The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  Even my father came gradually to accept that my passion for dolls was not something I was about to grow out of. In the end he stopped worrying about me. I think he was able to come to terms with my obsession by convincing himself that my hobby would eventually pay off. A lifetime in business had taught him that anything can become valuable, given time and the right circumstances, be it piggy banks or Victorian underwear or used beer bottles. One memorable Christmas he presented me with Merrick’s Price Guide to World Dolls, an indispensable textbook that had thus far been well beyond my means.

  “We’ll have you working for Christie’s at this rate,” he said. He smiled at me, and it was a good smile, open and friendly and relaxed. I don’t think I was ever the son he had imagined for himself, but we always found plenty to talk about and, in any case, I liked my father. I didn’t see any reason to trouble his mind by explaining that the goal of the true collector is not the accumulation of riches, but the consummation of passion.

  I remember how my father adored his cars, both the steel-blue Volvo he drove for work and the vintage Jaguar that lived in the garage and was taken out only at weekends. The Jaguar was racing green with chrome trim and soft, chestnut leather upholstery. My father cleaned the Jaguar once a fortnight without fail. I was sometimes allowed to buff the upholstery, using a chamois leather moistened with a yellow polish called Heller’s Wax that came in a tin. I loved the smell of the Heller’s, resinous and woody as ambergris. I think my father hoped that by letting me help him with the Jaguar he might be able to spark my interest in cars in general, but although I listened carefully in an effort to please him, I invariably forgot most of what he told me more or less as soon as we went back inside.

  I never learned to drive, and after my father died I stopped pretending I ever would. By the time of his death, both the Jaguar and the Volvo had been sold. He ran an Audi saloon instead, a car he always despised, though I never knew why.

  I have always found it interesting, the way people and their vehicles can become inseparable in the mind. My dear friend Clarence drives a white Ford van with a cracked rear windscreen and a large dent in the passenger door. She flexes her muscles as she gets into the driver’s seat, like a soldier climbing into a tank. Often when I think of Clarence, I think of that action, the way the van has become identified for me with her strength, her chaotic yet indefatigable way of being.

  INFORMATION (biographical/bibliographical/photographic) on the life and work of EWA CHAPLIN AND/OR friendship, correspondence. Female, single, mid-40s. Main interests: dolls of Germany and Eastern Europe. Please reply to: Bramber Winters, PO Box 656 Bodmin UK.

  2.

  ON THE BACK PAGE of Ponchinella there was a Personals column. I always read it, as I read everything else in the magazine, and in many ways Bramber’s advertisement was no different from the thousands of others I had seen there over the years. What first drew me to Bramber Winters was the beauty I found in her name. I vaguely recalled that Bramber was the name of a place, and when I looked in Coastage’s English Almanac I found I was correct: Bramber was a small village in East Sussex whose chief visitor attractions were a ruined castle and a pipe museum. When I asked Bramber if she had ever been to the village she said she had never heard of it.

  Later in our correspondence I sent her a postcard of Bramber Castle I happened to find on a stall at Camden market. The photograph was in black and white. It showed a grassy mound, surmounted by a number of toppled stones. A near illegible copperplate script covered most of the reverse. The Horsham postmark was dated July 1972. The recipient was a Mrs. Hilda O’Gorman, of East Mersea, Essex. I wondered what Hilda O’Gorman was doing now, if she was still alive. As always when I handle old letters, I felt a frisson of energy, a tiny secret acknowledgment from out of the past. I could almost convince myself that both sender and recipient knew of my plans for their postcard, and approved.

  When it came to Bramber’s request for information about Ewa Chaplin, I was on less certain ground. I had heard of Ewa Chaplin, of course I had. An artist of high renown and vanishingly small output, Chaplin was a Polish émigrée who had arrived in London at the outbreak of World War II. Some accounts insisted she was penniless, others maintained she came with the ubiquitous hoard of gold coins sewn into the lining of her shabby overcoat. All agreed she had turned to seamstressing and later to dollmaking as a way of making ends meet. Her dolls are unique, prized by museums around the world, sought after by private collectors, who pursue them with a zeal that can seem excessive even by the standards of the doll fraternity. I had never felt particularly drawn to them myself. I found there to be something cold in Chaplin’s creations, an edge of the uncanny I did not care for. Not that I said so to Bramber. I told her I was making inquiries, that I had a lot of contacts among European dealers and that I might even be able to get her an interview with Artur Zukerman, who had photographed dolls all over the world, including – famously – the American Chaplins. The first of these statements at least was true. As for the rest, I told myself those were bridges that could be crossed if and when I came to them.

  When I asked Bramber what it was, in particular, that drew her to Chaplin’s work, she said she first became interested when she happened to see a play based on one of Chaplin’s stories. It was when I was at school, Bramber wrote. My best friend Helen was in it. Ewa Chaplin wasn’t afraid to make dolls that weren’t comforting, she added. She seemed to know that dolls are people, just like us.

  I had never read Chaplin’s stories. As I understood it, Chaplin first began writing when she was a student in Krakow, though her work had not been published until after her death. I did know that Chaplin had supposedly based many of her dolls on the characters in her stories, but I never felt particularly curious about them, probably because I found the dolls themselves so unattractive. I could see what they meant to Bramber, though, and the candour of her words touched me deeply. I had never found anyone whose feeling for dolls appeared to accord so closely with my own. The experience was thrilling to me and almost shocking. I think that was the moment I first intuited the depth and intimacy of our connection.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD BEEN WRITING to Bramber for more than a year before I understood that we were destined to be together. The next time I wrote, I included my phone number. When Bramber wrote back, she said there was no payphone at West Edge House, and that she didn’t have a mobile. I wasn’t sure I believed her – who doesn’t own a mobile these days? – but on reflection I decided she was simply one of those people who dislike using the telephone. This small insight into her personality only endeared her to me further. Certainly I didn’t perceive it as a problem. Soon she would come to trust me as I trusted her. And in the meantime there were our letters, which I looked forward to as harbingers of a new reality, a reality in which we would confess our togetherness, becoming more fully ourselves in a way that is only possible in the presence of that rarest of human sympathies: mutual love.

  The idea that I might go and see her did not occur to me at first. I had not been invited, after all, and I was hardly the sort of person who could present themselves at someone’s door in the sure and certain knowledge of being welcomed inside. My life thus far had taught me enough about rejection not to actively court it. But once the initial seed had been planted – a television documentary about the decline of the tourism industry in the West Country – I found myself unable to uproot it. I would go west, I decided. And even if my bravery was not rewarded, at least I would have the satisfaction of knowing where I stood.

  For some weeks, months even, the idea of the thing and then the planning of it – consulting route maps, perusing railway timetables and gazetteer entries for the places of interest I hoped to visit along the way – was enough to sustain me. But as April became May and drew closer to June I knew I must act, or find myself ensnared in a cycle of regret. After browsing for information online, I discovered the existen
ce of the West Country Rover ticket, a travel card with a three-month validity that would enable me to access any part of the Devon, Cornwall and Somerset public transport networks, switching freely between bus, coach and train as my itinerary demanded. The woman behind the counter of the travel agent’s where I purchased my rover card had pink hair and blue eyes. Both made a startling if not altogether unpleasing contrast with the leopard-print fake fur boa draped across her plump shoulders.

  “Going on holiday, are we?” she said. “Fancy a spot of sunshine on the English Riviera?”

  “The sun isn’t really my friend, I’m afraid. I prefer a nice breeze.”

  She smiled at me brightly, as if my answer had told her everything about me she would ever need to know. She pressed a button to release my ticket from the machine and tore it off along its perforated edge. She selected a plastic wallet from the drawer underneath the counter and slipped the ticket inside.

  “Best keep it safe,” she said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  West Edge House

  Tarquin’s End

  Bodmin

  Cornwall

  Dear Andrew,

  Thank you for your letter. I was so excited when it arrived. I’ve always wondered whether anyone actually reads the personal ads in magazines and now I know they do. I would be delighted to correspond with you, if you would like to. There’s no one here I can talk to – not about dolls, anyway. I’m sure you understand!

  I have thirty-six dolls in all: twenty German, ten English and six French. The first doll I ever had was a “Marianne” by Claude Muriel. She was given to me by a friend of my mother’s when I was ten.

  So you live in London! I haven’t been in the city in twenty years. I think about going sometimes – I would love to visit the museums – but then it seems so far, and my job here makes it difficult for me to get away.

  Tarquin’s End is a small village, not much more than a hamlet, really. Some of the people at West Edge House – Diz and Jackie, for instance – have been here for years.

  I want to thank you for the postcards you sent. I love the Paul Chantal doll. She reminds me of a student from Lyon who used to give French conversation classes at my secondary school. Isn’t it strange, the way dolls always seem to bring back the past? I suppose it’s because they never age.

  The post came early today. Our deliveries sometimes don’t arrive until after lunch. Dr. Leslie says they leave us till last because we’re least likely to complain, but I once heard Diz saying to Jackie that really it’s because the postman is afraid to come up here. Diz’s real name is Derek Ryman. Sylvia Passmore – Sylvia is the housekeeper here – told me he used to be a doctor. Diz spends most of his time with Jackie, though you couldn’t imagine two people less alike.

  The postman brought a parcel this morning, but Jackie wouldn’t open the door to him. She stood stock still in the passageway between the stationery cupboard and the entrance to the visitors’ lounge, staring through the glass partition at the letters that were already on the doormat. She was wearing her yellow ribbed tights, the ones that make her legs look like corncobs. When the postman rang the bell again, Sylvia Passmore came out of the office, moved Jackie aside and went to open the door.

  “Don’t let him in,” Jackie said. “He’ll kill us all.”

  “Parcel for Maurice Leslie,” said the postman. “Can you sign?” Sylvia signed the paper on the postman’s clipboard with a red biro and then he gave her the parcel. Sylvia closed the door and came back inside.

  Jackie stuck both hands behind her back, flattening herself against the wall. “Don’t put that near me,” she said. “You don’t know what’s in there.”

  Sylvia made a tutting sound and marched off down the corridor. When I touched Jackie’s arm I found she was trembling, although when I saw her an hour or so later, sitting in the garden with Diz, she seemed perfectly all right again. It’s hard to tell why she gets herself in such a state over such ordinary things, how much she remembers afterwards. There are days when she chats away to the postman as if she’s known him for years.

  Both Jackie’s parents are dead now. Every couple of weeks she has a visitor, a tall, straight-backed woman with glasses. Sylvia Passmore told me this woman is Jackie’s daughter. A couple of Sundays ago the woman turned up here and asked if she could take Jackie for a drive in the country. Jackie wouldn’t get into the car at first, but then Diz said he’d like to go too and so things turned out all right.

  I wanted to send you a postcard of Bodmin, but Jackie refused to give me one, even though she has a whole stash of postcards – hundreds of them – hidden under her bed. I’m very fond of Jackie but I have to admit she can be unreasonable sometimes. I was born in a village called Heath, which is not far from Bodmin, but I grew up in Truro. We moved there just after my first birthday because it was easier for my father to find work there.

  My father was a car mechanic. My mother liked to say he was a mechanical engineer but he never did any exams, he was just good at mending things. I don’t only mean cars. The first thing I remember him mending was an alarm clock, the battered old Westclox from beside my parents’ bed. I was six at the time. He sat me between his knees and let me watch what he was doing.

  “I’m not sure what’s wrong with her, Ba. Let’s get her on the table and then we’ll see.”

  He took the clock to pieces and when he put it back together again it started ticking immediately. He couldn’t charge as much as the qualified garage mechanics because he didn’t have the certificates, but customers came to him anyway. They could tell he had an instinct.

  Our house was on Harlequin Road. My mother liked to say their bedroom had a view of Truro Cathedral, even though all you could see was the tip of the spire. I liked my own room better because it overlooked the builders’ merchants at the back. They were called Groat & Sons and they started work early. I used to make a gap in the curtains and watch the men in their blue overalls loading bricks and wood and scaffolding on to lorries. Dad sometimes did odd jobs there, mending broken machines.

  My first real memories date from my fifth birthday, when I was given a glass snow dome with a model of Hampton Court Palace inside. Although the snow dome was mine, I wasn’t allowed to keep it in my bedroom until I was eight. My mother was afraid I might break it.

  My mother and father used to drive over most weekends and take tea with Dr. Leslie. In the end they stopped coming – they were bored, probably – and I told Jennifer Rockleaze they were dead, just like Jackie’s parents. Jennie was new here then. Later, after we became friends, I told her the truth.

  Looking forward to your next letter!

  Yours always,

  Bramber

  3.

  I HAD NEVER HAD SEX with a woman. There was a girl I liked at school, a plump and gentle redhead named Angela Madden. I loved the soft rotundity of her forearms and cheeks, the whispery, luminous timbre of her voice. She had a way of lowering her eyelashes so that only a sliver of bright blue iris remained visible. Her hair was smooth and shiny, like Marina Blue’s. Unlike the others in my year group, Angela did not seem unnerved by me and we ended up spending most of our break times together, devising complicated games with marbles and colored chalk. One day I went into school to find her gone. No one said anything and a couple of days later I discovered she had moved with her family to Oxford.

  The other girls in my class skirted me warily, as if even the most cursory contact would be to risk immediate and summary rejection by their peers. The boys still called me names, although as we all grew older they seemed to derive less enjoyment from that particular pastime. I felt relieved, though no less alone. By the time we were all doing “O” Levels, some of the more bookish individuals in my year would at least deign to speak to me, but I couldn’t honestly have called them friends. By the time Wilson Crosse came into my life at the age of fifteen I think I had resigned myself to my solo
existence. I even believed I preferred things that way, perhaps because it was the only kind of life I had ever known.

  I met Wil in Welton public library. I visited the library at least once a week, not just to borrow books but because I liked the ambience: the waxed parquet flooring, the Victorian tiling in the lavatories, the inimitable odour and texture of well worn library books. Wil quite literally bumped into me in the antiques section, catching my shoulder as he strode past and making me drop the book I’d been reading.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. He had very fair hair, cropped short. He was taller than me, of course, but he didn’t seem to tower above me like most other men.

  He bent to retrieve my book, closed it then turned it over to look at the cover.

  “Fanshaw’s,” he said. “Invaluable.” He tapped the book’s spine with his index finger, as if stressing the point. The jacket photograph showed a Lucien Basquiat “Julienne” doll with hand-stitched lace-trimmed bloomers and auburn hair. “I’m no expert in dolls myself,” he added. “I’m more a mechanicals man.”

  “You mean automata,” I said. It sounded as if I meant to correct him. I could feel myself blushing.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Only I prefer to call them mechanicals in honor of Shakespeare. You remember, the rude mechanicals? Some of mine are very rude indeed.”

  He raised an eyebrow and grinned, making creases around his pale eyes. He handed me back my book, brushing the tips of his fingers against my palm. “I have a full set of Fanshaw’s at home,” he added. “You could come and have a look at them, if you like.”

  For the first few weeks he barely touched me, restricting himself to the kind of harmless intimacies that might easily be explained away as avuncular affection: stroking a finger the length of my wrist bone, an arm slipped around my shoulders from behind. He liked to take off my glasses and pinch my cheek. I was unused to such caresses – my father would ruffle my hair sometimes and my mother always kissed me goodnight but that was all – and the attention Wil bestowed on me made me feel flattered, privileged even, as if I had finally been allowed a glimpse of the kind of life most people seemed to take for granted.