Read Online The Apple by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michel Faber
Tags: General Fiction
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last. Their eyes meet across a distance of fifty yards or so. Sugar turns sharply – cutting her left heel on a jagged stone – and flees.
Back in her bedroom at Mrs Castaway’s bawdy-house, Sugar soaks her feet in a washtub. The injury is nothing to speak of. The dirt is floating free already. It was plain, nondescript dirt, street grime, not shit; for this she is grateful. Soon she will dry her feet and rub them with scented oil.
Her heart has stopped thumping now. It beats inside her breast, regular and only a little harder than usual. She is master – or is it mistress? – of herself again. How to account for her lapse? How could she have acted so foolishly, when she prides herself on her cool judgement? A man can insult her in the vilest conceivable manner, and she can continue her business with a calm face and an icy heart. It is a point of honour with her that none of her customers has ever had the faintest idea what she was truly feeling. Yet this morning she has chased after a stranger, helpless with fury. She stood dishevelled and confused in public, her distress evident to any passerby. This must never happen again.
Still soaking her feet in the tub, she reaches over to the stack of reading matter and seizes hold of the topmost thing. It’s an issue of Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion , which she buys avidly despite having no real home, no family and no companion. She buys it because it includes a monthly summary of all the important things that have happened in the world, explained in simplified terms that ignorant young ladies and dim-witted matrons can understand. Sugar, who despises the pompous intrigues of politicians and the vainglorious exploits of businessmen, would be happy to remain perfectly ignorant of everything that goes on outside Soho, but she’s found that a rudimentary grasp of current affairs can be useful in her line of work: she can learn just enough to feign agreement with the views of her clients. And Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion has other things in it as well: pictures of pretty clothes, engravings of exotic animals from all over the Empire, advertisements, testimonials – and a serialised novel. It’s to this that Sugar turns as she soaks her feet.
Chapter 13: UNMASKED!
Oh, the predicament of poor Hornsby as he led the innocent Fred into foul streets the like of which the lad had plainly never seen before. On the one hand, he had a solemn duty, as Fred’s best friend, to pull him back from the precipitous decision to which he, Fred, was, in his lamentable ignorance, so unswervingly committed. On the other hand, Hornsby knew that the grief his friend would, in the minutes that were to follow, experience, would be of such dreadful intensity that this noble young man might never – not if he lived to be a hundred – recover from it .
‘ There must be some mistake,’ said Fred, noting with growing alarm the shabby character of the dwellings they were passing, and the brute depravity on the faces of the inhabitants. ‘My lovely Violet cannot possibly live here .’
Hornsby made no reply, but pulled his friend ever deeper into the cesspool of wickedness .
‘This is the house,’ he said at last, as they came to a halt in front of the shabbiest, meanest house of them all; a house whose walls, were they not blackened with grime, might have blushed in cognizance of the depraved exploits transacted within them .
‘It cannot be,’ weakly remonstrated the ghastly-pale lad .
‘ If, by cutting off my right arm at the shoulder, I could unmake the truth of it, I beg you to believe I would do so, my friend,’ said Hornsby. ‘But this wretched abode, it pains me infinitely to say, is the home of that false creature to whom you are engaged .’
The unhappy lad, profoundly offended by this slur upon the virtue of the person he loved more than any other, turned exceedingly red in the cheeks, and gathered his soft white hands into fists, poised to strike at his friend.
Back in her bedroom at Mrs Castaway’s bawdy-house, Sugar soaks her feet in a washtub. The injury is nothing to speak of. The dirt is floating free already. It was plain, nondescript dirt, street grime, not shit; for this she is grateful. Soon she will dry her feet and rub them with scented oil.
Her heart has stopped thumping now. It beats inside her breast, regular and only a little harder than usual. She is master – or is it mistress? – of herself again. How to account for her lapse? How could she have acted so foolishly, when she prides herself on her cool judgement? A man can insult her in the vilest conceivable manner, and she can continue her business with a calm face and an icy heart. It is a point of honour with her that none of her customers has ever had the faintest idea what she was truly feeling. Yet this morning she has chased after a stranger, helpless with fury. She stood dishevelled and confused in public, her distress evident to any passerby. This must never happen again.
Still soaking her feet in the tub, she reaches over to the stack of reading matter and seizes hold of the topmost thing. It’s an issue of Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion , which she buys avidly despite having no real home, no family and no companion. She buys it because it includes a monthly summary of all the important things that have happened in the world, explained in simplified terms that ignorant young ladies and dim-witted matrons can understand. Sugar, who despises the pompous intrigues of politicians and the vainglorious exploits of businessmen, would be happy to remain perfectly ignorant of everything that goes on outside Soho, but she’s found that a rudimentary grasp of current affairs can be useful in her line of work: she can learn just enough to feign agreement with the views of her clients. And Purefoy’s Home & Family Companion has other things in it as well: pictures of pretty clothes, engravings of exotic animals from all over the Empire, advertisements, testimonials – and a serialised novel. It’s to this that Sugar turns as she soaks her feet.
Chapter 13: UNMASKED!
Oh, the predicament of poor Hornsby as he led the innocent Fred into foul streets the like of which the lad had plainly never seen before. On the one hand, he had a solemn duty, as Fred’s best friend, to pull him back from the precipitous decision to which he, Fred, was, in his lamentable ignorance, so unswervingly committed. On the other hand, Hornsby knew that the grief his friend would, in the minutes that were to follow, experience, would be of such dreadful intensity that this noble young man might never – not if he lived to be a hundred – recover from it .
‘ There must be some mistake,’ said Fred, noting with growing alarm the shabby character of the dwellings they were passing, and the brute depravity on the faces of the inhabitants. ‘My lovely Violet cannot possibly live here .’
Hornsby made no reply, but pulled his friend ever deeper into the cesspool of wickedness .
‘This is the house,’ he said at last, as they came to a halt in front of the shabbiest, meanest house of them all; a house whose walls, were they not blackened with grime, might have blushed in cognizance of the depraved exploits transacted within them .
‘It cannot be,’ weakly remonstrated the ghastly-pale lad .
‘ If, by cutting off my right arm at the shoulder, I could unmake the truth of it, I beg you to believe I would do so, my friend,’ said Hornsby. ‘But this wretched abode, it pains me infinitely to say, is the home of that false creature to whom you are engaged .’
The unhappy lad, profoundly offended by this slur upon the virtue of the person he loved more than any other, turned exceedingly red in the cheeks, and gathered his soft white hands into fists, poised to strike at his friend.
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