The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘Have you ever been to the opera?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Then I will take you.’

  There are times when she wishes she knew more, that she could impress him with a knowledge of travel, of poetry, of art and architecture, but without money or privilege the only things in which she has superior understanding are in fabrics and low trade: the difference between needlepoint and bobbin lace, or the importance of display in a shop window. She feels she has seen nothing except the tired tread of the streets between Bethnal Green and Regent Street, the eroded gilding of the doll shop, the decaying walls of her garret and basement room. Her life was a cell before, but now the freedom terrifies her. There are times when she longs for the enclosed familiarity of her previous life, because this expansive liberty seems like it will engulf her. What is she to make of it all? Two attics of her own – one in which to sleep and one in which to paint. And is it wrong of her to treasure them, to want to press them tight to her chest and not let go? And while she feasts on all this, she has left her sister to suffer in that dreary fleapit of a shop.

  She brushes wombat hairs from her dress. ‘Come, let’s go.’

  ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know why you waste your time with the Royal Academy,’ Rossetti says, through a forkful of quail. He is handsome, his neatly curated hair loose about his shoulders, though he is shorter than Iris expected. When they were introduced, the crown of his head reached her brow and made her feel as if she had to stoop. ‘The critics have made their stance more than clear – if they won’t accept us, then I don’t give a fig for any of them. I didn’t enter a canvas this year.’

  ‘But don’t you think we should attack the institution from within?’ Millais suggests.

  ‘Pah! The trouble is you think you are a Trojan horse, when in fact you are a child’s hobby horse and all the critics are laughing.’

  Hunt snorts, but Louis exchanges a look with Iris as if to say, I told you so, but in truth, she finds Rossetti’s frankness quite charming.

  She looks around her, at the dining room with its long windows overlooking Gower Street, at the plaster rose of the ceiling and its elaborate cornicing. Even though it is April, a fire thunders in the grate.

  There are six of them at the polished table: William Holman Hunt, Johnnie Millais, Gabriel Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal, and Iris and Louis. The other members of the PRB – William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner and Frederick Stephens – are busy. (‘Shunning us,’ Rossetti remarked, ‘except my brother who must bring home the tin and is working late.’)

  Lizzie sits opposite Iris, and she is as beautiful as Iris imagined. Her skin looks so smooth that it could shatter, her auburn hair is loose, and her face has a doll-like perfection. She has an expression of such quiet concentration that Iris is sure that she, like her, is drinking everything in. Iris can scarcely picture her among the milliners of Cranbourne Alley where she used to work (she remembers Mrs Salter briefly, squawking bonnet touters, immoral, the lot of them), so dignified does she appear. Iris is not wholly sure why they were invited: the dinners are usually gentlemen-only affairs, and she thought at first it was because she and Lizzie both want to paint. But when Rossetti passed on his landlord’s concerns about his profession with a guffaw (‘He advised me that my models must be kept under gentlemanly restraint, as some artists sacrifice the dignity of art to the baseness of passion’), she wondered if it was just because the painters’ other models are whores, and she and Lizzie were being paraded because they are more respectable.

  After all, Lizzie seems perfectly controlled, perfectly muted: she barely eats. She merely stirred the Julienne soup, turned away from the fish, and now she slices off a sliver of quail and nibbles it. It brings to mind Iris’s mother’s instruction on manners (‘In polite company, eat little and daintily’), but she cannot help it – the food is so delicious that she finds herself scanning the bird carcass for any edible traces, and heaping buttery mounds of mashed potato on to her fork. If she could lick the plate clean, she would.

  ‘These fussy creatures,’ Rossetti says of the quail. ‘I’ve a mind to gobble it up whole.’ He tears off a wing and pops it into his mouth, crunching the bones and grimacing.

  ‘That will be a painful rupture when you evacuate tomorrow,’ Hunt says. ‘Better summon the physician.’

  ‘Ladies present,’ Millais says, but Iris catches Lizzie’s eye and sees she is stifling a smile.

  ‘Our delicate sex,’ Rossetti says. ‘Do excuse me.’

  Rossetti slides a hand to Lizzie underneath the table and holds it, and Iris has to look away. They are whispering, only a thread’s distance between their foreheads. And they claim not to be courting. She hears scraps of their whispered words: my dear petticoated philosopher, sweet Sid. She senses Louis is concentrating a little too hard on his plate.

  ‘What are you working on next?’ Louis asks, clattering his cutlery.

  Hunt talks about his idea for either pastoral drawings of a shepherd and shepherdess, or a painting he has decided to call The Light of the World, which he has been mulling for a while; Millais speaks of his plans for Ophelia, of the look of quiet melancholy he wants to paint on the face of the drowned girl, of the symbolic profusion of flowers which will surround her – forget-me-nots, poppies and fritillaries. ‘By Jove, I’ll need a stupendously beautiful creature for it,’ he says.

  ‘You must use Lizzie,’ Rossetti says.

  ‘Of course,’ Lizzie says. ‘It’s my favourite of his plays.’

  ‘There! I knew the education I’ve been giving her would prove effective. We are moving on to Shakespeare’s histories next,’ Rossetti says, and Hunt nods approvingly.

  ‘Very good,’ Millais says. ‘I’ll need you to lie in a bathtub, but I’ll heat it with oil lamps.’

  ‘I’m not quite ready to perish of the cold for art’s sake yet,’ Lizzie says.

  ‘As for me,’ Rossetti says, lighting a fat Havana off the chandelier. ‘I haven’t decided what’s next. I know I would like to paint Dante and Beatrice. Perhaps Dante being consoled a year after Beatrice died.’

  Louis sniffs. ‘I don’t much care for that story. How can Dante love a woman for the rest of his life – nay, even neglect his wife for her – when he has glimpsed her only twice? Courtly love – it’s begun to tire me.’ He turns to the butler who is clearing the plates: ‘Thank you, Smith.’

  ‘How can it tire you?’ Millais asks. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, real, where true emotions reveal themselves honestly? Not stifled by convention, but rather expressing passion, heroism, spiritual awakening—’

  ‘But that’s quite it,’ Louis says. ‘These feelings are not real. Iris first drew this to my attention, and I’ve thought of it ever since. All those romances – they idealize love when it really is nothing at all like it.’

  Iris leans forward. She says, ‘What is it like?’ and almost adds to you, but her words are drowned out by a snort from Rossetti as he swats away the idea with a wave of his napkin.

  ‘I want to believe in the love that we paint,’ Louis continues. ‘But these past months, I’ve begun to wonder – well, if love isn’t something quite different from all of that. If we confuse this foolish rapid infatuation – Dante glimpsing Beatrice twice – with the truth of love, its endurance, admiration, of actually knowing somebody.’

  ‘You cannot possibly be serious,’ Rossetti says, blowing a plume towards the ceiling. ‘Your latest painting – Johnnie told me all about it – if Guigemar’s rescue isn’t courtly love, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘But I’m not painting the Queen’s rescue any longer. I’m painting her escape after Guigemar was cast out. And don’t forget that Guigemar and his Queen were lovers for a year and a half. Not a mere glimpse like Beatrice and Dante.’

  ‘Pah,’ Rossetti says, ‘the truth is, Guigemar rescued his Queen later, and that’s the heart of it. Don’t we want to rescue women, and don’t women want to be rescued in turn? We rescued Miss Siddal and Miss Whittle, after all.’ He w
aves his hand at Iris and Lizzie, and Iris remembers the snooty frown of the charwoman; her parents and sister would certainly say she had been ensnared, not rescued. ‘I see how you’ve railed against marriage, Louis, and how you’ve said it’s stifling to love, that it causes only trouble, and I heed your warning.’

  Iris catches a look between them; a knowingness from Rossetti, a warning from Louis.

  ‘Who wants the expense of acquiring and keeping an old wife when there is the thrill, the joy of sweet love?’ Rossetti kisses his fingers in turn. Puck, puck, puck, puck.

  Iris cannot look at Louis; she inspects the prongs of her fork and says in a voice which tries to be neutral but betrays itself by a strange crackling quality, ‘You do not agree with marriage, Mr Frost?’

  ‘I – admit that, no, I see many reasons why it is a stifling state,’ Louis says, with another frown at Rossetti. ‘Why must there be a legal document declaring you love one another – why witnesses to see it – when, if you love each other, isn’t that enough? Why parade it, why entangle yourself? What if you make a mistake? And I’m a heathen, after all, and the union of flesh in God’s eyes means little to me.’

  Iris stares.

  ‘I bow to your superior knowledge of the matrimonial condition,’ Rossetti muses. ‘No marriage, no passionate love either. Poor Sylvia, your first courtly maiden. But surely your latest paramour has not soured all your hopes of love?’

  ‘Watch your tongue, sir,’ Louis says, flushing. ‘Insult me if you will, but I won’t have you disrespecting Miss Whittle.’

  Rossetti flings his cigar on to his plate. ‘Egad – these damned Havanas are damp – there’s no lighting them,’ and he dabs his fingers into the rose-scented fingerbowl. ‘Fine – enough.’

  And the conversation moves on, to an attack on Joshua Reynolds.

  Iris stops listening. She does not know how to sift through her thoughts. Is she seen as his paramour? And who is Sylvia? And is Iris a fool for caring for Louis? He will never marry her, not least because he doesn’t believe in it; but also because she is only his model and he has given her little encouragement. He has not written her billets-doux, taken her hand, made her promises of any kind except for contracted payments and painting lessons. His generosity has sprung from friendship, from a brotherly sense of duty. She half-listens to the conversation – Sir Sloshua, Chaucer, Eastlake, Shakespeare – names she only just recognizes from her recent months with Louis.

  When the butler brings in a large treacle pudding, spined like a hedgehog with set caramel threads, Iris feels her stomach turn. She thinks for a moment she is going to be sick. She is back in her narrow garret bed, Rose’s thigh warm against hers, the smells of burnt sugar creeping through the chimney. Her sister is there, and she is here, trotted out like a whore, Louis’s paramour with whom he is not even infatuated, never mind willing to marry. She turns over the sponge with her spoon, and will not meet Louis’s eye.

  ‘I told you he was insufferable,’ Louis says. ‘The way he did his best to humiliate us, the things he implied – I can’t understand it. And what for? Spiteful fun, like a kitten toying with a mouse. But I ought to have bitten back properly, shown him I have claws and teeth too.’

  As they cross into Colville Place, Louis talks on, and Iris quickens her pace. She wants to be back in her boarding house in Charlotte Street, a space which is hers and where she can sift through the evening, weigh up what she has heard.

  ‘Queenie – you move faster than a firework.’

  ‘My name is Iris,’ she snaps at him, louder than she intended. The wine has given her a headache, and she feels a little giddy. She steadies herself by looking at the sky. The horizon yawns. Through the drifts of smoke, she can see the fat coin of the moon.

  ‘Iris, then,’ Louis says, and he stands in front of her, stopping her from moving any further.

  It is dark, and the street is empty except for a hunched vagrant.

  ‘You are upset. Do try and ignore—’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Come, I always know something is the matter with ladies when they answer so abruptly. It was Rossetti, wasn’t it, ruining—’

  ‘Well, perhaps I’m different. Perhaps I’m not like all the ladies who you seem so . . .’ She nearly says familiar with, but even through the fog of tipsiness she draws back. She has never drunk anything except watered beer or communion wine, and the feeling is quite new to her. She wonders again who Sylvia is.

  ‘All of the other ladies who I seem so – what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

  He pauses, toying with the silver chain of his fob watch. The smartness doesn’t suit him.

  ‘I want to walk,’ she says.

  ‘Walk? Walk where?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  They strike north up Charlotte Street, away from her garret. His footsteps chime. ‘Well, I have resolved to be undecided in my destination too. If you prefer, I can trail behind you, like an obedient dog.’

  ‘If you must,’ she says, and she smiles a little despite herself. He is beside her, their paces falling into a pattern with each other, and she begins to forget why she was upset. They whisk around corners and across squares and crescents. Bitterness still sits at the back of her throat, but there is a different feeling too – an edge of transgression that makes her heart beat faster. Here she is, doing exactly what she has been warned against. Unmarried, unbetrothed, walking the streets of London after midnight with a man who is not a relative, a man who is no innocent. She can see the bounce of his hair out of the corner of her eye, as soft as the wood shavings on the floor of Millais’s painting. His breathing has fallen into rhythm with hers.

  ‘I’ve always found London quite romantic after nightfall,’ he says, breaking the silence. Her pulse quickens. ‘Despite the thieves and the –’ he steers away from a woman who reaches out to him – ‘solicitations. I think, Iris, it is the risk of what could happen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He points at a pocket of gloom behind a stairwell. ‘Isn’t it thrilling to think that a man may be hiding there with a knife, ready to spring out and accost us? Or there – behind those railings.’ He looks across at her. ‘I hope I haven’t scared you.’

  She snorts. ‘I’m more robust than that. I’m not one of those fainting girls.’

  ‘What – you mean you are out without your smelling salts again? Really, Miss Whittle.’ She smiles. ‘Well, it’s a damned shame. I would rather have liked to prove my clout against a brigand, to take a fist on the chin to defend you.’ He shrugs. ‘But perhaps I’m beginning to sound a little like Rossetti.’ He looks about him. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was following you.’

  ‘Well, I was following you.’ He cranes at a street sign. ‘The trouble is that we both walk with such authority that we assume the other knows where we’re going. We’re a terrible pair.’ He nods at a black expanse in front of them, where there is no glimpse of streetlamp, no flicker of a candle. ‘I suppose that must be Regent’s Park. To think, we’ve crossed the whole of Fitzrovia and Marylebone without noticing.’

  ‘I thought artists noticed everything.’

  They cross the street and stand next to the dark speared railings of the park. Louis runs his finger over the tip of a spike. ‘I once knew a man who, out of his wits on opium, fell from a window and impaled himself on one of these. He looked like a fish on the deck of a ship, flopping around. It was ghastly.’

  ‘How horrid!’

  ‘It was.’ His eyes are so black that she can’t tell where he is looking. ‘Sometimes I can hardly believe that we will die. That I won’t exist any longer, and the world will just keep turning as it always did, with my paintings the only sign I ever lived. When Mother died – it sounds foolish, I know it does – but I remember being surprised that the sun rose that morning. It seemed as though everything should halt, that the sun should stop shining when she couldn’t be there to see it.
Am I talking nonsense?’

  Iris shakes her head, thinking of the webbing of her fingers as she spread her palm against the wallpaper, the blue veins like those on the butterfly wing. ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Every hour,’ Louis says. ‘She was quite magnificent.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She would have liked you, I think. She liked spirit. She was always excited about things, whether it was teaching us French, or one of my drawings, or the cherry blossom each spring.’ He looks down. ‘Heavens, I miss her.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d miss my mother a jot if she died.’

  ‘You might,’ Louis says but Iris shakes her head.

  ‘She never liked me. I could never please her. Even when I was little. There was some, I don’t know –’ she lowers her voice – ‘complaint which occurred as a consequence of my arrival, and she was often in pain and unable to have more children, and it made her angry at me. That was what happened with my collarbone. Her lying-in was difficult and it broke when I was born, and never healed right. I was naughty too – I always did wrong.’

  ‘I can’t imagine being angry at you,’ Louis says. ‘Just like I can’t imagine growing old.’

  ‘You’ll be wrinkled like an old boot one day,’ she says, and then walks through the gate, into the gloom. She spreads out her hands. The wine warms her now; her head no longer pounds.

  ‘Iris, where are you going? The park is dangerous—’

  ‘I thought you wanted to fight off the brigands?’

  ‘Yes, well, there might be actual brigands here.’

  And, with a laugh, Iris starts to run. She runs into the blackness, into the coolness of the April night, the grass whispering against her shoes. She quickens her pace, hare-fast. Her chest heaves against the straitjacket of her dress. She has never done anything so freeing in her life. If her sister could see her now! In Regent’s Park, after dark, with Louis racing beside her, trying to stop her – and she does not care. Because she can. Because she never could before. She stumbles slightly on a rabbit hole. The black is greying – she can pick out the shapes of the trees, the gravel paths, and the lake.