The Crimson Petal and the White (10 page)

‘’Ow d’you do, sir,’ they welcome him in unison.

But, unison or not, it’s obvious they aren’t twins. They aren’t even, pedantically speaking, girls – as William verifies when he removes Alice’s chemise. The undersides of her breasts no longer stand out from her midriff, but lie flat against it. The pink of her hairless vulva is tinged with telltale shadow, and her lips are no longer a rosebud, but a full-blown rose.

Worse than this, she moves like any other mediocre whore. A bit of puppyish curiosity would be delightful, but this practised submission, like a tame Labrador rolling over, is merely dispiriting. God damn it! Is there
never
such a thing as exceptional value for money? Does it always have to be a king’s ransom that buys promise fulfilled? Is it the sole purpose of the modern world to disappoint ideals and breed cynicism?

As Alice begins to wrap her body around him in the waxy heat, William wishes suddenly to flee the house, never mind the money wasted. For a moment he pulls back, squirming to be free, but he cannot persuade his erection to accompany him. So, making the best of things, he pulls Claire’s chemise off as well, and finds her to be younger than Alice, with cone-shaped breasts and subtle, welt-like nipples of hyacinth-pink.

Encouraged by this, William throws himself into the business at hand with a passion, a passion to exorcise his griefs and frustrations. There is an answer to be found, a solution to his suffering, if he can only break through the obstacles of the flesh. With such furious vehemence does he fuck that he loses, at times, all awareness of what he’s doing, the way a frenzied fighter may become blind to his opponents. Yet these are, for him, the best moments.

Aside from such transcendent lapses, however, he is not to be pleased. The girls are no good: they don’t move as he wishes, they are the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong consistency, they collapse under him when he requires them to bear his weight, they totter when he requires them to stand firm, they wince and flinch and all the while keep so damnably silent. Too much of the time, William feels himself to be alone in the room with his own breathing, alone with the faintly absurd sound of his foot sliding a cushion along a carpet, the dull musical twang of the bed-springs, the comical
ugh-ugh
of his own allergic cough.

The blame he lays entirely on Claire and Alice. Hasn’t he had the most sublime, the most joyous times with prostitutes in the past? Especially in Paris. Ah, Paris! Now
there
was a breed of girl that knew how to please a man! As William presses down heavily on these glum English girls, themselves lying crushed breast to breast, he can’t help reminiscing. In particular, about one occasion when he ventured out on his own to the Rue St Aquine, leaving Bodley, Ashwell and the others still drinking at The Cul-de-Sac. By some strange chance, God knows how (he was squiffed to the gills) he ended up in a room full of
exceptionally
friendly whores. (Is there anything more delightful than the laughter of tipsy young women?) Anyway, inspired by their boisterous vulgarity, William invented a hilarious erotic game. The girls were to squat in a circle close around him, legs spread apart, and he would toss coins, gently and carefully aimed, at their slits. The rule was that if the coin lodged, the girl was allowed to keep it.

The long years since that extraordinary night haven’t dimmed its sights and sounds: even now he can hear the ecstatic giggles and the cries all around him of ‘
Ici, monsieur! Ici!
’ Ah! to think that those girls are probably lying idle at the Rue St Aquine at this very moment, while he toils here, hundreds of miles away from them, straining to extract an ounce of enthusiasm from these dull English pretenders.

‘Do try to do your best for me,’ he urges Claire and Alice as he prises apart their squashed bodies, noticing that each of their clammy torsos bears the flushed imprints of the ribs of the other. He turns them over, over and over, as if hoping to find an orifice not yet detected by previous customers. His lust has become almost somnambulistic; he demands ever greater liberties, in a voice he hardly recognises as his own, and the girls obey like figments of his own sluggish dream.

He hardly knows what he’s saying, then, when at last he takes Alice by the wrists and gives her the command which will transform many lives.

The girl shakes her head.

‘I don’t do that, sir. I’m sorry.’

William releases her wrists, one by one. With the first hand freed, Alice tucks a lock of her hair nervously behind one ear. William flips it back onto her cheek.

‘What do you mean, you don’t do that?’ He looks from Alice to Claire who, sensing that the ordeal is over, is surreptitiously pulling her nightdress up over her shoulders.

‘Me neiver, sir.’

William rests his hands on his naked knees, speechlessly outraged. His blood, redistributed from below, flushes his cheeks and neck.

‘We would if we could, sir,’ says Alice, taking up her position next to Claire on the edge of the bed once more. ‘But we can’t.’

William reaches for his trousers, as if in a dream.

‘It seems odd,’ he says, ‘to draw the line at
that
rather than at … well, something else.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ replies the elder (for so she obviously is), ‘And so is Claire, I’m sure. You know it ain’t nuffink to do wif
you
, sir. Troof is, we wouldn’t do it for nobody, sir. Troof is, it would put us off, sir, put us off altogevver, and then we’d not be wurf a farvin’ to you, sir.’

‘Oh, but,’ pursues William, catching sight of a glimmer of hope, ‘I wouldn’t blame you for that, oh no. And it wouldn’t matter, you see. You’d not have to do anything more after that, just that one thing, and with your eyes closed if you liked.’

The girls’ faces are by now ugly with embarrassment.

‘Please, sir,’ begs Alice, ‘don’t press on us; we can’t do it and there it is, and we are very sorry to ’ave offended you. All I can do for you, sir, is give you a name – the name of a person as’d do what you ask.’

William, huffily dressing, and preoccupied with locating a lost garter, is not sure he has heard correctly.

‘
What
did you say?’

‘I can tell you ’oo’ll do it for you, sir.’

‘Oh yes?’ He sits taut, ready to vent his fury on yet more whore-bluff. ‘Some poxy hag in Bishopsgate?’

Alice seems genuinely abashed.

‘Oh
no
, sir! A very ’
igh-
class girl in
ever
such a good ’ouse – in Silver Street, sir, just off The Stretch. Mrs Castaway is the madam there – and it’s said this girl is the best girl in the ’ouse. She’s the madam’s own daughter, sir, and ’er name is Sugar.’

William is by now fully dressed and self-possessed: he might be a charity worker or a parson come to inspire them to seek a better life.

‘If… If this girl is so high-class,’ he reasons, ‘why would she be prepared to… do such a thing?’

‘Ain’t
nuffink
Sugar won’t do, sir.
Nuffink
. It’s common knowledge, sir, that special tastes as can’t be satisfied by the ordinary girl, Sugar will satisfy.’

William voices a grunt of sulky mistrust, but in truth he’s struck by the name.

‘Well,’ he smiles wearily. ‘I’m sure I’m most grateful for your advice.’

‘Oh, I ’ope you may be, sir,’ responds Alice.

Standing alone in the stinking alley behind the brothel, William clenches his fists. It’s not Claire and Alice he’s angry with; they’re already forgiven and half-forgotten, shut away like unwanted lumber in a dark attic to which he will never return. But his frustration remains.

I must not be denied
, he says aloud – well, almost. The words are loud in his mind, and on the tip of his tongue, withheld only for fear that to proclaim ‘I must not be denied!’ in an alleyway off Drury Lane might attract mockery from uncouth passers-by.

It’s blindingly clear to William that he must proceed directly to Silver Street and ask for Sugar. Nothing could be simpler. He is in town;
she
is in town: now is the time. There isn’t even any need to squander money on a cab; he’ll take the omnibus along Oxford Street, and then another down Regent Street, and he’ll be almost there!

Rackham strides forth, hurries to New Oxford Street and, as if the universe is impressed – no,
cowed
– by the sheer strength of his resolve, an omnibus turns up almost instantaneously, allowing him to board without breaking his pace.

Mrs Castaway. Sugar. Give me Sugar and no excuses
.

Once William is actually seated in the omnibus, however, and the solid street outside the soot-speckled windows becomes a moving panorama, his resolve begins to weaken. For a start, paying the fare reminds him of how much money he has already spent on his new hat (not to mention the lesser expense of Alice and … whatever the other one’s name was). Who can say how much this girl Sugar will cost? around Golden Square contain a mixed assortment of houses, some grand, some shabby.
What if
this girl demands more than he has on his person?

William stares across at the passengers opposite him – dozing old fossils and overdressed matrons – and notes how vividly real they are compared to the blurry world beyond the window-glass. Has he really any choice but to stay in his seat, a passenger among other passengers, until the omnibus horses have pulled him all the way back to Notting Hill?

And shouldn’t he be getting home, anyway? The responsibilities awaiting him there are most urgent – so much more deserving of his attention than this secret ember of lust glowing inside him. This Sugar, whoever or whatever she may be, can only make him poorer, whereas a few hours spent in duteous study could well rescue him from ruin.

William is staring sightlessly ahead of him, deep in thought; suddenly he notices a prune-faced dowager staring back at him.
What an ill-mannered
creature you are!
she seems to be thinking. Chastised, he lowers his head, and stays stoically seated, even as the omnibus rattles past Regent Circus. He’s had his extravagance for the day; he has made his stand. Now he sinks back, closes his eyes, and dozes for the remainder of the journey.

‘Chepstow Villas cor-
nerrr
!’ warbles the conductor. William jolts back to life. The world has turned greener; the buildings have thinned. It’s sleepy Notting Hill in the sunny glow of afternoon. London is gone.

Blinking and groggy, William dismounts the omnibus right behind a lady he doesn’t know. Indeed, he almost blunders into her, trapped in the wake of her black and terracotta striped skirts. In better circumstances, he might find her enticing, but she’s too close to home and he is still hankering after Sugar.

‘Forgive me, madam,’ he says as he circles free of her snail’s-pace.

She glares at him as if he has treated her shabbily, but William feels a second apology would be excessive. There ought to be a limit to how much allowance men make for the delicate speed of women.

Forging ahead, William hurries past the long ornate fence of the park to which he is one of the private key-holders. Where that key might be, he has forgotten; he’s in the habit nowadays of ignoring the pale flowers, evergreens and marble fountains that twinkle so fetchingly behind the wrought-iron bars. Oh, granted, in the beginning, when Agnes was still well, he did occasionally take the air with her in this park, to prove to her how nice a place Notting Hill could be despite everything, but now …

He slows his pace, for the handsome house directly up ahead is the Rackham house – his own house, so to speak – in which lie waiting for him his problematical wife, his ungrateful servants, and a stack of unreadable business papers on which (outrageously!) his entire future depends. He draws a deep breath and approaches.

But already there is an obstacle, before he’s even set foot on his own grounds. Just outside the front gate sits a dog – a fairly small dog, admittedly – at fully erect attention, as if volunteering its services as gatekeeper. It wags its tail and nods its head as William steps near. It’s a mongrel, of course. All the proper dogs are indoors.

‘Get away,’ growls William, but the dog doesn’t budge.

‘Get
away
,’ William growls again, but the animal is stubborn, or confused, or stupid. Who knows what goes on in a dog’s brain? (Well, actually, William did publish a monograph, during his time at Cambridge, called
Canines and the Canaille: The Differences Explained
. But Bodley wrote some of it.) William pulls the gate open and hastens through, in the process shoving the dog’s body aside with the great hinged grille.

Locked out, the animal takes offence at the rebuff. It rears up against the gate, paws scratching at the wrought-iron curlicues, and barks clamorously as William walks up the steep path towards his own front door.

These last few steps of his homeward journey tire him more than all the rest. The lawn on either side of the path hasn’t been cut for months. His private carriage-way leads to a coach-house with no coach and a stable with no horses, and serves only to remind him of the Sisyphean challenge ahead.

And all the while, the dog barks tirelessly on.

It should never be necessary to ring a doorbell more than once – especially if it’s one’s own. Principles like that should damn well be tattooed on servants’ thumbs, to help them remember. Nevertheless, William’s arm is raised for his third tug on the bell-pull when Letty’s face finally appears in the doorway.

‘Good arfernoon Mr Rackham,’ she beams.

He brushes past her, resisting the urge to dress her down in case she protests it’s the heavy weight of her new duties that’s to blame. (Not that such a complaint could ever come from Letty, and William would do well to accept her ovine placidity for what it is, rather than mistaking it for Clara’s grudging acquiescence.)

As Rackham clumps towards the stairs, Letty’s smile falters; she has disappointed her master yet again. He was so full of praise for her when Tilly was dismissed, but ever since then … She bites her lip, and shuts the front door as gently as she can.