The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  He has not looked at them for a while, and he starts at the end of the row. There is little Flick in rodent form, holding a minuscule porcelain plate. He has snipped strands of red fur from a cat and glued it to her mouse head.

  He remembers the thick pads of her tiny fingers toughened from the heat of the pottery – their friendship – is that not how it went, even though they never said a word to one another? And he remembers more: the bruises on her face and legs that bloomed yellow and purple and black. The way her father grabbed hold of her arm as if she were little more than a doll, the sounds that came from the cottage – how Silas trembled for her. They were alike in their beatings, in the way that many of the other children were, but to him it felt significant. A connection. Silas and his mother; Flick and her father. Everything in her sad, shattered body said, Save me. My life is nothing more than a spit in a fire.

  And he did save her. He made it easier for her. He helped her escape.

  Gentleman

  Albie has fled the rookery before Nancy can catch him to clean the bedclothes. He’s been enlisted as a kind of washerwoman lately, scrubbing the sheets with their dried snail-like slime. The vinegar and the rough brushes sting his fingers. It isn’t fair, after all, and yesterday he told the old sow he’s a fine model now and daren’t degrade himself, but she just laughed and handed him a brush.

  He’s wearing a pair of blue chammy breeches, fresh from a barrow off Petticoat Lane, which the hawker gave him in exchange for attracting customers with his acrobatics and somersaults. They have patched holes in the knees, and little horn buttons to fasten at the tops of his calves, and they befit his new station perfectly. He struts like a swell, doffing his billycock hat at the costermonger with a mock hauteur.

  ‘Din’t I tell you I’d be a fine man?’ he says to the lemon seller, but the lemon seller only scoffs.

  ‘Closest you’ll get to a gentleman is stood outside the hotels,’ he sneers back, but Albie taps his feet together and leaps into the air. ‘What with your raw gums.’

  ‘I’ll have fine ivories soon, you’ll see if I don’t.’ He consults his fob watch – a round card on a short rope – and announces, ‘Punctuality for a gentleman is important, to be neither early nor tardy, and I’ll take my leave of you, you poxed old coxcomb.’

  The lemon seller shrinks his head into his neck.

  Albie swerves into Colville Place, taking up more of the pavement than he needs, his arms spread like wings, and a man raps his wrist with the silver end of his cane – ‘Watch it, brat’ – and Albie sticks out his tongue. Nothing can sour his mood, not even the whistle of the wind between the gaps of his jacket, or the fact that the stray cat he enlisted to walk on a grubby piece of string in the manner of a gentleman’s spaniel bolted off on Oxford Street. Trade is good too: the Great Exhibition crowds will bring more rural folk for his sister.

  He is early, and a gentleman is punctual. Arriving early is as rude as tardiness. (He has begged Louis to tell him some traits of a gentleman, and this is one he can remember. He has demanded the meanings of the words as if they hold the clue to life – ‘tardy’ means ‘late’, and ‘punctual’ means ‘on time’.) He whispers under his breath, Punctual, punctual, punctual. The bell tolls out its hour, and he counts out the rings on his fingers. ‘Ten o’clock, egad!’ he whispers to himself. ‘’Twas not invited until the half past of the hour.’

  He notices the step outside the closed shop where he saw Silas before, and he decides to sit there until the single toll of the bell, criss-crossing his legs like a flunkey, his chin raised.

  He feels unsettled, as if the dusty panes of glass are watching him. He turns, and it is dark inside the shop and hard to see, a few old cobwebs hanging from the edges of the window frames. He catches his reflection, and he grins, but remembers his gums and puts his hand to his mouth. Then he smells it: a chemical scent.

  He swallows, and stands to peer through the glass more closely. A pair of eyes, and the man’s mouth curls in recognition.

  Albie tries the door, and it opens easily. He enters the old shop. Empty candle brackets sit on the wall.

  ‘Silas, sir,’ Albie says, and the man flinches. He is crouched next to the window. Usually he is so clean, so neat, but his cheeks are downy and his blue coat is torn and dirty.

  Albie looks around him, wraps his jacket tighter. ‘What’s you doing here?’ and then, longing for Louis to have been right about Silas, asks, ‘Is you here to sell Mr Frost some of your animals?’

  Silas says nothing but taps his collarbone three times. It makes a horrid knocking sound, and Albie does not know what to make of it.

  ‘Sir?’ Albie asks. ‘Is you in your cups?’

  ‘Begone,’ Silas hisses. ‘If she is to come . . .’

  Albie swallows, and he knows that he should have fought Louis harder, that his instincts were right. ‘Leave off her.’

  ‘Leave what?’

  ‘Her,’ Albie says, and the tap-tap-tap cuts through him, as if the man were rapping out the rhythm on his skull. ‘Iris. I knows what you’re about, sir, I does—’

  Silas waves a hand, and Albie follows the line of his gaze to Louis’s studio. ‘You know nothing, Alb – you know nothing of the suffering she endures.’

  Albie looks around him. ‘Sir, please. Leave off her. She does not want it. You must leave her.’ He puffs out his chest to make himself bigger, remembering Silas’s hands on the neck of that girl, the quilt of bruises on red-headed Moll. He feels a rush of anger, of protection for Iris. She doesn’t deserve it – and isn’t it all his fault? He introduced them, didn’t he? Now he must set it right and warn her. He pulls himself taller. ‘I am telling you to leave her!’ He is so close to the man that he can smell him. Underneath the chemical scent, there is a foul, more bestial stench.

  Silas does not shift his gaze. He swats Albie as if he is nothing more than a fly. His arm is stronger than Albie expected, and the boy tumbles backwards, landing with a square thud on the flagstones. His new breeches are coated in dust. He feels a flush of hatred so pure that he is shaking. He stands and tugs on the sleeve of Silas’s coat.

  ‘You must stop it! You must – you must forget her!’

  Silas’s mouth is a thin line.

  ‘Please,’ Albie says. ‘Leave her – I begs you – not her.’

  The more Silas ignores him, the greater Albie’s agitation. He shoves Silas to little effect, so Albie slaps him across the jowls.

  Silas snaps his eyes on to the boy, and grabs hold of the scruff of his jacket, the fabric screaming. Albie feels the force of the man’s hands, the reek of his breath, the sourness of grubby breeches.

  Albie tries to pound his fists, to dig his nails into the man’s back, but he has no momentum, nowhere to grapple. He is held tight in an embrace, Silas’s arm a manacle. A wave of pain as his head ricochets against the wall behind him – his mouth a hot red sting – the crack of bone. And his nose is wet, running – he pants through the bubble of blood.

  ‘If you,’ Silas says, his breath hot, ‘interfere. If you do anything – meddle, breathe a word – I will find that rat of your sister. I know it was her, in that old coal room. I know exactly where to find her, that cheap whore.’ Silas shakes him, and Albie whimpers, trying to summon a ball of phlegm to hurl in the man’s face, but there is nothing left in him.

  Silas lets him go, and Albie can do nothing but sink to the floor. He coughs something hard into his hand – it is his last tooth – and blood drips off his cupped palm like water. He tries to ram the tooth back into his gum, but it is no good.

  When he looks up, Silas has gone.

  Albie pushes himself upright. He won’t give up. He won’t. He’ll protect Iris. She’s the kindest, the best-hearted soul.

  He leaves the shop and knocks on Louis’s door, twenty minutes early. Punctual, he thinks, and his legs tremble.

  But there is no answer, though he knows they are in.

  He feels detached from himself, light and shimmering, his
rickety legs liquid. The pain in his head is ferocious, and he touches his nose where he heard it crunch. He lets out a cry, his fingers quivering.

  He knocks again and again, and the ache comes thicker, like the beat of a butterfly wing against his face. ‘Please,’ he tries, and he can hardly speak without his last tooth. Peath.

  His new breeches are dappled with blood, and more rolls off his chin, down his shirt, into the dust. It reminds him of the slime on the bedsheets that he scrubbed yesterday morning, his sister’s chipped grin, her palm in his as the bed rocked above him. He knows Silas meant his threat.

  His legs are shaking less, the surge of panic is subsiding. As the pain intensifies, he imagines his sister beaten, discarded on the street like an old rag. Just another whore in the gutter. Nobody would care; nobody would listen to him.

  Stooping at a sharp needling in his side, he starts to walk away from the door. He can’t risk his sister. He can’t.

  He isn’t fit for anything, not for the life of a model, not as a friend to Iris. He’s just a brawling street-dog, yellow, a coward. A fat tear rolls down his cheek, stopping at the dent of his mouth. He doesn’t wipe it away. He licks it with his tongue. Salt and iron.

  Gaze

  They ignore the knocking at the door. Nobody will impinge on their perfect little world. Iris rocks the heavy chintz hangings of the bed with her toe, and then glances back at Louis. His eyes are closed.

  She could stay here for ever, making love again and again and again. She can feel the stickiness of his seed on her belly, where it has dried and cracked like egg white. He told her he must not leave anything inside her. She lays her cheek in the dent of Louis’s chest, just below his shoulder, and listens to his heart beating.

  ‘My head fits here perfectly,’ she says. ‘It’s as if your chest were carved out especially for me.’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ he says, and he plays his fingers up and down her spine as if it were a pianoforte. ‘Are you content?’

  ‘Entirely,’ she says, and she closes her eyes. She shuts out the fears that lurk at the edges of her mind, and just concentrates on here, now. I am here now, she thinks, and Louis is here now, and things are perfect. Or perfectly imperfect. She is perfectly ruined. His chest is hairless, soft, and she runs her hand along the curve of his hip. She feels an ache, a bruising within her, her nipples tender from his fingers. Their kisses were not rosebud pecks, but thirsty, urgent, and twice he pulled her lip between his teeth and bit it.

  She always imagined that any form of venereal matters, as her mother once termed it, before covering her mouth, was about suffering, pain, endurance. She once saw a man in rags pushing the head of a street seller into his crotch at little past eleven in the morning, his hand rough against the tangle of her hair, the sound of her gagging like the retching of a cat. Even her sister and her gentleman – she shrank at the sight of his groping hands, the force in his arms, the bruises he inflicted on Rose. Iris wanted it for herself, and she did not. She learned to regard her own parts with shame, a secret, raw piece of herself to keep hidden. But now it feels like a conspiracy: nobody told her that the trap she was threatened with would be so enticing. Louis gazed at her naked, laughing as she squirmed, and then kissed her there. He called it beautiful. She was horrified at first, but then—

  ‘If you keep doing that, I’ll have to break my word as a gentleman and sacrifice you to Venus once more,’ he says.

  ‘What I’m interested to know,’ she says, kissing his earlobe, ‘is whether it was worth sacrificing the dignity of art to the baseness of passion?’

  ‘Oh, certainly not.’

  ‘Spoken like a true painter. Besides, this is little more than an anatomy lesson.’

  ‘It’s crucial that I study your form carefully.’ He picks up her arm and kisses it. ‘I must note each inflection, the tension of each joint, and search for dramatic truth within it all.’ He moves his hand across her shoulder and traces a finger over her breast. ‘And here, I am really just striving for purity of feeling. I must gaze on this for days until I’ve learned it by rote.’

  She grips him tighter. She sees a flash of dark, the crook of his – what to call it? – and she clenches with desire. When she saw it first of all, she felt a strange conflict between awe and disappointment at its ugliness. She had no idea that men shielded these stiffened parts behind their trousers (or behind their ‘unmentionables’ as her mother would call them).

  She lets her mind wander, to the blank canvas in her studio. She feels a surge of energy, as the picture assembles before her eyes: she will fill every inch with detail and colour and vibrancy. Louis and Albie will be at the centre of it – but what if she were to be in it too? Rather than taking her cue from Shakespeare or medieval romance, she could mimic the simplicity of her favourite Van Eyck painting. She can see the triangle formed by their bodies – she and Louis hand in hand, with Albie sitting at a table hulling strawberries, the quick slice of the knife catching a shard of sky. His hand poised with still concentration, the fruit ripe but not turning.

  Their postures will be relaxed, not drawn with the china-doll stiffness that the brotherhood is known for; rather, this will be a scene interrupted, as if the viewer has peered through a window. There will be no passive sourness in their expressions; she will have Louis look as if he is about to break into a laugh. It will be a celebration of life as it is, each object indicating joy. If only she could convince her sister to model too, but of course she never would. Instead, she will have a rose in a vase to indicate her.

  She remembers a poem Louis read to her about beauty and loveliness, and she will inscribe an extract from it in the frame. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever – and then something about a bower and dreams.

  ‘Have the goblins snatched you?’ Louis asks, and she blinks.

  ‘I was just thinking that I’m going to paint you,’ she says.

  ‘Is that so? And how?’

  Her idea feels fragile. The slightest touch could break it.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I do want to be taken seriously as a painter, you know. Do you think a woman can be?’

  ‘Well, you’re fortunate, because you have talent. And a model of your own who generously allows you access to his figure, purely for the purposes of perspective.’

  She props herself up on the bolster. ‘Talent? Do I?’

  ‘You know you do.’

  ‘You’ve never said that before. You said promise in a sniffy kind of way as though you had a nasty smell under your nose.’

  ‘Did I? Have I really never told you that?’ He winds a ringlet around his finger. ‘We could pretend you’re a man. Your paintings will sell far better. Other artists have done it and tricked them all.’

  She shakes her head. ‘It won’t feel like me if I’m – Ivan or – or Isaac.’

  ‘Miss Whittle, the famous painter! Living proof that women can create finer things than tapestries and washy flowers.’ He looks across the room, and she follows his eye to a miniature framed on the wall. ‘My mother would have loved you, you know.’

  ‘Would she?’ she asks. ‘Even though I was a shop girl?’

  ‘She would have forgotten it as quickly as I did. You have the stature of a queen.’

  ‘Oh, Guigemar.’ She strokes her favourite part of him, a rough patch of skin on the edge of his hip.

  ‘I warned you,’ he says, lifting her chin, and she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him until she thinks she will drown.

  Ticket

  I inclose a ticket for the Grayt Exhibishon opening day tomorow as you asked.

  Crystal Palace

  It is all noise, confusion and pressing crowds. A vast fountain spurts glittering jets of water into the sky, and a sea of women thrust through the turnstiles, grasp one another in a kind of ecstasy, and heap cloaks and bags over their male chaperones. The colours are as overwhelming as a high-class brothel – nests of tangled feathers, obscenely swollen hats, raised parasols, and acres of stiffened cri
noline. Crystal chandeliers drip among the elm trees and the sculptures and the thick-veined potted palms. It is a turning kaleidoscope, impossible to pin down, impossible to contain. Silas tries to calm himself by picturing the exhibition at night, empty of crowds. Silence reigning over rows of artefacts. This time will pass.

  ‘As bad as the parties at court.’

  ‘That gown of Lady Charlemont – so gilded – what was she thinking?’

  ‘And the ladies-in-waiting—’

  A coarser voice: ‘Flushing privies too here – I’ll be first to christen ’em.’

  Silas is whacked by a fan; he is hot, and he loosens the neck of his shirt. The building is a hothouse, and he is a mouldering fruit. He looks everywhere for Iris, picturing her plain dress among these squawking peacocks. He knew the Crystal Palace would be large – how couldn’t he, having watched its progress so carefully? – but its enormousness strikes him afresh. The curved glass ceiling seems as distant as the dome of the sky. It could take him weeks to view each exhibit, to roam the floors and aisles and galleries. He thinks of his own little palace in which he has taken such pride: its dark corners, the enveloping warmth of it. His packed shop, with the tiny attic bedroom above it, and the thick-walled tomb of the cellar below it – he could fit them into this space thousands, tens of thousands of times over. And the work: how could he, with only the lifespan of a single human, ever make enough exhibits to rival this edifice?

  Iris will remind him of his greatness. Her presence will make up for a lifetime of disappointments. She will be his greatest achievement, his jewel, the most delightful of creatures. It does not occur to him that she may struggle to find him in the crush. She will find a way to his puppies and meet him there.

  When the organ crescendo sounds and the Queen shuffles her way up the nave, Silas would not care if a cannonball destroyed these gaudy crowds, if there were nobody but him and Iris left in the world.