by Nina Allan
It sounds fanciful to say it, I know, but I wasn’t in the least surprised to find it was a Chaplin.
The doll before me had not been on display when I visited Bad Homburg, I felt almost certain – she may have been on loan elsewhere – but I recognized her at once, not just from the photographs in Artur Zukerman’s portfolio but also – inescapably – from my reading of “Amber Furness” just a few hours before. She had long red hair and leaf-green eyes. Her black lace gloves were exquisitely fashioned, her plaid woolen cloak cunningly fastened with a golden pin-brooch in the shape of a beetle. A label at her feet identified her simply as “Artist,” and included the additional information that the companion-doll to “Artist,” “Philosopher,” was part of a private collection in Milan. The whereabouts of a third doll belonging to the set and known as “Magister” were currently unknown.
The artist, and the magician. The maiden, and the dwarf. Bramber had never suggested that we trade photographs, nor any written information pertaining to personal appearance. I could only surmise that her dislike of the telephone extended to a similar distrust of the camera, and all other recording devices, be they visual or auditory. I had not pressed her on this – to demand that she reveal herself would be to invite her to demand the same of me. What would she think of me then: her manikin, her magister, her dwarf?
I had embarked upon my journey westwards in the belief that the mutual trust and affection and – yes – love that had arisen between us would be enough to overcome all obstacles. But what if I were deluding myself? What if Bramber recoiled from me in disgust or, worse still, indifference? This was a fear I had never dared voice, not even to myself.
Chaplin’s “Artist” doll, in her haughty innocence, seemed now to chide me for my own foolishness and hubris, in ascribing to my mission even the slimmest chance of success.
And yet I did still have faith, in spite of everything. If “Artist” was a chastening reminder of my limitations, so was she also a talisman – a symbol of all Bramber and I had in common, and of my desire not only to be with her but to set her free.
The heavy yellow light of late afternoon suffused the room, coating it and its precious accoutrements in a layer of gold varnish. I reached forward, resting the outstretched tips of my fingers against the glass of “Artist’s” cabinet. “Artist” stared back at me in defiance, or was it collusion? It seemed that she was not scorning me so much as daring me: make it happen.
Our reverie was interrupted by the sound of footsteps: a bulky security guard, peering in through the open doorway. The thought police, “Artist” murmured, right on cue. I started back from the cabinet in guilty surprise.
“Good evening, sir,” said the guard. “Apologies if I startled you. Just a reminder that we’ll be closing in a couple of minutes.”
I glanced at my watch: almost five.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost track of the time. I’m just leaving.”
“Right you are, sir.”
He turned away from me and walked off along the first floor landing. By the time I crossed to where he’d been standing, he was out of sight.
West Edge House
Tarquin’s End
Bodmin
Cornwall
Dear Andrew,
I once asked Helen how old she was when she first realized she wanted to be an actor and she said she wasn’t sure.
“I remember back when we were living in Wimbledon I was in the school play of Alice in Wonderland. There were these three other girls all squabbling about who was going to play Alice but I always knew I wanted to be the Red Queen, so I could shout ‘off with their heads.’ ” She laughed. “You can do anything you like on stage and no one can stop you.”
A dreamy look came into her eyes, as if she were imagining what it would be like, to see her name up in lights on a theater hoarding or spread across a cinema screen. For a moment I felt so jealous. Not of her, but of how well she knew herself. I think a part of me was shocked, that she could own up to wanting something that much.
If people know you want something it makes it easier for them to take it away from you.
It made me think of my mother, sweeping up the broken glass, with her mouth in a line and saying Bramber, go to your room, don’t you have homework to do? Even though it was the Christmas holiday and there was no homework.
My mother wanted to be famous, like Helen did, and Ewa Chaplin’s mother. Serena had a brilliant career in front of her, everyone said so, but then she was caught in the fire and her plans turned to dust. In just a couple of minutes, her whole life was changed.
Serena was always disappointed that Ewa didn’t care about music the way she did. She left the family when Ewa was eight and went home to Berlin. It was Ewa’s father Jonas who insisted that Ewa leave Poland. He said it wasn’t safe for her, she was half-Jewish, she should go to London. He knew someone there – an old friend from his army days. Ewa stepped off a train at Victoria Station sometime in the autumn of 1938. Her only luggage was a small black suitcase, which contained some items of clothing and her story manuscripts, together with Jonas’s life savings in old gold zlotys. Jonas had coated the coins in oil to hide their shine.
The reason I’m in West Edge House is because I killed someone. Dr. Leslie says that’s not true, that I should stop thinking that, but he’s just being kind. Somebody is dead because of me, and that’s the same thing, really, isn’t it?
I know I should have told you sooner but I didn’t know how. If you don’t want to write to me anymore I’ll understand completely.
Your friend,
Bramber
7.
ILEARNED A LOT FROM Ursula, but she could not teach me everything. She knew about clothes, not dolls.
In the beginning, I attempted only the simplest kinds of patterns, rag dolls made entirely from cloth. As time passed I became more competent and more adventurous. I began examining the dolls I owned to find out how they were made. I was content at first to copy the masters. But in the end, like every artist, I aspired to the creation of work that was truly original.
Most dolls today are made exclusively from vinyl, but before the age of plastic and mass-production, dollmaking was an art. Dolls’ bodies were handmade, usually from calico or leather, although there are numerous examples – mainly in museums – of dolls made from wood or wax. Dolls’ heads, hands and feet were made from bisque porcelain. Such creatures had weight and substance. Even the least fanciful of children might hold one in their arms and dream it was real.
In time I came to know the premier suppliers – artisan workshops in Germany and Japan, where dolls’ heads and eyes and feet were manufactured to order. By the time I graduated from Woolfenden College I had completed a copy of a Gilbert Sweeney “Rose Marie” that was, with the exception of the age of the materials, all but indistinguishable from the original. Two years on from that, I was beginning to experiment with designs of my own.
Dolls were my life, but I never dreamed they would one day become my living. Clark Cannings specialized in running feasibility studies for fledgling businesses. I tabulated batteries of theoretical sales figures and calculated the potential for growth on a year-on-year basis. The work made use of techniques I had outlined as part of my final-year dissertation, with the significant advantage that I was now being paid. I turned out to be good at my job, and my usefulness to the firm was never in question. Any problems I encountered belonged, as usual, to the social sphere. From the beginning of my final year at Woolfenden onwards I had experienced a secret mounting anxiety at the prospect of returning to the outside world. If school had been bad, what would it be like working in an office?
For the first week or so, things were pretty much as I had expected. My father had worked for an old-fashioned firm of solicitors where, apart from the secretaries, all of the employees were men. Clark Cannings was very different. Most of the twenty staff wer
e under forty and more than half of them were women. The office was open-plan. People chatted to each other throughout the day and drank coffee and ate packed lunches at their desks. Several of the women were in great demand, the men competing constantly for their attention. The banter was for the most part good-natured but there was no escaping the scrutiny of others. It was a situation I was completely unused to coping with.
No open hostility was directed towards me, but I often heard the sound of smothered laughter when I entered the room. Stationery went missing from my desk. One afternoon I returned from my lunch break to find a cartoon cut-out of one of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs Sellotaped to my computer screen. I did my best to ignore these insults, focusing instead on the job in hand, which I enjoyed in the same way that some people enjoy solving crossword puzzles or playing chess. As for my work colleagues, I hoped that some new form of entertainment would eventually present itself, or that they would simply become bored with teasing me.
At least no one could accuse me of shirking. I finished assignments quickly, which rewarded my colleagues with considerable savings in both time and effort.
“You’re a right little eager beaver, aren’t you?” said my line manager, Jeremy Gordon, about a month into my time there. Jeremy was a cherub-faced, rather portly computer programmer in his early thirties who had recently become engaged to one of the other statisticians. He liked to style himself the office clown. I had asked him what might be the easiest way of altering one of my page setups. When he looked at my graph of results he seemed surprised.
“That moron Dominic would have taken twice as long to come up with this lot,” he said. “Which is why we had to have him fired.”
There was a general outburst of laughter, before one of the others explained that Dominic Siddons had been the operator who had occupied my desk immediately before me, and that he had not in fact been fired, but had left to open a wine bar in Spain.
The atmosphere around me had altered, nonetheless. From that day onward I was known as the Beaver.
I was never one of them, exactly, but I did rise to become a sort of office mascot. They still made fun of me from time to time, but with the difference that this was now done openly rather than behind my back. And for anyone outside the office, jokes about my stature were strictly verboten. Once, when our central heating system broke down, the contracted repair technician made the mistake of calling me a shortarse. There was no real malice in his comment, but coming from an outsider it sounded wrong. He had been with us for most of the day, flirting with the women and ribbing the men. He had an easygoing charm and a clever way with words but after the comment about my height he suddenly found himself working in near-silence.
“Idiot,” said Jeremy Gordon, once the man had left. “We won’t be using him again.”
I felt comfortable at Clark Cannings, because within a relatively short span of time I was allowed to become part of the furniture. No one ever questioned me about my life outside the office – I think most of them assumed I didn’t have one. It was Derek Coombs, one of the media reps, who stumbled upon my secret. He was rummaging in my desk looking for Sellotape, and happened to find a copy of Dolls and Dollmaking in one of the drawers. I was out of the room at the time, in the lavatory. I was gone for less than five minutes but by the time I returned to the office a small crowd had gathered.
“I’ve heard of picking on someone your own size, but this wins the race,” quipped Jeremy Gordon. “Trust the Beaver to like them young.”
Everyone laughed. Derek Coombs replaced the magazine on my desk with a guilty thump. I could see he was blushing.
“I make dolls, that’s all,” I said. “It’s sort of a hobby.”
My colleagues seemed to accept my explanation immediately, and with an air of relief. The cap fitted, as they say. Here at last was an explanation for what I was.
“He’s like Pinocchio,” said Tanya Blackstaff.
“Geppetto, you mean,” said Jeremy Gordon. “He would say that though, wouldn’t he?”
“These are really beautiful,” said Jacqueline Stephens, who worked as a PA to one of the bosses, Charlie Clark. She had picked up the magazine again, and was holding it open at a photograph of two dolls in the “Vagabond” series by Margo Cleverley. They wore soft velvet caps and embroidered smocks, their features – the Cleverley series were all one-off creations – were painted delicately in enamel and fired to a vitreous shine. Margo Cleverley had won awards for her enameling alone, which was artistry of a very high order. It interested me that Jacqueline, who had no specialist knowledge of dolls so far as I knew, had picked them out.
“I don’t do enamel work myself. Margo Cleverley has been in the field for twenty-five years. I could make their clothes though, or something like them.”
“My gran had a doll like that,” Jackie said. “Her name was Queenie.”
“It’s those dwarfish little fingers that do it,” said Jeremy. “Nimble with the needle as well as the brain.”
People had started to drift back to their desks. The incident seemed to be closed. Then Martin Finlay, a junior programmer, asked if I accepted commissions.
“It’s for my niece’s christening,” he added hastily. “I wanted to get her something different, you know, something really special.”
His inquiry threw me, I have to admit. I had never thought of selling my dolls, a fact that probably sounds unlikely now, given how things turned out, but that was true, nonetheless. I had made dolls for Ursula, and once, somewhat incongruously, I had given one to my father. To give a gift to someone I cared for and wanted to please was one thing. To hand over one of my beloved creations to strangers, for money, was quite another. Nevertheless, I liked Martin Finlay, who was working at Clark Cannings part-time while he studied for his doctorate. If we hadn’t both been so shy we might have been friends.
“What’s her name?” I asked him. “Your niece, I mean?”
“Genevieve,” Martin replied. “Genevieve Margaret Coxton. But everyone calls her Jennie.”
Jennie’s christening was only a month away, which didn’t leave me much time. I told Martin Finlay I’d think about it, then spent the remainder of the day and all that evening thinking of nothing else. By the time I went to bed that night, I’d made up my mind to accept his commission.
I was still making replicas really, rather than designing from scratch, and yet the doll I created for Jennie Coxton was more than just a copy. She was based on a Weathercoatts “Lucinda” but the finishing details and accompanying trousseau were entirely my own. Her feet, hands and face were a set I had recently ordered from a craft studio in Stuttgart – white bisque with just the merest hint of rose. Her gown was of an Empire design: high-waisted, with the underskirt falling an inch below the hem. I made it from a piece of heavy ivory silk that had once formed part of the skirt of an Edwardian wedding dress.
I named the doll Imogen, and became so addicted to working on her that I ended up completing her with a week to spare. I used the time that remained to create a second, identical gown in primrose yellow, with a lace-trimmed silk tote bag to store it in.
I handed the doll over to Martin on the Friday before the christening. Everyone gathered round to inspect my handiwork.
“I can’t believe you made this,” Martin said. He flushed bright red. “I mean, this is incredible.”
Jacqueline Stephens put out her arms for Imogen as if she were a baby.
“She reminds me of Queenie,” she said. “How can you bear to let her go?”
She lifted the doll high in the air. Imogen’s glass eyes flew open: cerulean crystal with a single swirl of indigo trapped at the center.
“Is she heavy?” said Tanya Blackstaff. “Can I feel?”
The women passed her between them, stroking her cheek, smoothing her gown. The men looked on in silence, but how they stared.
“I’ve heard of living out on
e’s fantasies,” mumbled Jeremy. “But this is ridiculous.”
“How much do I owe you?” asked Martin. Until that moment I had barely considered the matter. We settled on one hundred pounds, which covered the cost of the materials and with a little to spare. The price was ridiculously low, of course, but then I happen to think I owe Martin Finlay a great debt of gratitude. Clarence insists this is a misconception, that true talent will always find its expression in the end, that it is a question of when rather than if. But whatever the whys and wherefores, when I turned up at work the following Monday it was to find Martin Finlay waiting for me on the stairs.
“My aunt would like to order a doll,” he said. “And a friend of the vicar’s wife would like one, too.”
I netted four further orders over the next six months, all from people who happened to encounter Imogen, either at Jennie Coxton’s christening or afterwards, at the family home. I knew that something momentous had occurred when I received an order through the post from a Mrs. Phillippa Dale, of Dartford, Kent. I had no idea who she was or how she had learned of my existence, and when I asked Martin about her he didn’t know, either.
“Some friend of my sister’s, probably. Or a friend of a friend.” He glanced again at her letter, written on smooth headed notepaper that bore a trace of expensive scent. “Your stock seems to be going up, though – she’s offering three hundred pounds.”
Mrs. Dale explained that she needed the doll to be delivered in less than a month, and hoped the amount named would provide adequate recompense. Spurred on by her enthusiasm, I created for her a dark-haired baby doll named Annelise. To add to the sense of theater, I arranged to have her delivered by courier in a covered Moses basket.