The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  The first time Wil had sex with me was on the couch in the smaller of his two downstairs reception rooms, the room he habitually referred to as the snug. It happened so quickly I barely had time to register what was going on. He held on to me tightly, ramming his narrow penis inside me with a force and an urgency I had never for a moment suspected he possessed. The pain was substantial, but not so great as my distress and bewilderment at Wil’s transformation into an entity I barely knew.

  “Go upstairs and wash,” he said when he had finished, and so I did. I could hear him moving about in the kitchen, putting plates on a tray and running water into the kettle. By the time I came back downstairs he was the same as always. On subsequent occasions he took me up to his bedroom, and afterwards there was always a fresh pair of underpants waiting for me, identical with the brand I normally wore. What he did with the old ones I never found out.

  I dreaded these episodes, but at the same time I became used to them. They were no longer frightening so much as unpleasant, like being forced to eat a food you cannot stomach. I reassured myself with the knowledge that out of all the time we spent together, the interludes in Wil’s bedroom were mercifully brief.

  Wil never spoke of what happened between us. We talked instead of the other things we had in common: antiques and automata and, of course, dolls.

  I adored his house, a substantial Victorian villa at the top end of Rhodesia Street. Behind the house lay half an acre of garden Wil had left to go wild. He loved insects and plants and trees, and declared himself against most forms of gardening, which he described as ecological vandalism. By contrast the inside of the house was a temple to order and cleanliness, a fact that seemed remarkable not just in view of the garden but also because of the profusion of fragile objects on display. There were books, of course, many hundreds of them, but that was just the beginning. Wil’s rooms were crammed with beautiful things: snuff boxes, lacquerwork, netsuke, Japanese fans. His passion though was for automata, of which he possessed several dozen and all in working order. The “rude mechanicals” – the erotic esoterica that formed the centerpiece of his collection – were able to perform the most remarkable feats, and were marvels of the clockmaker’s art. Wil’s favorite was an eighteenth-century French piece, in which a Roman centurion coupled first with a lady, then with a soldier and finally with a towheaded boy.

  “It’s so rare it’s not even catalogued,” Wil confided. “Objects like this were banned at one time. You could go to prison simply for looking at them.”

  I didn’t care much for the mechanicals. I found the relentless circularity of their motions pointless and faintly sinister. Wil did not own many dolls, though there was one I coveted desperately, a Schindler “Amy” with her own silk-lined rosewood traveling case. Wil used to joke about bequeathing her to me in his will, but in the event he gave her to me as a present when I went away to college.

  We wrote letters at first, and in the Christmas vacation of my first year we took tea together in a café in Pangbourne but I never visited him in his home again and by the following autumn we had fallen out of touch entirely. Wil had seemed older but then so did I. I found I could no longer tolerate his touch.

  * * *

  —

  MY PARENTS NEVER KNEW about Wil – on those occasions when I went to his house I always told them I was visiting a school friend. Had they dwelled on the matter more closely they might have questioned me further, for I had no school friends. As it was, I think they were so relieved at the idea that I might have that they were reluctant to spoil the illusion by delving deeper into it. I did tell Clarence – one night when her husband Lucan was away and we were both rather drunk. I was surprised by how clearly they came back, those memories. Clarence insisted I had been Wil’s victim. She actually called him a vampire, which struck me as funny – Wil was so pale, after all. She was right, I suppose, but I had never seen our relationship in those terms, or at least not until then. I did know that Wil was terrified of us being found out, but no more than I was. Whether there were others like me before or afterwards I have no idea. It would be naive of me, I suppose, to assume I was the first.

  Was I simply a doll to him, one of his rude mechanicals? Clarence seemed to think so. For a while she tried to persuade me that I should report Wil – shop him to the cops, was how she put it – but I wouldn’t hear of it. The thought of having to confront him across a court room – to see him again anywhere – was something I could not countenance. I found it simpler and more effective to think of Wil and our time together as little as possible. I told Clarence I’d rather we didn’t talk about him any more and in the end she agreed. Clarence is stubborn but she knows when she’s beaten. I think part of the reason we work so well together is that we respect each other’s privacy. Clarence was the only person in the world who knew about my relationship with Bramber. She seemed pleased at first – she said it was good for me to have friends – but when I told her about my planned trip to the West Country her attitude changed completely.

  “You have told her you’re coming?” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want it to be a surprise.”

  “Not everyone likes surprises. You can’t just turn up on her doorstep. You barely know the woman.”

  I prevaricated, saying I wasn’t about to make some grand announcement, not when I was just passing through. I didn’t want to put Bramber to any trouble. Clarence changed the subject, and I did my best to pretend the conversation had never happened, although I have to admit I was hurt, not by what she said but because I had believed she would understand.

  I had recently asked Bramber if I might come and visit her – testing the water, you might say – and she had replied by return of post, insisting it would be impossible because West Edge House didn’t cater for guests. I didn’t believe her, the same way I hadn’t believed her about the telephone. I wondered if she was just shy, or if there was something more sinister behind it. You hear about places, don’t you? Nursing homes and private clinics that are supposed to offer seclusion and care and a respite from the world but that are closer to being prisons. The thought of Bramber being locked away in a place like that, afraid to say anything unless it made matters worse – the idea made me feel ill. I said nothing to Clarence about my fears. Her earlier reaction had left me in no doubt that she disapproved of my feelings for Bramber, that she would be happier if we broke up. I did briefly wonder if she might be jealous, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Clarence has Lucan, after all, and Clarence has Jane.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY OF MY departure finally came. I arrived at the bus station early. People were already queuing for the Reading coach. The two women immediately in front of me were wearing identical camel-colored car coats.

  “Did you remember to pack the sandwiches?” said one to the other.

  “You know I did. You saw me putting them in.”

  I found myself picturing the flat they shared, a warren of dim purple rooms filled with china ornaments and the scent of lavender. The rest of the queue comprised a middle-aged man in a business suit and a teenage girl with a pasty complexion who looked as if she’d been crying. I too had packed sandwiches for the journey, together with Ewa Chaplin’s famous stories. The book had not been easy to come by. When I asked for assistance at my local bookshop, the bookseller scrolled silently down his computer screen for ten minutes then informed me that the volume I was after was an American publication. “A new translation,” he added. “It’ll take six weeks for us to get hold of it. At least.” Whether that last was meant as an apology or as a disincentive I couldn’t be sure. I told him I was in no hurry, that I was happy to pay a deposit if that was what was required.

  In the event the book arrived in slightly under a month, an attractive paperback whose cover illustration happened to feature – a coincidence, I’m sure – a reproduction of Corot’s subtle and nostalgic painting, Girl wi
th a Doll.

  What was I to make of these stories? The title of the collection was Nine Modern Fairy Tales, yet a cursory glance through its pages gave me no clues. I skimmed the introduction and the short essay on the translator, Erwin Blacher, who had apparently once shared a breakfast table with Ewa Chaplin during a symposium on European folklore, but the truth was, I was still far less interested in Chaplin herself than in what she meant to Bramber. As the coach headed out of London I found myself unable to concentrate on the book and in the end I returned it to my travel bag.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD ORIGINALLY PLANNED to pass through Reading without stopping, but a week before the start of my journey I changed my mind. I had not been in the town since my schooldays and I was curious to see how it had changed. As a boy, I had thought of Reading very much as the big city, a dour and vaguely frightening place that, even though it lay less than half an hour away by car, I seldom visited and only ever in the company of my parents. My clearest recollections of the town were tied up with the old-fashioned gentleman’s outfitters where my father bought his suits, and a Polish delicatessen that sold chewy dark sourdough bread and chocolate-covered pretzels. Staring through the window at the tangle of roundabouts and industrial estates that rolled in tidal waves against the town’s ruddy Victorian defenses it occurred to me that the Reading of my boyhood was almost certainly gone, obliterated in the tide of development like so many other places. I had been foolish to think of coming here. Too late now.

  I had booked into one of the faceless corporate hotels opposite the station, a decision that now seemed as inappropriate as stopping off in the town to begin with and mitigated only by the knowledge that it would be for just the one night. My room was on the second floor – two dozen identical doorways leading off a grubby magnolia corridor floored with brown corduroy. I deposited my holdall on the fold-out luggage rack then headed outside.

  The town, as I had feared, seemed completely alien, and if someone had told me that it was not, after all, the place I had once known but some peculiar counterfeit I would not have been surprised. I spent what seemed like hours roaming the streets around the center in a fruitless search for the Polish delicatessen, before admitting defeat and stumbling into an Italian restaurant on one of the side roads off Friar Street. I felt dispirited and footsore but the restaurant’s warmth and soft lighting had a revivifying effect and when the food arrived I began to feel better. I took my time over the wine and even ordered myself a brandy to round off the meal. It felt late to me, though when I returned to my room at the hotel I discovered it was not yet nine o’clock. I made coffee in the white plastic kettle and switched on the TV. The news came on and then a film, a noisy drama set at the time of the Vietnam War that I kept watching more to pass the time than from genuine interest. The film finished and I went to bed. I switched off the light, but the persistent traffic sounds outside, coupled with my own circling thoughts, made it impossible for me to sleep. I decided I would read instead, the first of Ewa Chaplin’s Nine Modern Fairy Tales. The story was strange – something about a young theater actress who decides to murder her husband – but it held my interest. I was even beguiled, a little.

  I closed the book and put out the light again. This time I slept soundly in spite of the street noise. It was as if the hotel and the town outside belonged to two different worlds.

  THE DUCHESS

  by Ewa Chaplin

  translated from the Polish by Erwin Blacher 2008

  You’re Nelly Toye,” said the dwarf. “I saw your Duchess of Malfi.”

  Nelly’s thoughts were so far away she hadn’t noticed the beggar in his soiled overcoat, had almost stumbled over him in fact. He was huddled against a ventilation grating – for warmth, she supposed. The heat of Süssmayr’s ovens rose steadily from the bakery’s basement sixteen hours a day. Süssmayr’s Pâtisserie, who had continued producing their magical confections even in the depths of wartime, had defined the ambience of this part of town for as long as Nelly could remember, yet the familiar, sweet aromas of baking dough and butter icing and caramelized sugar seemed unpalatable suddenly, almost noxious. Her stomach rolled.

  How can he bear the torture? she thought. He’s like the beggar at the feast. She glanced down at the man on the pavement and then quickly away again. For a second she almost believed it was Adrian she was looking at, her beloved older brother Adrian, who had perished in the mud of Paschendaele. She shook her head, feeling the warmth of a blush staining her cheeks. How could she have imagined such a thing? The man in the street wasn’t a dwarf either, she could see that now, he was an injured soldier. Both his legs had been amputated above the knee, the wooden trolley he used to propel himself about the city serving also as a repository for his worldly goods. Like so many who had returned from the war with their minds as well as their bodies blasted to wreckage, he was clearly destitute. Nelly’s husband Mason had frequently expressed the opinion that this new influx of beggars and social deviants should be cleared from the city. One couldn’t feed them all, he maintained angrily. The state should do something. Didn’t he pay his taxes, after all?

  This man with her brother’s eyes, though. What was that he had said about seeing the play? That could not be true, surely – yet he had spoken her name. All at once this seemed to Nelly like a bad omen, like in the scene at the beginning of Anna Karenina, where Anna sees the little peasant, hammering away at a stanchion at the side of the railway line. Seconds later a station guard falls onto the track and is killed. Anna sees the dwarfish peasant again at the end of the book, just moments before she throws herself under the train.

  Nelly pulled her fur stole more closely about her shoulders then fumbled in her pocket for a coin. She dropped the coin into the tin plate at the beggar’s missing feet. She remembered how in Tolstoy’s novel Vronsky gives the stationmaster money for the dead guard’s family. Nelly’s friend Cecily argued that his gesture meant nothing, that it was a ploy to gain the approval of the woman he was about to seduce. To Nelly now it seemed more like the kind of bargain people in operas strike with the devil: an attempt to buy off a fate that will ultimately lead to the destruction of all they hold dear.

  As she hurried off down the street, almost tripping on the cobblestones in her eagerness to be away, Nelly found she could still feel the soldier’s eyes burning into her back. Later that morning, when Konrad Binewski first showed her the painting of the duchess, she tried to tell herself that the incident with the beggar had nothing to do with it, that it had nothing to do with anything. In all likelihood this was true. Yet it is equally true that if Nelly had not encountered the soldier, she would not have been thinking about him, and so would not have made a point of altering her route to walk past Süssmayr’s three days later. This is where our story truly begins.

  No doubt there will be others among you who insist that without this first meeting, there would have been no second meeting. I’m not of the mind to argue, either way. Theater people are terrible about omens though, have you noticed? Those plays whose titles they won’t repeat, those phrases they don’t dare to utter before a performance? You could say that Nelly Toye was the victim not of omens so much as the tradition she embodied.

  * * *

  —

  Konrad Binewski was getting old. Nelly had known Konni all her life. He had been a friend of her father’s since they were first at university together in the 1860s, which made him seventy years old at least. Frightening, if you thought about it, which Nelly tried not to. She kept her eyes on him as he moved about the shop, the way he staggered, ever so slightly, each time he put down his right foot. Arthritis of the knee, he had told her, and as Nelly reassured herself, no one ever died of arthritis.

  Losing Konni would be like losing her father all over again. The shop itself, with its sun-flecked interior, was like a portal into the past: her father and Konni drinking Schnapps together in the back room after hours, the bois
terous political discussions that occasionally degenerated into a full-blown shouting match. Konni’s wife, Lizaveta, yelling down the stairs that supper was ready, God damn it, ready, so would the both of them just shut up and come upstairs?

  Liza had been a playwright, and often unwell. Nelly believed it had been the combination of these two aspects, their shaded glamour, that first kindled her own enthusiasm for the stage. The idea that Liza might truly be mad – mad as Ophelia, mad as Lucia – seized her youthful imagination with a romantic zeal. When Liza was well, she attended theater premieres with the actors she wrote for, penned excoriating anarchist diatribes in the radical press. When Liza was sick, she became a deadening, attic-dwelling presence, whom no one but her husband was permitted to see.

  Nelly was fifteen when Liza committed suicide – an overdose of morphine, it was whispered, though Nelly and Adrian were told simply that she died in her sleep. It was only then that Nelly began to grasp how much, in reality, Liza had suffered, how she had been crippled by the depression that finally killed her as surely as the typhus that killed her schoolfriend Käthe in the first year of the war.

  Nelly’s father and Konni had become close as brothers again after Liza killed herself. Konni and Liza had had no children, and now that Adrian and her father were dead too it was just Nelly and Konni, leftovers from a life that was gone for good.