‘—has abandoned you, because your lodgings stink like a mouldy crypt.’
‘I’m sure the Sid will oblige instead, or I’ll dig out a rookery girl,’ Louis insists.
Rossetti snorts. ‘Lizzie Siddal? I should think not. Millais is using her. And your painting of a girl now has no girl in it, and no hope of one either. Currently, you have a blank outline and a small painted dove. Try entering that into the Royal Academy.’ Rossetti sits back, steeples his fingers. ‘And you say your situation is not dire.’
Louis frowns. ‘But I have my vision, my idea is there. I can see it on the walls of the Academy. If only—’ He falters. ‘If only, perhaps, with a girl in it.’
‘Your vision is what matters,’ Millais says, patting his arm. ‘These details can be resolved.’
‘And the Cadaver—’ Rossetti continues, turning back to Silas. He flinches.
‘Silas,’ Louis corrects.
‘And Silas,’ Rossetti says with a sidelong look, ‘you’ve promised you’ll make it up to Louis. How? Will you magic back the fidgety wench that your mouldy specimen scared off? It is an outrage.’
‘It is not ideal, Silas,’ Millais adds, and Silas reddens. Even Millais is disappointed in him. ‘You should have seen Louis these past few days.’
‘His melancholia has been pitiful,’ Rossetti says. ‘As a professional, I thought better of you.’
I thought better of you. An outrage. Lopsided gait. He wants to bury his face in his hands. Lopsided gait. The three men seem to leer as one with Gideon’s face, their upper lips twitching with disguised mockery. Silas knows then that he is good for nothing, contemptible, talentless—
And then Louis says, ‘Really, gentlemen, it is not as bad as you make it sound. Silas, please forgive them. They are high-spirited tonight. I’m sure I’ll find a way through it all. At least I managed to paint the dove before it rotted.’ He reaches out and Silas cowers, but Louis only pats his shoulder.
His touch is firm, comforting, and this abrupt kindness is too much after Rossetti’s shouting. Silas cannot look up, cannot even steady his voice as he says, ‘I think I have a solution.’ His hand trembles as he downs his brandy, and he feels giddy. It tastes cloying. Too sweet. His emotions swim. He wants to please this man, to seize this bud of friendship, to make up for the dove – and before he can stop himself, he says, ‘I believe I have the model for you – it is a Queen you want, isn’t it, somebody majestic? She works at Salter’s.’
‘The doll shop?’
‘I understand so, yes.’ He stops. He puts his hand to his face, covers his neck as if to pack the words back down his throat. She is too prized, she is his, and he can scarcely believe what he has done.
‘She will not be right for you,’ he tries to say. ‘I spoke too hastily. She has a defect. Her collarbone, it would not please you.’
‘Well, I shall see for myself tomorrow.’ Louis takes out a leather notebook and pencil, and jots, ‘Salter’s.’
It is too late.
Quarrel
Iris is sitting with a doll’s foot in her hand. She stretches, yawns with a pop, and then glances up. She jumps.
Staring back at her, through the circled mist of the windowpanes, are the faces of four men. They are youthful, handsome, and one of them – the man with curly dark hair – stares particularly intently. She flushes, looks down at herself, and feels a strange compulsion both to cover up her body, though she is fully dressed, and to let them keep watching her. Her insides twist, and she thinks again of the wrongness that lies within her: the urge that led her to paint herself so obscenely, to watch her sister through the keyhole and thrill at it.
Rose’s head is bowed as she unpicks a minuscule lace collar.
Iris looks up again, intending to nudge her sister, but the man with the unruly hair raises a finger to his lips.
Iris starts. The impertinence of it! How dare they stare at her as if she is a strumpet in a shop, an exhibit in a museum! This man looks little more than a barrow-boy. He doesn’t even wear a hat. She sits up and touches her collarbone subconsciously.
‘Look!’ she says to her sister, checking first that Mrs Salter is not in the room. ‘Look at those rude—’
But the men have ducked away, and she finds herself pointing at an empty window.
The sun filters weakly through the panes until darkness comes. The oil lamps and candles are lit, the fire given one last stoke until it is left to die. The girls eat their dinner, Mrs Salter sucks on her laudanum bottle as if it were a teat, and they retreat to their respective rooms.
In bed, Rose tucks her knees into her sister’s. Iris reaches for her hand, and Rose lets her hold it. ‘I’m sorry about running away from you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Do you remember our shop?’ Rose’s palm is hot in hers. ‘The biscuit tins I’d paint. The handkerchiefs you’d embroider.’
‘Mmm.’
‘What did I do wrong?’
Rose doesn’t reply.
After a while, Iris realizes her sister has fallen asleep. She lies still for a while, Rose’s hand limp in her own, and then she pulls herself free, and pads out of the room, through the well-oiled door, down the stairs and into the cellar. She undresses and settles to paint. The looking glass is in front of her, the painting flat on the desk.
With each stroke of the brush, with each arch of shadow, with each patch of light, the tightness in her throat begins to dissipate. She dips a hand on to her lower belly where she felt it flip earlier. Those men – such rudeness! But she remembers too the quiet approval of their gaze. She thinks of her sister asleep upstairs, the skim of her thighs against the rough wool of her gentleman’s trousers, the bruises in her buttocks from his fingers.
Her hand is cold, and she dances it across her skin, trailing it below her belly button.
The door creaks open. Iris jumps and lunges for her nightgown, pressing it against herself.
‘I – I—’ she stammers, so confused that she does not turn around. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears. She is sure it is Mrs Salter, and that her employment will be at an end. She will be forced to sew slop, to degrade herself, to explain her actions to her family. She should have known that she would be discovered, that her moral crime would be found out.
‘What are you? What is—?’ The voice, enraged, but it is not Mrs Salter.
It is Rose.
And Iris cannot help it, though she shrugs off this feeling. She is disappointed.
Her sister is before her, holding up the picture to the candlelight. She peers with her good eye. ‘What are you doing? What – what is this?’ Rose rattles the paper. Her cheeks are dimpled with two red blotches.
‘Give me that.’ Iris snatches the painting out of her sister’s hand. She is no longer sorry, no longer ashamed. ‘It has nothing to do with you.’
‘This – it’s obscene! Without your nightdress – as if you’re doing it just to taunt me. The vanity of it! And nothing to do with me? What if we were both cast out without a reference?’ Rose raises her voice. ‘You know what Mrs Salter would think of it! And what chance would we have, then? What mistress would have us?’
‘I – I didn’t think you would be blamed too.’
‘Sister,’ Rose urges, taking hold of Iris’s elbow, landing her fingers on the pale bruise where Mrs Salter pinched her earlier, ‘you must promise not to do this painting – this picture—’ She pauses, swallows a cry. ‘I know it, and Mama knows it too, that there is something wicked in you.’
Iris feels Rose’s eyes roving over her body. She gathers her nightgown closer to her, covering her breasts, and her sister looks away quickly, but it is enough for Iris to catch that expression which she knows well. Bitterness and jealousy.
‘Promise me you’ll never do this again,’ Rose urges.
Iris stands mute. In one hand, her portrait of herself, of how Rose looked too before her figure was pitted with smallpox. In the other hand, her nightdress. She cannot promise. She wi
ll not promise.
‘Promise me,’ Rose repeats, her voice louder. ‘You must. I insist on it, or I’ll tell Mama.’
Iris says nothing, feels the pulse of her shock. She curls her toes against the wooden floor. Why did she and Rose become like this? They used to go everywhere together, willingly, their palms a puzzle that fitted only each other’s, and now Rose’s presence is suffocating.
‘If you don’t—’
‘Then what?’ Iris demands, and she hears herself as if it is the tantrum of a petulant child. ‘You will tell Mrs Salter and Mama? Well, I hate them! I hate this waste of a life! You just want to trap me here, to make me as miserable as you are. And I won’t promise. You don’t care what I want and you never have since your illness—’
‘Since my illness?’ Rose says, and her voice breaks into a sob. ‘You—’
‘I, what? I did nothing! Your illness wasn’t my fault. I didn’t want you to catch smallpox either, and yet you punish me for it! You lecture me on morality but you –’ She searches for the right word as even in her anger she knows she cannot take it back. ‘But you were the one who erred. You think I don’t know what you did with Charles?’
Iris hears the slap before she feels it. Her cheek reddens in a sharp crackle of pain. ‘How dare you!’ she shouts, without a thought for Mrs Salter hearing. ‘I hate you!’ She hurls her nightdress on to the floor, and forgets that she is naked, that she looks ridiculous.
Rose seems to unravel before her, and her cries are like those of a baby. Rasping, desperate. Her mouth is open, a thread of saliva hanging between her teeth, and her face is pinched with the pain of it.
‘Don’t – go—’ Rose tries to say, but Iris cannot bear it. She will not let the sight of her sister soften her resolve. She clasps the picture to her chest, and storms up the cold steps, back to her bed in the garret. She turns the key in the door, and realizes too late that her gown is downstairs. She will not go back. She cannot bear it.
She lies naked in bed, fizzing with rage.
Iris is woken by the bells of St George’s tolling five. The mattress beside her is empty. Patches of the night come back to her, and she pulls the counterpane over her head. She should not have spoken to her sister like that. She should not have lost her temper. She should have comforted her.
A knocking on the door and Iris unlocks it. Rose must have slept on the floor of the cellar.
Iris does not speak. Her mouth will not form an apology. There is something wicked in you. They dress quietly, coolly, interacting only to fasten each other’s corsets.
‘Please, sister,’ Rose whispers as she pulls the strings tighter.
Iris does not, will not promise, though she knows that her painting is at an end. Rose will never give her peace, will threaten and coax and goad – a small tear squeezes out of the corner of Iris’s eye. She speaks at last. ‘I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it.’
Rose’s voice is ice-water. ‘It’s for your painting you must apologize.’
‘I’m sorry for how it made you feel.’
‘That is hardly the same thing,’ Rose says, and Iris does not reply.
When Rose turns away to use the chamber pot, Iris slips the picture from under the covers and hurries down to the cellar to tidy up before Mrs Salter wakes.
But the storeroom is immaculate. The cases of doll parts are back on the dresser, the bureau wiped clean. A thought occurs to her, and she scrambles under the basket.
Her sister stands by the door, skin pitted, her left eye milky and vacant.
‘Where are my brushes? Where are the other – the other pictures I made?’ Iris demands. ‘What’ve you done with them?’
Rose pulls a strand of hair, tightens it around her fingertip like a noose.
‘Those paintings took me months! Where are they? If you have burnt them – and where are my paints?’
‘Why does it matter? They are just things,’ Rose says, her voice quavering. ‘And you must understand I – I want the best for you. If we were to be thrown out, what would become of us? What—’
‘Liar! You want me to be unhappy because you are,’ Iris snaps. ‘Those paints were mine. I bought them. I saved for them. It took me months.’
‘You should have given the money to our parents. It wasn’t yours to spend.’
‘Bitch,’ Iris mutters, a word that she has never spoken aloud before. It lessens the sting of the wound. ‘Bitch.’
They sit in mutinous silence for the rest of the day, Iris’s body tilted away from her sister’s. She confuses her blue and green paints, misses the lines of the lips.
At last, towards late afternoon, Mrs Salter tells her to hand-deliver two dolls to a family on Berkeley Square. ‘I don’t trust that fanged urchin with such an important commission.’
The relief of escaping the shop is palpable, and Iris leaps up, pressing the dolls into the basket like a pair of herrings. ‘Do not dally,’ Mrs Salter begins, but Iris is already out of the door, the bell clanging behind her.
It is almost four o’clock, the street filled with shoppers and vendors. Everyone is buying, trading, bartering: soaps, gewgaws, sweets, a tup or a tug. A terrier seller holds a cage above his head, but his bellowed price and the dog’s yaps are lost over the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels. Iris looks behind her at the green shopfront with its gilded lettering and wishes she had a flaming torch and a bottle of brandy.
‘Excuse me,’ somebody says, touching Iris’s sleeve.
She jumps back, about to raise an arm to slap off a pickpocket, but a woman with a long nose stands in front of her.
‘I apologize for this direct approach.’
Iris wonders if she has mistaken her for someone else.
‘I don’t believe we have made one another’s acquaintance. You work in the doll shop. My name is Clarissa Frost.’ Iris struggles to hear her over the grinding of carriage wheels. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Iris lowers her head to hear her words.
‘Your name?
‘Iris.’
‘Miss Iris—?’
She flushes at her lack of etiquette. ‘Whittle. ‘But why?’
‘I hope you will forgive the impertinence of my approach, Miss Whittle. It must seem quite out of nowhere.’
Iris looks behind the woman and sees the nervous face of one of the men who had watched her through the window yesterday. She scowls. He is still hat-less.
‘You again,’ she says. The pique of the morning has soured her, and she finds herself unable to curb her annoyance.
‘Oh,’ Clarissa says, turning to the man with a frown. ‘I understood you hadn’t been introduced?’
‘Introduced? Oh, no. He should learn not to stare through windows at shop girls.’
He laughs, an unabashed bark.
‘It isn’t funny,’ she says. ‘I am a woman, not an exhibit.’
‘He is my brother,’ the lady says, silencing him with her hand as he looks about to speak.
‘Brother?’ she repeats. He looks like a rag-and-bone man in his too-short trousers and white-flecked shirt. His blue jacket is coming loose around the seams. The idea that he might be related to this elegant woman in a silk dress is almost laughable.
‘I’ll be the first to admit his sartorial style is different from mine,’ Clarissa says, then as Iris jolts from a passer-by’s elbow, she adds, ‘Perhaps we could talk more amenably in here? The din of the horses. It is abhorrent.’
She steers Iris into a smart cake shop, its ceiling vaulted, white tablecloths neatly ironed, silver tea sets gleaming. Iris forgets about the basket in her hand. Her mind runs over the possibilities, but nothing is satisfactory. Why is she worth such extravagance? Her old poke bonnet is hopelessly outmoded compared to Miss Frost’s petit bord, and Iris tries to ignore the sneer of the porter. The woman seems not to notice: she clicks her fingers, orders a plate of sandwiches and tea. ‘Do not scrimp on the cucumber this time, and I know thinned cream when I taste it.’
It is only then that she realizes this woman is a bawd, and the man is a pimp, sent to scour the streets for naive young girls to hoodwink.
‘I must be going,’ she says, moving to leave. ‘I’m not some silly green goose. I understand it all now. Good day.’
‘Wait – please,’ the woman says. ‘My brother is a painter.’
‘A painter?’ Iris repeats.
‘He is Louis Frost.’
He looks up hopefully. She shakes her head.
‘Well, then – perhaps – he is part of a brotherhood, a group of painters. The PRB. That is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? Holman Hunt – John Millais – Gabriel Rossetti?’ Clarissa raises her voice with the same expectation.
‘I don’t – I haven’t heard of them.’
‘Oh, but you will, and soon,’ she says, pressing forward earnestly. She gestures at the chair, and Iris lowers herself into it. ‘Louis trained at the Royal Academy. He had two paintings in their last Summer Exhibition. He is on the brink of great things, I am sure.’ Her voice falters. ‘Albeit, the critics need some convincing.’
Royal Academy, exhibition, critics. Iris repeats these words in her head. They sound delicious, as ripe as cherries. To pluck such words out of the air, frame such sounds! Perhaps they have found some way of seeing her paintings, and they want her to join them in the brotherhood – but already, she knows from the name that this is a group only for men.
‘And me?’ she asks. The man is staring at her. He does not snap his head away when she catches him looking. His eyes are so dark that they are almost black. In the middles, they are gold. If she were asked to paint a doll with those eyes, she would not have the colour.
‘It sounds indelicate, but I assure you that everything would be done with the utmost propriety.’ Clarissa coughs. ‘He is looking for a model.’
‘A model?’ Iris tries to keep her expression fixed. She picks at a thread on her sleeve. Even she knows that modelling is only half a step above prostitution. Her sister would never forgive her. She would read her flaunting of her body, her face, as a personal slight. Her parents would not let her set foot in the house again. She would lose her position at the doll shop.
The Doll Factory Page 5