The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  Albie stiffens. He doesn’t like the man creeping up on him. That clean, medicinal smell; it turns Albie’s stomach. All the same, he decides not to correct the miser that it was only a bob he coughed up. ‘Iris thingummy,’ he says, attempting to feign an upper-class accent but it sounds Irish. ‘This is, I mean, meet Silas. Dunno his surname either, as a matter of fact.’ Iris smiles curtly. ‘I sews slop for her at Salter’s doll place.’

  ‘On Regent Street?’ Silas asks, and Iris nods.

  ‘And I bring Silas dead things.’ He considers strangling the air for dramatic effect, and thinks better of it, glancing back to where Iris stands. She looks faintly repulsed. He feels a sudden urge to laugh with her about Silas, but he can’t catch her eye.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘My collection,’ Silas explains, ‘will be famous one day.’

  ‘Well, I look forward to visiting it,’ she says, but her voice is flat and almost mechanical, and Albie can tell she is barely listening. She is searching for somebody, and she waves her farewell. He watches the back of her bonnet disappear into the crowd.

  Albie shrugs, and tips his cap at Silas. The man is looking into the distance, grasping his collarbone in the place where Iris’s twists.

  ‘Sir,’ Albie says to him, deciding that the man really does only have half his wits. ‘Her neck thing. It ain’t a contagion.’

  The Great Expense

  Iris slips through the crowd, away from Albie and the man with him. She wishes she was shorter and could vanish beneath the toppers and the bonnets, that she wasn’t so easy for Rose to pick out.

  She looks about her for any sign of her sister. No. Good – she has escaped her.

  Iris closes her eyes. When she opens them, she will see the scene afresh. She will imagine it is a wide canvas in front of her, each detail perfectly mapped, a study in perspective.

  She looks up. The towering iron frame seems to touch the edges of clouds. The steam looks like the smoke of the Napoleonic battle scenes she has seen hanging in the National Gallery, but this is more vivid, so unlike the brownish pictures she remembers. She would like to paint with the colours she sees before her, to portray the world like a stained-glass window.

  She imagines the frames of this museum filled with red and blue and green panes, like stepping into a vast kaleidoscope. But it would be too dazzling; already this has a grandeur unlike anything she could imagine. If men can make this, if they can encase elm trees and conquer nature on this scale, then what might she be capable of? There are times when she feels as unimportant as a louse, and then there are moments when she feels as if she could take off into the sky, and free herself from the trappings of home and the shop and even, she thinks with a sinking within her, her sister.

  ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ she says to a woman next to her.

  ‘Quite marvellous,’ the stranger replies with unexpected warmth. Iris feels a rush of love for this unfamiliar human, and for all of the people pressed around her. Everyone, with their worries and their joys and their loves and their frustrations, their tears and dreams and laughter – they are all gloriously alike.

  She starts to run. She dashes towards the open fields of the park, her red plait bouncing against her back. Her feet are kitten-light, the grass soft underfoot, but she has barely reached the first avenue of trees before she is forced to stand still, her breathing shallow. A shard of whalebone pierces her hip, her ribs packed tight by the frame of her corset. Her fingers sweat in their lace gloves.

  She hears a sound behind her, a called-out name, and she knows who it is without turning around. She wonders why her sister insists on following her everywhere, what she could be hoping to find. Iris’s life is duller than tarnished silver; besides, the hypocrisy rankles. Her sister would have accepted her gentleman, had he offered, without a backwards glance at her hunchback.

  ‘Oh,’ Iris says, pretending to see Rose for the first time. Her sister’s hand is held out in agitation, dirt on the hem of her dress. She moves with the elegance of a lady, as if on castors, and from this distance Iris can almost believe she is as beautiful as she ever was. Iris thinks of her own gawky walk that she has caught in window reflections, the hunch of her shoulder. ‘Thank heavens, Rose! I’ve found you at last. We’ll be late for dinner. Mama will be fretting.’

  ‘But you ran away from me. I saw you. I thought you’d left me.’

  And her sister’s face is so bereft, so lost, that Iris despises herself.

  The clamour of the omnibus from Hyde Park to Bethnal Green; Iris’s arm nudged away from Rose’s. A brief tutting, a smell of sour laundry. They sit at the table. Iris’s father coughs into his sleeve.

  Iris tries to chew the suet pudding, but she swallows a lump of meat whole. She can hear the food turning over in her sister’s mouth, the sift of her breath. When she can bear the sound no longer, she says, ‘I’m looking forward to seeing my favourite jolly minister tomorrow—’

  ‘I am delighted you find his sermons so edifying,’ her mother interrupts, with a look of warning.

  ‘Oh, indeed.’ Iris pauses, her fork halfway to her mouth. The gristle on the kidney glints, the fat yellow. She tries to catch her sister’s eye, to make up for earlier. ‘I have always felt that an over-indulgence in the communion wine is a clear sign of a strong religious bearing. The minister’s desire for the blood of Christ cannot be sated.’

  She glances up, and Rose smiles for a moment, but then starts rubbing her hand against the pits of her chin. Iris stares instead at the polished china spaniel on the mantelpiece, a cheap gimcrack meant to ape the clutter of a higher-class household. It is just like her parents: their pathetic attempts to share the habits and morals of a society to which they don’t belong. Other shop girls, she is sure, do not have parents this imposing, this concerned with moral ruin.

  Her mother sighs. ‘Iris, please. I suppose you thought that was amusing?’

  Iris sees her link her arm through Rose’s, a battle formation that was drawn up on the day of the letter from Charles, the day of her sister’s illness. Iris never could understand it. Her sister treated her as if it was she who wrote the letter, disappointed her prospects, ruined her face with those raised boils. After that, she could never fix matters, as if she had forgotten overnight how to console her sister, how to amuse her. She remembers how things were before, when they designed their imaginary shop with its flowered wallpaper and frames of pressed roses. She loves her sister; of course she does. And yet . . .

  Iris tries again. ‘The Great Exhibition was quite splendid—’

  ‘The Great Expense, more like,’ her father says, with a splutter of a laugh as if to encourage his audience to appreciate his wit. Iris smiles obligingly.

  ‘Mrs Salter says that the worshipping of commodities will be the downfall of society,’ Rose adds.

  ‘She should know,’ Iris says before she can stop herself.

  ‘And what, pray, does that mean?’ her mother asks.

  Iris does not reply. She dabs the napkin against her chin. Brown gravy on grey linen.

  ‘Iris ran away from me,’ Rose blurts out. ‘I was so afraid. One moment she was there, and then I could not find her at all. She just vanished into the crowds. It is hard for me to see sometimes with my . . .’ She does not finish the sentence, merely lowers her good eye.

  Tattle.

  ‘Is this true, Iris? And why? You used to be so fond of your sister, and now – running off from her, abandoning her in a crowd.’

  Iris still does not speak. She knows it was cruel of her, but it was not her who shut out Rose first of all. She tries to remember the sight of the transept as it hovered and swayed above the steel edges, the elation she felt. But the tightness in her chest refuses to lift.

  She will never escape. She will never be free. She is destined to eke out this pitiful life, to suffer the slaps and insults of Mrs Salter, to endure her sister’s jealousy, until, at last, some scrawny boy fattens her with child after child, and she spends her days winching
laundry through a mangle, swilling rotten offal into Sunday pies, all while tending to infants mewling with scarlatina and influenza and goodness knows what else, until she contracts it too . . .

  Her mother sighs and Iris tries to ignore the scorch of her glare.

  ‘More potatoes?’ her father asks, patting his pocket subconsciously, as he always does once Iris and Rose have handed over the majority of their weekly wages. His head is bowed, his pate greasy.

  ‘No, thank you,’ the others murmur.

  Her mother coughs.

  ‘Iris?’ Her mother’s voice is a thread, pulled taut. Her father looks up. The hairs on his forearm quiver. ‘Why can’t you answer like your sister? Is it really so trying for you?’

  Iris stares at the thick skin of gravy on her plate. It is an effort not to slam her fist on to the table, not to grab hold of the stained tablecloth, not to clatter everything on to the floor. She would like to see the china spaniel splinter into a hundred shards.

  Iris smiles. ‘No, thank you.’ She takes another mouthful.

  The clock chimes six.

  PRB

  ‘A tumbler of hot brandy,’ Silas says, placing a coin on the table as a church bell tolls lustily. Six o’clock evensong. He is sitting in the booth closest to the fire, his cheek pinked from the heat. The world glitters. The clam-shaped grate, the ceiling with its hanging silver tankards, the spat embers which glow and die on the rug at his feet. There is a plaque on the wall bearing the line, ‘What ales ye?’ and he makes a point of smiling at it each time, just to prove that he can read. His drink, when it arrives, is hot and spicy, and he skims off the layer of liquid butter with his first sip. He thinks again of the girl, of the winding of her collarbone, the green of her eyes.

  ‘It’s been a while since we’ve seen you here, mister,’ Madame says in a tone which appears friendly, but he is sure her expression shows discomfort, ‘though we see your artists often enough. Too often, it could be remarked.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Silas replies, though he wonders why he has avoided the warmth and hum of the Dolphin for so long. He likes it here; the ale is sweet and eavesdropping sweeter.

  A young girl in the booth opposite Silas, her dress pulled so low that the rosy crescents of her nipples show, roars with laughter and smacks a grey-haired man across the chest. She wears her usual ostrich feather in her hair, dyed pink. The Madame hurries towards her, ‘Look here, Bluebell. I’ll not have you disrespecting our esteemed customers.’

  Silas clasps his drink, and even the foam of brandy reminds him of the colour of her hair. Iris, Albie had called her. Her eyes, sockets slightly hollowed, contained a loneliness and longing that felt at once familiar. It was as if there was an invisible cord which united them.

  She reminded him so strongly of a grown-up version of Flick that he almost wondered if it could have been her. Flick, before she went missing from the factory when he was fifteen. He tried to show her his collection once, and she ran through the countryside beside him. He remembers the red flash of her hair, her bony-knuckled hands. He felt like a gentleman ushering a lady into his study for the first time: This is my world. He struggles to recall her expression as he brought out the skulls of the rabbit and the badger and the hare, and his treasure – the ram with the twisted horns.

  His mind often winds back to her, and he was comforted by the vision of her as she might have been. Flick become Iris. Not the girl’s imagined death in a Staffordshire river, or at the hand of the heir to the pottery factory, or under the wheels of a drunken coachman, but rather an escape, to London, to a doll-making shop and better prospects.

  ‘Hop it, Louis,’ someone shouts, and Silas turns in his booth and recognizes three artists laughing on the boards by the bar. It is almost three weeks since Louis Frost and Johnnie Millais visited his shop, likely too soon to try and sell them another creature. The third man, Gabriel Rossetti, has linked arms with Millais and created a bridge at chest height. Louis stands a few paces back. His dark hair billows, as wild as a dandelion clock.

  ‘Gentlemen! I beseech you,’ Madame admonishes, but Louis has already taken a run-up and leapt over the outstretched arms. He lands with a thump on the floor. The ceiling rattles. He dusts his trousers, and grins at the customers. Some cheer, others scowl into their victuals.

  ‘Vive la PRB!’ Rossetti calls and the shout irks Silas, not because the noise disturbs him, but because of the exclusion implicit in this secret set of initials they assign themselves. PRB? Something brigade?

  ‘Vive la PRB!’ Johnnie Millais and Louis Frost echo.

  Louis leads the descent into the ‘Marseillaise’. ‘Allons enfants de la Patrie!’

  ‘Le jour de gloire est arrivé!’

  ‘Tais-toi – it has not arrived quite yet,’ Madame thunders over them, and they quieten. She flaps them into a wooden booth behind Silas. ‘Not arrived at all, in fact, if that scathing review of your work in The Times was an indication.’

  ‘A low blow—’

  ‘Most ungracious—’

  ‘Our day will come, you’ll see, dearest crone—’

  A few patrons snicker. Silas is not one of them. He stares at the boys, ten years younger than him, but with a brimming energy and confidence he could never imagine inhabiting. He has seen them trawling for their so-called stunners, linking arms on a pavement and filtering each woman who passes them. Perhaps he could have found a friendship circle like theirs if he had been a medical student.

  He catches fragments of their conversation.

  ‘Tottenham Court Road – not a stunner in sight – how am I to finish The Imprisonment of Guigemar’s Queen for the exhibition without a—’

  ‘Better than scouring the rookeries for gypsies like Mad—’

  ‘Says the wry-necked, blubbering red-headed boy.’

  ‘Pray, do not remind me of that cretinous review.’

  ‘Oh, Millais, everyone knows Dickens for what he is—’ Louis’s voice, consoling.

  ‘A silly prick!’

  The men laugh, and Silas wonders if he should lean over and talk to them, try to sell them a stuffed sparrow or a kitten or a skull as a backdrop for their paintings. He has immersed himself too much in the conjoined puppies lately, and not sold as many butterfly-wing necklaces as he would like.

  ‘Look, it’s the Cadaver!’ Rossetti shouts, and Silas recognizes his nickname. The partition between the booths is slatted, and Silas turns, nods, raises his tumbler.

  ‘Forgive his impertinence,’ Louis says, kneeling on the bench and leaning over so that his head seems to hover in mid-air above Silas. The artist looks even more vampiric than usual; his black hair is mussed, his skin so pale it is almost blue. ‘Gabriel, you rude pig. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be called that.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s an endearment,’ Rossetti replies, his face appearing alongside Louis’s.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve been called worse,’ Silas says.

  Louis taps out an unknown rhythm on the banister of the booth, the paint banked in his nails.

  ‘Silas, just the man I’ve been looking to see, in fact. You’ve saved me a trip to your shop.’

  I will have a museum soon, Silas thinks, not a shop. He takes another sip of brandy and says, ‘Oh? Is there another animal you’d like?’

  Louis waves his hand. ‘No. And I’m sorry to say this, but it’s that stuffed turtle dove you sold me—’

  ‘Yes?’ Silas asks. He thinks of the rascally attacker of cress sellers, the way he aligned its feathers in a perfect fan. It was one of his best-made pieces, a sublime example of craftsmanship.

  Louis sighs. ‘Well, I’m afraid it – well, it mouldered.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Silas stammers.

  ‘It rotted. I was away in Edinburgh for a mere week, and came back to find the house filled with bluebottles.’ He shudders, gesticulates as he speaks. ‘It was – oh, it was crawling with maggots. I came in the door and almost vomited. Heavens, Johnnie, remember the stink?’

  ‘I co
uld almost smell the thing in Gower Street.’

  ‘Are you sure it was the bird?’ Silas asks, picking at the edge of the table. His stomach cools. ‘I am certain I dried it properly.’

  ‘Is he sure?’ Rossetti bellows. ‘Is he sure? What else would it be? His paintbrushes sprouting fungus? You are only lucky it happened to Louis, and not to me. I don’t have his equitable temper—’

  ‘Rossetti, please,’ Louis says, stilling his arm, and speaking more gently to Silas. ‘I hate to mention it, really I do, but it’s just – well, it’s made things rather tricky. My model – my Queen – she stormed out – she said she wouldn’t be in the same house as a smell that putrid, and it’s really quite an inconvenience at this stage of my painting.’

  Silas grips his glass tighter. ‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I can’t think what caused it. I will of course compensate you.’ Louis dismisses the idea with a waft of his hand, but his generosity only makes Silas more wretched. Could he have neglected to dry the bird properly, so absorbing was his work on another specimen – a bat, was it? He will give the bat to Louis to make up for it. Or he will insist on compensating him – he must, and he will not think of the money lost – though he does, and he kneads his brow. They will repay him with more custom in the future, he has a little saved to cover the rent.

  ‘And now, courtesy of that rotten dove, your situation is dire,’ Rossetti says, turning away from Silas and speaking so loudly that even Bluebell frowns. Silas stares at his tankard, not daring to take in the disdain on the faces of other patrons. He is a failure, and Rossetti does not care who hears it.

  ‘I would not say dire—’ Louis begins.

  ‘Your turtle dove is a maggoty disaster, slung somewhere in the depths of the Thames sewage.’

  ‘I’d almost finished painting it—’

  ‘Your model, that fidgeting shop girl—’

  ‘She only moved some of the time—’