The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Suddenly Caroline and Sugar seem to have all the space in the world. They lean against the pedestal of one of the stone lions, eating cake with their heads thrown back and licking flecks of cream off their gloves. By the standards of respectability, they might as well be licking at gobs of ejaculate. A decent woman would eat cake only on a plate in a hotel, or at least in a department store – although there’s no telling who, or what, one might risk meeting in such a universally hospitable place.
    But in Trafalgar Square shocking manners are less conspicuous; it is, after all, a popular haunt for foreigners and an even more popular haunt for pigeons, and who can observe perfect propriety in amongst so much filth and feather-flutter? The class of people who worry about such things (Lady Constance Bridgelow is one of them, but you are far from ready to meet her yet) will tell you that in recent years these miserable creatures (by which she would mean the pigeons, but possibly also the foreigners) have only been encouraged by the official sanctioning of a stall selling paper cones of birdseed at a halfpenny each. Sugar and Caroline, having finished their cakes, buy themselves a seed cone at this stall, for the fun of seeing each other flocked all about with birds.
    It was Caroline’s idea; the stream of clerks is thinning now, swallowed up by the embassies, banks and offices; in any case, she’s already bored with them. (Before she fell from virtue, Caroline could be entranced by embroidery or the slow blinking of a baby for hours at a time: these days she can barely keep her attention on an orgasm – admittedly not hers – happening in one of her own orifices.)
    As for Sugar, what amuses her? She’s regarding Caroline with a benign smile, like a mother who can’t quite believe what simple things delight her