he grasps her gently by the wrists, to keep her from uncovering his nakedness. Her wrists are strong, with a pulse in them, a heartbeat of blood against his palms.

"Oh Henry," she sighs, twisting her body around to one side of his chair, resting her buttocks on the arm of it. "Stop pussyfooting; there's no stopping what has been begun, can't you see that?"'

Holding her like this, her wrists still trapped in his hands, he becomes aware of a strange and delicate balance, an equilibrium of will and sinew and desire: his arms are the stronger, and he can bend her however he wishes; he can fold her shut, covering her breasts with her own elbows, or he can spread her arms wide; yet, in the end, the way they move is hers to decide, and the power is hers to wield. He lets her go, and they embrace; for all that he isn't worthy, he lays claim to her as if he is, as if sin has yet to be invented, and they are two animals on the sixth day of Creation.

"They're all jackals, Henry," she whispers, "and you are a lion."

"Mrs Fox…" he gasps, suddenly stifling in his night-shirt. The fire in his hearth has made the room so hot there's no need for clothing, and he allows Mrs Fox to make him as naked as herself.

"You know, Henry, it's high time you called me Emmeline," she murmurs in his ear, as with one sure hand she finds his manhood and guides it into the welcoming place that God has made, it seems, for no other purpose than to receive him.

Once joined, they are in perfect agreement how to proceed together; he moving deep inside her, she clinging tighter and tighter, her cheek pressed hard against his, her tongue, cat-like, licking his jaw.

"My love, ye-every-es," she croons, covering his ears with her hands in case the distant, nagging clang of a fire-engine bell should distract him from the call to rapture. "Come into me."