The Crimson Petal and the White Page 2

  There are faces at all the windows there. The silent faces of children, individually framed, or in small groups, like shop-soiled sweetmeats in a closed-down emporium. They stare down at the wreck, waiting. Then, all at once, as if by communal agreement on the number of seconds that must pass after the cabman’s disappearance around the corner, the little white faces disappear.

  At street level, a door swings open and two urchins run out, quick as rats. One is dressed only in his father’s boots, a pair of ragged knickerbockers and a large shawl, the other runs barefoot, in a night-shirt and overcoat. Their hands and feet are brown and tough as dog’s paws; their infant physiognomies ugly with misuse.

  What they’re after is the cab’s skin and bone, and they’re not shy in getting it: they attack the maimed vehicle with boyish enthusiasm. Their small hands wrench spokes from the splintered wheel and use them as chisels and jemmies. Metal edgings and ledges snap loose and are wrenched off in turn; lamps and knobs are beaten, tugged and twisted.

  More children emerge from other filthy doorways, ready for their share. Those with sleeves roll them up, those without fall to work without delay. Despite their strong hands and wrinkled beetle-brows, none of them is older than eight or nine, for although every able-bodied inhabitant of Church Lane is wide awake now, it’s only these younger children who can be spared to strip the cab. Everyone else is either drunk, or busy preparing for a long day’s work and the long walk to where it may be had.

  Soon the cab is aswarm with Undeserving Poor, all labouring to remove something of value. Practically everything is of value, the cab being an object designed for a caste many grades above theirs. Its body is made of such rare materials as iron, brass, good dry wood, leather, glass, felt, wire and rope. Even the stuffing in the seats can be sewn into a pillow much superior to a rolled-up potato sack. Without speaking, and each according to what he has in the way of tools and footwear, the children hammer and gouge, yank and kick, as the sound echoes drily in the harsh air and the framework of the hansom judders on the cobblestones.

  They know their time is likely to be short, but it proves to be even shorter than expected. Scarcely more than fifteen minutes after the first urchins’ assault on the wreck, a massive two-horse brewer’s dray turns the corner and rumbles up the lane. It carries nothing except the cabman and three well-muscled companions.

  Most of the children immediately run home with their splintery armfuls; the most brazen persist for another couple of seconds, until angry shouts of ‘Clear off!’ and ‘Thief!’ send them scurrying. By the time the dray draws up to the wreck, Church Lane is empty again, its house-fronts innocent and shadowy, its windows full of faces.

  The four men alight and walk slowly around the cab, clockwise and counter-clockwise, flexing their massive hands, squaring their meaty shoulders. Then, at the cabman’s signal, they lay hands on the four corners of the wreck and, with one groaning heave, load it onto the dray. It settles more or less upright, two of its wheels having been plundered.

  No time is wasted scooping up the smaller fragments. The horse snorts jets of steam as it’s whipped into motion, and the three helpers jump on, steadying themselves against the mangled cab. The cabman pauses only to shake his fist at the scavengers behind the windows and yell, ‘This ‘ere was my life!’ and then he, too, is carted away.

  His melodramatic gesture impresses nobody. To the people of Church Lane, he is a lucky man, a survivor who ought to be grateful. For, as the dray rattles off, it exposes a pattern of dark blood nestled between the cobbles, like a winding crimson weed.

  From where you stand you can actually see the shiver of distaste travelling down between Caroline’s shoulder-blades: she’s not brave about blood, never has been. For a moment it seems likely she’ll turn away from the window, but then she shudders exaggeratedly, to shake off the goose-flesh, and leans forward again.

  The dray has gone, and here and there along the house-fronts doors are swinging open and figures are emerging. This time it’s not children but adults — that is, those hardened souls who’ve passed the age of ten. The ones who have a moment to spare — the bill-poster, the scrubber, and the fellow who sells paper windmills — dawdle to examine the blood-spill; the others hurry past, wrapping shawls or scarves around their scrawny necks, swallowing hard on the last crust of breakfast. For those who work in the factories and slop-shops, lateness means instant dismissal, and for those who seek a day’s ‘casual’ labouring, there’s nothing casual about the prospect of fifty men getting turned away when the fittest have been chosen.

  Caroline shudders again, this time from the chill of a distant memory. For she was one of these slaves herself once, hurrying into the grey dawn every morning, weeping with exhaustion every night. Even nowadays, every so often when she has drunk too much and sleeps too deeply, a brute vestige of habit wakes her up in time to go to the factory. Anxious, barely conscious, she’ll shove her body out of bed onto the bare floor just the way she used to. Not until she has crawled to the chair where her cotton smock ought to be hanging ready, and finds no smock there, does she remember who and what she’s become, and crawl back into her warm bed.

  Today, however, the accident has shocked her so wide awake that there’s no point trying to get more sleep just yet. She can try again in the afternoon — indeed, she’d better try again then, to reduce the risk of falling asleep next to some snoring idiot tonight. A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.

  Responsibilities, responsibilities. To get enough sleep, to remember to comb her hair, to wash after every man: these are the sorts of things she must make sure she doesn’t neglect these days. Compared to the burdens she once shared with her fellow factory slaves, they aren’t too bad. As for the work, well … it’s not as dirty as the factory, nor as dangerous, nor as dull. At the cost of her immortal soul, she has earned the right to lie in on a weekday morning and get up when she damn well chooses.

  Caroline stands at the window, watching Nellie Griffiths and old Mrs Mulvaney trot down the street on their way to the jam factory. Poor ugly biddies: they spend their daylight hours drudging in the scalding heat for next to nothing, then come home to drunken husbands who knock them from one wall to the other. If this is what it means to be ‘upright’, and Caroline is supposed to be ‘fallen’ …! What did God make cunts for, if not to save women from donkey-work?

  There is one small way, though, in which Caroline envies these women, one modest pang of nostalgia. Both Nellie and Mrs Mulvaney have children, and Caroline had a child once upon a time, and lost it, and now she’ll never have another. Nor was her child an illegitimate wretch: it was born in loving wedlock, in a beautiful little village in North Yorkshire, none of which things exists in Caroline’s world anymore. Maybe her blighted insides couldn’t even sprout another baby, and all that flushing with alum and sulphate of zinc is as pointless as prayer.

  Her child would have been eight years old now, had he lived — and indeed he might have lived, had Caroline stayed in Grassington Village. Instead, the newly widowed Caroline chose to take her son to London, because there was no dignified work in the local town of Skipton for a woman who’d not had much schooling, and she couldn’t stand living on the charity of her mother-in-law.

  So, Caroline and her son boarded a train to a new life together, and instead of going to Leeds or Manchester, which she had reason to suspect were bad and dangerous places, she bought tickets to the capital of the civilised world. Pinned inside her provincial little bonnet was eight pounds, a very substantial sum of money, enough for months of food and accommodation. The thought of it ought to have comforted her, but instead she was plagued by headache all the way into London, as if the massive weight of those banknotes was bearing down hard on her neck. She wished she could spend this fortune right away, to be rid of the fear of losing it.

  Within days of arriving in the metropolis she was offered help with her dilemma. A famous dres
s-making firm was so impressed with her manner that it commissioned her to make waistcoats and trousers in her own home. The firm would provide her with all the necessary materials, but required the sum of five pounds as a security. When Caroline ventured the opinion that five pounds seemed a great deal to ask, the man who was engaging her agreed, and assured her that the sum was not of his choosing. No doubt the manager of the firm, his own superior, had become disillusioned by the dishonest behaviour of the folk he’d taken on in more lenient times: yards and yards of the best quality cloth stolen, hawked in street markets, only to end up in tatters on the bodies of street urchins. A chastening picture for any businessman of a generous and trusting nature, did not Caroline agree?

  Caroline did agree, then; she was a respectable woman, her boy was no urchin, and she considered herself a citizen of that same world her employer was trying to keep safe. So, she handed him the five pounds and began her career as a manufacturess of waistcoats and trousers.

  The work proved to be tolerably easy and (it seemed to her) well-paid; in some weeks she earned six shillings or more, although from this must be deducted the cost of cotton, coals for pressing, and candles. She never skimped on candles, determined not to become one of those half-blind seamstresses squinting over their work by a window at dusk; she pitied the shirt-makers eulogised in ‘The Song of the Shirt’ in the same way that a respectable shop-keeper might pity a ragged costermonger. Though keenly aware of how much she’d come down in the world, she was not dissatisfied: there was enough to eat for her and her boy, their lodgings in Chitty Street were clean and neat, and Caroline, being husbandless, was free to spend her money wisely.

  Then winter came and of course the child fell ill. Nursing him lost Caroline valuable time, particularly in the daylight hours, and when at last he rallied she had no choice but to engage his help.

  ‘You must be my big brave man,’ she told him, her face burning, her eyes averted towards the single candle lighting their shadowy labours. No proposal she would ever make in later years could be more shameful than this one.

  And so mother and son became workmates. Propped up against Caroline’s legs, the child folded and pressed the garments she had sewn. She tried to make a game of it, urging him to imagine a long line of naked, shivering gentlemen waiting for their trousers. But the work fell further and further behind and her drowsy boy fell forwards more and more often, so that in order to prevent him burning himself (or the material) with the pressing iron she had to pin the back of his shirt to her dress.

  This dismal partnership didn’t last very long. With dozens of waistcoats still waiting, the tugs at her skirts became so frequent it was obvious the boy was more than merely tired: he was dying.

  And so Caroline went to retrieve her bond from her employer. She came away with two pounds and three shillings and a sick, impotent fury that lasted for a month.

  The money lasted slightly longer than that and, with her child in marginally better health due to medical attention, Caroline found work in a sweater’s den making hats, jamming squares of cloth onto steaming iron heads. All day she was handing dark, shiny, scalding hats farther along a line of women, as if passing on plates of food in an absurdly steamy kitchen. Her child (forgive this impersonality: Caroline never speaks his name anymore) spent his days locked in their squalid new lodgings with his painted ball and his Bristol toys, stewing in his sickliness and fatherless misery. He was always fractious, whimpering over small things, as if daring her to lose patience.

  Then one night at the end of winter he began coughing and wheezing like a demented terrier pup. It was a night very like the one we are in now: bitter and mucky. Worried that no doctor would agree, at such an hour and in such weather, to accompany her unpaid to where she lived, Caroline conceived a plan. Oh, she’d heard of doctors who were kind and devoted to their calling, and who would march into the slums to combat their ancient foe Disease, but in all her time in London Caroline had not met any such doctor, so she thought she’d better try deception first. She dressed in her best clothes (the bodice was made of felt stolen from the factory) and dragged her boy out into the street with her.

  The plan, such as it was, was to deceive the nearest physician into believing she was new to London, and hadn’t a family doctor yet, and had been all evening at the theatre, and only realised her son was ill when she returned and found the nurse frantic, and had hailed a cab immediately, and was not the sort of person to discuss money.

  ‘Doctor won’t send us away?’ asked the child, scoring a bull’s-eye, as always, on her worst fear.

  ‘Walk faster,’ was all she could reply.

  By the time they found a house with the oval lamp lit outside, the boy was wheezing so hard that Caroline was half insane, her hands trembling with the urge to rip his little throat open and give him some air. Instead she rang the doctor’s bell.

  After a minute or two, a man came to the door in his night-gown, looking not at all like any doctor Caroline had met before, nor smelling like one.

  ‘Sir,’ she addressed him, doing her best to keep both the desperation and the provincial burr out of her voice. ‘My son needs a doctor!’

  For a moment he stared her up and down, noting her outmoded monochrome dress, the frost on her cheeks, the mud on her boots. Then he motioned her to come in, smiling and laying his broad hand on her boy’s shivering shoulder as he said:

  ‘Well now, this is a happy coincidence. I need a woman.’

  Five years later, moving sleepily through her bedroom, Caroline stubs her toes on the ceramic basin and is provoked to clean up her bedroom. She transfers the stagnant contraceptive bouillon carefully into the chamber pot, watching, as she pours, the germs of another man’s offspring combine with piss. She heaves the full pot onto her window-sill, and pushes the window open. There’s no crack of ice this time, and the air is still. She’d like to toss the liquid into the air, but the Sanitary Inspector has been sniffing around lately, reminding everyone that this is the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. Threats of eviction have been made. Church Lane is infested with Irish Catholics, spiteful gossips the lot of them, and Caroline doesn’t want them accusing her of soliciting cholera on top of everything else.

  So, she tips the chamber-pot slowly forwards and lets the mixture trickle discreetly down the brickwork. For a while the building will look as though God relieved Himself against it, but then the problem will get solved one way or another, before the neighbours wake up — either the sun will dry it or fresh snow will rinse it.

  Caroline is hungry now, a sharp belly-hunger, despite the fact that she doesn’t normally wake until much, much later. She’s noticed that before: if you wake up too early, you’re famished, but if you wake later, you’re all right again, and then later still you’re famished again. Needs and desires must rise and fall during sleep, clamouring for satisfaction at the door of consciousness, then slinking away for a while. A deep thinker, that’s what her husband used to call her. Too much education might have done her more harm than good.

  Caroline’s guts make a noise like a piglet. She laughs, and decides to give Eppie a surprise by paying an early-morning visit to The Mother’s Finest. Put a smile on his ugly face and a pie in her belly.

  In the cold light of day, the clothes she hastily threw on in order to see the wrecked cab don’t pass muster. Rough hands have wrinkled the fabric, dirty shoes have stepped on the hems, there are even speckles of blood from the scabby shins of old Leo the dyer. Caroline strips off and starts afresh with a voluminous blue and grey striped dress and tight black bodice straight out of her wardrobe.

  Getting dressed is much easier for Caroline than it is for most of the women you will meet later in this story. She has made small, cunning alterations to all her clothing. Fastenings have been shifted, in defiance of fashion, to where her hands can reach them, and each layer hides shortcuts in the layer beneath. (See? — her seamstressing skills did come in useful in the end!)

  To her face and hair
Caroline affords a little more attention, scrutinising the particulars in a small hand-mirror tacked upside-down to the wall. She’s in fair repair for twenty-nine. A few pale scars on her forehead and chin. One black tooth that doesn’t hurt a bit and is best left alone. Eyes a little bloodshot, but big and sympathetic, like those of a dog that’s had a good master. Decent lips. Eyebrows as good as anyone’s. And, of course, her splendid nest of hair. With a wire brush she untangles the fringe and fluffs it out over her forehead, squaring it just above the eyes with the back of her hand. Too impatient and hungry to comb the rest, she winds it up into a pile on top of her head and pins it fast, then covers it up with an indigo hat. Her face she powders and pinks, not to conceal that she’s old, ugly or corrupt in flesh, for she isn’t any of these yet, but rather to brighten the pallor of her sunless existence — this for her own sake rather than for her customers.

  Arranging her shawl now, smoothing down the front of her dress, she resembles a respectably well-to-do woman in a way she never could have managed when she slaved in the steam of the hat factory, suffering for her virtue. Not that an authentic lady could so much as fasten a garter in less than five minutes, let alone dress completely without a maid’s assistance. Caroline knows very well she’s a cheap imitation, but fancies herself a cheekily good one, especially considering how little effort she puts into it.

  She slips out of her room, like a pretty moth emerging from a husk of dried slime. Follow discreetly after her. But you are not going anywhere very exciting yet: be patient a while longer.

  On the landing and the stairs, all of last night’s candles have burnt out.

  No new ones will be lit until the girls start bringing the men home in the afternoon, so there’s not much light to see Caroline downstairs. The landing receives a lick of sunshine from her room, which she’s left open to distribute the smell more evenly around the house, but the stairs, corkscrewed as they are inside a windowless stairwell, are suffocatingly gloomy. Caroline has often thought that this claustrophobic spiral is really no different from a chimney. Maybe one day the bottom-most steps will catch fire while she’s on her way down and the stairwell will suck up the flames just like a chimney, the rest of the house remaining undisturbed while she and the spiral of dark stairs shoot out of the roof in a gush of smoke and cinders! Good riddance, some might say.