The Crimson Petal and the White (101 page)

Outside the iron gates of the Rackham soap factory in Lambeth, a carriage stands waiting, shackled to two placid grey horses. In this coach, behold: Lady Bridgelow. Ensconced snugly in the burnished cabin, like an aquamarine pearl in a four-wheeled shell, she draws all eyes to her even before she alights.

‘Lord, look at that smoke …’ tuts William, as he steps out of his own carriage and peers regretfully into a sky tainted with the murky efflux from Doulton & Co, Stiff & Sons, and various other potteries, glass-makers, breweries and soap-makers in the neighbourhood. He guiltily appraises his own chimneys, and is reassured to note that the smoke issuing from them is wispy and clean.

‘Oh, William,
there
you are!’ Inside the coach, a pale starfish of pigskin fingers wiggles.

Approaching Lady Bridgelow after he’s motioned the watchman to throw the gates wide, William apologises profusely for any inconvenience she may have suffered, to which she responds by insisting that it’s
her
fault for arriving earlier than they’d agreed.

‘I’ve been looking forward to it so much, you see,’ she trills, allowing herself to be helped out onto the footpath.

‘Difficult for me to believe …’ says William, gesturing vaguely at the utilitarian ugliness of the factory’s immediate locale, so different from the glittering pleasure gardens he imagines are Lady Bridgelow’s natural habitat.

‘Oh, so you doubt my word!’ she teases him, feigning offence with a limp diminutive hand laid on her satiny blue breast. ‘No but really, William, you mustn’t take me for an old relic. I’ve no desire to spend the rest of my days pining for things that are about to pass into history. Honestly, can you imagine me following a herd of doddery aristocrats around the countryside while they shoot pheasants and bemoan the evils of Reform Bills? A fate worse than death!’

‘Well,’ says William, bowing in mock-obeisance, ‘if I can save you from such a fate, by showing you my humble factory …’

‘Nothing would amuse me more!’

And they proceed through the gates.

(What about Sugar, you ask? Oh well, yes,
she
enters too, hobbling on her crutch, with Sophie close by her side. How odd that Lady Bridgelow, for all her playful repudiation of patrician snobbery, appears not even to have noticed the governess’s existence – or perhaps her innate grace and tact don’t permit her to remark on the misfortune of a person’s physical disability. Yes, that must be the reason: she doesn’t wish to embarrass the hapless governess by enquiring how she came by her unsightly limp.)

Sugar watches in dismay as William and Lady Bridgelow walk side by side, cutting a path through the toadies and sycophants who cringe to give them room. By contrast, those same employees edge inwards again after Mr Rackham and his distinguished guest have passed, as though primed to eject from the premises any interlopers who might be skulking in their wake. Sugar does her best to walk tall and hold her head high, putting as little weight as possible on her crutch, but she’s plagued by the additional pain of indigestion, and it’s all she can do not to grip her stomach and whimper.

The factory itself, when the little party enters its fiercely lit interior, is nothing like Sugar had anticipated. She’d pictured a building of grand proportions, a cavernous, echoing structure like a railway station or a church, filled with monstrous machines that hum and gleam. She’d imagined the processes happening invisibly inside tubes and vessels, each feeding the other, while dwarfish human attendants oiled the moving parts. But Rackham’s Soap Factory isn’t that sort of set-up at all; it’s an intimate affair, conducted under ceilings as low as a tavern’s, with so much polished wood on show that it might almost be The Fireside.

Stunted girls with pinched faces and red hands – a dozen of them, like manufactured replicas of Janey the scullery maid – are working in an atmosphere thick with the mingled odours of lavender, carnation, rose and almond. They wear rustic wooden clogs with roughened soles, for the stone floors are iced with a waxy, pellucid patina of soap.

‘Watch your step!’ says William, as he escorts his visitors into his fragrant domain. Under the glowing lights, his face is scarcely recognisable; his skin is golden, his lips silver, as he assumes the role of the master of ceremonies. Forgetting his reticence, free of his stutter, he points here, he points there, and explains everything.

‘Of course, what you see here is not strictly soap
manufacture
– that’s a dirty business, not worthy of a perfumer. The correct word for our far more fragrant procedures is
re
-
melting
.’ He enunciates the word with exaggerated clarity, as if he expects his guests to scribble it on a notepad. Lady Bridgelow swivels her head in polite wonder; Sophie looks from her Papa to Lady Bridgelow and back to her Papa, puzzling over the mysterious chemistry that imbues the atmosphere between them.

The bars of soap, which Sugar had imagined tumbling fully-formed out of a chute or a nozzle at the very end of a complex automaton, exist only as puddles of gelatinous ooze, twinkling in wooden moulds. Wire frames are poised above the aromatic goo, to guillotine it into rectangles when it stiffens. Each mould contains a different colour of mucus, with a different scent.

‘This yellow one is – or will be – Rackham’s Honeysuckle,’ says William. ‘It relieves itching, and the demand for it has grown five-fold this year.’ He dips a finger into the glimmering emulsion, and reveals two distinct layers. ‘This cream that’s risen, we skim off. It’s pure alkali, which in my father’s day was allowed to remain, thus making the soap irritating to sensitive skin.’

He moves on to a different mould, whose contents are bluish and sweet-smelling.

‘And here we have what will become Rackham’s Puressence, a blend of sage, lavender and sandalwood oil. And here’ (moving on again) ‘is Rackham’s Jeunesse Eternelle. The green colour comes from cucumber, and the lemon and chamomile act as an astringent, restoring smoothness to the face.’

Next he takes them to the curing chamber, where hundreds of bars of soap lie nestled on beds of metal and oak.

‘A full twenty-one days they’ll lie here, and not a day less!’ declares Rackham, as if malicious whisperers have claimed otherwise.

In the wrapping room, twenty girls in lavender smocks sit at a massive table, ten on either side, overseen by a vulpine fellow who paces slowly around them, his ginger-haired hands hooked in his waistcoat pockets. The girls lean forward in formation, their brows almost touching as they enfold the soap in waxed paper parcels. Each of the parcels is printed with an engraving of William Rackham’s benevolent visage, as well as a minuscule text authored by Sugar one late night in May, while she and William sat side by side in bed.

‘Good morning, girls!’ says William, and they respond in chorus: ‘Good morning, Mr Rackham.’

‘Often they sing to themselves,’ says William to Lady Bridgelow and his other guests, with a wink. ‘But we’ve made them shy, you see.’

He approaches the table, and gives the lavender lassies a smile. ‘Let’s hear a song, girls. This is my little daughter come to see you, and a very fine lady as well. You needn’t be bashful; we’re moving on to the crating hall now, and shan’t be watching you, but if we could only hear your sweet voices, why, that would be capital.’ Then, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial tone, he murmurs, ‘Do your best for me,’ while rolling his eyes meaningfully in the direction of Sophie, to appeal to their collective maternal nature.

William and his visitors then proceed to a large vestibule at the rear of the factory, where sinewy shirt-sleeved men are packing loose piles of finished soaps into flimsy wooden caskets. Sure enough, no sooner have Lady Bridgelow, Sugar and Sophie stepped across the threshold than a melodious chanting starts up in the room they’ve just left: first one timorous voice, then three, then a dozen.

‘
Lavender’s blue, diddle diddle,

Rosemary’s green, diddle diddle,

When I am king, diddle diddle,

you shall be queen …
’

‘And here,’ says William, pointing at two massive doors beyond which, through a crack, they can glimpse the world outside, ‘is where the factory ends – and the rest of the story begins.’

Sugar, who has been preoccupied with the triple challenge of keeping her limp as unobtrusive as possible, restraining her urge to groan as her stomach gripes wickedly, and suppressing the temptation to punch Lady Bridgelow’s simpering face, becomes aware of a discreet tugging at her skirts.

‘Yes, what is it, Sophie?’ she whispers, bending down clumsily to allow the child to whisper in her ear.

‘I need to do a piddle, Miss,’ says the child.

Keep it in, can’t you
? thinks Sugar, but then she realises that she, too, is bursting to go.

‘Pardon me, Mr Rackham,’ she says. ‘Is there, on the premises, a room with … washing facilities?’

William blinks in disbelief: is this some sort of obtuse enquiry about soap production, a gauche attempt to reprise her performance in his lavender fields, or is she requesting a formal tour of the factory’s water-closets? Then, mercifully, he understands, and commandeers an employee to show Miss Sugar and Miss Sophie the way to the conveniences, while Lady Bridgelow affects a consuming interest in the list of far-flung destinations chalked upon the delivery slate.

(‘
I heard one say, diddle diddle

since I came hither

that you and I, diddle diddle,

must lie together …
’)

Lady Bridgelow ignores the child’s indiscretion with the grace of one whose pedigree exempts her from such gross frailties. Instead, she picks up an individual soap and studies the curious text on its wrapper.

The employees’ latrine has a much more modern and streamlined appearance, in Sophie and Sugar’s eyes, than the rest of the soapworks. A row of identical white glazed stoneware pedestals, each attached to a brilliant metal cistern bracketed under the ceiling, exhibit themselves like a phalanx of futuristic mechanisms, all proudly engraved with the name of their maker. The seats are a rich brown, glossy with lacquer, brand new it seems; but then, according to the address inscribed on all the cisterns, the Doulton factory is only a few hundred yards down the road.

The pedestals are so tall that Sophie, having clambered onto one, dangles her feet in space, several inches from the eggshell-blue ceramic floor. Sugar turns her back and walks a few steps farther along, studying the wall-tiles while Sophie’s pee trickles into the bowl. The pain in her guts is so sharp now that it catches her breath and makes her shiver; she longs to relieve herself, but the prospect of doing it in front of the child worries her, and she wonders if, by superhuman force of will, she can wait until later.

Merely piddling in Sophie’s presence wouldn’t be so bad: a shared intimacy that might compensate, to some extent, for the erosion of dignity. But the pangs in her bowels are fearsome, and she’s loath to unleash a noisy flux of stink into the room, for
that
would ruin beyond repair the image of Miss Sugar the serene custodian of knowledge, and brand upon Sophie’s mind (and nose!) the gross reality of … of Miss Sugar the sick animal.

Hugging herself tight and biting her lip to suppress the cramps, she stares at the wall. A disgruntled employee has attempted to gouge a message into the ceramic:

W. R. is

but the hardness of the surface has proved too obdurate.

Suddenly she must – absolutely
must
– sit down. Her stomach is skewered with agony, and every inch of her skin prickles with cold sweat; the flesh of her buttocks, bared in desperate haste as she claws handfuls of her dress onto her bent back and yanks down her pantalettes, is wet and slippery as a peeled pear. She lets herself drop heavily onto the seat, and with a stifled cry of anguish she slumps forward, her bonnet falling to the tiled floor, her hair unravelling after it. Blood and other hot, slick material erupts and slithers between her thighs.

‘Oh God!’ she cries. ‘God help me … !’ and a flush of dizziness seems to flip her upside down before she loses consciousness altogether.

A moment later –
surely
only a moment later? – she wakes on the floor, sprawled on the chilly damp tiles, her thighs slimy, her heartbeat shaking her body, her ankle throbbing as if caught in a steel trap. Craning her head, she sees Sophie cowering in a corner, face white as the stoneware, eyes huge and terrified.

‘Help me, Sophie!’ she calls, in an anxious hiss.

The child jerks forward, like a doll pulled by a string, but her expression is contorted by impotence. ‘I–I’ll go and fetch someone, Miss,’ she stammers, pointing at the door, beyond which lurk all the strong men and serviceable ladies with which her Papa’s factory is so well-stocked.

‘No! No! Sophie,
please
,’ begs Sugar in a frantic whisper, thrusting up her hands as she flounders in a tangle of her own skirts.
‘You
must try.’

For another instant, Sophie looks to the outside world for rescue. Then she runs forwards, seizes her governess by the wrists, and heaves with all her strength.

‘Well,’ says William, when the goodbyes have been spoken and Lady Bridgelow has been borne away. ‘How did you like
that
, Sophie?’

‘It was most wondrous, Papa,’ replies the child, in a spiritless voice.

They’re seated in the Rackham carriage, their clothing exhaling the sweet scent of soap into the confines of the cabin, their knees almost touching, as Cheesman ferries them away from Lambeth. The visit has been a resounding success, at least in the estimation of Lady Bridgelow, who confided in William that she’d never had an experience that thrilled quite so many of her senses at once, and she could well imagine how it might overwhelm a person in less than robust health. Now he is left with Sugar, who does indeed look green around the gills, and Sophie, who looks as if she’s been subjected to an ordeal rather than given the treat of her life.