The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  “I remember when Debenhams had its own haberdashery department,” Ursula said. “The one in Harrogate did, anyway. It’s gone now. Hardly anyone makes their own clothes these days. I think it’s a shame.”

  It was Ursula who first suggested I try making a doll. “You can start off using a pattern,” she said. “But once you get the hang of the basics you can design your own.”

  She found a book for me in the local library, Let’s Make Dolls. The book was filled with diagrams that had to be copied onto tracing paper for use as templates. Ursula showed me how to enlarge the diagrams by working to scale, then helped me pin them onto calico. The next stage was cutting out, after which the pattern pieces had to be pinned together in pairs, ready for stitching. My first doll took me six weeks to complete, including her clothes. She was a classic Raggedy Ann, with the traditional stripy stockings and woolen braids. Her dress was sprigged blue cotton with a white petticoat under. The petticoat was trimmed with broderie anglaise.

  As soon as she was finished I began making another, this time from a more complicated pattern. This new doll had long dark ringlets and Victorian silk pantaloons. As my experience increased, I began to enjoy even those parts of the process I had initially found tedious or overly time-consuming – the copying-out of the scale diagrams, for instance.

  Ursula told me I was a natural, but I have come to believe the term is meaningless, that it is simply a matter of discovering the thing that engages your attention to such an extent that the world acquires a new clarity in the light of it. The thing you sense in your bones that you were born to do.

  Ursula also showed me where to shop for materials. Some of the larger department stores still possessed haberdashery departments of some description, though these were not in the main half so interesting as those small, independent emporia that had been around for decades, surviving on local custom and pure stubbornness. Shops like these sold a more idiosyncratic selection of cloth, often at significantly reduced prices. I grew to love the interiors of these stores, dingy and chaotic but stocked from the owner’s unique taste and therefore filled with the promise, each time, of finding something extraordinary.

  There were also the vintage clothing boutiques and charity shops, and towards the end of each week Ursula and I would scour the local papers for announcements of jumble sales and church bazaars then head out by bus to school gymnasiums and village halls in obscure locations, returning in the evening with great armfuls of garments which we would cut up into usable squares of fabric, the variety of patterns and textures so thrilling to us it was like an addiction. And of course our haul of treasure cost us almost nothing.

  Under Ursula’s guidance I soon learned as much about fabric as I already knew about dolls. I learned to recognize the difference between natural fibers and synthetics, to estimate the strength of a weave, to notice how the colors in a piece of old velvet were richer and stronger than those in its modern, mass-produced equivalent. Ursula taught me how to unpick a garment and then cut it down. Some items yielded yards of usable material, others no more than a scrap, but if the cloth was beautiful or unusual enough the effort was worth it. I remember one piece from that time in particular, a child’s high-waisted dress with a large triangular burn-mark in the back of the skirt – clearly the result of an accident with an electric iron. The dress was made of silk, with glass buttons down the front of the bodice and on the cuffs. Ursula and I came across silk all the time, but this piece was special because of the color: a mauve so delicate it gave the impression of transparency.

  I kept the material for a long time before making use of it. In the end I turned it into a tunic for one of my troll dolls, a green-eyed girl named Livia with the face of a Karl Petersen shepherdess doll. She must have been dropped in her earlier life, because although her head was otherwise perfect, her right ear had been broken off, leaving a penny-sized, crater-shaped scar with the texture of compacted sand.

  Ursula was right in what she said about nobody making things. The art of creating objects by hand has been almost entirely superseded by mass production. Goods arrive in industrial quantities from village-sized factories, staffed by underpaid vassals in these nuclear-age reconstructions of the feudal state. Raw materials are harvested indiscriminately, torn from the earth with scant regard for the devastation such demand might place on the environments that produce them. Nottingham lace, Sheffield steel, Staffordshire pottery – they may as well be the names of long-extinct life forms in the Natural History Museum.

  This saddens and frustrates me, more than I can usefully express. When Karl Marx talked of workers becoming alienated from the fruits of their labors, I believe it was precisely this usurping of the necessary by the merely profitable that he had in mind.

  * * *

  —

  I BECAME AWARE ONLY gradually that I wanted to sleep with Ursula. I imagined removing her outer garments, wondering if she made her own underwear too or bought it from Marks & Spencer like everyone else. Above all I wanted to know what she would look like with her hair down. I lay in bed at night, stroking myself under the covers and thinking about how it might feel to work my fingers beneath the narrow elastic of whatever Ursula might be wearing beneath her exquisite jackets and shirts.

  These imaginings aroused me unbearably, but when I finally came, my climax was ground out in the guttering, distasteful light of memories of the acts I had performed, however unwillingly, with Wil. I found it difficult to reconcile the reticent, modest young woman who was my friend with the musk-scented, insatiable shadow who shared my bed. I could imagine the act in enough detail to drive me mad, but not what I might say to her afterwards, how our friendship might survive such a monstrous breach of privacy.

  I never spoke a word to her of what I was going through. I think now that I should have done, that if I had, I might have discovered she was harboring similar feelings for me. All the signs were there, I realize that now, although at the time I was terrified that if Ursula found out how I felt I would lose her forever. Whatever the theoretical outcome of such a confession is now irrelevant, though it could hardly have been more distressing than what eventually occurred.

  Ursula disappeared from my life so suddenly and so completely it took me years to accept the fact that she was gone. After we graduated, she sold her accountancy books and began taking private commissions for bespoke clothing. I went to live in a rented flat above a laundrette in Hammersmith and started work as a data analyst with a private consultancy firm called Clark Cannings. I would meet Ursula for a meal every Wednesday evening at a wine bar just off Covent Garden, and every other Saturday we went shopping. On one of these Saturdays she simply failed to turn up, and when I telephoned to check if I had the date wrong there was no reply. I tried again, thinking I must have misdialed, but there was still no answer.

  I phoned later that afternoon and evening, then twice every day for a week, letting the phone ring until the line cut out. The next time I tried there was no dial tone, just a click when I connected and a synthetic female voice telling me the number I was calling was unavailable. There was a light on in her flat sometimes, but no one ever came to the door. I sent her postcards and letters, some of them pleading with her to tell me what I had done wrong, others describing the minutiae of my life and my daily routine as if nothing had happened.

  I scanned the newspapers daily, both local and national, dreading the sight of her photograph because of what it might mean – woman murdered, woman abducted, woman urgently sought – and yet hoping for it against all hope, because at least then I would know.

  I even considered writing to her parents, then realized I didn’t have their address.

  Almost a year from the day of our last meeting, a new tenant moved into Ursula’s flat, a tall, Scandinavian-looking woman with short blond hair and a red Honda moped. I didn’t dare to approach her. For a while I continued to write, hoping that Ursula’s post would be sent on to her ne
w address but in the end I realized I had to stop. Sending the letters had been helpful at first. Now it was just painful.

  A long time afterwards – five years or more – I saw a doll I had made for Ursula sitting in the window of one of the scores of antique shops along the Portobello Road. She was a copy of a Schindler original. Her dress was dove gray and very plain but her petticoat, a mass of soft pleats, had been created from more than a dozen different fabrics and had taken me most of a week to sew together. I marched into the shop, declaring I’d buy the doll before I’d even asked how much it was.

  As soon as I got home I took off all her clothes and turned them inside out, examining the seams and pockets in the hope and almost certain expectation of finding something – a message, a code, anything – that would finally reveal Ursula’s whereabouts and what had happened to her, but there was nothing.

  I held the doll against my face and inhaled, hoping to catch a trace of Ursula’s scent. Ursula never wore perfume as such, but I had always noticed and liked the aroma of the toiletries she used: a herby, yellowish smell, like sundried gorse.

  The doll, whose name was Marnie, smelled faintly of chemicals, as if she and her clothes had recently been dry-cleaned. Every trace of Ursula’s scent had been removed. If I had not made her myself, I would have found myself doubting she was the same doll.

  I could not help feeling that this act of purging had been deliberate, a message that only Ursula and I would understand: our time together was over and somehow I must come to terms with living without her.

  West Edge House

  Tarquin’s End

  Bodmin

  Cornwall

  Dear Andrew,

  I recognized my father’s gift for mending things as a kind of miracle, a means of giving life back to the dead. I also saw how his work with machines gave him a fuller sense of who he was, a place in the world where he felt comfortable. My mother never seemed to feel comfortable anywhere, and if she came across something broken she threw it away.

  It was Mrs. Hubbard who first taught me to use a computer. Mrs. Hubbard was Dr. Leslie’s secretary when I first arrived here.

  “You’re too bright to be shut away in here,” she used to say to me. “You know that already though, don’t you? You’ll leave when you’re ready, I suppose.”

  Mrs. Hubbard was enormously fat. She wore vast tent dresses patterned with pagodas or windmills or oversized flowers, and puffed like a broken engine as she moved. She had a soft, moon-like face and tiny hands. Her nails were always perfectly manicured, painted with satin sheen nail varnish in an endless array of colors. Her first name was Meredith. She lived with her husband in one of the fishermen’s cottages on Salt Street, just down from the village shop.

  She died suddenly one day of a heart attack, on her way home from work. Dr. Leslie was rushed to the scene immediately but Mrs. Hubbard was dead by the time he got there.

  The nearest hospital is eight miles away, in Bodmin.

  “She was lying there blocking the pavement like a great beached whale,” said Sylvia Passmore, who happened to have stopped off at the village shop on her way home and so saw the whole thing. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but she was asking for it. She was well over twenty stone, you know. You can’t expect to carry on like that and get off scot-free.”

  She said that Meredith’s husband had wept openly in the street. “He was older than her by a mile, you know. Not that you’d know from looking at him. He’s good-looking in a way, or at least he would have been when he was younger. How the two of them got together, goodness knows. He’ll be married again before the year is out, you wait and see.”

  A couple of days after Meredith died, Dr. Leslie asked me if I would like to take over the computer. I thought Sylvia might be upset, but she said no, she didn’t have time, not with all the other things that had to get done around here. “Anyway, it’ll keep your brain from going soggy,” she said. “You can’t be too careful in a place like this.”

  It’s my job to type up Dr. Leslie’s records, and keep them properly filed. I do the accounts now as well – it’s not too difficult once you get the hang of it. Maths was never my best subject at school but Edwin once said to me that numbers are no more difficult to understand than words, once you learn their language. Edwin loved numbers, the same way my father loved machines.

  Edwin was never my boyfriend, not really. I don’t know what he was.

  A new patient arrived here last night. Dr. Leslie’s phone kept ringing, which was unusual for that time in the evening. Every time it went off, Sylvia went charging down the corridor to answer it. Sylvia hardly ever stays at West Edge House overnight. I once overheard her telling the postman she thought the house was haunted.

  The new patient finally arrived at around nine o’clock. I’d gone to my room by then, but when I heard the front doorbell go I came out on to the landing to see what was happening. There were a group of people clustered around the door – Dr. Leslie and Sylvia Passmore, the two night nurses, someone else I didn’t recognize but who must have arrived with the patient, a boy with long hair who kept hugging himself and laughing.

  I watched them for a while then went back to my room. A short while later they brought him upstairs. The room next to mine was empty, so they put him in there. I heard him crying through the wall, a strangled, gargling sound, as if he were fighting for breath. I could hear one of the night nurses murmuring to him, a constant, even sound, like running water. Eventually the crying stopped and I went to sleep.

  I didn’t see the new patient again until tea time today. I went along to the first-floor lounge to make some toast and found him sitting there on the sofa, next to Jackie. There was a cup of tea on the table in front of him but he hadn’t touched it.

  “This is Michael,” Jackie said. “Michael Round. I made him some tea but he says he only drinks Earl Grey.”

  “There might be some in the kitchen cupboard,” I said. “I’ll go and have a look.”

  Michael Round was wearing gray flannel trousers that were too big for him and a green cardigan. His hair kept falling in his eyes and for a moment I thought how like Edwin he looked but then I realized he didn’t at all, it was just the hair.

  There was an old packet of Earl Grey teabags in the larder – I think they belonged to Meredith Hubbard – but by the time I got back to the first-floor lounge, Michael Round was gone.

  “They’ve taken him away for questioning,” Jackie said gaily. She grinned. “They won’t get much out of him, though. He’s trau-ma-tized.”

  She spelled out the word deliberately, as if it were the answer to a quiz question, rolling the “r.”

  “Did he tell you why he’s here, Jackie?”

  “Of course he didn’t. Saw his daddy knocked down in the street, probably. How should I know?”

  I was telling you about Edwin. He was sixteen when I first met him. His family moved to Truro from Pangbourne, in Berkshire. I remember he started school three weeks into term, which doesn’t sound like much but where schoolkids are concerned, three weeks can be the difference between a new person settling in normally and being treated like a freak. It didn’t help that Edwin had also been kept down a year. People made up all kinds of strange reasons for this, mainly that he was retarded, or that he’d been brought up in a religious cult and hadn’t learned to read until he was ten. None of it was true, but it was still a whole week before anyone said so much as a word to him.

  He was six feet tall, and with his earnest expression and heavy spectacles he could easily have been mistaken for one of the teachers. He wore a navy-blue blazer over his school jumper and always had his tie done up to the top. Also, he never tried to hide the fact that he was clever. After only a couple of days the rumors about his being retarded became ridiculous – anyone could see how brainy he was – so they were replaced with new rumors about a mental institution.

&nbs
p; But what set Edwin apart most of all was that he honestly didn’t seem to care what anyone said about him. He responded politely when eventually he was spoken to but he didn’t try to get in with people, or attach himself to any particular group. At break time he would wander slowly around the playing fields, reading a book. At lunchtime he sat on his own. There were teachers who made a fuss of him – who called him a prodigy and whispered about him going to Oxford – but he didn’t appear to take much notice of them, either.

  I used to stand and watch him from the other side of the football field and wonder what he was thinking about. I didn’t approach him, though. I was afraid of looking an idiot or being told to get lost. If it hadn’t been for Helen being in the play, Edwin and I might never have spoken at all.

  * * *

  —

  I’m picking up where I left off but really this is two letters in one because I spent most of last week in bed with a cold and couldn’t get down to the post box. Every time I tried to stand up I felt dizzy. Even when I did manage to dress myself I kept falling asleep in my armchair. At one point I dreamed about my mother, yelling at me for leaving the back door open when the gas fire was on. The next day I received a postcard from my father, telling me he was planning to spend Christmas with a cousin of his, in Spain. The postcard had a photograph of a donkey on it – not a Spanish donkey with a straw hat but an English one, in a donkey sanctuary somewhere in Dorset. The postcard had a musty smell, as if it had been shut away in a drawer for ages, and when I looked at the postmark I saw it was dated ten years ago.