The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  I turned out the light, imagining Bramber lying asleep two hundred miles to the west of me. Did she dream? I wondered. Did she ever dream of me?

  I think it was in that moment that I truly understood the purpose of my journey: not simply to see Bramber and to speak with her, but to save her. I intended to take her away from West Edge House, and bring her home with me to London.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE AFTERNOON OF the following day I had nothing to do. I thought I might pay a second visit to Magpie’s, but in spite of wandering around the streets for the better part of an hour I was unable to find the shop again and in the end I gave up. I returned to the high street, then followed the lane that ran behind the pub until I came to open fields. I walked until I was completely out of sight of the village then lay down in the grass. The sun was high – hotter than the day before, even – and the constant whirring of crickets was almost hypnotic. The earth smelled dusty and yellow. A five-spot ladybird hurried in and out between the grass stems. I’m nowhere, I remember thinking. Then I fell asleep.

  I awoke several hours later to find my right arm reddened from sunburn and my head spinning from the heat. I staggered back to the Bluebell, feeling nauseous and hoping that the pub landlady – Marian – would not be around to catch me in such a disheveled state. Upstairs in my room I filled the hand basin with cold water and did my best to cool my burning head and arms. I applied some skin lotion and put on a clean shirt. Then I went in search of Marian. I told her I’d been recalled to London on a personal matter and would be leaving sooner than I had expected. The next day, in fact.

  “I’ll pay for the extra night, of course,” I added quickly.

  “Not to worry,” she said. She smiled, as if in closet understanding of my situation. “We’re never that busy anyway, not as a guest house. It’s the pub that pays the bills.” Each time she moved I caught the scent of her, the tart aroma of aniseed or some other herb, exacerbated by the heat. She still reminded me of Angela, though not so forcibly, and I wondered why the likeness had so unsettled me.

  As I turned to go back upstairs she spoke again. “You’re not really a dwarf at all, are you? You’re a nice-looking man, only small.”

  “I suppose it depends on what you think dwarf means,” I replied. “I don’t often think about it.”

  “I’m sorry if I was rude,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Did you know you’ve got beautiful hands?”

  “Do you think so?” I said. “Thank you.” I looked down at her own hands, plump and daintily freckled, the gold wedding band on her ring finger. I wondered how long she had been married, and whether her husband was an incomer like the greengrocer or a local like the man with the red face who had tried to cadge a free pint. My own hands had remained smooth and ringless, almost unchanged from when I was a child. I wondered what it might be like to touch this woman – Marian – as I had never been given the chance to touch Angela Madden.

  There are more than two hundred varieties of dwarfism. I know, because I looked up “dwarf” in an encyclopaedia when I was eight. If I were to be classified as anything, it would be as a proportionate dwarf, what used to be called a midget. Still was, frequently and with gusto, when I was at school. The mutation is completely random, and brings neither the foreshortened limbs nor the associated spinal abnormalities that are common among achondroplasics. If I were a couple of inches taller I wouldn’t even qualify as a dwarf, I would just be a shortarse, the way the kids at Martens noisily insisted. I’ve never actively sought out other small people – as a child I’m not sure I even knew there was such a thing – but when I encounter them, however rarely, in books or films I experience a flicker of – what? – fellow-feeling, especially more recently.

  We cannot change the world but we can be in it. We can exist, at least. There – I said “we.” I think that’s a first.

  * * *

  —

  I CAUGHT THE BUS from outside the post office at ten o’clock the following morning. It took the left-hand fork at the end of the high street, following a road that ran uphill through a modern housing estate, a part of town that, throughout my various explorations, I had still not come across.

  As we reached the outskirts of the village and turned on to the broader, more evenly surfaced A-road that led to the dual carriageway I felt in my holdall for Chaplin’s Nine Modern Fairytales. I found I was eager to while away the journey time with another story.

  AMBER FURNESS

  by Ewa Chaplin

  translated from the Polish by Erwin Blacher 2008

  The brooch was shaped like a beetle, a golden cockchafer with fringed antennae and a long, tapering carapace. The beetle’s wing cases were slightly parted, revealing the lacy silver folds of the wings beneath. Their roughened, filigree edges caught at the light.

  The brooch would be beyond her means, Amber knew – the shops in this part of the city were mostly of the kind that discouraged casual browsing. Still, the piece compelled her, not only because it was beautiful but because she believed she recognized it as the work of Danka Olssen, a recently elected member of the Guild of Goldsmiths who took her inspiration from the natural world. Amber had written on Olssen as part of her higher study portfolio at the College of Art.

  She pushed open the part-glazed door and stepped inside.

  The shop was poky and dark, and smelled faintly of tobacco. A strange sound filled the air, a constant, restless murmur that after a moment’s confusion Amber recognized as the diligent, measured ticking of many clocks. The shop was full of them: mantel clocks and carriage clocks, silver half-hunter watches on looping chains. There were grandfather clocks and grandmother clocks, their polished walnut cases inlaid with fine marquetry, and in a glassed-off alcove to the right of the door there were more than a dozen skeleton clocks, their delicate workings protected beneath crystal domes.

  Every clock in the room showed a different time and it was the clocks that predominated. Amber had expected to see more jewelry, more precious artefacts, but there were none, just the tray of brooches and rings that had drawn her inside.

  Behind the counter sat the shopkeeper, a man with a large, well-modeled head and shoulder-length gray hair. He wore a dark suit, with a paisley-patterned waistcoat beneath the jacket. The stool he sat on was high, like a bar stool, and as Amber stared at him she realized with a jolt that his feet, in their polished brogues, were way off the ground.

  He’s a dwarf, she thought. Well, so what?

  “Can I help you at all?” he said. His voice was deep, chestnut-colored, pleasant to listen to, and his wire-rimmed, owlish glasses reminded Amber of her old mathematics teacher in high school. The most extraordinary thing about him was his hands. There was a finesse about them, a dextrous delicacy that Amber found it hard to quantify. The hands of an artist, surely, or a musician.

  “You have a brooch in the window,” she said. Her voice caught in her throat. She swallowed. “I’d like to have a look at it, please.” She could feel herself blushing. She wondered if she should explain to him that there was no question of her buying the brooch, that all she wanted was to see it close to. She imagined his reaction: puzzlement, irritation, contempt even? But he was already leaning into the window casement, perched on a set of wooden steps that had previously been concealed behind the door. He lifted the tray of jewelry items carefully towards him.

  “Let’s see.” His fingertips were square, the nails beautifully cut and filed. They could have been a doll’s hands, they were so perfect, or a storefront mannequin’s. He placed the tray on the counter, his hands folding themselves together afterwards like the wings of a bird.

  “This is the one you meant, isn’t it?” he said, pointing to the golden beetle without the least hesitation. Amber would remember this later and find it strange.

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought it might be—”

  “By
Danka Olssen, yes. A beautiful example.” He unpinned the brooch from its velvet backing and levered it free. He laid it in his palm, contemplating it with what seemed a childlike pleasure. He’s like King Midas, Amber thought, though she could not have said exactly where the idea arose from.

  “Did you buy it at auction?” she asked.

  “A probate sale,” said the dwarf. His eyes behind the wire spectacles were rainwater gray.

  “I love Danka Olssen’s work,” Amber said. “I studied her in college.”

  “Are you a collector?”

  “Oh, no.” She laughed. “I can’t afford to be.” She blushed harder, embarrassed at how much of herself she had inadvertently revealed. Not just her poverty, but her studentship, which must surely point towards a lack of worldly experience. As she reached out to touch the brooch, her fingers brushed inadvertently against his wrist.

  “You are an artist yourself, then?” he said. If he had noticed the contact, he gave no sign of it. He gazed at Amber steadily with his rainwater eyes.

  “I’m hoping to be,” she said. Now he’ll look at my hands, she thought. It’s what everyone does, eventually. He didn’t though, and Amber felt a momentary rush of gratitude, of kinship even. She supposed the dwarf knew everything there was to know about being stared at. “I love your clocks,” she said. “They’re mesmerizing.”

  “I have always been in love with the idea of time.” He fell silent for a moment, gazing around the room. “It’s interesting, how it fascinates, is it not? The simple arrangement of numbers around a dial? Some people think it is their symmetry that makes timepieces so appealing but I have always believed it is because they are alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “I mean they have a function beyond being decorative. They do something. Having a clock in the room is almost like having company.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” Amber said. She thought of the first clock she had owned, a tiny gold-plated wristwatch given to her by her parents on her eighth birthday. On those nights when the pain in her joints was bad enough to keep her awake, she would lay the watch on the pillow close to her ear. Its ticking had comforted her, as had its luminous green hands, sweeping their way incessantly around the darkened dial. A secret compass that showed her the way down into sleep.

  “There is something else, too,” said the shopkeeper. “A clock is the only instrument specifically constructed for measuring a quantity that is intangible.”

  Amber laughed again. “What about radiation?” she said. “What about Geiger counters?”

  “The atoms of radioactive substances can be quantified. They’re simply not visible to the human eye. Not without an electron microscope, at any rate.”

  “I’ve never thought about time that way,” Amber said. “It makes me feel nervous.”

  “That’s because a world without clocks would not be a safe world. You would be surprised how quickly everything we have come to count on would fall apart.”

  “Do you make clocks as well as sell them?”

  “No,” he said. “I have never possessed the requisite creative talent, unfortunately. I’m good at mending them, though. I have been told I have the hands for it, but I believe it has more to do with instinct than with mere dexterity.”

  He looked down at his beautiful hands, as if the idea of their suitability for his chosen profession was still a surprise to him. “Is it arthritis?” he said suddenly. He gazed at her steadily and without embarrassment, never lowering his eyes from her face.

  “It began when I was five,” Amber said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore, though. The doctors say I’m in remission.”

  The fingers of her left hand were all but lifeless. She could use them to hold things down but that was all. The fingernails of her index and middle fingers were thickened and misshapen, like those of a very old man, the finger joints swollen and reddened in spite of the fact that the disease was not currently active. The fingers of her right hand were strong and agile, though the hand itself was twisted and slightly splayed. It looked as if someone had struck it with a hammer.

  “When I was a child, the pain in my joints used to keep me awake at night,” she said. “There were exercises I was supposed to do but they hurt so much and seemed so pointless I used to make things instead. The pain was still as bad but at least I had something to show for it.”

  He took her left hand in his, raising it gently towards him with his delicate fingers. Amber had a momentary vision of their two hands together, the perfect formation of his artful joints, her clumsy deformity. The touch of his hand had sympathy in it, and a practiced deftness, the touch of the hand of a man who mended clocks.

  “I would like to see some of your work,” he said. He wrapped the gold beetle in a twist of cotton wadding, then packed it neatly away inside a small cardboard box. He placed the carton on the counter in front of her.

  “Do you like music?” he said. “There is a concert in the Old Town next week that I would like very much to attend. Do you think you might do me the honor of accompanying me?”

  A bribe, Amber realized at once. My society, my attention, for the brooch. She had read of such things in fairy tales, but never in life, or at least never as they might be applicable to herself. Such unequal bargains never ended well, not in the stories anyway. But was this really so unequal? The man was clearly intelligent, and cultivated, and with a wealth of knowledge. He was also a dwarf, but again she thought, so what?

  The dwarf and the freak, she thought. Was there any wonder he felt himself drawn to her? But then she liked him, she had to admit, at least a little. An evening in his company would not hurt either of them.

  She reached for the box. “I would love to,” she said.

  “My name is Anders,” he said. “Anders Tessmond.” He told her he had bought the lease on the shop and the flat above just the year before.

  “What was the shop before you moved here, do you know?” Amber asked.

  “Can’t you guess?” said Anders Tessmond.

  “A tobacconist’s?”

  Tessmond nodded, and they both smiled.

  * * *

  —

  He was wearing a loosely tailored dark-gray smoking jacket, an exquisite diamond tie-pin in the shape of a rose. Amber couldn’t help noticing how well the jacket fitted him. As if it had been made for him personally, she thought, as she supposed it must have been.

  The first half of the concert featured a flute and piano duet. The flute player was tall, with long, heavy limbs, her white skin made to seem even whiter by her black velvet dress. The pianist had a bent, bony body, hunched over the keys, limbs akimbo like the legs of a gigantic insect. A cockroach perhaps, or a giant grasshopper. His fingers moved at a speed that seemed unnaturally fast.

  The music itself left Amber unmoved. She shifted in her seat and glanced around. Anders Tessmond, she saw, had his eyes closed. His lips were slightly pursed, as if he were sleeping. They were beautifully shaped, Amber noticed, with the color and texture of crushed pink silk.

  “I don’t care much for music,” Amber said in the interval. “I know nothing about it. I’m afraid I must be disappointing company.”

  They stood together at the crowded bar. The people around them chattered excitedly and she had to lean forward and slightly downward to hear what Tessmond was saying.

  “Music should be an experience you respond to naturally. Knowledge is no substitute for love.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. She looked down at him, pressing the stem of her champagne glass tightly between her fingers. Anders Tessmond knew about this music, she could tell. He would be able to explain it in exhaustive detail if only she asked. Yet he seemed unbothered by her ignorance, at ease with it even. She did not know if this made her feel better, or worse.

  For the second half of the program, the flute player was replaced by a huge, bear-
like man in a tuxedo. He had closely shaved red hair, just like his photograph in the program, which identified him as Olaf Scherer, from Copenhagen. He took the stage commandingly, like a giant in a fairy tale, then proceeded to sing a series of unintelligible songs in a booming baritone that made her head ache.

  The program provided a list of the songs, together with translations of their titles. One of the songs was called “The Dwarf.” Amber stole a glance at Anders Tessmond, wondering if he knew. Then she realized that he was bound to, that this was why he had brought her here.

  “It’s about a dwarf who murders a queen,” he told her, when the concert was over.

  “Why does he kill her?”

  “He is in love with her. He’s been in love with her for years, and believes she loves him, too. But then the queen announces that she is to marry a young knight of the realm. The dwarf goes mad with grief. He cannot bear the sight of her. He kills the queen and then himself. That’s the end.”

  “But surely,” Amber said, “he should have realized?”

  Anders Tessmond smiled. “What should he have realized, exactly? No one was closer to the queen than he was, no one knew her better. He had been her dearest companion since she was a child. She used to tell him everything. He had always believed her confidence meant love.” He raised his glass to his rose-colored lips. “Court dwarfs were very popular in Europe at one time. They appear in many famous paintings. Some even had their own servants. Others were fed in the kitchen, alongside the dogs.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Well, it’s odd, certainly. I have always considered it strange, not to say perverse, that the extent of a person’s humanity might somehow be determined by their height.”