Free The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

him, and he can’t yet see his way clear to victory.
    In the end, though, he will triumph; he must triumph, because his happiness is, he believes, essential to a larger scheme of things. Not that he necessarily deserves to be happier than other men, no. Rather, his fate is a sort of … a sort of hinge on which much else depends, and if he should be crushed by misfortune, something greater will collapse along with him, and surely Life wouldn’t risk that.
    William Rackham has come …
    (Are you still paying attention?)
    William Rackham has come into the city because he knows that in Regent Street he can put an end to his humiliation by buying a new hat. Which isn’t to imply he couldn’t buy just as good a hat at Whiteley’s in Bayswater and save himself the journey, but he has an ulterior reason for coming here, or two ulterior reasons. Firstly, he’d rather not be seen in Whiteley’s, which he’s been heard to disparage, in the course of those smart dinner parties to which he always used to be invited, as hopelessly vulgar. (Where he’s heading now is vulgar too, of course, but he’s less likely to meet anyone he knows.) Secondly, he wishes to keep a careful eye on Clara, his wife’s lady’s-maid.
    Why? Oh, it’s all very sordid and complicated. Having recently forced himself to make a few calculations of his household’s expenses, William Rackham has concluded that his servants are stealing from him – and not just the odd candle or rasher of bacon, but on an outrageous scale. No doubt they’re taking advantage of his wife’s illness and his own disinclination to dwell on his financial woes, but they’re damned mistaken if they think he notices nothing. Damned mistaken!
    And so, yesterday afternoon, as soon as his wife finished describing to Clara what she wished bought in London the next morning, William (eavesdropping outside the door) smelled avarice. Watching Clara descend the stairs, looking down on her from the shadowy landing, he fancied he could see plans for embezzlement already simmering in her stocky little body, simmering towards the boil.
    ‘I trust Clara with my life,’ Agnes objected, with typical exaggeration, when he told her privately of his misgivings.
    ‘That may be so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t trust her with my money.’ An uneasy moment followed then, as Agnes’s face was subtly contorted by the temptation to point out that the money wasn’t his but his father’s, and that if he would only comply with his father’s demands, they’d have a lot more of it. She behaved herself, though, and William felt moved to reward her with a compromise. Clara would be trusted with the actual purchase, but William would, by sheer ‘chance’, accompany her into the city.
    And so it is that the master and the lady’s-maid have travelled down from Notting Hill together on the omnibus, a cab being ‘out of the question, of course’ – not (Rackham hoped the servant would understand) because he can ill afford cabs nowadays, but because people might gossip.
    A vain hope. The servant naturally chose to believe she was seeing yet more evidence of her master coming down in the world. (She’d also noticed how worn and outmoded his hat has become; in fact, she was the only person who’d noticed it, for he has been avoiding all his fashionable friends in shame.) Every change in the household routine, no matter how trifling, and every suggestion of economy, no matter how reasonable, Clara interprets as further proof that William Rackham is being squashed under his father’s boot like a slug.
    In her delight at his humiliation, it doesn’t occur to her that if he isn’t rescued from his predicament he might eventually be unable to keep her employed: her insights are of a different kind. She’s detected, for example, a cowardly retreat on the matter of the coachman, whose coming has been foretold for years, but who has never yet materialised. Lately there appears to be an unspoken agreement