The Crimson petal and the white

HELP I AM STUK

He reads and re-reads the words, flabbergasted.

He has no wish to find out which of his hirelings is such an idler as to have spent valuable time carving this joke. All he can think about is that his wife's insanity is common knowledge of the most shop-soiled kind.

Even farm-hands discuss it amongst themselves. He might just as well be a cuckold, with all the sniggering that surrounds him!

A breeze agitates the cr@epery-papery vestiges of the tree's foliage, and William, knowing he's being absurd, but unable to resist, peers up into the branches, in case Agnes may be up there after all.

In the Rackham house, there's an embarrassing surplus of angels, far too many to fit onto the Christmas tree. Sugar, Rose and Sophie have been pottering around downstairs, looking for spots not already festooned with decorations. Loath to admit defeat, they've fastened their fragile-winged fairies onto the unlikeliest surfaces: window-sills, clocks, the new hat-stand, the frames of prints, the antlers of a stuffed doe-head, the lid of the piano, the antimacassars of seldom-used chairs.

Now it's the morning of Christmas Eve, and time for the finishing touches. Outside, the snow whirls and flusters, an eerily silent storm.

The mail has just been delivered and, through the fogged and frosted parlour window, the hunched figure of the postman can still be glimpsed disappearing into the milky gloom.

Indoors, the hearths blaze and crackle, so that the Christmas tree has had to be moved to the opposite side of the parlour, for fear of floating sparks igniting it. Sugar, Rose and Sophie crouch around the X-shaped wooden base, their skirts wrapped modestly around their ankles, as they replace the decorations that have fallen off. Rose is singing to herself,

"Christmas is coming,

The goose is getting fat

Please put a penny

In the old man's hat…"

There's scarcely a clump of pine-needles that doesn't sag with coloured thread, silver balls and matchwood sculptures, but the coup de gr@ace is yet to come: Rose is an avid reader of the ladies' journals, and has been inspired by a "tip" for gilding an indoor tree with the ultimate Yuletide illusion.

Following a simple recipe, she's filled some empty Rackham perfume spray-bottles with a water-and-honey mixture, described as a harmless and effective "glue" to hold a snowy sprinkling of flour. Armed with a bottle each, Rose, Sugar and Sophie now spray this sticky fluid onto the tree's extremities.

"Oh dear," laughs Rose nervously.

"We ought to've done this before we dressed the tree."

"We shall have to sprinkle the flour very carefully," agrees Sugar, "if we're not to make a dreadful mess." All this talk of we is delicious; she could kiss Rose for starting it!

"I'll know better next year," says

Rose. She's just observed Miss Rackham spraying water and honey directly onto the carpet, and wonders if she has the authority to forbid the child from participating in the flour-sprinkling. Flattered though she is that Miss Sugar is willing to work side by side with a housemaid, there's always the risk that a trifling mistake will suddenly sour their relations.

"Stand back, Sophie," says Sugar,

"and be our adviser."

The two women take turns to shake flour into each other's cupped palms, which they then allow to fall, as neatly as they can manage, onto the sticky branches. Sugar's head is light with the triumph of it: to be a member of the Rackham household, virtually one of the family, sharing a rueful smile with Rose as they commit this foolishness together. No act between herself and another woman has ever felt so intimate, and Sugar has done many things. Rose trusts her; she trusts Rose; with their eyes alone they've made a pact to see this business through to its completion; they sprinkle flour into each other's hands, and hope it will remain their little secret.

"We must be mad," frets Rose, as the sifted powder begins to drift into the air and make them sneeze.

Sugar holds out her hands, in whose dry flesh every crack and flake is clearly delineated with flour. But nothing needs be said; every woman has her imperfections, and Rose, now that Sugar sees her up close, is ever-so-slightly cross-eyed. They are equals, then.

"If you haven't got a penny

A ha'penny will do

If you haven't got a ha'penny,

Well, God Bless You!"

Another few sprinkles, and the deed is done.

The flour has made an unholy mess, but that portion of it which adhered to the branches resembles snow quite as remarkably as the ladies' journal promised, and the spills can be swept up in no time at all. This, Rose makes clear, is no task for a governess.

While she sweeps, Rose sings "The Twelve Days of Christmas", limiting herself to repetitions of the first day. Her voice is a crude and quavery thing compared to Agnes's, but the sound of singing really does lend good cheer, and no other voices are going to be raised. Sophie and Sugar regard each other shyly, each hankering to hum along.

"On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…"

Without warning, William walks into the parlour, a sheet of paper in his hand, a preoccupied expression on his face. He stops short, as if he'd meant to step into a different room altogether but took a wrong turn in the corridor. The Christmas tree, by now a rococo edifice of baubles, flour and folderol, seems barely to register on his consciousness, and if he notices that the two grown women are powdered up to their elbows, he doesn't let on.

"Ah… splendid," he says, and promptly retreats. Still dangling from his slack hand is a letter which, if Doctor Curlew's handwriting were only ten times larger, might have been readable from across the room-not that Sugar could have made much sense of a message consisting simply of: As we discussed, I have made arrangements for December 28th. You won't regret this, believe me.

Rose heaves a sigh of relief. The master has had his chance to be angry, and hasn't taken it. She bends to her dustpan and brush, and resumes singing.

Once the spilled flour has been swept up, Rose, Sugar and Sophie replace the gaily-wrapped gifts under the tree. So many boxes and packages, tied with red ribbon or silver string-what, oh what, can be in them all?

The only package whose contents Sugar knows for sure, is Sophie's present to her father; the rest are mysteries. As she helps to arrange them attractively, stowing the smaller ones amongst the larger, the shapeless parcels on top of the sturdy cartons, she affects to be uninterested in the tiny labels inscribed with the recipients' names. The few that she manages to catch sight of give her no satisfaction (harriet? Who the devil is Harriet?), and with Rose and Sophie watching she can't very well go probing, can she?

Please God, she thinks. Let there be something for me.

Upstairs, William opens the door of his wife's bedroom as noiselessly as he can, and slips inside. Although he has persuaded Clara to leave the house for a few hours, he turns the key in the lock, just in case her vixenish instinct should lure her unexpectedly back.

Within the four walls of Agnes's room, there's no evidence of the festive season. Indeed, there's very little evidence of anything whatsoever, as all the clutter of Agnes's pastimes-indeed, any object that might obstruct Clara's nursing-has been consigned to storage, leaving scrupulously dusted vacancy in its place.

As for the walls, they were bare even before this pitiful affair, for Agnes has never had an easy rapport with pictures. The last print to grace her bedroom was banished when a ladies' journal decreed that ponies were vulgar; the one before had to be removed when Agnes complained that it was dripping ectoplasm.

Now Agnes lies sleeping, insensible to everything, even the extraordinary performance of the snowstorm just outside her window, even the approach of her husband. William gently lifts a chair, deposits it near the head of the bed, and lowers himself onto the seat. The air stinks of narcotic syrup, beef tea, mulled egg, and soap-Rackham's Carnation Cream, if he's not mistaken. A great deal of soapy water is sloshed about in this room lately; Clara, rather than risk a mishap-a fall, a drowning-in a tub, washes her mistress in bed, then simply exchanges the sodden linen for dry. He knows this, because she's told him so, only to refuse his offer of a second lady's-maid with a sniff of injured stoicism.

Agnes's feet are healing slowly, he's given to understand. There may, according to Doctor Curlew, be lasting damage to the left one, causing her to limp. Or perhaps she'll walk as gracefully as she ever did. It's difficult to predict, until she's up and about again.

"Soon," he murmurs near her sleeping head, "you'll be in a place where you'll get better. We don't know what to do with you anymore, do we, Agnes? You've led us a merry dance, yes you have."

A wisp of flaxen hair is tickling her nose, making it twitch. He combs it aside with his fingertips.

"'Ank you," she responds, from the depths of her anaesthesia.

Her lips have lost their natural pinkness; they're as dry and pale as Sugar's, but glisten with medicinal salve. Her breath smells stale, which disturbs him more than anything: she always had such sweet breath! Can what Curlew says really be true, that women a damn sight more degenerate than Agnes have walked out of Labaube Sanatorium restored to the peach of health?

"You want to be good, don't you?"' he whispers into Agnes's ear, smoothing her hair against her delicate scalp. "I know you do."

"Far… farther… Scanlon…" she whispers in return.

He lifts the sheets off her shoulders, and folds them down to the foot of the bed. The necessity for Agnes to be forced… no, persuaded, to eat a more robust diet is all too obvious; her arms and legs are terribly wasted. How cruel a dilemma, that when she's responsible for herself, she starves on purpose, whereas when she's rendered helpless, she achieves the same effect unconsciously!

Whatever his qualms are about the treatment she'll receive at the hands of strange doctors and nurses, he has to admit that Clara and her porridge-spoon are not equal to the challenge.

Agnes's feet are snugly bandaged, two soft hoofs of white cotton. Her hands are bandaged too, tied with a bow at the wrists, to keep her from interfering with her dressings in her sleep.

"Ye-every-es," she says, stretching to greet the cooler air.

Gingerly, William strokes the line of her hip, which is now as sharp as Sugar's. It doesn't suit her: she needs to be more rounded there. What looks striking on a tall woman can look worryingly gaunt on a tiny one.

"I never meant to hurt you, on that first night," he assures her, stroking her tenderly. "I was… made hasty by urgency.

The urgency of love."

She snuffles amiably, and when he hoists his body onto the bed next to her, she emits a muted, musical "Oo".

"And I thought," he continues, his own voice trembling with emotion, "that once we… once we were underway, you'd begin to like it."

"Umf… lift me up… strong men that you are…"

He hugs her close, from behind, cuddling her bony limbs, her soft breasts.

"You like it now, though, don't you?"' he asks her earnestly.

"Mind… you don't let me fall…"

"Don't be afraid, my dear heart," he whispers directly into her ear. "I'm going to … embrace you now. You won't mind that, will you?

It won't hurt. You'll let me know if I'm hurting you, won't you? I wouldn't hurt you for all the world."

The noise she utters as he enters her is a strange, lubricious sound, pitched half-way between a gasp and a croon of compliance. He lays his whiskery cheek against her neck.

"Spiders…" she shudders.

He moves slowly, more slowly than he's ever moved inside a woman in his life. The snow against the window turns into sleet, pattering against the glass, casting a marbled shimmer on the bare walls. When his moment of rapture comes, he suppresses, with great effort, his urge to thrust, instead keeping absolutely still while the sperm issues from him in one smooth, uncontracted flow.

"… Num… numbered all my bones …" mumbles Agnes, as William allows himself a solitary groan of ecstasy.

A minute later, he is standing by her bed once more, wiping her clean with a handkerchief.

"Clara?"' she whimpers peevishly, one bandaged hand pawing the air for the bedclothes.

"Cold…!" (he's opened the window a crack, just in case the servant's nose is as sharp in sense as it is in shape.) "Won't be long, dear," he says, bending to wipe her again. Suddenly, to his dismay, she starts peeing: an amber-yellow, foul-smelling trickle onto the white bed-sheets.

"Dirty… dirty…" she complains, her distant, dozy voice tinged now with fear and disgust.

"It's… it's all right, Agnes," he assures her, pulling the sheets over her.

"Clara will be back very soon. She'll attend to you."

But Agnes is squirming under the bedclothes, groaning and tossing her head. "How am I to get home?"' she cries, as her unseeing, demented eyes flash open and she licks her jellied lips. "Help me!"

Sick with grief and regret, William turns from her, shuts the window, and hurries from the bedroom.

"Next time I wake," reflects Sophie that evening as she's being tucked into bed, "it will be Christmas."

With a forefinger, Sugar taps the child lightly, mock-sternly, on the nose.

"If you don't go to sleep soon," she says, "Christmas will come at midnight, and you won't know what's what."

Oh, how sweet it is, to have won so much of Sophie's trust that she can raise a hand to her in playful rebuke, without causing a flinch. She pulls the blankets up; Sophie's chin is still a little damp, and Sugar's hands still warm and pink, from the bathwater.

"And you know what happens, don't you,"

Sugar teases, "to little girls who are still awake at midnight on Christmas morning?"' "What happens?"' Sophie's apprehensive now, that she might stay awake despite her best efforts to sleep.

Sugar hadn't expected this; her threat was empty rhetoric. She delves into her imagination and, within an instant, is opening her mouth to say this: A horrible ogre bursts into your room, seizes you by the legs, and tears you in two bloody pieces like a raw chicken.

"A horr-"' she begins, her voice rough with malicious glee, before she manages to clamp shut her mouth. Her stomach abruptly revolves inside her, her face flushes blood-red. It has taken her nineteen years to reach this understanding, that she is Mrs Castaway's daughter-that the brain which nestles in her skull, and the heart which beats in her breast, are replicas of those same organs festering in her mother.

"Not-nothing happens," she stammers, stroking Sophie's shoulder with a shaky hand. "Nothing at all. And you'll be asleep before you know it, little one, if only you close your eyes."

So saying, she extinguishes Sophie's light and, still burning with the shame of what she almost did, retires to her own room.

In Agnes Unwin's diary, on the morning of her wedding, the seventeen-year-old girl appears in high if somewhat frenzied spirits. Certainly, as far as Sugar can tell, Agnes's fears and doubts about giving herself to William Rackham have fallen-or been pushed-away. Only the ceremony now fills her with trepidation-but trepidation of a thrilled and puppyish kind:

Oh, why is it, dear Diary, that although there have been a million Weddings in the history of the world, and thus a million opportunities to learn how to make their course run smooth, my Wedding has turned into such a mad scramble! Here I am with only four hours left before the Great Event, half dressed in my Wedding gown, and my hair not even done! Where is that girl? What can she be doing that is more important than my hair, on this Day Of Days! And she has put the orange blossoms on my veil too soon, and they are drying out! She had better find fresh ones, or I shall be cross!!

But I must stop writing now, in case in my haste to record every precious event, I break a finger-nail, or spill ink all over myself.

Imagine that, dear Diary: inkstained at the Altar!

Until tomorrow then-or (if I can snatch a moment) perhaps even tonight!-by which time I shall be, no longer Agnes Unwin, but Forever yours, Agnes Rackham!!!

Sugar turns the page, and finds it blank.

She turns another: blank again. She riffles through the remainder, and just when she's convinced that Agnes must have begun a fresh diary to chronicle her married life, she spots a few more entries -undated, clotted, fearsomely small.

Riddle: I eat less than ever I did before I came to this wretched house, yet I grow fat.

Explanation: I am fed by force in my sleep.

And, on the page following:

Now I know that it is true. Demon sits on my breast, spooning gruel into my mouth. I turn my head, his spoon follows. His vat of gruel is as big as an ice pail. Open wide, he says, or we shall be here all night.

More blank pages, then, finally:

The old men lift the stretcher on which I lie, and carry me through the sunlit trees to the Hidden Path. I hear the train which delivered me hooting and moving off on its return journey.

One of the Nuns, She who has taken me especially under Her wing, is waiting at the Gates, Her hands clapsed under Her chin. Oh Agnes dear, She says, Are you here again?

What is to become of you! But then She smiles.

I am carried into the Convent, into a warm cell at its very heart, which glows in colours from the stained glass windows. I am lifted off my stretcher and on to a sort of high bed-like a pedestal with a matress on top. The awful pains in my swollen stomach, the giddy biliusness I have been suffering each day, return with a vengeance. It is as if the demon inside me fears the Holy Sister's healing powers, and seeks to take firmer hold.

My Holy Sister leans over me; She is many different colours in the light of the stained glass, Her face is buttercup yellow, Her breast is red, Her hands are blue. She places them gently on my belly, and inside me the demon squerms. I feel it pushing and lungeing in rage and terror, but my Sister has a way of causing my belly to open up without injury, permitting the demon to spring out. I glimpse the vile creature only for an instant: it is naked and black, it is made of blood and slime glued together; but immediately upon being brought out into the light, it turns to vapour in my Holy Sister's hands.

Falling back in exzaustion, I see my belly shrinking.

"There now", my Holy Sister says to me with a smile. "It is over."

Sugar flips to the end of the volume, hoping for more; there isn't any. But… but there must be!

Her curiosity is aroused, she's gripped by Agnes's narrative as she never was before, and besides, she's arrived at the period she most fervently wishes to know about: the early days of William and Agnes's marriage. Breathing shallowly in anticipation, she fetches, from the pile stacked against her thigh, the next diary in chronological sequence. She's seen it before.

It reveals nothing. She finds the next one.

It begins:

"Season"-also Reflections, by Agnes

Rackham Ladies, I ask you: Can there be any greater annoyance, than hat pins which are too blunt to penetrate a perfectly ordinary hat? Of course, when I say "ordinary", I don't mean to imply that my hats are not "extra-ordinary" in the sense of Sugar stops reading and lays the diary down, confused and disappointed. Ought she press on?

No, she simply hasn't the stomach for more of this stuff, especially on the night before Christmas. Besides, it's late: a quarter to twelve. Overcome suddenly by that peculiar breed of tiredness which waits for a clock's permission before it strikes, she can barely summon the energy to stow the diaries back under her bed; only the thought of Rose discovering her snoring under a mound of them in the morning prods her to action.

Secret safely concealed, Sugar has one last piss in the pot, slips inside the sheets, and blows out the candle.

In the pitch dark, she lies listening, her face turned towards the window her eyes cannot yet descry. Is it snowing still? That would explain how little street noise she can hear. Or are there no revellers? In Silver Street, Christmas Eve was always a noisy affair, with street musicians competing for festive generosity, a cacophony of accordions, barrel-organs, fiddles, pipes, drums-all woven together in a web of unintelligible chatter and uproarious laughter, a web that was spun to the top floors of the tallest houses. No hope of sleeping amid such a hubbub-not that anyone at Mrs Castaway's was trying to sleep, busy instead with organ-grinding of an unmusical kind.

Here in Notting Hill, the sounds are fainter and more cryptic. Are those human voices, or the snortings of a horse in the stable? Is that a fragment of a minstrel's tune being blown across the grounds from Chepstow Villas, or the squeak of a gate, much nearer by? The wind whimpers under the eaves, fluting across the chimney tops; the rafters creak. Or is that the creaking of a bed, inside the house? And is that whimpering Agnes's, as she tosses in her poisoned sleep?

You ought to help her. Go help her. Why don't you help her? nags Sugar's conscience, or whatever she's to call that unruly spirit whose sole delight is to pester her when she craves rest. They're keeping her doped because she says things they don't care to hear. How can you let them do it? You promised you would help her.

This is a low blow, a promise scavenged from the meeting in Bow Street, when Agnes collapsed in the mud, and her guardian angel came to her rescue.

What happened was… I promised to help her get home, no more, she protests.

Didn't you say, "I'll be watching you to see that you're safe"?

I meant, only to the end of the street.

Ooooh, you are a slippery, cowardly slut, aren't you?

The wind is blowing harder now, cooing and lowing all around the house. A shaft of whiteness plummets through the gloom past Sugar's window.

Agnes in a white night-gown? No, a quantity of snow dislodged from the roof-tiles.

Why should I care what happens to Agnes? she sulks, turning her face into her pillow.

She's spoilt, and addle-brained, and a bad mother, and… and she'd spit on a prostitute in the street, if spitting were fashionable.

Her mischievous opponent doesn't deign to answer; it knows she's remembering the tremble of Agnes's shoulders beneath her hands, there in the alley, as she whispered into the poor woman's ear: "Let this be our secret."

I'm in William's house. I could get into terrible trouble.

The unruly spirit is silenced by this-or so she imagines, for a minute or two. Then, What about Christopher?, it harangues her.

Sugar balls her fists inside the bedclothes and digs her brow into the pillow. Christopher can take care of himself. Am I supposed to rescue everyone in this damned world?

Oh, poor baby, is the mocking rejoinder. Poor cowardly slut. Poor whore, poor-whore, poor-hoor, pooor-hoooor…

Outside in the windswept streets of Notting Hill, someone blows a horn and someone else raises a joyous cheer, but Sugar doesn't hear them; she's narrowly escaped learning what really happens on Christmas Eve, to little girls who stay awake too long.