The Crimson Petal and the White (4 page)

‘Will that be all, madam?’ he harrumphs, affectedly sweeping a small feather duster over a rack of ink bottles.

‘Oh yes, thank you,’ says Sugar in her sweet fancy vowels and scrupulous consonants. ‘Only, please … if you’d be so kind … I wonder if it could be made a little easier for me to carry?’ And she transfers the ream of paper – slightly rumpled from the bosom-to-bosom embrace – into his hands. Scowling, he wraps the purchase in pin-striped paper and improvises a carry-handle of twine around it. With an ingratiating coo of thanks Sugar accepts the parcel from him, admiring his handiwork, demonstrating with a sensuous stroke of her gloved fingers what a good job he has done. Then she turns her back on him and takes her friend by the arm.

Out in the sun, up close, Caroline and Sugar appraise each other while pretending not to. It’s months since they last met. A woman’s looks can crumble irreparably in that time, her skin eaten away by smallpox, her hair fallen out with rheumatic fever, her eyes blood-red, her lips healing crookedly from a knife wound. But neither Caroline nor Sugar is much the worse for wear. Life has been kind, or at least has been sparing with its cruelty.

Shush’s lips, the older woman notes, are pale and dry and flaking, but weren’t they always? In Sugar’s poorer days, before the move to smarter premises, she and Caroline lived three doors apart in St Giles, and even then customers would occasionally knock on the wrong door and ask for ‘the girl with the dry lips’. Caroline knows, too, that underneath Sugar’s gloves there’s something wrong with her hands: nothing serious, but an unsightly skin ailment which, again, men have always seemed happy to forgive. Why men should tolerate such defects in Sugar was, and still is, mysterious to Caroline; indeed there’s not a single physical attribute of which she could honestly say that Sugar’s is better than hers.

There must be more to her than meets the eye.

‘You’re lookin’ awful well,’ Caroline says.

‘I feel wretched,’ says Sugar quietly. ‘God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.’ Her face and voice are calm; she might be commenting on the weather. Her hazel eyes radiate – or appear to radiate – gentle good humour. ‘Bring on Armageddon, what do you think?’

Caroline wonders if she’s missing a joke, the kind which Sugar shares with educated men now that she’s relocated to Silver Street. Sugar used to be good for a laugh, back in the Church Lane days. Her parlour piece – a great favourite with all the whores – still makes Caroline smile, remembering it. Not that she remembers it very well, mind; it involved not just play-acting but words, hundreds of ’em, and the words were the best part. Sugar pretending to seduce an invisible man, begging him in a voice almost hysterical with lust. ‘Oh, you
must
let me stroke your balls, they are so
beautiful
– like … like a
dog
turd. A
dog
turd nestling under your …’ Your what? Shush had such a good word for it. A word to make you wet yourself. But Caroline has forgotten the word, and now’s not the time to ask.

The fact that Sugar should be so much more desired and sought-after a whore than herself has always puzzled her, but that’s the way it is and, judging by gossip in the trade, it’s more true lately than ever. Certainly there’s no doubt that the relocation of Mrs Castaway’s from St Giles to Silver Street – a hop, skip and jump from the widest, richest, grandest thoroughfare in London – was as much due to the demand for Sugar as to the madam’s ambition.

Which raises the question: what’s Sugar doing here in a dingy Greek Street stationer’s, when she now lives so close to the splendid shops of the West End? Why risk dirtying the hems of that beautiful green dress on carriage-ways where no one’s in a hurry to sweep up the horse-shit? Indeed, why even bother to get out of bed (a bed Caroline imagines to be royally luxurious) before midday?

But when Caroline asks, ‘What are you doin’ all the way down ’ere?’ Sugar just smiles, her whitish lips dry as moth’s wings.

‘I was … visiting a friend,’ she says. ‘All of last night.’

‘Oh yes,’ smirks Caroline.

‘No, really,’ says Sugar earnestly. ‘An old friend. A woman.’

‘So how is she, then?’ says Caroline, angling for a name.

Sugar closes her eyes for a second. Her lashes, unusually for a red-haired person, are thick and lush.

‘She’s … gone away now. I was saying goodbye.’

They make an odd pair, Caroline and Sugar, as they walk up the street together: the older woman small-boned, round-faced, swell-bosomed, so neat and shapely in comparison to her companion, a long, lithe creature wreathed in a
peau-de-soie
dress the colour of moss. Although she has no bosom to speak of, this Sugar, and bones that poke alarmingly through the fabric of her bodice, she nevertheless moves with more poise, more feminine pride than Caroline. Her head is held high, and she appears to be wholly at one with her clothing, as if it were her own fur and feathers.

Caroline wonders if it’s this animal serenity that men find so attractive. That, and the expensive clothes. But she is wrong: it’s all to do with Sugar’s ability to make conversation with men like the one you will meet very shortly. That, and never saying ‘No.’

Now Sugar asks Caroline, ‘How far out from home do you mean to start today?’

‘Not ’ere,’ the older woman replies, frowning, and gesturing back towards St Giles. ‘Crown Street, maybe.’

‘Really?’ says Sugar, concerned. ‘You were doing all right a few months ago, weren’t you, around Soho Square?’ (Here you see another reason why Sugar has done so well in her profession: her ability to recall the less than fascinating minutiae of other people’s lives.)

‘I lost me nerve,’ says Caroline with a sigh. ‘It was a good day, that day I ran into you and was all excited about Soho Square; I’d landed meself two champion customers in a row, and I was finkin’: this is the patch for me from now on! But it was beginner’s luck, Shush. I just don’t belong this far into the good parts. I should know me place.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Sugar. ‘They can’t tell the difference, half these men. Put a black dress on, take a deep breath, puff your cheeks out and they’ll mistake you for the Queen.’

Caroline grins dubiously. In her experience, the great jaded world is not so easy to impress.

‘They see through me, Shush. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s arse.’

‘Oh, I think you can,’ says Sugar, suddenly serious. ‘It all depends who’s buying it.’

Caroline sighs. ‘Well, if I keep to my part of town, I find there’s more buyin’ and less refusin’. Every time I try me luck any further west than Crown Street, it’s a struggle.’ She squints up Greek Street in the direction of Soho Square, as if everything that lies beyond the Jews’ School and the house of charity is too steep to climb. ‘Oh, I get foreigners, right enough, and boys from the country, I get a few of those, that don’t know no better than to follow on and on. You keep ’em talkin’ all the way there, “Oh yes, and what brings a man like you to London, sir?” and ’fore they know it they’re in Church Lane and there’s no backin’ out. So they ’as their pound o’ flesh, pays you well for it and just puts it down to experience. But then you also get the ones that keeps on at you: “Is it far, is it far, are we there yet? – you’d better not be one of those
Old City
sluts.” When they’re like that, sometimes you can still steer ’em into an alley, make ’em settle for a soot-arse, but sometimes they just shakes you off ’alf-way, really wild, and says, “Why don’t you solicit from your own kind?” I tell you, Shush, it really takes it out of you when they do that. You feel so low, you want to go ’ome and weep …’

‘No, no,’ protests Sugar, shaking her head. ‘You mustn’t look at it that way. You’ve brought
them
low, that’s what you’ve done. They thought they were Prince Glorious, and you’ve made them see they don’t cut the figure they thought they did. If their rank was obvious for all to see, why would a woman like you approach them in the first place? I tell you, it’s
they
who go home and weep – pompous trembling little worms. Ha!’

The women laugh together, but Caroline only for a moment.

‘Well,’ owever they see it,’ she says, ‘it can get me snivelling. And in public too.’

Sugar takes Caroline’s hand, grey and green gloves locking together, and says, ‘Come with me to Trafalgar Square, Caddie. We’ll buy some cakes, feed the pigeons – and watch the undertakers’ ball!’

They laugh again. The ‘undertakers’ ball’ is a private joke between them, jokes being the main thing to have survived the three years since they were neighbours and daily confidantes.

Soon they’re walking together through a maze of streets neither of them has any use for – streets they know only as the locales of other women’s brothels and introducing-houses, streets already marked for destruction by town planners dreaming of a wide avenue named after the Earl of Shaftesbury. Crossing the invisible boundary between St Anne and St Martin-in-the-Fields, they see no evidence of saints, and no fields unless one counts the tree-lined lawn of Leicester Square. Instead, they keep their eyes open for the same pastry-shop they visited last time they met.

‘Wasn’t it here?’ (Shops appear and disappear so quickly in these modern times.)

‘No, farther.’

London’s pastry-shops (or ‘patisseries’, as they tend to style themselves lately) – poky little establishments that look like prettified ironmongers, displaying a variety of squat objects named after gateaux – may appal the French on their visits to England, but France is far away across a distant channel, and the patisserie in Green Street is quite exotic enough for such as Caroline. When Sugar leads her through the door, her eyes light up in simple pleasure.

‘Two of those please,’ says Sugar, pointing to the stickiest, sweetest, creamiest cakes on show. ‘And that one too. Another two – yes, two of each.’ The two women giggle, emboldened by that old girls-together chemistry. For so much of their lives, they have to be careful to avoid any word or gesture that might hinder the fickle swell of men’s pride; what a relief it is to throw away inhibition!

‘In the same scoop,
maydames
?’ The shop-keeper, aware that they’re as much ladies as he’s a Frenchman, leers smarmily.

‘Oh yes, thank you.’

Caroline gently cradles both of the thick paper scoops by their coned undersides and compares the four creamy lumps within, trying to decide which she’ll eat first. Paid in full, the shop-keeper sees them off with a cheery ‘
Bon
jewer.’ If two cakes each is what prostitutes buy, then bring on more prostitutes! Pastry will not stay fresh waiting for the virtuous, and already the icing is beginning to sweat. ‘Come again,
maydames
!’

Onwards now to the next amusement. As they approach Trafalgar Square – what excellent timing – the fun has just begun. The unseen colossus of Charing Cross Station has discharged its most copious load of passengers for the day, and that flood of humanity is advancing through. Hundreds of clerks dressed in sombre black are spilling into view, a tumult of monochrome uniformity swimming towards the offices that will swallow them in. Their profusion and their haste make them ridiculous, and yet they all wear grave and impassive expressions, as though their minds are fixed on a higher purpose – which makes them funnier still.

‘The
un
-dertakers’ ball, the
un
-dertakers’ ball,’ sings Caroline, like a child. The wit of the joke has long gone stale, but she cherishes it for its familiarity.

Sugar is not so easy to please; to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song – these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one’s lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes,
that
one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her. Well, Sugar is determined to be different. The Fates can look down any time they please, and find her always set apart from the common herd, ready for the wand of change to christen her head.

So, these clerks swarming before her cannot be undertakers anymore; what can they be? (Of course the banal truth is that they’re clerks – but that won’t do: no one ever escaped into a better life without the aid of imagination.) So … they’re an enormous party of dinner guests evacuating a palatial hotel, that’s what they are! An alarm has been raised: Fire! Flood! Every man for himself! Sugar glances down at Caroline, wondering whether to communicate this new perception to her. But the older woman’s grin strikes her as simple-minded, and Sugar decides against it. Let Caroline keep her precious undertakers.

The clerks are everywhere now, piling out of omnibuses, marching off in a dozen directions, clutching packed lunches in parcels tied with string. And all the while still more omnibuses rattle into view, their knife-boards covered with more clerks shivering in the wind.

‘I wish it’d rain,’ smirks Caroline, recalling the last occasion when she and Sugar stood under cover, squealing with delight as the omnibuses ferried the clerks through a merciless downpour. The ones on the inside were all right, but the unfortunates riding on the knife-boards were hunched miserably under a jostling canopy of umbrellas. ‘Oh, what a sight!’ she’d crowed. Now she clasps her gloved hands as if in prayer, wishing the skies would open so she could see that sight again. But today, the heavens stay closed.

Under benign sunshine, grow busier still, a chaos of pedestrians and vehicles making little distinction between street and footpath. Riding slowly through the hordes of clerks, like farmers trying to drive hay-carts through a flock of sheep, are the Jewish commission agents in their flashy broughams. Displayed at their sides are the ladies of mercantile nobility, lapdogs shivering in their laps. Wholesale merchants, holding their heads visibly higher than retail merchants, alight from cabs and clear a path with a sweep of their walking sticks.

It is from inside Trafalgar Square, however, that the scale of the parade can best be appreciated, as the crowds of clerks stream around and about like a great army surrounding Nelson. All Sugar and Caroline have to do is push through into the Square proper, holding their cakes and parcel aloft. With every step, despite the press of bodies, men make way for them, some falling back in ignorant deference, others in knowing disgust.