The Doll Factory

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She stops at the brink of the water, clutching her side and panting. Louis is here; he has outrun her, and he is smiling too.

  ‘Oh Iris,’ he says, staring at the pond. ‘It is beautiful.’

  They stand and gaze at it, at the brimming silver of the moon, its twin reflected in the lake, the mists which rise like steam. It is as if the world has been assembled just for them.

  ‘I want to paint it. I don’t want to forget this. It is just – perfect.’

  ‘It is,’ she says.

  He takes a step forward, tugging his laces. ‘I’m going to swim.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she says. Unbidden, a thought rises: Louis, pale and nude in the moonlight. She frowns, and then adds, ‘It’s better if you go in first, so then I can rescue you.’

  ‘Rescue me? Not a chance – I’d have to save you.’

  Part of her is warmed by the hint of seduction in what he says, but she also registers slight disappointment. She expected more imagination from him, words which were less worn.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he says, and he puts his arm around her waist and pretends to throw her into the lake. She stumbles, trips, falls against him, grabs his side. The water laps her feet; her shoes might be ruined.

  He does not move his hand, and she does not move hers either.

  They stand there in the silt, the water gaspingly cold, side by side, neither speaking. She does not look at him. She is afraid he will kiss her if she does, and if he kisses her, then what is next?

  She can feel each finger as it grips her waist. He holds her tighter and she could die. Her hand rests under his ribs. He is strong, slim, and she can feel him shiver a little. It makes her body hot, as if all of her energy is channelled to the places where they touch. She wants it to stop, and she does not want it to stop.

  His hand is on her waist. His hand is on her waist. This moment will pass, but she wants to stay here with the mists and the darkness and him. Right now, she is his.

  Kindred

  Silas is standing outside Iris’s lodging on Charlotte Street, his feet blistered from walking. He stares up at a streetlamp, at the gas orbs which stutter and flicker, and he does not even blink.

  Like an opium addict who has managed to be dry for weeks, who feels his footsteps winding him towards the soiled dens of Shadwell to breathe in the poppy vapours, he knew he could not resist finding her. His creature.

  He can remember little of his evening, and he longs to shake free the dregs of memories that still linger: wandering the streets in a daze after lingering outside the Dolphin, his eyes flitting over ladies in silk, in rags, in cotton frocks – sitting outside Colville Place, waiting, waiting, waiting, convinced she was a maidservant in that house – but then the reeling shock, the first sight of him – bad enough in itself, but more, far more terrible – by the lake—

  It was worse than when he saw Flick with the factory owner’s son, her coy wriggle as he planted kisses on her neck.

  The streetlamp putters, gasps, shines again.

  Within him, there is turmoil; red-hot anger, a ferocious, crashing desire. But he does not show this. He is as motionless as stone, gazing at the faltering lamp with his lips slightly parted. His feet and hands prickle from his stillness, but he enjoys this reminder that he is alive, breathing. He concentrates on what he can feel, see and smell. His fingernails, digging sickles into his palm. The dancing light. The smell of cheap perfume, Bluebell’s. She must have rubbed up against him in the tavern.

  The lamp ticks and fizzles out. Silas blinks. The light next to it extinguishes itself; and he turns stiffly, slowly, and sees dawn spreading like a bruise across the horizon. The urge to sleep hampers him, and he feels thinned by the sadness of his night.

  He turns the corner to Colville Place, his limbs aching. He sits on the same step as before, leaning against the wooden door of the empty shop. He rests his head on the blistering paint.

  An idea comes to him, and he presses the door. It creaks a little. The shop is clearly deserted; if he broke in, he could be safe, hidden, and he could slumber for as long as he wanted. He looks about him, waits for a girl with a pail of milk to pass. He squares his shoulder to the wood, and it takes only a few shoves until the flimsy lock splinters, and he half-falls into the hallway.

  It is dark at first, but his eyes adjust quickly. The plaster on the walls is cracked, the stone floor dusty. He balls his coat into a pillow, and sleep comes almost immediately.

  When he wakes, he doesn’t know where he is. He grapples about him, the flagstones grimy under his hands, searching for his shelf of mice, for his stack of periodicals. Nothing. Then he remembers, and he recalls too the embrace, Louis’s hand on Iris’s waist. He shields his face.

  He walks to the broad shop window. From this angle, he can see into the first-floor room, where Louis paces and eats and sleeps and lurks – the creeping devil! Louis in the Dolphin, with his arm wrapped around a stream of women, pulling them on to his lap – the way Silas handed her to Louis as if trussed up on a platter—

  He waits. She will come soon, with her vixen ways. She was his, and she betrayed him.

  It isn’t long – a few tolls of the half-hour bell, perhaps – until she arrives, with her endearing gait. He feels a jolt at the sight of her, a tug of longing from deep within him. She has a magnetism which he finds impossible to deny, a string which links his heart to hers. It is disarming how quickly he can forgive her. She is wearing his favourite dress – the one she wore when they first met – the clavicle exposed in all its beauty. The pale skin, the way it bows outwards. If only he could forget her – if only she had not cast this spell on him.

  She stops outside the shop, and he reaches out a hand as if winding her in.

  If you look inside, he tells her, I will understand that you are mine. I will understand your message, that he means nothing to you, that you want me to keep watch over you.

  He doesn’t dare breathe, and he pushes his fingers against his throat where his pulse swells. It calms him a little, though it frightens him too, that she has this power over his body, that he responds in such a potent way to her.

  She steps closer and circles the pane with her sleeve to clear the dust, and then – he can scarcely believe it – cups her hands around the window and looks in.

  Silas is still, his back pressed to the wall, as her breath fogs the glass.

  A moment later, she has turned to the house opposite. The sun is joyous, beaming through the fumes and turning the buildings to ghost-shapes.

  He sees her stand outside Louis’s door, fidgeting as she waits for him. The things that a crueller mind than his might conjecture! But he would suspect no such baseness, not since her clear sign.

  When he watched Flick’s cottage, all of Stoke was sleeping except the men who shovelled coal into the hot mouths of the kilns through the night. He always hid himself well. He learned her by rote: the way she walked with a slight flexing out of her foot. He loved her – oh, how he loved her! He knew that the factory owner’s son was only exploiting her, a napkin in which to frig, a trial ahead of the wealthier ladies he would meet in time. Silas nursed his love for years, until he could wait no longer. Her hair was like a flame as she raced across the countryside. He showed her the spot for blackberries, and she crammed them into her mouth greedily, and he saw the fruit glistening between her teeth.

  And when he laid her out on the grass, she was so thin that he could see her skeleton beneath her skin, the rung of each rib.

  Blossom

  Iris adjusts her plait while she waits for Louis to answer the doorbell. Her skin prickles. In the cool light of morning, what they did feels both shocking and precious. It was nothing, and it was something. She wonders what they will say, how much has changed. She once stood at this door on a different day, and was nervous then too. It is as if she could reach out and catch her shadow, see her old self reflected in the windowpane.

  He is before her, his hair crumpled, a slight frown. He smiles briefly,
and then waves her in. There is a torn letter on the dresser.

  She wonders who will speak first.

  She follows him upstairs. The house breathes, its pictures crooked.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about my new painting,’ he says at last, when they are in his studio. He walks to the window and stands with his back to her, his forehead pressed against one of the panes.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My shepherdess one, which we did the sketches for. I want it to be three foot by two foot. I might even start the painting today, if I can track down that boy with no teeth.’

  ‘Albie.’ She stares out the window at a hunched figure sitting on the step opposite. He wasn’t there a moment ago when she looked through the glass of the empty shop.

  ‘Shall we send for him?’

  ‘We might as well. I need something to absorb me.’ He rubs his neck. ‘I shouldn’t have drunk so much wine.’

  She looks down, wondering if he means he regrets it. ‘I shouldn’t have either.’

  ‘We aren’t known for being in our cups. But,’ he says, ‘I enjoyed myself yesterday evening.’

  ‘I did – I did too.’ She looks up at him, and he meets her eye, and they both look away.

  ‘Do you think I would have died if I’d swum in that pond? Of the cold?’

  She laughs, partly as the suggestion is self-indulgent, and partly in relief that he has acknowledged that the night happened and she did not imagine it. ‘I should think not.’

  ‘I’d have been written off as a suicide. No irises for me. No plot in the churchyard at all.’ He plays with a hole in his shirt, winding the thread around his finger, and she is comforted to see that he is nervous too. But there is something in his eye that unsettles her – something ashamed that she cannot place. After all, she tells herself, nothing really happened last night. He made no promises, no avowals, he did not kiss her. He has had a previous lover, serious enough that Rossetti knows of her – Sylvia – and her chest kicks with jealousy.

  She distracts herself by looking again at the deserted shop, and imagines her sister running it. It was difficult to see inside, but she could tell it was deep, with enough room for two tables and three long shelves on each wall. It would be perfect for Flora. The dusty panes polished like mirrors, stacked with perfume bottles, embroidered cushions, soaps with pink petals.

  ‘We’d better begin our day’s work,’ Louis says. ‘I thought we could work in the garden, if Guinevere will admit us into her lair.’

  They send word to Albie through a runner who knows him, and then settle in the overgrown garden. It is a mine of holes dug by the wombat, and Louis has to take a walking stick to the nettles to clear a pathway to the mossy fountain and gargoyle. Iris arranges herself on the edge.

  Louis sets up a stool and an easel beside her and starts to sketch her. He works quickly, broad strokes.

  Glance, stroke, glance, stroke.

  Iris tries not to mind the stiffness in her legs. But today, sitting still is a kind of torture. She wants to throw off all her nerves and excitement. She feels a pulling low within her.

  Louis pauses, and beckons her over.

  She stretches, her shoulder crackling.

  ‘See, Queenie,’ he says, pointing at the sketch in line and stump, though it isn’t his best and the marks are wavering. ‘How I haven’t drawn your shape in a single line – though Rossetti and the others might favour this method – but as light and dark, your neck picked out by its shadows.’ He touches his finger to her throat in the drawing.

  ‘I see,’ she says.

  ‘Now,’ he says, giving her a sheet of paper. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘What shall I draw?’

  ‘Whatever you choose.’

  He doesn’t offer himself, so she sits in the chair while he hovers behind her. She sketches the gargoyle, trying to see the shapes in its pout and horns. It is a relief to be free of the stillness of the house, to study how the breeze sieves light through the trees.

  Her drawing is more confident and accurate than it was a few months ago, less linear, more an exploration of darkness. She turns the pencil on its side and cross-hatches the shadow, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees a bird settle on a branch. She painted a marble hand before, and now she is drawing a stone statue. All she has done is doggedly replicate the forms, produce something not quite achieving the detail of a daguerreotype. She is glad, for the first time, that the painting of the hand will not be her debut. She can do better. Her pictures have had no narrative, unlike Louis’s, no sense of a moment paused in time, of a life continuing outside the canvas. She is suddenly tired of the stasis of her work, and she turns her eye to the robin, trying to convey the energy in its plumage, the dart of its beak. Millais and Louis do not even paint from live animals but buy stuffed creatures. It feels like a deceit.

  She makes mistakes, sighs. ‘I want to draw his wings, the way they flutter when he preens himself.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you’re fighting a losing battle. Art is about stopping movement.’

  She stares at her sketch. ‘I’m not any good.’

  ‘Is that truly what you think?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He never responds to her promptings for praise, and she finds herself growing irrationally vexed by it.

  ‘I should stop painting,’ she says, wanting him to contradict her. ‘I’m really no good at all.’

  But he just pulls a branch of blossom from the tree and the petals are whipped away in the breeze like limp confetti.

  Shepherd

  Albie is wearing a sheepskin jerkin as he lies on an assortment of cushions in Louis’s studio. He pictures the heaven that the do-gooders rant on about as a nest in the clouds, and this sheepskin must be how they feel. How he’d love to bounce up and down on the clouds! He strokes the fluffed edge of the jacket and hears a growl across the room. He remembers he is meant to be lying still, and returns his hand to his hip.

  ‘When’ll I get the payment?’ Albie lisps. And then, as he is a working man now, he announces in the brusque tone he has heard his sister use, ‘Ye’ll pay up two bob according, dearie, I ain’t seeing you scarper when it’s all over.’

  ‘What?’ Louis says. ‘I’m not scarpering anywhere – this is my house. Hold still.’

  ‘’Pologies,’ Albie says, but his nose itches and before he knows it, his hand is on his face.

  The man growls again.

  ‘I ain’t a fool, sir, no, if you don’t hand me a pretty silver piece I ain’t handing you my cunny.’

  ‘What?’ Louis says again. ‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about—’ He slams down the pencil. ‘You’ll be lucky if I pay you a damned thing. By God, will you lie still.’

  The threat of no payment is enough to curb Albie’s fidgeting for at least a minute and a half. He’s going to be paid two bob a day. He’ll almost be as rich as the swells in the circle. If he knew his adding, he could work out how many days’ work it would be before he could fit his teeth.

  ‘Are there fleas in that sofa?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he says, and he tries his best to be good.

  He remembers again the cloaked body of Silas, snoozing on the step outside the empty shop, and he shivers. He saw him on the way to Louis’s door and thought at first that he was a vagrant. But that chemical smell, even from a few paces off – he knew who it was. He wondered if Silas had found out where Iris lived and was watching her.

  He sucks on his tooth and thinks of what to say to Louis. I think a man might be taken with Iris. But he frets Louis’ll laugh at him. He doesn’t know for certain there’s anything to it, after all. He could tell Iris herself, but she’s in the garden sketching birds around an old rotten fountain and he doesn’t want to scare her. He remembers the red marks on Moll’s neck the day before. Isn’t it better that he lets Iris know to keep her wits about her?

  ‘There’s a man,’ Albie begins.

  Louis frowns, a look that says, Shut your trap, but Albie h
as started now, and like a horse running full gallop, he can’t be easily stopped.

  ‘I saw him outside, sir. He can be quite wicked and you should be minded to keep an eye.’

  ‘For the love of God, child, hold still!’

  ‘But sir, I think he might be watching Iris.’

  Louis looks at him. ‘Who’s watching Iris?’

  ‘The man, sir. He was outside just now, on the step opposite. He saw Iris at the Exhibition and he asked me about her and—’

  Louis stands and walks to the window. ‘There’s nobody there. See for yourself – wait, no, no, don’t move.’

  ‘He was there before, I swear it, sir. He’s called Silas, he’s got a shop stuffed full of the strangest things.’

  ‘Ah,’ Louis says, laughing a little as he picks up his pencil. ‘Silas. I know exactly who he is. He’s a harmless fool. He couldn’t hurt a fly, even if he wanted to. I’ll wager it was me he was seeking, not Iris – wherever could you have got that idea? He pesters Millais on Gower Street all the time, but he must have found out my address too. He probably just wants to sell me a dead dove or a spaniel.’

  And Albie blushes, wishing he hadn’t said anything at all. He knew it was silly. So why then, does his mind still fuss? He recalls the woman pinned to the wall by her neck, the distracted way Silas had asked about Iris. He tries to quell his fears, but they only rear back at him, more violently than ever before.

  A Child

  Two weeks have passed since the night by the lake, and they have not spoken of it again. Iris begins to wonder if Louis regrets it, or if he simply never thinks of it. She remembers the pressure of his fingers against her side every evening as she undresses, and sometimes the surprise of a recollection is enough to make her body fold over, her thighs pressed tight at the ricochet of desire. She could not name it: she does not know where her feelings lead, except a longing to feel the weight of his body against hers, his hands there, cooling the heat or inflaming it – she could not say. Sometimes she catches him looking at her, and then glancing away.