The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  There was a woman in the saloon bar, loading empty glasses on to a tray.

  “I was planning to close for the afternoon,” she said. “Seeing as we’re so quiet.”

  She was wearing a sleeveless cotton print dress, revealing plump white forearms sprinkled with freckles. Her voice had a soft lilt to it that I presumed must be the local accent. Red curls clustered about her forehead and temples. She reminded me – immediately and irrevocably – of Angela Madden.

  “I’m not here for the beer,” I said, and smiled. “Not yet, anyway.”

  She stared back at me with confusion. Then she spotted my holdall and clarity dawned.

  “Oh, you’re Mr. Garvie,” she said. “You called about the room.” The realization seemed to fill her with dizzy relief. She set the tray of glasses aside on the bar and came towards me, smoothing her hands across the skirt of her dress. Her movements were unhurried and graceful, so much like Angela’s. I wanted desperately to ask the woman her name, but decided that in view of our earlier misunderstanding that would probably be a mistake.

  She showed me out of the bar and into a narrow, windowless hallway and then up a flight of stairs. At the top there was a small square landing, three doors leading off.

  “Front or back, it’s up to you,” she said. “We’ve no other guests at the moment.”

  I went for the door on the left, if for no other reason than to avoid pushing past her in the confined space. I wondered where she slept herself, and supposed there must be a private set of rooms to the rear of the bar.

  “I’m just downstairs if you need anything,” she said. “Food starts at six.” She handed me a set of keys then disappeared.

  The room I had chosen turned out to be at the front, overlooking the street. On the opposite side of the road I could see the post office and a newsagent’s. A little further along there was what looked like a greengrocery, with crates of fruit and vegetables set up outside. Three women stood together outside the post office but otherwise the street was empty. The village seemed not so much sleepy as dead. Coastage’s described Wade as a bustling, vibrant community with a weekly farmers’ market. I knew the book was some years out of date, but even so it was difficult to understand how a place could change so dramatically in so short a time.

  My room was pleasantly cool, but the hours spent cooped up inside the coach had left me with a longing to be outside. The pub was so quiet that even though I’d been speaking to the landlady less than ten minutes earlier I could not escape the feeling of being alone in an empty house. The sensation unnerved me, for some reason. I used the bathroom across the hall then went back downstairs.

  Outside, the women in front of the post office had dispersed. The sun stood high in a sky bereft of clouds. I realized then that I was hungry – I had not eaten since leaving Reading. I walked along the street to the greengrocer’s, selected two apples from the display outside then went into the shop, where alongside the fruit and vegetables I discovered a small stock of basic grocery items. I chose a carton of Ritz crackers and took them up to the counter with the apples.

  “Beautiful day,” said the man behind the counter. He slipped my purchases into a bag.

  “It’s a beautiful part of the world,” I said. I passed him a five-pound note.

  “Certainly suits me.” He was a big man, with tanned muscular forearms and iron-gray shoulder-length hair. He had a London accent, and I couldn’t help wondering what had brought him to Wade. In spite of what I had said to him, I was already beginning to dislike the place. It seemed isolated and insular, a long way from anywhere. I felt I had been lured here under false pretenses. What I proposed to do with myself for three days I had no idea.

  At its far end, what passed for the high street narrowed and divided. I took the right-hand fork, passing alongside a terrace of red-brick cottages and fully expecting the village to come to an end. Instead, I found that one street led to another and then to a third. I saw more of the red-brick terraces, but there were also more substantial properties, double-fronted whitewashed cottages, detached Victorian villas behind tall green hedges. The deeper I penetrated into it the more of Wade there seemed to be, the village expanding ahead of me like an endless, self-replicating mirage.

  I walked for more than an hour. I polished off the two apples and then started eating the crackers straight from the box. Their saltiness made me thirsty and I cursed myself for not buying a bottle of water to go with them. I looked around, hoping to spy another corner store or pub but there were just more houses. The interlinking streets were curiously similar and I even began to wonder if I’d been walking in circles. At the junction of two identical terraces I came upon an off-license, a tiny branch of Thresher’s, but it was closed. A little further on there was a hairdresser’s called Betty’s. There were pictures in the windows, black-and-white photographs of models showing off hairstyles from the 1950s. From somewhere in the depths of the building came the monotonous drone of a hairdryer.

  I saw people from time to time, but none of them spoke to me. As I passed the access lane between two tall houses, a gate suddenly flew open and a woman came dashing out. She wore a full-skirted white linen dress with a shiny pink belt at the waist. She was young and strikingly pretty. Her high heels rattled on the cobblestones.

  “Gordon!” she cried, and again, “Gordon!” though there was no one else in sight. The weather was too hot for running, yet she ran nonetheless, passing close in front of me as if I were invisible. I continued along the street. After a minute or two I came upon an elderly gentleman, bending over a stem of ragwort that had managed to worm its way upwards through a crack in the pavement. He looked me straight in the eye but didn’t speak.

  At that point, my sense of adventure evaporated completely. I felt sweaty and exhausted, desperate to get back to my room at the Bluebell, to dump my shoes on the floor and lie down on the bed. I began to retrace my steps and after about ten minutes I found myself back outside the hairdresser’s. Approaching from the opposite direction I noticed things I hadn’t seen the first time: the gated entrance to a children’s playground and, opposite the off-license, exactly that kind of junk shop I could never resist, its crowded windows and darkened interior acting as a powerful magnet to draw me inside.

  The shop was called Magpie’s. There was a row of mismatched wooden chairs outside, like rejects from a dentist’s waiting room. I found it mysterious that I had somehow failed to see them when I passed by before. The dusty window framed all the usual items of bric-à-brac: fringed lampshades and china teapots, chipped willow pattern plates and a brass Art Deco lamp stand in the form of a cobra. A fake, probably. There was no one behind the counter. A door at the rear of the shop offered a glimpse of pale-blue walls and red terracotta tiles. A radio played Mozart. I heard the chink of a spoon against the rim of a cup.

  I wandered contentedly among the white elephants, my feelings of disquiet dispersing amidst the familiar and comforting odor of secondhand books. I was not intending to buy anything as I did not want to add to my luggage but one glimpse of the doll – she’d been dumped in a tea chest, together with what must have been a hundred assorted napkin rings and three mismatched sets of pearl-handled cutlery – and my resolve was thwarted instantly. She had been dressed in a bright green baby’s romper suit – well-worn and bobbly and quite hideous – but I recognized her at once as a Bedingfield, a 1909 “Laura Louise.” Her long chestnut hair had been twisted into dreadlocks and one of her eyes was missing but when I lifted her I heard it rattling inside her head. Otherwise she seemed undamaged. I was just starting to unbutton the romper suit so I could examine her more carefully when I heard someone come through the door at the rear of the shop.

  “I’ve not seen that in ages. I thought it had been sold.”

  A woman’s voice. I turned to face her, and in a brief moment of utter confusion I thought it was the pub landlady I was seeing, the woman from the Bluebe
ll who looked like Angela. Then I realized this woman was older, and thinner. The resemblance was remarkable, all the same.

  “My husband picked that up at some auction,” she was saying. “Part of a job lot, it was. Shame about the eye.”

  “The eye can be mended,” I said, before I could stop myself. Even an amateur would understand that a damaged piece is a piece that can be bought more cheaply, especially when the seller has no idea of its real value. I knew these things – I had been reading books on auction-craft since the age of twelve – but in the case of “Laura Louise” the knowledge was useless to me. Any dealer with even a modicum of experience can smell desire. If this woman was any good at her job, she would know I had already decided to buy the doll, even at a price that would make other, less impetuous collectors walk away from it in disgust.

  “Is that right?” the woman said. “It’s like anything, I suppose – easy if you know how.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was easy,” I said, in a pathetic attempt to regain some ground. I would have to unstitch her head from her body to get at the eye. It was unlikely that I would be able to save her hair – it was too badly matted – and without her original clothes she would never be worth much anyway. I couldn’t leave her, though, could I? It was out of the question.

  “How much is she?” I asked.

  “Ten pounds?” the woman said. She laid her head on one side, a blackbird eyeing a worm. I went away with the doll wrapped in a double sheet of newspaper, thinking that ten pounds was probably the most anyone had paid for anything in Magpie’s, ever.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME I arrived back at the Bluebell, the evening was coming on and the heat had subsided. The landlady had just come outside to put out the food board. She asked me if I’d had a pleasant afternoon and I said yes.

  “Food’s just started serving if you’d like a bit of supper?” Her hair had been loosely plaited, then fastened to the back of her head with a tortoiseshell comb.

  “I’ll be down in ten minutes,” I said. “I just want to wash my hands.” I also wanted to phone Clarence. I couldn’t get a phone signal from my room, an inconvenience that seemed altogether typical of a place like Wade. Luckily there was a payphone, tucked away in a small vestibule between the bar and the public toilets. Clarence answered almost immediately.

  “Are you having a good time?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said, then told her about the Bedingfield.

  “You’re supposed to be on holiday, not snooping around for finds.”

  I could hear Jane in the background, practicing the piano. There was a focus, an intensity to her playing that was unusual in a child of ten, disconcerting even, but then Jane communicates much more easily through music than she does through speech. For those who don’t know her, Jane can come across as backward in her intellectual development, though she is anything but.

  “You know me,” I said to Clarence. “I’m a workaholic. Did Lucan get back from Rome?”

  “He missed his flight.” Clarence sighed. “There aren’t any seats until tomorrow afternoon.”

  Lucan once telephoned me out of the blue and asked me to go for a drink with him. We met in a bar close to Mansion House tube, which was near where he worked. It was summer, one of those sweltering London evenings where it seems as if the light will never quite fade from the sky. Lucan became rapidly drunk – the heat, probably. He told me he was jealous of Jane.

  “I suppose that’s natural. She does need a lot of attention,” I said. I felt uncomfortable, being there alone with him. I found myself staring at the long, silvery hairs on the backs of his hands, the circles of sweat staining the underarms of his handmade Italian shirt.

  “It’s not that so much. Or at least I don’t think so. It’s just that she seems so sure of herself. So sure of who she is, I mean. It’s as if no one else exists, apart from her.” He mopped sweat from his forehead. “Ignore me. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Jane resembled Lucan in every way, except that Lucan was beautiful and Jane was not. Her face was flat and pale, and when she played the piano a deep furrow of concentration appeared between her eyes. I sometimes wondered if it was the plainness of Jane’s features that made people suppose she had learning difficulties.

  Clarence didn’t invite people round much in the evenings because Jane tended to be nervous around strangers. Lucan spent a lot of time abroad. I suppose he had affairs. Clarence never talked about it and I didn’t ask. I felt guilty, I suppose, not just because Lucan had confided in me but because I had agreed to meet up with him without Clarence knowing. Some secrets feel harmful, even when from the outside there’s nothing to them.

  “Jane’s sounding wonderful,” I said.

  “She’s had a good day today. She’s been working on her Beethoven.” Clarence sighed again. She sounded tired, as she invariably did during the school holidays. I began asking her about the exhibition of studio ceramics she was helping to organize at a new gallery space in Camberwell but the pips went before she could answer.

  “I’m about to be cut off,” I said. “I’ve run out of coins. I’ll ring again when I get to Exeter.” I put the phone down before she had the chance to ask if she could call me back. Clarence and I talked most days when Lucan was away but I had found our conversation that evening to be an unwelcome distraction. I went through to the saloon and seated myself at a table beside the open window. I caught the high, sweet smell of straw bales and beneath that the coarser, darker odor of manure. London seemed light-years away and I was glad.

  Several of the other tables were already occupied, mostly by couples. Three men – obviously regulars – were stood at the bar. One of them seemed familiar and after a moment I recognized him as the shopkeeper who had sold me the apples and crackers earlier in the afternoon. The man beside him was ribbing the landlady, trying to persuade her to let him have a pint on tick.

  “Go on, Marian, be a sport.” He had brawny sunburned forearms and a florid complexion.

  “Sport’s one thing, fool’s another,” she said. She turned pointedly away towards the shopkeeper. “Pint is it, Geoff?”

  Her name was Marian, then, not Angela. I felt obscurely relieved. I went up to the bar to look at the specials board. When Marian had finished dealing with the shopkeeper I ordered the chicken curry and a half of lager.

  “I hear you met my sister,” Marian said, scribbling my food order on the back of a napkin. “Lisa said you were interested in antiques. Dolls or something, she said.”

  “That’s right.” So they were sisters, which at least explained the likeness between them, though how Marian could already know of my visit to the junk shop was more of a puzzle. Some sort of village bush telegraph? The idea was slightly less unnerving than the thought that the sister – Lisa – had considered my presence interesting enough to move her to pick up the telephone the moment I left. “I enjoy old things, that’s all.”

  “We’ve plenty of old things around here, that’s for sure.” She stole a glance at the red-faced man who had managed to inveigle his way onto someone else’s table. “Thanks,” she added, as I handed her a ten-pound note. “Take a seat and I’ll bring it over.”

  One of the locals wolf-whistled. I pretended not to notice, the strategy I have always adopted when confronted by ignorance. I fumbled my wallet back into my pocket and returned to my table. I had hoped to exchange a few pleasantries with the shopkeeper but he had gone to sit with someone else, a woman in a red dress. His wife, probably.

  The curry, when it came, was bland but satisfying, a typical pub curry. I sipped at my beer, listening to the ebb and flow of conversation around me and wishing I had thought to bring something to read. I felt as conspicuous here in the saloon bar as I had done wandering the streets of Wade, and I thought about how much like families small communities are: not hostile necessarily but insular, in the way that
all small groups of people who know each other too well are insular. A gang of office workers in the busiest city can be as closed to outsiders as the most isolated rural outpost – I knew that from my days at Clark Cannings.

  The only way to become accepted in a place like Wade would be to marry in. Or else to make oneself amenable and curb one’s opinions. Hardly an attractive prospect, either way.

  I finished my food and returned to my room, cursing myself once again for having stranded myself in the village for another two nights. I felt unbearably restless, almost ready to head out into the streets once again. I told myself that would be foolish – there was nowhere for me to head to, after all – and decided to cheer myself up by writing a letter to Bramber instead. Bramber had once told me she enjoyed the way I described things, and although I had never considered myself anything of a prose stylist the idea that I was giving her pleasure spurred me on. I told her about the junk shop, Magpie’s, recalling its interior and contents in some detail. I explained how I had discovered the Bedingfield – the tea chest stuffed with old cutlery, the green romper suit – and then gave an outline explanation of how I would repair her.

  I made no mention of where I was. I was allowing Bramber to believe, I suppose, that I was off on one of my jaunts to the furthest reaches of London, the autonomous suburbs and end-of-tube-lines where the postcodes started to blur and the tidy hedges and tarmacked driveways of middle England began to set in. Such trips had remained a part of my life even after Ursula’s vanishment. Bramber was accustomed to me telling her about them, even if I had never told her about Ursula.

  I wondered if she would notice the Warminster postmark. The thought of her noticing made my stomach flutter. We would be conspirators then, two people sharing a secret without having to name it. I sealed the letter inside its envelope and got ready for bed. It was past eleven by then, and the pub was deathly quiet again. I supposed there was a limit to the time you would want to spend in the company of neighbors you were bound to run into again the following day, and the day after that.