The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She hovers her hand over the doorbell, and then reads the plaque beneath it.

  ‘The Factory. PRB. (Please Ring Bell.)’

  She smiles at it, a sly drawing of a line separating those who know the initials’ true meaning, and the uninitiated who do not. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She feels a brief pride over her inclusion in that inner circle. She knows because Clarissa told her. Her sister does not. Only those who season their speech with phrases like ‘critics’, ‘Royal Academy’ and ‘exhibition’ would know it. But then, she has no claim to any of that. The paper painting in her hand, tucked into a sleeve of fabric pinched from Mrs Salter, crumples in the wind.

  ‘Are you going to ring the bell, or would you prefer to have your lesson on the street?’

  Iris leaps back, trips over a pot, and stubs her toe. The pain is searing. She looks about her.

  ‘Up here, Miss Whittle,’ he calls. Louis salutes her from the first-floor window.

  ‘I – I was just about to ring the bell—’

  ‘And have been for the last five minutes? I must admit I nearly gave myself away when that cart burst past. It looked like you were grazing on the potted plant.’

  ‘You’ve been watching me?’ She reddens.

  ‘I would say observing. It’s an important skill for an artist. I’ll attend you now.’

  She has her words prepared. I am not your model yet – somebody you can stare at unannounced for five minutes! But when the door opens, Louis smiles at her and her outrage falls away. She breathes in the scent of turpentine and wax and linseed oil. The carpets are threadbare, the chandelier missing most of its shards, but the walls are thick with paintings – some finished, some barely begun. The hallway is painted a startling swampy blue, and peacock feathers are arranged in a neat row between the dado rail and the ceiling. There is gilding everywhere – the skirting boards, the door frames, the banisters and newel posts.

  She wants to take her time, but Louis hurries her along.

  ‘Is your sister here, Mr Frost?’

  ‘Clarissa? Oh, no. She has her fallen women causes. The Marylebone Society. Some mite needed tending to. And please, call me by my Christian name. I can’t stand all this mannerly nonsense.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know, I know. I did ask her to chaperone. But I can promise that you will leave here entirely unsacrificed to Venus.’

  Her chest constricts. She would like to find a way to tell him, delicately, that he should desist from such flirtation – she is here to learn to paint, and for nothing else. Other models may comport themselves like prostitutes, but she is different; she will grip tight the jewel of her respectability. And then she realizes she is already thinking as if she has agreed to model. She has not. She will not. Or may not.

  ‘Are your servants present?’

  ‘Servants?’ Louis wafts his hand. ‘I couldn’t bear to have anyone fussing like that. A weekly charwoman is all a gentleman should need in these modern times.’ He gestures at the narrow staircase. ‘Come, I’ll give you a grand tour of the studio.’

  She has never met anybody like him. It is either very liberating or very intimidating, and she is not sure which. She can see that he is the kind of person used to getting his own way, who makes a virtue of shocking with his views, and it gives her a perverse sense of delight: she won’t humour him by being outraged. She will take pleasure in thwarting him, and feign complete composure at his remarks.

  ‘I note, at least, that you’re no longer at death’s door,’ she says.

  ‘I must assign the credit for my hasty recovery to the nursing skills of Guinevere.’

  ‘She sounds very generous,’ Iris says, and she finds herself pleased that he is married. It removes any complexity.

  ‘She is. But she ate all of my Christmas pudding so she is far from being a model woman. In fact, you will meet her shortly.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Louis leads her up the stairs and through a door. ‘The studio, ma’am. I tidied especially.’

  ‘Tidied?’ Iris steps on a mussel shell and flinches. It is as if the room has been spun like a globe until the contents of every drawer, every bookshelf, have been hurled up. A stuffed bear cub lies in the corner, blanketed by newspapers. There are a pair of convex mirrors on the wall. The studio is brimful with clutter.

  ‘Of course, Mother and I could never agree on a definition for the word, either. Ti-dy. What a dull sound it makes! But there is such mediocrity, when everything is arranged as it should be. Don’t you find that? I’ve never believed in cataloguing things – of putting books here, and cutlery there, and whatnot. It shows such a want of taste and imagination.’

  As he speaks, she tries to take it all in. She looks at his easel, streaked with colour.

  ‘Such a dismal mechanical mind which tidies. A factory mind.’

  A movement in the corner, and she screams. ‘What is – the bear is alive! Good God!’

  Louis starts to laugh. He laughs until he is holding on to the edge of the door, his mouth open in a silent howl, eyes pinched closed. ‘A – a – a bear—’

  ‘It really isn’t funny,’ Iris begins, trying not to flinch as the creature ambles towards them. She does not want to provoke his mockery further, but she worries it will attack. He looks just the sort of person who would buy a dangerous animal for a jape, and then find himself killed by it. She moves back. ‘Have you had its teeth and claws pulled?’

  It is enough for Louis to straighten, wiping away the tears from his eyes. ‘No! How could I? That would be cruel. This is Guinevere, a wombat, and she is in mourning.’

  ‘Oh. Ah – I see,’ Iris says. ‘And she is not your –’ She almost says wife, but stops herself. She tests the unfamiliar word. ‘A wombat. In mourning.’ Iris notes the small black handkerchief fastened around the beast’s neck, and tries to hide her amusement behind her hand.

  ‘I see nothing humorous in it,’ Louis says. ‘She lost Lancelot over Christmas, although admittedly they were not friends. He roamed upstairs and she lived down here. I was quite bereft.’

  ‘Was he very old?’

  ‘If only.’ Louis looks down. ‘Rossetti thought it would be entertaining to have him smoke a cigar, but Lancelot gobbled the whole box, a slab of chocolate beside, and snuffed it the next day. Rossetti and I are no longer on speaking terms.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She extends a half-hearted pat in the direction of the wombat, which fails to make contact with its fur. Guinevere is built with the heft of a brown, hairy cannonball. ‘Is she friendly?’

  In response, Louis bundles the creature into his arms, groans at her weight, and tickles her under the chin.

  While Louis strokes his pet, Iris wanders the studio, trying to commit every detail to memory. His easel sits in the far corner, a huge paint-spattered structure, so unlike the small desk she paints at. She longs to see what he is working on, but does not dare intrude. To have a room like this, a space in which to paint! But if her family could see her now, alone with an unmarried artist, considering becoming his model. Her reflection tracks her, and it makes her feel like she is being watched, or – for a fraction of a second – that Rose is here too.

  She inspects the dressers more closely, their shelves crammed with all sorts of curiosities. She wants to pick them all up, to feel their weight in her hand, to discover all the treasures which lie behind them. Pearly shells, skulls, blown eggs, a bird’s nest, and then the larger things: a knight’s armour and chain mail, a stone gargoyle, and vast plaster torsos and busts. She runs her finger along the fine nose of a Roman senator, and then picks up a marble hand.

  ‘Oh! You’d better put that down,’ Louis says, taking it from her.

  ‘Is it very fragile?’

  ‘Not at all – but it is exceedingly valuable. You see, I borrowed it from the British Museum.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could.’

  Louis fidgets. ‘Well, I didn’t exactly ask them.’

  ‘You stole it? What
if you’d been caught?’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have been. I’d make an excellent professional thief, if I wanted. I had Rossetti create a diversion. Millais would never have consented to it.’ He gestures expansively as he talks. ‘And it isn’t theft if I return it.’

  ‘What a fascinating logician you are,’ she says, picking up a silky peacock feather and staring at the blues and greens and purples in the fronds. The black and gold remind her of Louis’s eyes.

  ‘I can see you disapprove.’

  ‘Me? No . . .’

  ‘You wouldn’t steal a thing.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she says, but she does not meet his eye.

  ‘Prove it.’ He takes a step closer.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, then, that just confirms it. How prim you are!’

  ‘I’m not!’ She folds her arms. Yet she can feel the closeness of him, smell the oil on his clothes. She feels a fluttering: she cannot tell if it is panic or excitement.

  ‘Well, until you’re able to show me otherwise, I’m afraid I’ve formed the view that you’re an unthieving, delicate little thing.’

  ‘Delicate little thing? You scarcely know me,’ she says, trying not to rise to the bait.

  ‘Some ladies may find that a compliment.’

  ‘I am not some ladies,’ she says. He is so close to her that she thinks for a moment that he is about to kiss her. She would turn away if he tried, though her chest patters. But he merely sucks in his lip, and walks to the window.

  ‘Can I see your painting?’ he asks, and he pulls out two chairs at a desk in the corner. ‘Come, sit.’

  ‘It isn’t that good,’ she says, hesitant. She takes the paper out of the sleeve of fabric and flattens it on the desk before them.

  It was the only picture which survived her sister’s outburst – the one which she hid under the bed – and she has cut off the paper just below the chin. She looks at it through fresh eyes, and decides she is pleased with it: she hopes he will be impressed.

  She waits.

  ‘Hmm,’ he says, peering closer. ‘It is certainly primitive.’

  ‘Primitive?’ She snatches it back.

  ‘Oh, hush. It isn’t an insult – though I admit there’s limited grasp of anatomy, proportion, perspective, chiaroscuro or composition—’

  Iris doesn’t know if she wants to scream, cry or slap him. She flares so quickly that she cannot stop herself. ‘I expect I wouldn’t find your work to my liking either.’

  ‘That may be so, and you wouldn’t be the first. I believe Dickens drew attention to my –’ he uses a familiar lilt, as if used to trotting out the review by heart – ‘“odious slime-merchant of a Romeo, with the fragrant Juliet having much in common with the corpse of a workhouse hag”. There. That is my work. If you want praise, then my suggestion is to return to the doll shop.’

  ‘I haven’t left the doll shop, and I have no intention of doing so,’ she says, but her voice falters. ‘And the critic – he said that? I think I’d hit him for that, if I were a man.’

  ‘Well, I did sulk for a few days. But we are doing something new in art, and it takes time. He likes the old stalwarts, the dullards, with no imagination, no spark at all.’

  He picks up her painting once more.

  ‘I did say this is primitive, and I meant it. But I don’t necessarily consider the term an abuse. In fact,’ he says, peering closer at the small portrait, ‘there is some promise here, which I must say I didn’t expect. I expected wishy-washy flowers, not something so natural. It certainly lacks skill and mastery, but you’ve had no tuition – and what matters more is that it is honest.’ His gestures grow in energy. ‘See, how you have painted the shape of your face as it is, not in an idealized oval – admittedly, your nose does have the same contours as a marrow, which undoes the beauty found in the original. But your use of colour – why, it has the look of an illuminated manuscript. It is alive.’

  Iris sits on her hands to stop them from shaking. He motions to her. ‘Come, pull in your chair. You must return to your beloved factory soon, but I promised you a quick lesson.’ He lifts one of the convex looking glasses off the wall and places it in front of her. It reflects the room in its glorious cluttered entirety, like the portrait of a perfectly formed new life. ‘I hate these mirrors sometimes – it makes me feel like I have a distorted double. But when I’m painting, I can see an object in multiple dimensions. It can make it feel magical too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  His voice softens. She glimpses a gentleness to him which she hadn’t noticed before. ‘See under your nose, you’ve made the first mistake of amateur painters. You have the shadow here as a darker pink.’ She blushes to see her reflection. Their eyes meet in the mirror. ‘Look at it. It isn’t a dark flesh colour – there is blue in there too, a little red, some yellow. And your eyes – they are not merely green – look at the depth of colour in them. They are shadowed by your eyelids as well as rich in their own hue.’ She blinks. ‘Do you mind if I improve this?’

  She shakes her head, and he mixes up a pale blue and dabs it under her nose and chin. He intensifies the green of her eyes, corrects the swell of her nose in a few simple strokes.

  ‘How can you do that?’ she asks, and she can scarcely believe it is the same painting. It looks so much more real, so much more like her. It is as if he has performed a magic trick.

  ‘Practice. And that’s what you’ll have time to do if you agree to model for me. When I’m not painting or sketching you, you can sit at this desk and work by yourself. You can borrow my paints and canvases. I’ll give you a lesson at the end of each day.’

  She says nothing.

  ‘And I can teach you how to use oils, and perhaps next year you can enter a canvas into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. You might be rejected, of course.’ He shrugs. ‘I live for painting. If I couldn’t paint, I don’t know what I’d do. You either feel this way about art, or you don’t. And I see something in you akin to our principles – but no matter. The decision is yours entirely.’

  Iris looks around her, determined to delay the moment when she must refuse him. ‘Could you tell me about you – about the PRB?’

  He nods and stands, and walks behind his easel to where the canvas sits. She follows. The weave is so fine it looks like wood. It is painted all white, with small thimbles of rough colour built up in patches on the background – the russet leaves of Virginia creeper, the yellow of the stone. The only part which is finished is a dove, which flies past a sketched window: the beak and feathers are painted in intense detail, its eye catches the light with minute touches of pale blue, of white. It grasps a silvery olive branch in its bill.

  The blank outline of a woman and man are drawn in graphite: she stands as he kneels at her feet and kisses her hand. ‘Millais will pose as Guigemar,’ he explains. ‘It will show the moment when he rescues the Queen from King Mériaduc.’

  It could be Iris’s face which will complete it.

  ‘Our technique is different from that taught at the Academy – we use vivid colours on a wet white ground,’ he says, and he talks and talks, and Iris listens. She listens harder than she has ever done in her life. No man has ever spoken to her this frankly, this intelligently. He speaks as if he believes she will understand him, not as if he were addressing a child or a pet. She wishes that there was some way of saving his words so she could hear them later, to mull over everything that he has to share with her.

  He tells her how their brotherhood wants to represent nature as it really is, how Johnnie Millais, the youngest ever member of the Royal Academy, is now slighted by the institution, but he does not care, because he believes in their painting movement. He tells her about the importance of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and how much rests on where a picture is hung – on the line, which is within the viewer’s eyeline – and how dull they all found their studies at the Academy and the endless drawing of plaster casts and sculptures. He makes her laugh by telling her how Mill
ais was despised by the other students for his talent, and how he was once suspended from the window by a pair of silk stockings tied around his ankles, rescued only because Louis happened to be walking past. He draws out a book of engravings from Pisa’s Campo Santo, and talks about the beauty in them, before art became dishonest and idealized after Raphael. ‘It’s all a pack of lies now. We want to paint Jesus with dirty feet, Joseph with a wart on his chin – that is real – not this wishy-washy dullness with dark backgrounds. We will bring our pieces to life.’

  ‘But if you want to make things lifelike, if you paint with this detailed – this exact – reality, why do you choose these idealistic scenes?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ he says.

  She points at a painting of a knight holding a bouquet to a simpering barefooted maid. ‘Well, a knight and this sort of perfect love – shouldn’t you be painting real scenes to match your style? Real love – poor girls left abandoned by their lovers’ (against her will, she thinks of Rose) ‘or starving children in the street. There’s enough reality in London – enough life and honesty.’

  She sees Louis regarding her differently, his chin raised. ‘Hmm,’ he says, and Iris feels her neck redden. ‘Hunt is trying to do more of that. But I suppose I see it.’ He looks at her. ‘Will you sit for me?’

  She chews her lip, wishes they would form the words she wants of their own accord, that the decision could be taken out of her hands. She imagines Rose and her parents are standing behind her, urging her towards it. Instead, she says, ‘I’m not sure. I would like to, but . . .’

  ‘Are you certain you can’t model and work for Mrs Salter? The Sid – Lizzie, that is, who often models for Rossetti – she continued to work, and her family don’t mind it.’