The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  They walk through the muffled streets, their footsteps creaking in the snow. He squares his fingers, tells her how she should look at the world as an artist would. ‘See those icicles hanging off that house? You could think how you would compose them, what they could indicate. Peril, perhaps, and you could also use them as a mirror, to reflect back something outside the scope of the painting. See the flicker of that girl’s dress in them –’ he points to a child shaking small vials of white powder – ‘look at the angle of her arm, how it forms a triangle, how that could lead the eye into something more important in the painting.’

  ‘Rat poison a penny,’ the child calls out. ‘Secret recipe – a penny, a penny.’

  ‘You could send your dear Mrs Salter a gift,’ Louis suggests. ‘To add to her medicine collection.’

  ‘You are wicked.’

  ‘Ah, now, this is more like it,’ and he stops a little boy with an armful of hothouse flowers when they are outside Regent’s Park. ‘I’ll take one of those blue primroses.’

  ‘A shilling, sir.’

  Iris is about to tug his arm – a shilling for a single flower! But he pushes the coin into the boy’s fist. She remembers saving tuppence a week for her paints, and there is something about his extravagance which unsettles her just as much as it thrills her.

  ‘It isn’t quite an iris, but it will do,’ he says. ‘May I?’

  She nods, and he tucks it into her hair, his finger brushing her ear. This is all too much – it is too fast, too enchanting, and she wants everything to slow down. She does not have time to drink it all in, to adjust, to reflect on what is right or wrong in what she is doing. It feels so easy that it must be a trick. Just a week ago she was at the doll shop. We believe you have been hideously misled, tricked into a course which you cannot wish to take.

  Her throat feels oily, dense, as if she has just eaten a spoonful of dripping. She and Rose used to eat it for lunch each day, and she remembers the white viscosity of it, the cooled fat that they would scoop out and spread on their bread. It would stick to the roof of her mouth in a thick film, and all through the day she could taste it.

  ‘You’re dreadfully quiet,’ he says, but she just tells him that she is tired.

  As they walk through Regent’s Park, Louis talks with an openness that surprises her. He tells her about his French mother, recently deceased (‘She was a widow for all of my life, and comfortable too – she felt no need to remarry after Father died, and why should she? I felt no want of a stepfather’), and he tries to coax details of her own life out of her. But she is as closed as an oyster. It isn’t that she wants to be secretive, but how can her history begin to compare to his? It seems as if her life was charcoal before, and now it takes on the vividness of oil paint. How can she tell him that she has seen little but the inside of a shop, done nothing except rise at five each morning and pass through each of her duties as if sleepwalking? She is sure that he has never smelled the vinegar of washing or turned the wheel of a mangle. And through all this, she considered herself fortunate.

  ‘What is your mother like?’

  ‘Let’s not talk of her,’ Iris says, because it feels as if a vice has closed around her throat. She opens her mouth, and a snowflake fizzes on her tongue. ‘See if you can catch that one,’ she says, seeing a flake as large as a dandelion puff.

  He runs under it, snaps at it like a terrier. ‘What do I win?’

  ‘Eternal glory.’

  ‘Eternal, eh,’ he says. ‘I had no idea it was so simple.’

  They stroll to the edge of the frozen lake, and stand next to the huts of the icemen. She watches the skaters, and they race as fast as her thoughts.

  Pond Skater

  Albie spins a long pirouette, the hem of his coat fanning into the ice. He comes here most mornings after dropping the sewn outfits at Mrs Salter’s, but today the pond is busy, wealthy children in billowing silks skating alongside the bakers’ and butchers’ apprentices. He looks around him, at the small shacks of the icemen, at the low boil of the winter sun, and at the browned slush which sits on the surface like consumptive phlegm. The ice snickers. Albie links in with the long line of boys ‘doing the train’, and they whizz around the lake together, blowing their choo-choos into the air.

  When his feet are wet and start to bite with the cold, Albie teeters to the edge and unties his borrowed skates. He thinks of buying his sister some gin-laced furmity.

  ‘Albie!’ somebody says, and Albie turns and grins. ‘I thought you might be here. I’ve been waving like a madwoman.’

  Iris holds out her arms and he bounds into them.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says at once. ‘How was Rose this morning?’

  ‘She don’t like me much. Always holding her nose around me, and saying I smell.’ He sniffs.

  ‘Could you – could you tell her I miss her?’

  Albie shrugs, then points at the rosette on her chest. ‘You’re wearing that thing I gave you.’

  He thinks for a moment of telling her about Silas and the odd way he enquired after her. Albie saw him once with a woman pinned to the wall by her throat, but he knew nothing of how it came about, if she’d tried to swindle him. Would a warning to Iris be strange, extreme? Surely she’d just laugh if he said, ‘There’s a man who asked about you’?

  But before he has made up his mind, Iris severs his thoughts. ‘Albie, you must meet Mr Frost.’

  ‘How do you do,’ the man says, and then peers closer when Albie smiles at him. ‘Goodness, whatever happened to your teeth?’

  Albie places his fist over his mouth. ‘Big ones never growed, sir. I want ’em false.’

  ‘Those’ll cost you a pretty penny.’

  ‘Four guineas a set,’ Albie says, and then he notices the man’s gaze sharpening, and Albie feels like he is being peeled. He shrinks back in the way his sister does when a certain bloat-faced spotty man visits her. The potato, Albie calls him, on account of his crusted boils like starchy black eyes.

  ‘Damn it, Queenie, he’s perfect,’ Louis says.

  ‘Perfect for what?’ Iris asks, and Albie has a mind to query the same, as well as who Queenie is, but his tongue is busy exploring the roof of his mouth from where he burnt it on a pie earlier.

  ‘For my shepherd picture, which I’ll start soon,’ the man says. ‘Can’t you see it?’

  ‘I s’pose,’ Albie says. ‘If there was tin in it, there ain’t much in the skill of herding sheep. I’m a quick learner. For Spitalfields Market, sir?’

  The Queen

  The months turn.

  In the remaining half of January, Louis completes his preparatory sketches and pins down the outline of Iris as the Queen, and he begins to shade her copperish hair.

  Iris learns how to stand still (‘I am now a model woman,’ she says to Louis, archly), and how to paint too: how to build up the colours and depth of oils, how to add increasingly fine detail with a sable brush so that no strokes are apparent, how to discern the geometry and perspective in a face or a hand. She washes down the paints with so much linseed oil that her pictures almost have the transparency of watercolour. (‘Close to Rossetti’s style,’ Louis says, and Iris wants to ask if she shows any of his talent, but she leaves the question unspoken.) She paints over all of these, and finds a delight in how temporary they are, how her early mistakes do not matter. Her sketches stack up, one a day, and she allows only Louis to see them, shielding her work from Holman Hunt or Millais. She draws the marble hand more often than anything else, observing the slant of the fingers, the little chip in the heel of the palm.

  At night, she sews dresses for Clarissa’s reformed women, snipping the reams of thick navy cotton into waists and skirts, backs which the girls can button themselves, arms loose enough to permit household work. She imagines these girls starting their lives afresh like her, even if polite society may think that she has done the reverse of these rescued women and chosen degradation.

  Hunt and Louis argue briefly when Hunt says that The Imprisonm
ent of Guigemar’s Queen is too similar to the prison cell in the painting he has recently finished, Claudio and Isabella, and the rescue is an imitation of his Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, but they reconcile when Louis points out that, if anything, he may as well accuse Millais of copying him with his Mariana wistfully awaiting her lover in her chamber, and he buys Hunt a box of his favourite boiled sweets. Hunt laughs at last, and agrees that as their paintings all seem to touch on imprisonment, rescue and the agony of waiting, they may as well embrace it as a PRB motif for 1851.

  Each night, Louis escorts Iris around the corner to her boarding house, and their farewells on the street are restrained, quiet. When she cannot sleep, she traces the pattern of the wallpaper with her fingertip and thinks, I am alive – my life did not truly begin until now. She feels as if her blood is threaded with a new capacity for happiness and for love and for laughter. For the first time, she is afraid of death. She stares at her hand, unable to believe that her spirit will one day leave it, that her spark will depart. Her painted face will outlive her, preserving her as she is now.

  She is so full of joy that it seems as though it can never be extinguished.

  In February, the charwoman’s sneer at her lowered state is as pronounced as ever, and her parents refuse to open their door to her. Iris minds it less, but she feels differently about Rose, who is still not answering her letters. She remembers Rose gazing at her sketch of their father’s snuffbox when they were thirteen, enraptured, saying, ‘You really drew this? You aren’t lying to me?’ and then insisting on taking her to the National Gallery, spreading out her hands and telling her she’d be better than any of them. ‘Once we have our shop, you can be a shop girl and a famous artist. And that will pull in the trade, won’t it?’ Another memory lands on top of this, and grief saws at her: her sister’s anguished expression that evening in the cellar.

  She thinks of Rose whenever she squeezes paint on to porcelain, whenever her pencil touches the paper. But the thoughts brush past her quickly, and then the slow joy of building colours or copying shapes will take over, and she will sit in contented, suspended concentration for hours. She draws the hand from all angles, and then maps the outline she will use when she is ready to paint it properly. She buys a tiny, fine-weave canvas from Brown of High Holborn, so smooth that it looks like a primed mahogany panel. Louis gives her a thin brush and she has to hold it to the light to see the bristles.

  She practises painting on small, stamp-sized areas. Louis allows her to work on the background to The Imprisonment of Guigemar’s Queen. She paints two bricks of the cell, five leaves of ivy which link their tendrils through the barred window, two rubies set into the Queen’s crown. He completes the food placed at her feet on a silver tray: ripe plums gorged on by a wasp (‘To hint that her beauty is wasting while she waits,’ Millais explains), a loaf of bread, a goblet of wine. Louis uses copal resin to heighten the gloss further, to make the Queen’s green, fur-trimmed dress shine like stained glass. ‘If this is imprisonment, I’d delight in it,’ Iris says, plucking a grape from the bunch. But Louis cannot get the Queen’s expression right: it is too wan, too simpering. He decides to leave the face for a month or so.

  And still Louis and Iris talk, about poetry and ambition and Millais and spring and family and Iris begins to wonder if he sees her as a sister. She is surprised by his thoughtfulness: if she mentions a pigment she wants, she finds it on her desk the next morning. If she talks about a delicious suet pudding she smelled when walking to the park, he will return from a PRB meeting with a treacle cake wrapped in paper. He will wave away her thanks, say it is nothing more than he would do for Clarissa, and she feels sure that if he wanted her, he would have tried to seduce her by now. Even if she would have had to turn him down.

  She hears talk of the love between Ford Madox Brown and his model Emma Hill, and their illegitimate baby Catherine; and Millais gossips about the attraction he has observed between Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal, though Rossetti denies it. And Iris makes tentative enquiries of Millais (no longer Mr Millais to her) which are so muted that he does not understand what she is asking – yes, he assures her with a frown, of course Louis has painted other models before. And Iris does not know how to sharpen her questions.

  One afternoon, Louis asks Iris if he can show Millais her sketches. She agrees, and sits in the corner, stroking the sleeping head of Guinevere, straining to hear every word. ‘By Jove, what a secret you’ve kept her,’ Millais says, peering closer. ‘There’s a dignified simplicity here.’

  ‘Now do you see what I meant?’

  And Iris realizes, suddenly, that Louis has talked about her art with Millais. She wishes she knew what he had said, so scant are his compliments about her work. He tells her only how she can improve.

  ‘I thought they were just silly girlish sketches. And all these weeks, I was wondering over the time you wasted, tutoring her.’

  Louis nods. ‘See how she has drawn the fingers here. Of course it isn’t masterly, but there’s such promise, don’t you think?’

  Millais turns to the next sheet. ‘Quite. She’ll be snapping at our heels if we aren’t careful.’

  And it is an effort for Iris to stop herself from picking up Guinevere by the paws and waltzing the room with her.

  In March, Louis and Iris take long walks. She has to skip every few paces to keep up with him. His strides are even longer than hers. He picks a bunch of bluebells, and it is difficult for her to throw away the bouquet when it wilts and dies. She begins to see the world as a canvas: the swift fingers of a fishwife gutting herrings could be stilled on her page. The way her knife, dented a little, glints off the coal fire behind her. A dab of madder mixed with gamboge for it, a hint of ultramarine too to show the silver metal, and her fingernails, white at the quick, five scuffed mirrors – the possibility of movement shown in the strain of her arm, her hair lifted in the breeze. And yet, Iris is afraid to paint something so real, so alive, and so she draws the marble hand again and again and again.

  She and Louis walk through Regent’s Park and Green Park, and to Highgate Cemetery, where they sit side by side and sketch a stone archangel, and it seems to her that each day she moves further from her role as his student and model to become that of a co-painter, a friend. She treasures each of his touches – when he puts his hand over hers to help guide her pencil, when their fingers accidentally brush as they walk through the cemetery gates.

  She wears a looser corset with simpler dresses, leaves her hair unplaited, and she greets any disapproving leer with cold nonchalance. Once, she smokes Louis’s pipe.

  ‘My,’ Louis says when she scowls at a sour glance from a gentleman as they descend the steep hill from Highgate, ‘you have mastered the withering glare. I hope never to receive such a look – it would smite me dead. Not a delicate thing at all.’

  He assists her with her painting of the marble hand, as she traces the composition in graphite and adds the first layer of white and a speck of emerald and ultramarine, drawing out the finer lines of the palm. She works on it late into the night, and whenever she is modelling, she mulls over the adjustments she will make to it that evening, the edges she will draw out, the shadows she will extend. The painting consists only of the hand resting on a wooden surface, the background behind it a smooth reddish pink.

  When it is finished, it is far from perfect, but she is proud of it, and wonders about submitting it to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Louis tells her it is unlikely to be accepted and urges her to wait for another year. ‘Think of the improvement you’ll make in that time! You have so many years ahead of you.’ But she is impatient for success.

  They visit the site of the Great Exhibition and watch the glazing wagons running along the gutters, as hundreds of panes of glass are melted into place.

  And all the way they talk. He tells her about his own travels – Ostend and Paris, and Venice, where the fat gondolier almost sank the boat, where they danced through the night at balls and the
re was the most magnificent Gothic architecture. He tells her about the energy and inspiration he found in the city, how he read The Stones of Venice and how Ruskin values artistic freedom and truth in a way that Louis feels is akin to the principles of the PRB, how he wishes the critic would notice his work.

  He tells her about the Georgian squares of Edinburgh, where Clarissa will be living for the next half-year to nurse a sickly friend, and he leaves for a week to accompany his sister on the journey by boat.

  In his absence, she borrows some of his brushes and paints, and for the first two days she enjoys the seclusion of working alone in her attic bedroom, the time she can dedicate to painting and drawing. She has never encountered such peace, just her and her work. On the third day, she craves company, longs for the hours to pass, to have somebody she can talk to about her painting, who will entertain her with an anecdote. On the fourth day, she writes to her sister, and watches for a letter in return with a fretfulness she has never felt before. There is no response. Her solitude strikes her anew; her absolute reliance on Louis frightens her. He is all she has. She thinks of him constantly, reimagines their conversations, remembers how his hand grazed hers. She must put him from her mind. But the more she tells herself this, the more he occupies her thoughts.

  When he returns, she finds herself curiously awkward around him. She is quiet, as is he. Their acquaintance seems to have lost its ease.

  He sketches her for The Shepherdess, and she has pins and needles each day from having her legs tucked underneath her. He asks her if she is comfortable, and she lies that she is. When he teaches her in the evening, he has the coldness of a professional, and she wonders if something happened or was said in Edinburgh which has forced this distance. He keeps their conversation on art, away from any mention of Clarissa, or home, or feeling.