by Alex Pheby
She leapt in shock, her arms swinging up from her sides and her hands coming to rest on her cheeks, framing her mouth.
Such are the reactions possible for a doll of her type – such are the proscribed preoccupations: small boxes, desiccated coconut. Such is the range of experiences which, for dolls, are relevant. There is no ice, no frost bite, no hunger, no blistering, no matches. Death, envy, and justice are not for dolls. There is curiosity. There is surprise. There is, to an extent, loneliness, but of dolls one must speak, more properly, of the forms of movement, the manner of hinging of the joints, the shapes in which the limbs are held, all of which make more sense than talk of feelings, and ideas, or longing, or slavery.
The body of a doll is an idiosyncratic object, and while it would not be true to say that each is unique, as those things created by God are unique, they are certainly not all perfectly of a type. Some dolls are all of one thing – wool, for example – and more all in one way, as a snake is, or a wooden effigy. A porcelain doll may or may not have a skeleton of pipe cleaners, but either way it must move with proper attention to the fragility of its china parts – it must move as if it fears breakage.
A wooden soldier has no such concerns – it must move as its courage determines, its métier – but it will be stiff; that is its nature. A jack in the box is dictated by its spring and the potential energy stored in its tensioning. Its motions are momentary and abrupt. If it is possessed of intelligence, of sentience, of volition, it will find itself frustrated. It will seek ways in which it might be capable of drawing the objects of its interest into the scope of its attention without the need to move the position of the box. It will twist its head, swivel its eyes, cry out in a high pitched voice as a means of attracting an object to it. Its spine will be as flexible as rubber and its movements random, except inasmuch as they tend toward stillness. Each of its movements will be less than the one before it, until it is left facing in the direction it finally stops. If this direction is not facing the audience then other members of the cast will need to make a show of directing it so that it faces the front, without fearing the breaking of frame, or its lines will not be delivered visibly and the movements of its lips will not be caught by the lens and the scene will need to be reshot.
Verity – one should not be a slave to it.
There are times when beauty trumps truth, but these are very few, for truth is beauty and even in the fantastic there are forms of truth – fabular truths, allegorical truths, wider human truths – that are beautiful in a universal manner. In this, a dancing puppet can exceed any philosophy in approaching both universal truth and perfect beauty – who could say otherwise after a visit to the Louvre, or to the Musée D’Orsay, or the ballet, or the countryside, or the, or the, or, all the others?
The dancer Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famous writer James Joyce, performed for the famous director Jean Renoir at Les Ateliers du Vieux Colombier, Paris, France, in the summer of 1927, and her performance was filmed. She had been commissioned to perform for a role in Renoir’s La Petite Marchande d’allumettes, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s La Petite Fille aux allumettes, but her dance was cut from the final edit. She was removed.
This is apt.
Truth and beauty, perhaps they are inseparable, and so lies and ugliness. Looming down, weighing on the shoulder, wiping the mouth and the nicotine-stained fingers, putting aside the glasses, folding them first and pulling up the nightdress, moving aside the sheet. Fingers on lips. Hands on heads. Line up in the playground, cane to the palm, slipper to the arse. Pull up the skirt, pull down the knickers, face the front, face the corner. Gym shoes, gym shorts, gym knickers. Hands out, hold still, pull yourself together. Hit the mark, proceed slowly to stage left in a stiff and wooden manner, obedient as a soldier. And break now.
Costume.
More paint to the cheeks.
Stop crying; you’re making it run.
When my colleague returned, the guilt of my theft was still on my breath, which was perhaps why I acquiesced to his contradictory requests: he argued both for making every effort to ensure no aspect of the tomb was disturbed, but also wanted me to assist him with the lid of the sarcophagus, suggesting that we should lift it to ground and inspect the condition of the mummy, if there was one.
By now I felt that there would be, but in our excitement we had either overestimated our combined strength, or underestimated the weight of the stone lid – anyway, there was no way we would be able to lift it safely. Generally, these sarcophagi were made so that the lid fit into grooves in the lower container, but this one was different (perhaps this related to the fact that it was open rather than sealed), so we were able to slide the lid to the side enough for us to see within, but not so much that we risked the lid smashing to the ground.
He brought up the light to the foot of the sarcophagus, and there were the tell-tale wrappings. Her precious body was still in situ, left where it had been centuries before.
Find the son who loves her and bring him within the tomb
To ward off curses, they include the Wadjet eye.
ARTHUR HUBBELL
PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1930
It is the afternoon of a dreary day in Paris, late autumn, not raining, but rain isn’t far off in any direction. Arthur’s Hubbell’s mood is low, but it was low before he opened the bottle. Outside on the rue de Bellechasse there are the usual Parisian goings on, so familiar now that he has given up noticing them: the wandering, well-dressed tourists skirting isolated islands of the French, who bellow at each other across the rivers of delighted spectators, spit in the street, and discuss illegal business full in the face of everyone, Francophone or otherwise. He is standing looking through the netted window, but he’s not seeing anything. His eyes meet at a point so far distant it doesn’t exist on this continent, and perhaps not anywhere.
He places the wineglass down on the table, edge of its base first, and then leaves it to keep itself upright. There are two or three clumsy revolutions before it settles into a safe position a hand’s breadth from falling and smashing on the tiles. He’s in the rooms he rents from a widow everyone believes to be a madame, but who is, to his eye, just a particularly hefty old woman with a vulgar turn of phrase. He doesn’t care, anyway. She is cheap, and the rooms are clean.
The armchair beckons, and an open book, cigarettes, but he goes instead to the mantelpiece. There is a clock there, hers, and candlesticks, hers, but between and around them are photographs unframed, his. Six or seven – scenes of the French countryside, the imposing facades of small rural churches, details of days out, taken very close up, so that their formal qualities replace their context. They can’t be mistaken for tourist snaps, and are clearly the work of someone who has pretensions to artistry. Undeserved.
There are sketches, too, avant-garde in a way he recognises, but which hasn’t yet acquired a name. Perhaps he wasn’t present for the naming – it’s so easy to miss out on these things unless one lives one’s life in the bars, drinking until sunrise and never sleeping. If he was one of these people he wouldn’t need a hotel.
Behind the sketches there is another picture, turned to the wall and hidden. Not that hidden. Hidden? No, of course not! Why do you say that? What’s to hide? It must have fallen behind the others, that’s all. So suspicious! But it is hidden enough. He takes it out and holds it six inches from his face. Stares at it.
It is a portrait of her. His love.
He is aware that he can’t do her justice in the way that a Man Ray or a Steichen does her justice, but it’s not for anyone else, it’s only for him. While he’s no slouch, photographically speaking, he’s also not that hard to please. Anyway, she would be beautiful in any picture, an idiot could see that. Even if she put out her tongue and ruffled her hair, crossed her eyes, she’d be beautiful. It would be pointless to deny that, even if it’s hard to see the beauty in her features all the time. Her perfect stillness in an image is disrupted by his living memories of her in person in as many situatio
ns as a man can imagine, good and bad. Experiences have a tendency to overlay an image, like nylons on the lens. Or Vaseline.
He’s staring at her now, and is drunk enough to move his whole body backwards and forwards when he wants to see her clearer, keeping the image still, rather than moving the image and keeping himself still. He blinks more than he needs to, and swallows. The bottle is empty, but there are more bottles somewhere, and he’d drink them too if it wasn’t for the need to see her now, to study her features. He doesn’t know what he is looking for that he hasn’t seen a thousand times. Whatever it is, he’s not finding it. Once or twice he turns the picture over and stares at the back, on which is written a date, and then turns it frontwards again.
It’s not a matter of beautiful or not beautiful anyway. If it was that simple there wouldn’t be a problem, but it never is that simple. God, if they could just remain silent, just stand there in their beauty, preferably naked, and simply exist then that would be wonderful. But they don’t. They have their wants and their needs and their opinions and they must, absolutely must, make those known to the world. Didn’t he have his wants? Didn’t he have his opinions? Didn’t he have his needs? Well, if he did, they weren’t causing anybody any sleepless nights. Whereas she…
It occurs to him that he needn’t stand by the mantelpiece any longer. One of the advantages of a photograph is that it can be carried around. It goes where you want to go without much fuss being made over it. It doesn’t insist on being consulted and having its desires taken into account. He takes her to the kitchenette, where there is some casserole left and three or four already opened bottles of wine that he can finish without having to do anything that might bring himself to his own attention, such as making the effort to find the corkscrew and going to the trouble of opening a fresh bottle. Either of these actions would demonstrate the very obvious fact that he is making unseemly progress through a finite supply of bottles, and that he is drinking too much for his health.
He spoons food into his mouth and uses its reluctance to go down his throat as an excuse to help it on its way with the last third of a stale bottle of Merlot. The food can chaperone the wine, which shouldn’t be out on its own at this time of the afternoon.
There is a small table in the kitchenette, more use for preparing meals than for dining, but there’s enough room for him to prop his elbows either side of the photo, hold his head in his hands, and rest his forehead on the top of the bottle. He tilts it a little and then puts the full weight of his skull on it.
Her nose, so perfect.
People will tell you that noses must be straight, but that’s rubbish – there needs to be a curve, a concavity, only a little or the whole thing gets like a caricature, but a definite slight concave curve. Otherwise it is too masculine – there is something masculine about perfect straightness, something mathematical, whereas the curve is more feminine, more natural… are breasts triangles, after all? They aren’t, and neither are her lips.
The same people who will tell you that noses should be straight will tell you that a woman’s lips should be full and red, but the best lips are barely there unless you get close. They’ve got an anaemic blueness to them, and their contours are only visible to you when you’re close enough to have earned them. Same with the nipples: subtle and pink and formless, not great brown teats.
Red lips are a whore, and dugs are animalistic.
The back of the kitchenette has a window onto the small yards where people empty basins of water and have long and private conversations in loud voices in front of their neighbours. There is such a conversation taking place now, and it disrupts his ruminations on the perfection of her face.
When he gets up to pull the sash, a bottle spins across the table, circling like a compass needle, erratically following the dictates of whatever magnetism determines the motion of spinning wine bottles before they eventually drop off the table and shatter. That is what this one does.
His grasping hands only grasp in retrospect, clutching ineffectually above the fragments of green glass. One is huge, half a bottle in size, and the others are increasingly small until they become so small they will only be found by the next tenant of this place, becoming invisible to Arthur forever.
And the window is still open.
He sits back down and between his feet are vicious shards like daggers, and in his ears is an argument about a woman’s sister and why it is that she is able to afford dresses that the speaker can only dream of. Another voice makes suggestions about possible ways women can come to afford expensive clothing, and whether it is worth it all, in the end. In front of his eyes, there is the photo of his love, lodged in his heart like the fragment of mirror is lodged in the eye of the boy in the fairy tale, colouring everything and making it different from the way it ought to be. Making him think and do evil.
Another bottle with wine in is just out of reach, and what wine was left in the broken bottle is now on the floor with the glass pieces. He looks at her while he shifts enough to reach the new bottle.
She was always so beautiful and he never used to drink so much.
He sighs and then a part of him that is disgusted to see how low he has fallen, all over a woman, picks him up and marches him to the sink. He puts the dirty dishes on the draining board and then fills the sink with cold water, right up to the brim. In books, the villain’s head is dunked into freezing water before the hero extracts vital information out of him. Ostensibly this is to bring the miscreant to his senses, but there’s also an element of punishment in the dunking, and both of those things seem to be at play as Arthur pushes his face down until the water threatens to go into his ears. It’s something he’s always been sensitive to. He holds his face under, and then opens his mouth and attempts to drink the water in the sink, as a means of diluting the wine.
This is not the best idea he’s ever had. The water catches in Arthur’s throat and chokes him, forcing him to rear up and shake himself about like a dog. While he coughs he soaks the floor, the surfaces, his clothes, with water.
He can’t now consider himself sober, but he certainly feels more sober than he did. The combination of the cold, the rallying of his autonomic nervous system, and his own self-loathing all kick in to undercut his selfpity and the dull, maudlin indulgences that come with Paris in the rain in the late autumn.
The telephone rings. Will this be her? Can one person’s concentration on another cause them to become aware, across a distance, that they are being concentrated on? It would be nice if that was the case. Despite his wetness, he goes to the phone, his drunken feet ignoring the glass, and the water, and the remnants of wine spilled which will surely stain the carpets and result in a stern letter from the fat, vulgar widow who is probably a madame. It will be worth it if this is her, if she plans a reconciliation, something she has always been able produce out of a hat, like a rabbit.
He picks up the phone and he can tell straight away it is not her. It is the bloody Irish girl, Joyce’s daughter, and, too drunk to think of any other way of putting her off, he gingerly replaces the handset in the cradle. A little later he removes it and leaves it nestled in the leaves of his book while he goes to take a bath.
By now another basket of supplies had been lowered to the tomb entrance and I ran to get a second lamp. It is good practice when entering a tomb to make a record of its disposition before too much else occurs, so I brought pads of paper, paints, and pencils too. When I returned, my colleague was sitting cross-legged on the ground, sobbing. I thought he was unhappy at first, that he had seen something that confirmed my worrying feelings, but in fact he was laughing so hard that tears were rolling down his cheeks. I asked him if he was feeling well, and he replied never better. I passed him a pad of paper and told him to make himself useful while I shone my torch into the gap in the coffin lid.
To my dismay, I saw that the binding linens that should have protected the corpse had been slit in numerous places and that the skin was visible beneath. I moved the light up to t
he face and her head had been pulled to the side and the same red paint that had been splashed on the lid was splashed here too, where the lips would have been.
‘I bring you your loving son, that he may open your mouth for you!’
They position the arms crossed over the abdomen and wrap the corpse again, finishing with a shroud of fresh linen.
THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
PARIS, CHRISTMAS 1930
There is a good story by Chekhov called ‘The Lady and the Dog’. In that story a woman goes on holiday with her dog while her husband is left behind, and she has adventures. It is set in Yalta, which is by the seaside, and the lady parades herself up and down the sea front, looking forlorn, in the hope that some roué or rake will take her for a vulnerable case and move in on her. Her dog is a help in this, for she can pay it too much or too little attention by turns, and thereby indicate her desire for company, or her intense sadness and introversion, and all from a distance. This is rather like what a fly fisherman does, making his lures and then flicking them about on the surface of the water to represent something a pike likes. Or a chub: a mayfly landing on the surface and spreading its legs so that it can balance on the surface of the water like Jesus. It skates here and there like a little girl does at Christmas when the lake is frozen over, and she deserves a treat, good girl, that’s the way.
The dog is little and white and has been trained to perform many minor tasks for the amusement of its master (who remains at home) – such as sit, stay, roll over, play dead and lick the vulva, scrotum, and anus while he watches, good boy, have a biscuit.
When she needs to carry a parasol, she keeps the dog on a lead, but when she can she picks the dog up and brings it to her breast, like she would if she were mothering a child. This it is acceptable even in public, since that is what is done with dogs. It is also done, but less often, with rabbits and chinchillas. Those do have the tendency to wet themselves and earn their mistress’s censure when later they are indoors and there are all sorts of items at one’s disposal for the punishment of such crimes, major and minor.
