The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  “Do you think Jane is mad?” Lucan asked me as he left the pub. “No one uses that word these days, do they? No one’s allowed to.”

  “Jane’s not mad,” I said. “She’s different, that’s all. Special.”

  Just Jane, is what I should have said. I supposed Lucan would have heard the word “special” about a thousand times already. Enough times to make him sick and tired of it, anyway.

  West Edge House

  Tarquin’s End

  Bodmin

  Cornwall

  Dear Andrew,

  Thank you, so much, for everything you said to me in your last letter. I’m so glad we’ve become friends. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but when I put that advertisement in the magazine I never imagined that anyone would actually reply. It was like a dare I put on with myself, just to do something, something that would prove I didn’t always have to do what people expected. No one would expect me to do this, I thought. I told myself that if anyone ever found out – anyone from here, I mean – I could say it was for research. That’s why I said I wanted help with my work on Ewa Chaplin. But really I wanted to see if anything would happen.

  I think of my mother driving me out to those unknown houses and villages in the car, the way I would sometimes imagine what it might be like to wander off into the background of whatever place we ended up in and start a new life there. A different life, with different people and different thoughts. Writing to you does that to me. It makes me feel as if the world could turn into something else at any moment. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.

  Since getting to know you I have started to think again of how I might leave this life behind – of packing a bag and catching the bus and coming to London. I would arrive at your door and you would let me in and we would talk and talk until it got dark. We would set the world to rights, as my dad used to say.

  Maybe Dr. Leslie is right, though. I’m not well enough to travel. Even the thought of buying a ticket sends me into a panic.

  I used to believe that Helen and I would never be parted. I can see now that this was untrue, that someone like Helen would never really be friends with someone like me. It was as if I’d walked into someone else’s life by mistake and no one had remembered to throw me out yet. Helen didn’t care what I thought about things, she just liked talking to me, the same way Anne Frank liked talking to her friend Kitty when she wrote her diary. Because she knew that Kitty would always be interested in what she had to say.

  Kitty didn’t really exist though and neither did I.

  My mother was against my friendship with Helen right from the start. “These unequal friendships never last,” she said. “I know what I’m talking about, believe me. You’ll end up getting hurt.”

  I wasn’t sure what my mother meant by unequal, whether it was just that the Masons had more money than us or some other reason. The Masons lived in one of the large detached houses on Wimbush Hill. Helen’s father was an orthodontist. He sometimes dealt with emergency cases at the big new NHS hospital in Plymouth but most of his work was with his private patients at his clinic in Truro. He had an angular, elegant profile, a large fair head and a nose that reminded me of Robert Redford’s. The main time I used to see him was after school, when he would drive up outside in his Daimler to take Helen home.

  Mrs. Mason had beautifully shaped long legs and wide hazel eyes. She worked three days a week at a farm shop near Devoran but mostly she liked doing the garden. The first time I saw her she was down on her knees, weeding the flower beds in the Masons’ front garden. She had grass stains on her jeans, and yellow trainers.

  I found it difficult to imagine what kind of conversations the Mason family might have when they were alone together. It was true that Helen didn’t really talk to me when we were at school, but then she didn’t speak to anyone else much, either. She wasn’t particularly popular, with the rest of our classmates or with the teachers. She usually scraped by in exams but she never seemed to care much either way. Sometimes when a teacher asked her a question in class she would stare at them blankly and then shake her head, as if she’d just woken up. The only time she seemed fully present was in English class, when Mrs. Beasley made us take turns reading Shakespeare. Most people hated those classes, especially the boys – they reckoned reading aloud made them look like idiots.

  Helen was always the first to volunteer. I remember once when we were doing Othello, she recited the whole of Iago’s first act soliloquy from memory. Her voice sounded different, as if everything she had said up till that moment had been play-acting, and only this self – her Iago-self – was real.

  When she finished, there was silence. Then one of the boys in the back of the class threw a wolf whistle and everyone laughed.

  I looked across at Helen and she was gone. I don’t mean physically gone – she was sitting right there. But there seemed to be a space around her, separating her from the rest of the class and from Mrs. Beasley and from everything that was happening around her. She hadn’t even heard the wolf whistle, I could tell. Suddenly she looked straight at me, and smiled. As if only she and I in the world understood what had just happened.

  Except I didn’t understand, not properly. I hated Othello. I couldn’t understand why Desdemona didn’t just tell Othello she’d lost the handkerchief and have done with it. I even found myself wondering if she wanted to die, if deep down she regretted walking into a life with Othello when she barely knew him. He was a soldier, after all, he was used to going out into the world and fixing things. Desdemona was used to another kind of life entirely.

  They reminded me of my mum and dad, in a way, how different they were. By the time I was in the fifth form Mum and Dad were barely speaking to each other. Not in an angry way, they just had nothing to say. I began to hate going home after school. My mother would usually be out on one of her drives. When Dad came home from work he would take his boots off in the kitchen then fall asleep in front of the television until suppertime. It frightened me to see him so exhausted. More and more often, rather than go straight home, I would go to Truro public library instead. Edwin would sometimes be there, holed up in one of the study booths with a pile of science books. Some of the books were ancient. Others had tight shiny covers and looked as if they’d never been opened.

  Once, when Edwin left his desk to go to the toilet, I leaned across and had a look at what he’d been reading, a fat red volume called The Metaphysics of Physics, filled with complicated three-dimensional diagrams that seemed to rise up off the page. If you stared at them long enough you could almost convince yourself they were solid objects. I turned the pages, trying to make sense of them and failing. I didn’t realize Edwin had come back until he was standing right behind me.

  “They’re optical illusions,” he said. His voice made me jump. I thought he might be angry, that I’d been interfering with his things, but he didn’t seem bothered, not at all. “A lot of them are used as the basis for modern computer graphics. Like this one.”

  He pointed to one of the diagrams, a series of cubes that appeared to expand and contract even as I looked at them. The sensation of movement made my head hurt. In the end I couldn’t help but look away.

  “Two dimensions can be bent into three,” Edwin said. “Think of a Möbius strip.”

  I asked him what a Möbius strip was and he showed me how to make one by tearing a strip of paper from the back of his exercise book. He twisted the paper around itself then stuck the two ends of the strip together with a piece of Sellotape.

  When he cut the strip in half along its length, the two parts remained joined together, like links in a paper chain.

  “It’s a common conjuring trick,” Edwin said. “Anyone can do it. It looks like magic, but it’s just a simple rearrangement of space.”

  Helen was very keen for me to go and see the play she was in. She kept asking me what day I was coming, and when I said I wasn’t
sure yet, because I needed to get the money from my father, she gave me a free ticket for the Saturday matinee.

  It wasn’t a school play. Helen belonged to a small theater company that put on productions in the Old Chapel. They weren’t as popular as the Truro Players but Helen said she much preferred them because they did modern plays. “Not the same old Noël Coward stuff,” she said. I’d never seen a play by Noël Coward so I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I did know that Helen was the youngest member of the company. I had an idea there had been some bad feeling over her joining, that some of the older members had tried to keep her out, especially after she auditioned for the part of Amber Furness. I think that might have been why she wanted to have me in the audience – so she’d know she had a friend close by.

  I would have gone every night if she’d asked me, and helped her to learn her lines, but she never did.

  The play was set in Glasgow, although the program notes said the original story the play was based on took place in an unnamed country in Eastern Europe. The main character apart from Amber is Gareth Maitland – the cast list describes him as “an alchemist.” He rents a room above a noisy pub on Renfrew Street. Gareth Maitland is a dwarf, although it took some time to work this out, because the actor who played him was actually quite tall. The only way you could tell was by watching the way the other characters reacted to him.

  Amber Furness is the landlord’s daughter. Her father wants her to marry the son of a friend of his, a local businessman, but Amber, who is a gifted scholar, wants to travel to Germany and study mathematics. Amber and Gareth become close friends because of their shared interest in science and philosophy. At the end of the first act, Amber tells Gareth about her plan to run away.

  Gareth Maitland falls deeper and deeper in love with Amber. He becomes convinced that together they will discover the secret of alchemy. He is on the point of asking Amber to marry him when he catches sight of her on the street outside, talking to a man he’s never seen before. The man is Joachim Blum, a student from Göttingen. Gareth drops the tickets he has bought for the Eurostar into a drain in the pub’s backyard. When Amber comes to his room later, to talk, he says nothing of what he has seen. He makes tea and listens, the same as always. Afterwards, when Amber has left the room, Gareth pours away the dregs of her tea and rinses out the cup.

  Nothing seems to change at first. Amber looks the same, at least to the audience. It is only as the third act wears on that you notice the way the other characters are beginning to shy away from her. Right at the end, Joachim Blum arrives at the pub, looking for Amber. When Amber appears onstage, Joachim Blum draws back from her, as if she has the plague.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He throws a coin on the floor in front of her. “Buy yourself some soup.”

  Joachim doesn’t recognize her. It’s only then you understand she has been turned into a monster.

  On my way out of the theater I caught sight of Edwin. I had no idea he was there until that moment. He saw me at the same second I saw him. He came over and asked if I felt like going for a coffee somewhere and I said yes without even thinking about it. He was wearing the same blazer and trousers he wore for school. I wondered if he ever wore jeans, like everyone else.

  I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. Being with Edwin felt normal, as if we’d known one another for ages, since before I’d known Helen, even. He asked me what I thought of the play.

  “I’m not sure I understood it,” I said. “If Gareth Maitland had really loved Amber, he wouldn’t have given her the tea.”

  “You’re talking about the Platonic ideal of love,” Edwin said. “Desire is different. Desire can drive you to anything, even murder.”

  He told me about a painting by Velazquez called “Las Meninas.” “It shows the Spanish infanta, with her court dwarfs,” he said. “There’s a song by Schubert, too, called ‘The Dwarf.’ When the dwarf discovers the queen has betrayed him, he strangles her with her own scarf and throws her body into the sea.”

  We talked some more about the play, and what an interesting idea it was, to have a play about an alchemist set in the twentieth century. Then Edwin started telling me about one of the teachers at his old school, an asylum seeker from Poland who had spent time in a Russian labor camp. The one thing neither of us mentioned was Helen – Helen in the role of Amber Furness. I remembered her big speech at the end of Act Two, standing on the corner of Renfrew Street with the light filtering through her hair, making it stand out around her head like a golden crown. The actor playing Joachim Blum wore torn jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket. He handed Helen a gray school exercise book, filled with what he described as equations of the infinite. Helen clasped the book to her chest as if she were afraid someone might steal it from her. We think the same way, you and I, she said. We dream the same dreams.

  Helen lit up the stage like a firework. People say things like that all the time about famous actors, but it’s the only way I can think of to describe her. It was as if the Helen I knew from school was only half of her, a pale ghost. The Helen lighting up the stage was someone else entirely, someone I never believed in until the moment of seeing her. She was beautiful, I realized, and also terrifying.

  No wonder she never seemed to care what the teachers thought. Why would you, when you had this other person blazing inside you?

  The following week I bought a card for her, a black-and-white photograph of marguerite daisies in a crystal vase. I wanted to tell Helen how remarkable she was, how much her performance had affected me, but I couldn’t think how to say that, not properly. I suppose that was when I finally understood what my mother had meant about an unequal friendship. Helen would never really care about anything or anyone as much as she cared about being on the stage. In a way that was all right and in another way it wasn’t.

  What would happen to someone like that, if they couldn’t get to do what they dreamed of doing, if they failed for some reason?

  I never sent the card. I put it away in a drawer, still sealed in its cellophane wrapping. It might still be there, for all I know. For a while I wondered if things might have been different if I had sent it, if Helen and I would have become close in the way I wanted us to be but then I realized I was being stupid. Helen didn’t want to be close to me – the idea would have horrified her. I don’t know what she wanted.

  Thinking of you, dear Andrew.

  Your friend,

  Bramber

  8.

  WE WOULD TALK AND talk until it got dark, she wrote. As if the world could turn into something new at any moment. Her words filled me with the kind of gladness I had only felt on very rare occasions – my last day of school, for example, or the time Ursula accidentally locked herself out of her flat and ended up spending the night on the sofa in my living room. Those doubts that occasionally gnawed at me – that the closeness between us was and always had been a figment of my imagination – vanished like beads of frost in an autumn sunrise. Clarence was wrong, I knew that now for certain, and I had been right all along: Bramber needed me and wanted me and her letter proved it.

  I felt an all but insurmountable urge to respond in kind, to make my confession, as it were. To lay bare not only my feelings but my past as well. I wanted Bramber to know everything about me, my darkest memories as well as my brightest hopes, so that there would be no shadows between us at our first meeting, and we would come together not as curious strangers but as trusted intimates.

  I restrained myself, not wishing to overburden her, though the thoughts pressed in on me. People and places I had not thought of in years continued to resurface. Natural enough, I supposed – the past tends to come back most strongly precisely in those moments when we are breaking away from it. Yet the memories were painful, all the same, if only because they served as a reminder of how lonely I had been throughout those years, the years before Bramber, before the ongoing, dreamlike present, before the future that seemed so
nearly within my grasp.

  * * *

  —

  ABOUT TWO YEARS AFTER Ursula went out of my life I started seeing Runymeade Saxe. Run lived in an immaculate mews cottage off Swanns Lane, at the lower end of Highgate village and less than fifteen minutes’ walk from where the Ibsen twins lived, though the twins and their bramble-clad, peeling monument of a home were still years in my future.

  I met him one Friday in a bar close to Covent Garden, an area I still sometimes frequented, if I am honest, solely in the hope of seeing Ursula. Run asked me if I was looking for someone. I gazed up at him for a moment – the delicately arched eyebrows, the starched white shirt front – and then said yes. He reminded me of Wil, which in a strange way made things easier. He flagged down a taxi on the Strand and gave the address of a hotel somewhere near Aldgate.

  I went with him as if in a dream. I gazed at the traffic beyond the windows, the lit-up hoardings, the tide of Friday-night revelers pouring from the entrances and exits of a thousand bars. I understand now that I was afraid, although at the time I felt so distanced from my actions I seemed almost not to be there in person, but rather looking down on myself from a great distance: a tiny clockwork figure with his eyes on the road.

  Run said something to me about the warmth of the evening, then asked if I’d seen a comedy that happened to be playing in one of the theaters off Seven Dials, then simply took my hand. His skin felt smooth as calf’s leather. I noticed he wore a gold signet ring on his left little finger.

  By the time we got out of the taxi it was spitting with rain. From somewhere in the middle distance came the glittering fandango of thrown glass breaking, swiftly followed by the sounds of laughter and running feet. From somewhere closer to hand I caught the unmistakable odor of blocked drains. A fizzing neon sign said “Hotel Atlantis.” Run steered me through the shabby foyer and then upstairs.