A haze of smoke on his side of the glass; a panorama of rain on the other. He imagines the metropolis seen from a great height, all of it bound together not just in a shimmering web of rain but in his own web as well, the web of his destiny. Yes, on this luminous grey day he will gather the Rackham empire into his grasp, while Sugar sleeps. Let her sleep, until the time is ripe for him to tug on a thread and wake her.
Obscure noises emanate from elsewhere in the house, not recognisable as footsteps and voices, scarcely audible above the din of the downpour. Rainy weather makes servants skittish, William has found. In fact, he’s noticed it so often that he’s toyed with the idea of writing an amusing article about it, for Punch, called ‘Servants and the Weather’. The silly creatures dash back and forth aimlessly, standing very still for a few moments and then jerking into motion, disappearing suddenly under the stairs or into a corridor — just like kittens. Amusing … but they’ve kept him waiting so long for his breakfast this morning that he could almost have written the article already.
A slight dizziness, caused no doubt by hunger, prompts him to sit in the nearest armchair. He stares down, through his tobacco fog, at the polished parlour floor, and notes that a tiny trickle of water has entered the room through the French windows, from the sheer force and persistence of the rain. It’s advancing unevenly along the floorboards, inching its way towards him; it has a long way to go yet, trembling, waiting on another gust of wind. With nothing better to do, William sits entranced and watches its progress, laying a mental wager on whether, by the time Letty comes to announce that breakfast is served, this trickle will have reached the tip of his left slipper. If it hasn’t, he’ll… what shall he do? He’ll greet Letty nicely. And if it has … he’ll chastise her. Her fate, therefore, is in her own hands.
But when the servant finally comes, it isn’t Letty, but Clara.
‘If you please, sir,’ she says (managing to convey, in that delightful way she has, that she couldn’t care less if he pleases or not), ‘Mrs Rackham will be joining you at breakfast this morning.’
‘Yes, I … what?’
‘Mrs Rackham, sir … ‘
‘My — wife?’
She looks at him as though he’s an imbecile; what other Mrs Rackham could it be?
‘Yes, sir.’
‘She’s … quite well, then?’
‘I can’t see anything wrong with her, sir.’
William ponders this, while his cigarette, forgotten between his fingers, slinks towards scorching him.
‘Splendid!’ he says. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’
And so it is that William finds himself seated at a table laid for two, waiting for the empty chair opposite him to be filled. He blows on his tender burnt flesh, shakes his hand in the air. He’d like to dunk his fingers into ice-cold wine or water, but there’s only tea, and a small jug of milk which he (and … Agnes?) will need shortly.
The dining-room, built for a family of Biblical proportions, appears cheerlessly spacious. To compensate, some servant or other has over-stoked the fire, so that surplus warmth is getting stowed under the table, trapped by the heavy linen tablecloth. Better they had spent their meagre brainpower on drawing the curtains wider: it’s none too bright in here.
Letty arrives, carrying a platter of toast and muffins. She looks flustered, poor creature. Not at all the way she looked months ago when he told her she’d be earning an extra two pounds a year ‘because Tilly isn’t here anymore’. No frown on her face then! But he knows what the problem is: Agnes, as mistress of the house, was meant to decide exactly which tasks would devolve to which servants, and she’s done no such thing. Instead, the servants seem to have carved up the new responsibilities themselves.
‘Everything all right, Letty?’ he murmurs, as she pours him a cup of tea.
‘Yes, Mr Rackham.’ A lock of her hair has fallen loose, and one white cuff of her sleeve is lower than the other. He decides to let it pass.
‘Do dampen that fire a bit, Letty,’ he sighs, when she has finished arranging the toast in its rack and is about to leave. ‘We’ll all burst into flames in a minute.’
Letty blinks uncomprehendingly. She spends much of her time hurrying through draughty corridors, and her bedroom is in the attic, so warmth is not something with which she’s too familiar. Her gimcrack little hearth is prone to choking up, making her room colder still, and what with the recent increase of her duties, she hasn’t had time to spoon out her flue.
William mops his brow with a napkin while the servant kneels to her task. Why has Agnes chosen this morning, of all mornings, to join him at breakfast? Has her lunacy granted her a glimmer of clairvoyance? A glimpse of him and Sugar in delicto? Lord knows she’s slept peacefully through many adulteries, so is it his after-glow of elation she senses? Yes, that must be it: his elation is charging the house like static before a storm, and Agnes has been stimulated. One minute she was unconscious, her sick-room shrouded and still; the next, her eyes flipped open like a doll’s, animated by the electric change in atmosphere.
Surreptitiously, William lifts the lid of the butter-dish, and scoops out a smidgen of the golden grease to soothe his fingers.
Let’s leave William now, and follow Letty out of the dining-room. She herself is of no consequence, but on her way towards the long subterranean passage to the kitchen, she catches sight of Agnes coming down the stairs –and Agnes is one of the people you came here to meet. It will be so much better if you have a chance to observe her now, before she composes herself for her husband.
Here, then, is Agnes Rackham, gingerly descending a spiral of stairs, breathing shallowly, frowning, biting her lip. As she reluctantly entrusts her weight to each carpeted step, she clutches the banister with one white-knuckled hand, while the other hand is laid on her breastbone, just under the mandarin collar of her morning-gown. It’s Prussian blue velvet, that gown, and so ample in comparison to her dainty body that its hems threaten to ensnare the toes of her soft grey slippers, and send her tumbling.
You wonder if you’ve seen her somewhere before: indeed you have. She is a high-Victorian ideal; perfection itself at the time William married her, ever-so-slightly quaint now that the Seventies are half-way over. The shapes and demeanours now at the height of fashion are not Agnes’s, but she remains an ideal nonetheless; her ubiquity cannot be erased overnight. She graces a thousand paintings, ten thousand old postcards, a hundred thousand tins ofsoap. She is a paragon of porcelain femininity, five foot two with eyes of blue, her blonde hair smooth and fine, her mouth like a tiny pink vulva, pristine.
‘Good morning, Letty,’ she says, pausing at the banister while she speaks the words. With the challenge of facing her husband still ahead, there’s no point tempting Fate, on this hazardous descent, by talking and walking at the same time.
William jumps to attention when his wife arrives.
‘Agnes, dear!’ he says, hastening to pull her chair out from the table.
‘No fuss, please, William,’ she replies.
Thus begins the fight, the old fight, to establish which of them has the superior claim to being normal. There is a standard to which all reasonable humans conform: which of them falls short more noticeably? Which will be found most wanting by the impartial judge hovering invisibly in the space between them? The starting-gun has been fired.
Having seated his wife, William walks stiffly back to his own chair. So deathly quiet do they sit then that they can hear, not far outside the room, anxious female voices hissing. Something about Cook throwing fits, and a disagreement between the hissers (Letty and Clara?) about which of them has more arms.
Agnes calmly butters a muffin, ignoring the to-do on her behalf. She takes a bite, confirms the thing is made of leftover breadcrumbs, replaces it on the plate. A slice of Sally Lunn, still warm from its swaddling of serviette, is more to her liking.
A minute or two later, a perspiring Letty arrives at the Rackhams’ table.
‘If you please …’ she simpe
rs, curtseying as well as she can manage with two large, heavy-laden trays balanced, trembling, one on each arm.
‘Thank you, Letty,’ says Agnes, leaning back, observing the reaction of her husband as the food is unloaded, dish by dish, onto the table: a proper breakfast, the sort that gets served only when the mistress of the house is on hand to inspire it.
Eggs still steaming, rashers of bacon crisp enough to spread butter with, sausages cooked so evenly that there isn’t a line on them, mushrooms brown as loam, roulades, fritters, kidneys grilled to perfection: all this and more is set before the Rackhams.
‘Well, I hope you’ve an appetite today, my dear,’ quips William.
‘Oh yes,’ Agnes assures him.
‘You’re feeling well, then?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’ She decapitates an egg: inside it is saffron-yellow and as soft as anyone could possibly want. ‘You’re looking very well,’ observes William.
‘Thank you.’ She searches the walls for inspiration to go on. And, though there’s no window visible from where she sits, she thinks of the rain which kept her company all night, stroking against her own window upstairs. ‘It must be the weather,’ she muses, ‘that has made me so well. It’s very strange weather, don’t you think?’
‘Mmm,’ agrees William. ‘Very wet, but not nearly so cold. Don’t you find?’
‘True, the frozenness is gone. If there is such a word as frozenness.’ (What a relief! On the damp foundations of the weather, a spindly conversation has been built.)
‘Well, my dear, if there isn’t such a word, you’ve just done the English language a good turn.’
Agnes smiles, but unfortunately William is looking down just then, investigating if his roulade is beef or mutton. So, she prolongs the smile until he looks up and notices it — by which time, although her lips are shaped exactly the same, there’s something indefinably amiss.
‘I take it you heard the … disagreement?’ remarks William, pointing vaguely towards where the hissing occurred.
‘I heard nothing, dear. Only the din of the rain.’
‘I think the servants are lacking guidance in who should be doing what, now that Tilly is gone.’ ‘Poor girl. I liked her.’
‘They look to you, my dear, for that guidance.’
‘Oh, William,’ she sighs. ‘It’s all so complicated and tiresome. They know perfectly well what needs doing; can’t they sort it out amongst themselves?’ Then she smiles again, happy to have retrieved a useful memory from their shared past. ‘Isn’t that what you always used to talk about: Socialism?’
William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one’s servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it’s not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham’s household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.
A more immediate problem: the conversation is dying. William racks his brains for something to interest his wife, but finds only Sugar there, Sugar in every nook and corner. Surely, in the three or four weeks since he last breakfasted with Agnes, he’s met someone they both know!
‘I … I ran into Bodley and Ashwell, on …Tuesday, I b’lieve it was.’
Agnes inclines her head to one side, doing her best to pay attention and be interested. She detests Bodley and Ashwell, but here’s a valuable opportunity to get in practice for the coming London Season, during which she will be required to do a great deal of talking to, and feigning interest in, people she detests.
‘Well now,’ she says. ‘What are they up to?’
‘They’ve written a book,’ says William. ‘It’s about prayer, the efficacy of prayer. I imagine it will cause quite a stir.’
‘They’ll enjoy that, I’m sure.’ Agnes selects some mushrooms for a slice of toast, lays them on in careful formation. Small morsels of time are consumed, with an indigestible eternity remaining.
‘Henry didn’t come to visit us last Sunday,’ she remarks, ‘nor the week before.’ She waits a moment for her husband to take up the thread, then adds, ‘I do like him, don’t you?’
William blinks, discomfited. What is she getting at, discussing his brother as though he were an amusing fellow they met at a party? Or is she implying she cares more for Henry than he does?
‘Our door is always open to him, my dear,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he finds us insufficiently devout.’
Agnes sighs. ‘I’m being as devout as I possibly can,’ she says, ‘in the circumstances.’
William thinks better of pursuing this subject; it can only lead to trouble. Instead, he eats his sausage while it’s still warm. Inside his mind, a naked woman with flame-red hair is lying face-down on a bed, semen glistening white on her crimson-lipped vulva. It occurs to him that he has not yet seen her breasts. Staring deeper into his thoughts, he wills her to turn, to rotate at the waist, but nothing happens — until Agnes breaks the silence.
‘I wonder if…’ She puts one nervous hand to her forehead, then, catching herself, slides it over to her cheek. ‘If this weather were to go for ever … Raining, I mean … Rain would become normal, and dry skies something rather queer?’
Her husband stares at her, demonstrating his willingness to wait as long as it may take for her to resume making sense.
‘I mean,’ she continues, inhaling deeply, ‘What I imagine is …The whole world might so … fit itself around constant rain, that when a dry day finally came, hu-husbands and wives … sitting at breakfast just like this … might find it awf-awfully strange.’
William frowns, stops chewing sausage for a second, then lets it pass. He cuts himself another mouthful; in the luminous dimness of the rain-shrouded dining-room, a silver knife scrapes against porcelain.
‘Mmm,’ he says. The hum is all-purpose, incorporating agreement, bemusement, a warning, a mouthful of sausage — whatever Agnes cares to glean from it.
‘Do go on, dear,’ she urges him weakly.
Again William racks his brains for news of mutual acquaintances.
‘Doctor Curlew …’ he begins, but this is not the best of subjects to share with Agnes, so he changes it as smoothly as he can. ‘Doctor Curlew was telling me about his daughter, Emmeline. She … she doesn’t ever wish to remarry, he says.’
‘Oh? What does she wish to do?’
‘She spends almost all her time with the Women’s Rescue Society.’ ‘Working, then?’ Disapproval acts like a tonic on Agnes’s voice, giving it much-needed flavour.
‘Well, yes, I suppose it can hardly be called anything else … ‘
‘Of course not.’
‘… for although it’s a Charity, and she’s a volunteer, she’s expected to do … well, whatever she’s asked to. The way Curlew describes it, I understand she spends entire days at the Refuge or even on the streets themselves, and that when she visits him afterwards, her clothes fairly stink.’
‘That’s hardly surprising — ugh!’
‘They claim an amazing rate ofsuccess, though, to be fair — at least so the doctor tells me.’
Agnes peers longingly over his shoulder, as if hoping a giant-sized parent might come rushing in to restore decorum.
‘Really, William–’ she squirms. ‘Such a topic. And at the breakfast table.’
‘Hm, yes …’ Her husband nods apologetically. ‘It is rather … hm.’ And he takes a sip of his tea. ‘And yet … And yet it is an evil that we must face, don’t you think? As a nation, without quailing.’
‘What?’ Agnes is forlornly hoping the topic will disappear if she loses the thread of it irretrievably enough. ‘What evil?’
‘Prostitution.’ He enunciates the word clearly, gazing directly into her eyes, knowing, God damn it, that he is being cruel. In the back of his mind, a kinder William Rackham watches impotently as his wife is penetrated by that single elongated word, its four slick syllables barbed midway with t’s. Agnes’s cameo face goes white as she gulps for air.
‘You know,’ she pipes, ‘when I loo
ked out of my window this morning, the rose bushes — their branches — were jogging up and down so — like an umbrella opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and …’ She shuts her lips tight, as if swallowing back the risk of infinite repetition. ‘I thought — I mean, when I say I thought, I don’t mean I actually believed–but they seemed as if they were sinking into the ground. Flapping like big green insects being sucked down into a quicksand of grass.’ Finished, she sits primly in her chair and folds her hands in her lap, like a child who has just recited a verse to the best of her ability.
‘Are you quite well, my dear?’
‘Quite well, thank you, William.’
A pause, then William perseveres.
‘The question is, Is reform the answer? Or even possible? Oh, the Rescue Society may claim some of these women now live respectably, but who knows for certain? Temptation is a powerful thing. If a reformed wanton knows very well she can earn as much in an afternoon as a seamstress earns in a month, how steadfast will she be in honest work? Can you imagine, Agnes, sewing a great mound of cotton shifts for a pittance, when if you will but remove your own shift for a few minutes …’
‘William, please!”
A trickle of remorse stings his conscience. Agnes’s fingers are gripping the tablecloth, wrinkling the linen.
‘I’m sorry, dear. Forgive me. I’m forgetting you haven’t been well.’
Agnes accepts his apology with a quirk of the lips that could be a smile –or a flinch.
‘Do let’s talk about something else,’ she says, almost in a whisper. ‘Let me pour you some more tea.’
Before he can protest that a servant should be summoned to perform this task, she has grasped the teapot’s handle in her fist, her wrist shaking with the eflort of lifting it. He rears up in his seat to help her, but she’s already standing, her petite frame poised to support the massive china pot.
‘Today is a special day,’ she says, leaning over William’s tea-cup. ‘I intend,’ (slowly pouring) ‘to put my heads together — Cook and I — our heads together, to bake you your favourite chocolate and cherry cake, that you haven’t had in so long.’