The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘No,’ he says, tapping her drawing. ‘That disobeys the fundamentals of perspective. Draw it as you see it. I know you can do better than this.’

  Iris takes the paper from him, answers his questions in mono-syllables, and he does not try to snap her out of her sulk.

  And before long it is early April, and the deadline for the Summer Exhibition. The Imprisonment of Guigemar’s Queen is wedged in the easel, the paint dry except for the Queen’s face, which Louis is doing his best to perfect.

  ‘Must you, Queenie?’ Louis says, when Iris yawns, and she sees the first glimmer of affection in him since he returned from Edinburgh. ‘Please – there – now, do not move.’

  It has been dark for hours, the carriage waiting outside the door for the finished picture. Iris can hear the snort and whinny of the horse, the pawed clip of its hoof on the cobbles.

  ‘Always at the final hour. Burning the midnight oil,’ Millais says.

  ‘Such a helpful contribution,’ Louis says. ‘I’m sure you sent off your canvases weeks ago, and varnished too. We can’t all work with your speed.’

  ‘They barely accepted me last year, don’t forget.’

  ‘If Mariana is rejected, I’ll torch the place for you.’ Louis frowns. ‘Or eat Guinevere. Pray, do not distract me.’

  Iris feels the rise of another yawn, but she swallows it. The clock strikes eleven. Louis is chewing his lip, his hair fluffed and wild. Every so often he paces, holding up a hand if Millais tries to speak.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a wise idea to work on it now? The paint will be wet and could smudge—’

  Louis hisses at Millais in response.

  As Louis works on, sometimes smiling, sometimes growling at his easel – ‘It’s all wrong! I’m sure they will reject it’ – Iris thinks of her own painting, the small marble hand, the rose madder she used for the background. She knows that she could improve it, that it is unlikely to be accepted, and not just because the thumb is a little out of proportion. The Committee does not view women artists generously. But hasn’t Mary Thornycroft exhibited several times previously, and might Iris at least enter? She will wait until the final moment to decide if she will cram her picture into the carriage next to Louis’s canvas. Guinevere nudges her leg and she resists reaching out a hand to stroke the wombat.

  When Louis slams down his paintbrush at last and says, ‘I am finished,’ she walks over to his easel, and looks at it afresh. ‘What do you think?’ he asks her, tapping his palette knife against his wrist. ‘It isn’t too – garish?’ He has painted the cavity where her lips part in unmixed emerald. ‘Too trite – too – oh, I don’t know. I doubt they’ll accept it.’

  She intended to say something mocking, perhaps, ‘At least it shows promise,’ but she does not speak at all.

  Part of her is pleased for him. But another part of her is jealous.

  The brush-strokes are invisible, so precise that she feels she can smell the dampness of the prison walls, touch the vein on an ivy leaf, feel the wrapped silk of the spider’s prey. The Queen stands, almost as real as she is, reaching towards a dove flying past a barred window, an olive branch in its beak. A silken ribbon is knotted around her waist, lavish food littered about her feet. Her face is in profile but tilted towards the observer, a half-smile on her lips, colour on her cheeks, and Louis has managed to capture her as if she is poised, about to run free. It is a moment of redemption.

  It is intended as an echo of Millais’s Mariana, and Louis has inscribed an identical quotation underneath it, ‘My life is dreary, / He cometh not’, as well as three lines from the Lai de Guigemar in medieval French.

  ‘Well?’ Louis demands, drumming the paintbrush on the palette. ‘Well?’

  ‘It is quite – it is perfect,’ she says.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Millais says. ‘By deuce, if that isn’t hung on the line, nothing will be.’

  ‘Fine,’ Louis says, and then he whisks it off the easel and packs it into a wooden crate. He has written ‘WET PAINT’ and ‘TAKE CARE’ on the lid, and Iris decides then that she will enter the Summer Exhibition. They may reject her, but at least she will try.

  ‘Where’s my painting?’

  ‘Come down to the carriage with me, then I’ll walk you home,’ Louis says.

  ‘But where’s my painting? You said you’d have it framed for me.’

  Louis looks at Millais. They stop in the doorway, the crate held between the men like pallbearers with a coffin.

  ‘Iris—’ he begins.

  ‘What? You don’t think I should enter.’ She bites down on her lip. ‘I know it isn’t as good as yours, that I can improve. But—’

  Louis looks at Millais again.

  ‘Well, I shan’t tell her,’ Millais says.

  ‘I should have mentioned . . .’

  She feels a pain in her throat. ‘You think,’ she says bitterly, ‘that I don’t show promise after all.’

  ‘Oh, Iris,’ Louis says. ‘Don’t be so hard – it isn’t that.’ He does not meet her eye. ‘It’s – Guinevere. It was my fault entirely. I left it on the sideboard in the drawing room. Hunt was round, you understand, and I wanted him to see it. But I didn’t notice she was in the room – I should have checked, I know – and she must have got hold of it. And you know how sharp her claws are and she – well, it’s quite ruined.’

  Rookery

  Silas has forgotten Iris. He tells himself this as he wakes up each morning. It has been two and a half months since the afternoon she failed to come to his shop. He knows that she isn’t dead because the next day he went to Colville Place and waited until she appeared. No missive arrived explaining her absence, and she did not visit at five o’clock the next day, or the day after that.

  And so, he has forgotten her.

  If he were to encounter her on the street, her hand would fly to her face. She would apologize for having missed their engagement, and he would try to remember who she was. ‘Oh,’ he would say at last. ‘You were the girl who was supposed to call on me. I’m afraid I can’t recall your name,’ and he would have the pleasure of rejecting her beseechings to visit his shop another time.

  Or, he would be observing his works in the Great Exhibition, and see a vaguely familiar form next to his Lepidoptera window, neatly silhouetted. She would hurry to him, her shoes clacking on the tiled floor, clasping her butterfly bauble, and he would not care. ‘If only I had come,’ she would say. ‘I was afraid to.’ Or, ‘I forgot your address.’ And he would reply, ‘Oh – Isobel, was it? – you need not worry about that, but I am far too busy now to show you my small museum.’

  He works on his exhibits tirelessly. The puppies are packaged in padded boxes (marked ‘VERRY FRAJILL’) and hand-delivered to the Committee. The Lepidoptera window is almost complete. Albie has caught over sixty butterflies and he brings the creatures trapped in clay bottles, still alive because the boy is so soft he says he can’t bear to kill something that pretty. Silas wonders whether the urchin was always this sentimental; it seems new, and it tires him.

  Silas takes the jars from him, pays Albie a farthing or a ha’penny depending on how many he has gathered, and uncorks the insects in the cellar. He has lost one or two butterflies which fluttered out before he could catch them. Now he is more careful. On one occasion he pulled a single wing off a brimstone so that it crawled in flightless circles, its body like a slender Havana. He watched it for a while before he grew bored and crushed it with the clip of his pince-nez.

  Once he has the wings, Silas arranges them by colour, and they look like autumn leaves spread out on the floor of the cellar: blues and cabbage whites and tortoiseshells. He glues them in symmetrical patterns to the panes of glass, the window divided into nine neat squares. When he has finished a square, he places another frame of glass on top. The work soothes him in a way he did not expect.

  But as the month progresses, and Silas has only filled five of the nine panes, he realizes that he will have to fill the empty spaces with moths. When it is dar
k, he sets a lamp in his shop and opens the door. They flutter in, their movements almost drunken, knocking against the ceiling and the cabinets. Silas traps them in a net, carefully, for it takes only a slight knock for their wings to crumble to dust.

  One afternoon, once Silas has attached the wings of six fritillaries in an orange-speckled arc, he feels in need of a drink. He kneads his shoulders. They ache from being hunched all day.

  ‘The usual buttered brandy?’ Madame at the Dolphin asks when he arrives. She wipes a smear of rouged salve from the rim of a glass.

  ‘Two,’ Silas says, sliding the coins towards her. The tavern is quiet for a Thursday afternoon. It is one of the first hot days of the year and all the sots must be clogging up the parks.

  ‘Got company, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lawks, well, two brandies, sir. Spoil yourself, that’s what I always says – spoil yourself as if you was brought up on candied ginger and turtle soup.’ She laughs, but he has heard her trot out this line before and his smile in return is more of a grimace.

  He takes his two hot drinks and knocks a glass back in one. The liquid sears his belly. He winces, but it feels good. He has been busy – he has been living in a kind of frenzy. His clothes hang off his bones, and at night, he can run his hands over the gutters of his ribs. He has forgotten to eat; he needs a female touch. Perhaps, if he achieves renown at the Great Exhibition, and is commissioned to open a real museum, he will be able to afford a maid. He pictures a young girl fussing about his collar, scooping bone marrow on to his plate, plying him with steaming mounds of beef pudding. She would listen to him, wonder at his ingenuity and his skill, call him ‘the greatest mind of his generation’.

  Silas glances across the table to where Bluebell is pawing the chest of an elderly lawyer, fingering the chain of his fob watch. She winds it around her finger, and then winches the gentleman nearer as if he were a fish on a line. The lawyer’s wrinkled face is flushed from her kisses, his eyes half-closed. The pink ostrich feather in her hat trembles in the heat from the fire.

  The gentleman stands, and Bluebell bellows, ‘Madame, fetch the gentleman a bucket to piss in.’

  When the man has gone, Bluebell leans closer to Silas. He blushes, longs to feel her touch. He thinks if she holds him, he will weep.

  She whispers something.

  ‘Sorry?’ he says.

  ‘I said to shove your filthy tongue back in your mouth. You’re like a bitch in heat. It makes me sick.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. You ain’t called Starey Silas for nothing.’

  ‘St-Starey Silas?’

  ‘Oh, just crawl back to the vile pond you sprung from, would you?’

  He smarts, stares down at the swirl of his drink. His reflection bobs back at him. He feels a redness creep up his neck, and the world swims as he downs his second glass. He slams it on to the table, then stands. ‘You should learn some manners,’ he says. ‘I’ll be a fine gentleman one day, and you’ll wish you hadn’t spoken to me like that.’

  She shrugs, pouting into a brass pocket mirror as she applies another layer of rouge.

  Silas slouches to the bar, trying to keep his footsteps even. The room blurs. He really should eat. ‘That harlot,’ he says, pointing a finger at Bluebell, ‘you’d better teach her some graces.’

  Madame leans forward, anchoring herself on her elbows. ‘Teach her?’ she demands. ‘After what you did to her? It’s little surprise—’

  ‘After what I did? I’ve never spoken to that slattern in my life.’

  ‘As innocent as a lamb new born,’ Madame says, before swivelling to serve another customer.

  Silas’s footsteps hammer the pavement. He does not dodge street hawkers, does not edge out of the way of children or dames or frock-coated gentlemen with their varnished boots. They should respect him, for a change. He walks fast, unstoppable, as straight as a hem.

  He stands at the crossroads of Oxford Circus, watching the horses as they thunder past – some silver-bridled, others gaunt and foaming – and imagines throwing himself into their tracks, the churn of their hooves, the iron scrape of a barouche wheel – annihilation. His body would be little more than a carcass, split open on the road.

  He rocks on his heels, and memories crackle at the corners of his eyes. Starey Silas, lopsided gait, the hiss of Bluebell’s scalp as he pulled back her hair, the nought of Flick’s mouth, and Iris – Iris who did not come. He shuts his eyes, tipping a little further, a little closer to the racket of carriages.

  He starts, pulls himself back. He won’t give them the satisfaction. He will be a success. He will be. And hasn’t he almost achieved all he wanted? Wasn’t this everything he dreamed of? He tries to picture his Lepidoptera window, his puppies’ skeleton next to their stuffed pelt, on display at the Great Exhibition. The finest spectacle of the age, and he is included. The organizers estimate that at least five million people will visit in six months alone. Five million people will cast an eye over his work, admire his skill.

  But all he can see is Iris’s face.

  He tugs at the skin of his cheeks, and then sets off in the direction of St Giles. And when a white-blonde girl takes his hand (he is only a brief walk from Colville Place), he allows himself to go with her.

  ‘Is it far?’ he asks, and she distracts him with her prattling.

  ‘Our ’stablishment’s a fine one –’ they turn into a grimed alley, a cesspit of rat-picked waste, which smells worse than the tanneries of the South Bank – ‘don’t let the street deceive you, sir –’ he sidesteps drifts of horse dung – ‘us girls are young, innocent as doves –’ and she pauses outside a tottering rookery, propped up by a wooden beam like a gouty limb – ‘cheap, sir, but honest – mind the step –’ he winces, sees a window weeping as a woman empties a metal bucket, and steps inside.

  She takes him downstairs to a tiny room, the roof so low that he cannot stand upright. It smells vinegary, sweaty, of the grassiness of ejaculate. The ceiling is swollen and smoke-stained like a black lung, damp pressing it downwards. But the walls are dark too, and he realizes that this used to be where the coal chute went.

  The girl lifts her soiled nightdress to reveal dugs no larger than puffy flea bites. He stares into her face for the first time. There is something so childlike about her, something so . . .

  ‘No,’ he says, his voice a choke. ‘You will not do – I want a redhead.’

  ‘Oh, sir, give me a try. I’m sure I’ll be just up your alley – or maybe you’ll be just up mine, sir?’ She cackles, and he stares at her blackened teeth. He cannot meet her eye. He sees a cap in the corner, and recognizes it at once. Albie.

  ‘No,’ he says, and he turns from her.

  ‘Wait,’ the girl croaks.

  ‘Is there a redhead here?’

  The girl looks down, the flirtation gone from her voice. She says, quite dully, ‘Moll. Room above this one.’

  Silas takes the steps, two at a time. He feels a pull in his trousers, a tingling at what will be awaiting him. He enters without knocking.

  A red-headed girl sits on a single bed. Her nightgown is less discoloured, her eyes less young, her frontage more than adequate. The room is taller; it has a small window though the bottom pane is broken, and embers smoulder in the grate. It smells better than the last room – cheap perfume and old alcohol masking the sour aromas beneath.

  ‘Ah, at last,’ Silas says. ‘This is altogether finer.’ He stares at the yellowed bandage of the bed. ‘When were the bedclothes last cleaned?’

  ‘You get what you pay for,’ the vixen croaks, her voice low and cracked. ‘You want a grande horizontale, go to Haymarket, and you can have ’em for guineas and guineas. But ye’ll pay up a sixpence according, dearie, pr’vided you want it usual.’ She taps the bulge in his trousers. ‘And I can tell that our humble surroundings don’t put you off, sir, not really.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he murmurs. ‘Your hair – so red.’

  She starts to rub his
crotch, and he closes his eyes, handing over the coins. He sits down on the bed next to her. The springs scream. Even in the dim candlelight, he can see specks of blood on the sheets, a maggot-shaped indentation in the mattress where the girl must curl up each night. He sees himself through her eyes: his benevolence in visiting her, a far better prospect than the factory scabs she must service. He even took the care to wash two days ago.

  ‘You like us rascally women, sir,’ she says. ‘I can tell you do, sir.’ He wants her to stop talking, to shove his hand over her mouth until she quietens. He hates the deep rasp of her voice, the lilting intimacy that sounds forced and tired. Her red hair – he concentrates on that at least.

  She starts to scratch her elbow, and flakes of dried skin catch and dance in the candlelight. He tries not to think that he is breathing in this girl, breathing in her skin and grime and sickness, and, as she eases open his trousers, taking him in her hand (‘What a fine truncheon, sir, you do know how to spoil us naughty girls’), he wants nothing more than for darkness to take over. He wants to hurl himself into her, to fuck every part of her until he feels nothing – until all of his shame and sadness and anger and loneliness are void. He wants to fuck away every thought of Iris. Iris.

  He knocks her fist away, and grabs hold of her hair, pushing her on to her back. She lets out a brisk cry, ‘Oh!’ and he tears her nightdress in a swift movement, his fingernails snagging on her chest and scratching it. The fabric splits easily and she hisses, ‘You’ll be paying for that,’ but he wrenches her hair again, ignoring her cry. He readies himself, one hand on her throat, the other pinning down her drumstick arms. He takes a quick glance at her flea-bitten body, and her pubic hair is black.

  ‘What – false—’ he cries, pushing her away from him. His prick softens, and he notices the tincture of her hair, its deceit. She gasps free, scrambling away from him. Her pillow is red from seeped dye. There is a low pain in his stomach, an ache in his testicles, and he fumbles for the buttons of his trousers. He wants to be away from her, to be on his own once more, and he stumbles out of the room and down the stairs, ignoring the moans he hears from behind each door, the mewl of a baby. This place – it is repulsive! A cradle of vice.