The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Page B

says Caroline. ‘They’re … you know … of kings and people like that.’
    Sugar performs a chuckle of catty mischief from her encyclopaedic repertoire of laughs. ‘Kitty Bell had her portrait done, don’t you remember, by that old goat from the Royal Academy who fell for her? It was even hung at an exhibition; Kitty and I went to see it. “Flower Seller”, they called it.’
    ‘Ooo, you’re right too – the slut.’
    Sugar pouts. ‘Jealous. Just think, Caddie, if you had a painter begging you to let him do your portrait. You sit still, he works, and then at the end of it, he gives you a painting in oils, like … like a reflection of how you’d see yourself in a looking-glass on the one day of your life when you were prettiest.’
    Caroline licks the inside of the paper scoop, thoughtful, half-seduced by the mental picture Sugar has painted for her, half-suspecting she’s being gulled. But, teasing aside, Sugar sincerely believes Caroline would make a fine subject for a painting: the small, pretty face and compact body of the older woman are so much more classically picturesque than her own bony physique. She imagines Caddie’s shoulders swelling up out of an evening gown, smooth and flawless and peachy, and compares this rose-tinted vision with her own pallid torso, whose collar-bones jut out from her freckled chest like the handles of a grid-iron. To be sure, the fashions of the Seventies are growing ever more sylph-like, but what’s in fashion and what a woman believes in her heart to be womanly may not be the same thing. Any print-shop is stocked to the rafters with ‘Carolines’, and her face is everywhere, from soap-wrappers to the stone carvings on public buildings – isn’t that proof that Caroline is close to the ideal? Sugar thinks so. Oh, she’s read about the Pre-Raphaelites in journals, but that’s as far as it goes; she wouldn’t know Burne-Jones or Rossetti if they fell on top of her. (Nor is such a collision likely, given the statistical improbability: two painters, two hundred thousand prostitutes.)
    There’s a fleck of cream on Caroline’s chin when her face emerges from the paper scoop. Having savoured the fantasy of being an artist’s muse and scorning mere money for the greater glory of her very own painted portrait, she’s decided not to swallow it.
    ‘No fanks,’ she says in a nobody’s-fool voice. ‘If there’s one fing I’ve learnt, it’s that if you join in games you don’t understand, you finish up fleeced, wivout even knowin’ ’ow you got that way.’
    Sugar tosses her crumpled paper scoop to the ground and shakes her skirts free of cake-crumbs and birdseed. ‘Shall we go?’ she suggests and, reaching over to Caroline’s face, she gently wipes the fleck of cream off her chin. The older woman recoils slightly, startled at this unexpected physical intimacy outside working hours.
    It’s half past eight. The undertakers’ ball is over and are once again sparsely peopled. First the garret-shop slaves, casual labourers and factory workers, now the clerks: the city swallows armies of toilers and is still not satisfied. All day there will be fresh deliveries from all over England, from all over the world. And tonight, the Thames will swallow what wasn’t wanted.
    Caroline yawns, exposing the one blackened tooth among the white ones, and Sugar yawns in response, covering her mouth demurely with her gloved hand.
    ‘Lord, I could drop into bed now and snore me ’ead off,’ declares the older woman.
    ‘Me too,’ says Sugar.
    ‘I got woken early. A cab got smashed up, in Church Lane, as close to my window as …’ (she points to King George) ‘as that there statue.’
    ‘Was anyone hurt?’
    ‘I fink a woman died. The police carried a body away, wiv skirts on.’
    Sugar considers tickling Caddie with a description of her faulty grammar made flesh: a procession of earnest moustachioed policemen, pretty skirts frou-frouing under their sombre overcoats.