The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She stares again in the mirror, but this time she lets her gaze travel down, to her small breasts with their hard nipples. She chews her lip. Deformed. And yet: she wonders if there are traces of beauty in her.

  She used to hate that collarbone twist, the way the bone had healed at an outwards angle after it broke when she was born. It only affected her gait a little, but she would catch the children on her street exaggerating it (‘Here comes the hunchback’), her sister rebuking them with only a hint of pity, risking their vehemence too (‘The twin giantesses’). But in recent years, she has come to accept it as a part of herself that she would not change even if she could. It certainly does not deter the shouts of the barrow-boys. Occasionally, they try to grab her waist as she passes. ‘Fancy a brush?’ or ‘I’ve got a hunch you’re after a poke with my truncheon.’ She will set her face (‘Got a case of the morbs, miss? Cheer up!’), push past them, ignore their whoops. Rose, unmocked, untouched, undesired, will look down, and Iris will place an arm around her shoulder and remind her sister how much she hates the whistles, in a tone which feels too insistent.

  She supposes that one day she will have to encourage one of the boys who stands on the threshold of the shop, twisting his cap, because marriage is a way out, though to where she does not know. She is twenty-one, after all, and it is not long until her beauty tips like cream. Her parents have written to her with word of a porter who is keen to call on her, but she avoided him when he visited.

  But. Rose. She will never find a match; the best Iris can hope is to marry adequately, and support her sister through it. To leave her sister – she does not know if she could do it. They are twins, bound together, and her sister’s illness seemed both to tighten and unravel that knot. When they were children, and Iris sketched with a nub of coal on any paper she could find – butter wrappings, snippings of newspaper, offcuts of old wallpaper – her sister was fascinated by the way her pencil could echo the shapes in front of her. ‘Draw those scissors!’ she would command, and Iris would oblige. ‘Draw me an elephant!’ but she could never improvise. Now her sister turns from her when she tries to entertain her with a sketch.

  Iris nudges away the thought, and mixes the right rosiness for the underside of her breast where the shadow falls. She runs the paintbrush along the page, watches the watercolour bloom on the sheet. She feels in control, as if her body is her own again, not a vessel for Mrs Salter to use to scrub floors, not merely as a daily reminder to Rose of what she could have been. She feels a tremor of something that could be shame, could be satisfaction, could even be the cold.

  She stares at her side. It is impossible to imagine a man’s rough hand gripping it. She presses her palm there, moves it to her breast and clutches it. She flinches and returns to her painting.

  She has never asked Rose about what she witnessed her doing with Charles, ‘her gentleman’, as they called him. At the beginning, Rose chattered about little else, showing Iris with a blithe pride the gifts he sent: chocolate bonbons and a yellow canary (which flew up the chimney and died). They were fifteen, and he was supposed to rescue her from this grind of a life, pretty her up as his young wife in his modest townhouse in Marylebone. He befriended Iris too, and he told her he’d lend her some money to set up their shop when he and Rose were— He broke off at this hint of marriage. Flora would shimmer out of their imaginings and become real, and Iris turned to her sister to check that she didn’t mind this attention, her gentleman including Iris in his and Rose’s dreams.

  He came to visit each Sunday when their parents were on an errand. Rose had always told Iris to stay in the upstairs room, but one afternoon the sisters had had a disagreement and Iris felt suddenly peevish at being shut away, kept apart from her sister’s secrets. She settled outside the door and spied on them through the keyhole. She watched how he sat down, pulled her sister to him, teased up her skirts, and undid the buttons of his trousers. Iris barely had time to draw breath before Rose straddled him, rising and falling with a practised rhythm. Iris was horrified, enthralled, unable to look away, mesmerized by the contortions of his face, his hands which gripped her sister’s milky thighs. She wished for a moment that it was her with her petticoats hitched up, her twin who watched through the keyhole instead. It was all done so horribly easily, so simply, in the wooden chair that her grandfather had made.

  Iris still does not know how Charles found out that Rose had contracted smallpox. The day after the boils pussed all over Rose’s face and body, Iris admitted him into the hallway and took a letter from him. ‘She’ll be so pleased to hear from you. It’s just a rheum, and she’ll be better in no time,’ she lied, but he said little and left abruptly. The letter was not a billet-doux, but ended everything, and with it her sister’s boisterous laughter, her whispered confidences. When Rose screamed at Iris to be gone from the room, Iris took hold of the chair and drove it into the wall.

  A sudden sound. Heavy footsteps.

  Iris is so lost in the memory that she jumps, knocking the murky paint water over the desk.

  She lunges for her painting, pulls it free before the liquid pools on to it. The footsteps have receded.

  ‘Oh, heavens,’ she mutters, holding her hand over her chest, and she could laugh with relief. How foolish of her! But the noise did sound so close, and so loud that she was sure it was Mrs Salter on the stairs. It was nothing more than the confectionery apprentices back from a late night at a penny gaff.

  It is only when she starts to mop the water that she notices the doll’s head. She curses. It must have been splashed by the jar as it fell. A grey watermark bruises its face.

  ‘Oh, lawks,’ she mutters, picking up the head and wiping it against her nightgown. It took her hours to paint. She scrubs at the china harder and harder, spitting on each cheek, but it is no good. The porcelain is stained beyond repair.

  She grits her teeth, releases a bestial growl. To think, it was just somebody passing outside. And now – she looks through the high barred window and decides it must be midnight at the earliest – she will have to work through the night to paint another face.

  Iris pulls on her nightgown, suddenly aware of the cold of the small room. She will not look at her picture. Obscene.

  She is struck by a familiar feeling that there is something wrong deep within herself, like a tumour which cannot be lanced. She should destroy her painting, catch the paper with the edge of the candle.

  But she stands, tucks it under the basket and picks out another blank china head.

  The Great Exhibition

  It is Saturday morning and the bells are tolling. For the past fortnight, Silas has been so immersed in the construction of the puppies’ pale skeleton, that he has lived on nothing but stale cake and weak beer. He craves a buttered brandy at the Dolphin. He peers at the clock; it won’t be open for several hours.

  ‘Oh, hang it,’ he says, and resolves to fill the time by visiting the building site of the Great Exhibition. He is uncertain how he feels about it: how can his small shop ever compare to one of the largest museums ever built? Such a showy edifice seems designed merely to diminish his achievements, and yet he finds himself watching its assembly almost weekly, longing for it to be complete.

  His alleyway is usually deserted, but a couple of men are sprawled in the gutter-muck, one smeared with his own vomit, his breeches damp with piss. Silas stares at them for a moment. The shape of the head and shoulder looks so like Gideon – but he knows he is mistaken. He holds his handkerchief to his nose, and brushes the wall of the passage as he steps past them.

  Silas met Gideon when he first arrived in London in 1835, when Silas was living in a cramped shared lodging in Holborn, his room stacked with stuffed creatures and skulls. He had moved to the city in the hope of expanding his reputation beyond the drawing rooms of Stoke; besides, there was little point in waiting around after Flick disappeared. He had heard talk of a coterie of surgeons, of medical men fascinated by dissection and preservation.

  It was not difficul
t to find University College London, and each afternoon Silas would watch through the bars of the railings as surgeons of great renown criss-crossed the pristine green square, the heavy doors slamming shut behind them.

  At night, he would loiter in the cloisters around the back, knowing that soon the bodies would be brought in, but from where he did not fully understand. Sure enough, after a little waiting, a movement across the quad, a whinny of a horse and a scrabble with a blackened carriage, the bounty would be carried through on wooden boards, draped in cloth. He would inch forward, crane his neck, long to be part of the lesson which discussed them.

  Gideon approached him one afternoon. He was a medical student, thickset and with a languid air of privilege. He told Silas of the specimens in the dissecting room: the tumorous lungs in jars, the rows of syphilitic skulls, a pickled brain severed from an axe wound, the blossoming nervous systems shot through with wax.

  ‘Of course, we gather these samples to understand life, to see how it can be extended. Your interest in preserving the dead is different, though still quite fascinating—’

  Silas puffed out his chest, and as the days passed, Gideon sought out his company more and more frequently. He coaxed specifics of Silas’s collection out of him. Standing by the railings, Silas relayed details of his work on the sparrows and the rats and the field mice, confided his plans for a museum and the endurance of his name. He wondered at what point they had become friends; it seemed a moment that should have been accompanied by celebration, and yet it had happened without them realizing it.

  ‘I think,’ Gideon said, when Silas brought in a stuffed robin after numerous entreaties, ‘that the wayward lean of its beak, a phenomenon I have never seen in the wild, is its most remarkable aspect.’ His moustache twitched, and he hid his admiration behind his hand. ‘A true scientific rarity. Indeed, I don’t ever recall seeing a robin with such a lopsided gait. A marvel, a marvel.’

  Silas could have laughed. Gideon, a medical student, a gentleman, was impressed with his work. With him. And to have a friend like this, who chose to converse with him most afternoons, however briefly – it was an honour.

  After that, he summoned the courage to ask Gideon for an ‘item for his collection’, and Gideon intimated that he had an absolute treasure in mind for Silas, one which would be the making of him.

  ‘It is a piece which even Frederik Ruysch would turn in his grave to possess,’ Gideon whispered, when at last he handed over a small cloth bag. His upper lip convulsed.

  Silas took it with studied calm and started to unwrap it, imagining the subsequent discussions he would have with Gideon, their heads bowed in a tavern. From the weight of it, a heart maybe, or—

  ‘No,’ Gideon said, stilling his hand. ‘Wait until you are home. It’s too splendid a treasure. If my tutors were to discover I had given it—’

  ‘How much? I can’t afford a great sum.’

  ‘You mustn’t think of it. After all of the –’ Gideon paused – ‘pleasures I have received from your company.’

  ‘I cannot begin to thank you.’

  ‘You could acknowledge me in your famous museum? When it opens.’

  ‘Of course! Of course.’

  Silas nodded and smiled, and despite the tug of hunger to open the bag, he heeded Gideon’s instructions and ran home, swerving carriages in his haste.

  He slammed the door behind him, turned the key and tore the cloth off the parcel.

  A half-gnawed chicken leg lay inside, along with two overcooked carrots.

  Silas bit his lip to prevent himself from crying, only then understanding the mockery that lay behind each remark, each twitch of the moustache.

  Before he knows it, Silas is walking down a footpath in Hyde Park, his thigh cramping with fatigue. He casts back, and realizes that he remembers nothing of the walk, his mind empty after seeing the two drunk men. It is a familiar feeling; for as long as he can remember, he has swallowed occasional memories, like a daguerreotype before it is exposed to mercury fumes. He shakes himself, but no image appears.

  But he should not worry. Here the air is less brackish, and a bird is singing. There is beauty. The skeletal trees are pretty, shedding the last of their summer greenings, and the dried twigs crunch like bones. A man elbows him, apologizes, and Silas moves on, following the crowd to the construction site of the Great Exhibition.

  Silas has often visited to witness its assembly, paying the small fee to enter the confines of the wooden palisade. He cannot understand why the building will be dismantled from Hyde Park after a year. What is the point of a museum if not to preserve its objects for ever? But as he stares up at the frame, at its cranes and pulleys silhouetted like vultures against the sky, he feels a shrinking within himself. It is magnificent. To capture and display so many products of industry, commerce, design, science – over a hundred thousand exhibits, he has read, and all under one huge glass roof – Silas does not know where to let his gaze settle. It is little surprise that Punch has nicknamed it the Crystal Palace.

  All around him, activity bubbles. A foreman is bawling instructions as workmen in toppers haul on heavy ropes, while others whip the raw flanks of carthorses. Steam pants into the sky. The vast ribcage of the transept is winched up slowly, wavering in the breeze.

  If only the organizers would ask him for a piece to add to the arts section. But nobody has approached him. Nobody has replied to his letters. And why not? Why is his collection not taken seriously?

  He tries to brush away the webs of resentment, but his fists are tightly clenched. Low clouds gust across the sky. The black lungs of London fill and ebb. A horse bellows.

  He will redouble his efforts. He will work harder, later, and perhaps one day he will open a museum even grander than this.

  He sees a child dart forward and snatch a red handkerchief from a lady’s purse. He peers closer, recognizing that scruff of pale hair. The familiarity is a balm, a reminder that he is not alone in this roiling mass of industry. Silas smiles, and calls out, ‘Albie!’

  But the boy does not hear him. And then Silas understands: he has been caught. A woman’s hand is on his wrist, the handkerchief a limp flag in his fist, and Silas slips on a piece of turf in his haste to hurry over, readying himself to play Albie’s rescuer, to beg her not to notify the authorities – but then he sees that Albie is laughing.

  Silas looks at the woman more closely. She is as tall as a man and has her red hair tidied into a long plait. She is – Flick? Grown up, womanly. But it cannot be. This woman has a slight stoop on her left side.

  It is as if a bell has been rung in an old house. Silas has felt the tremor of the wire as it runs deeper into the building, through walls and floors. He stands transfixed, watching as the vibrations set a series of smaller bells ringing.

  He could not say what it means.

  Pickpocket

  Albie is hunkered down in a ditch in Hyde Park. As he strains on his haunches, his buttocks two grubby white moons, a group of men pass by. One of them stops, jeers and throws a stick at him.

  ‘Beat it, cur!’ Albie yells, giving his cheeks a brief wipe with an oak leaf and pulling up his breeches. His shit steams in the air. He regards it with the same curiosity he reserves for all of his bodily waste. How do his ears know how to produce that sour-tasting orange gunk, and how does his nose know how to make that blackened gloop that he snorts into his sleeve?

  He picks up the turd with two sticks and hurls it after the pack of retreating men, hiccups with laughter as they scatter, and then scampers off in the direction of the throng.

  It is a fine day to pick up a treat or two, well worth the hassle of scaling the palisade to get inside. The crowds are distracted by the construction of the great palace, the straining ropes, the cheers and jostling. Albie does not know what the building is for, and does not particularly care, but he stares at the metal frame, so huge that it towers over elm trees. The surrounding ground is little more than a mud-tub, scrambled from the turning circles of carriages
laden with iron and scaffolds. He pictures himself returning when the glass is installed and hurling a brick at it, just to see the shock of the wealthy men.

  He ducks now here, now there, a little thread stitching the throng together. He has a false hand tucked into his sleeve, and he uses his real one to loosen silk handkerchiefs from pockets. He leaves the pearl bracelets and the glimmering silver chains. While he would not admit it, he is afraid of being sentenced to hard labour, or of being bundled on to a ship bound for the colonies and leaving his sister behind.

  These people, with their gold brocading and cloistered houses, wouldn’t even let him scrub their privies. And so, he grins as he unburdens them. There is a pawnbroker on Duck Lane who will take the goods for a ha’penny each, no questions asked, and before long he’ll have enough tin for a smart set of teeth. Sea-cow ivory – that’s his dream.

  He plucks a red spotted handkerchief from a woman’s sleeve, and has just tucked it down his trousers when someone grips the plaster hand and shakes it free from his jacket.

  ‘No – I didn’t,’ he begins, but then he sees it is Iris. His relief comes as a throaty giggle, like a cat with a fur ball, and he throws her his most alluring smile.

  ‘Hand it over, Albert,’ she commands.

  ‘Hand over what, miss?’ She frowns, and he sighs. ‘Aw, miss, it’s just a thing, in’t it? And it’s a tough life. If you knew how hard—’ But his line has lost its charm and he knows it. He gives the offending item to Iris, sees her return it (‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I believe you dropped this—’), and avoids her eye. ‘You’re a right old spoiler.’

  ‘Stealing things again, are you?’ a man says, and Albie recognizes Silas, dressed in his neat blue cloak. ‘Thought you wouldn’t need it after the two shillings I gave you.’