Free The Apple by Michel Faber Page A

Frampton’s Pills of Health ’, says the label on the bottle. The ingredients aren’t specified, however, except for the routine assurance that they are entirely natural, pure and unadulterated. William Rackham shakes one pill into his wrinkled palm and lifts it close to his nose. His long experience as a perfumer would certainly allow him to identify the smell of opium if any were perceptible. There is none.
    He lays his hand down on the desktop, fingers folded loosely over the pill, delaying the moment. There is always the hope that he will draw a deep breath, exhale slowly, and feel the illness drain out of his body in an unexpected, delirious thrill. He draws the breath, exhales, waits. A gust of wind rattles his study window, and the lamplight dims momentarily, making him feel as though the walls of his room are contracting. He knows every inch of these walls, every calcifying spine of every long-unread book in the bookcases, every glint on the burnished wood of the clock, every yellowish blemish on the clockface, every faded print in every outmoded frame, every hairline crack in the ceiling cornices, every tiny air-bubble trapped behind the wallpaper. It seems like months since he set foot outside this gloomy sanctum.
    It’s high time he paid a visit to his lavender fields. The journey to Surrey would be a tonic in itself; just to get away from London and its air of suffocating competition, its pervading sense of a million human creatures jostling and gasping for their own lungful of life. How sweet it would be to walk in the fresh air, with the sun overhead and damp soil underfoot, and the smell of acres of lovingly-tended lavender in his nose.
    A cold chill runs down his back, as though a prankster is trickling ice-water under his shirt-collar. An intolerable itch attacks the insides of his nostrils and, before he can fetch his handkerchief from his pocket, he sneezes mightily. A hundred specks of opaque, watery snot are sprayed all over his desk. They glimmer on the surface of the dark green leather inlay.
    William Rackham stares at the vista in dismay. If he summons a servant to clean up the mess, she will take one look at his desk, and another at his guilty face, and judge him to be no better than a helpless infant. But surely a man of his standing should not be cleaning up snot? And what should he use to clean it if he did? His handkerchief is white silk, and his desk is stained with ink, mottled with dusting-powder and, to be quite frank, a little mildewy on parts of the leather surface. His sleeve … Almighty God, is this a fair fate for a man who has already suffered a thousand humiliations? Wiping up snot with his sleeve?
    He bends in his creaky chair and, with his free hand, retrieves a couple of crumpled sheets of paper from the wicker waste-basket. If he wields them with care, they will serve as cleaning-rags. Best possible use for them, really, these letters from people who no longer welcome the overtures of William Rackham, Esq.
    Two sheets of crumpled paper. His correspondence has dwindled remarkably in the last decade and a half, dwindled along with his empire. ‘Empire’? Too grand a word, he knows. It never quite applied to Rackham Perfumeries, did it? But what word to use instead? ‘Business’ sounds grubby. ‘Concern’, that’s the safest. His dwindling concern.
    Ah, but who could have blamed him for using the word ‘empire’, in those heady years when the world lay before him? Who could have failed to be swept up in his own pride, when he first mounted the crest of Beehive Hill, and looked down upon the vast rolling fields of lavender, the shimmering lake of Lavandula , his industrious domain? It seemed inconceivable that his manufactures should not make their way into every shop in the country – and for a brief time, in the mid-1870s, it was almost so. Nowadays, Newcastle, Leeds and Glasgow are still strongholds of his merchandise, and, for some reason that he’s never fully