‘Are you my Din’s baby?’ I cooed at him. ‘Are you my little Din? Ooh, what a din you are making. Ooh, what a din Din made here. Ooh, and do you want some din-dins? Din-din-din-da-din-dindin.’ And so it became a silly song, pounding though my heart was, and he was soon quiet but alert, and looking round at the dark shapes thrown by the moonlight around the room. I placed him back in his drawer. ‘Din-din-da-dindin.’
What with Jack, and me and Din, and Sylvia here too, I was indeed running a veritable atelier of transgression. I should have written on Pansy’s advertisement that those who trod the straight path in life need not apply. Was the road to Damage’s really such a crooked one? The streets outside looked straight and Roman, but Roman indeed was the dwelling to which it brought one.
The following morning I did not unlock the workshop at all. I knew I could not face Din now, were he to show, yet neither could I face another day without him. Curses on him. Was I really no better than all the other Ladies of the Society, in my desire for the man?
I wanted better things from today. I put the money for Lizzie, and some to buy leather, into my purse under my skirt, and then thought again, and took the bookmark with me too. I went to the grocer and ordered four weekly deliveries of food to Lizzie’s house, which cost the equivalent of a month of Jack’s wages. Then I went up to the river, and gave the other month to Lizzie in cash, with the futile plea that she didn’t spend it all on gin. And finally, I headed off to Bermondsey once more, to the tanners.
I did not go to Select Skins and Leather Dressings, but went instead to Felix Stephens. It was smaller than Select Skins, with only a handful of customers, and I waited by a stack of hides to be served. Curious, I thought, how being a women renders one both conspicuous and invisible at the same time. But soon, visibility won out, and a man came over to ask me my business there.
‘I’ve come to settle the account of Mr Peter Damage,’ I said, and was led into the office at the back. The man showed me into a chair, then went to the other side of the desk, from which he pulled out two large ledgers. He rifled through the first, then the second. He did not hurry, but was efficient and calm, and I warmed to him. Eventually he turned both ledgers round to me, and talked me through each item and the date of purchase, before ringing the totals owed in red ink, and adding them up.
‘You can pay half plus five per cent, or a quarter plus seven per cent, now. Up to you. How’d you like it?’
‘I’d like to pay it all, please,’ I said, handing over the full amount. He seemed surprised at first, but happily counted through the notes and coins, placed the cash in to a money-box, and wrote PAID IN FULL across both pages of the ledgers.
‘And now, I was hoping you could have a look at this for me.’ I pulled out the bookmark and gave it to him.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. That’s where I need your expert eye.’
He fingered it with courteous disdain. ‘It’s a botch job, that’s for sure,’ he said dourly. ‘Look at this flay mark. Done by an amateur, I can tell you that much.’
‘I thought that was a vein.’
‘No. This line, here, is a vein, which shows me that it wasn’t bled immediately after slaughter. It must have been left for quite some time – means the blood had time to putrefy in the veins.’
‘So possibly it had died naturally, and was chanced upon in the wild, by someone who thought its skin would be nice to use for a book.’
‘Possibly. Whatever happened, it was left for some time. The skin should have been removed and cured within minutes, especially in a hot climate.’
‘And how would they cure it?’
He started to relax a little, with the chance to show off his skill. ‘You’d hope the leather you’d buy over here would be brined, or wet-salted. But brining is expensive and you need quantities of hide to wet-salt. So I think this has been dried. The oldest way known to man, but it’s an uneven, unpredictable, uncontrollable process. This has probably been laid over stones, as it’s dry in patches. Done by a cheapskate, that’s for sure. ’Straordinary, really, that you’ve got it at all – leather like this usually stays in the poor countries, as no right-minded man here would buy it. Good tanning is a hard job, madam, that’s the truth, if you think about it; it ain’t easy, drying a hide just enough to stop it rotting, without making the leather all hard and inflexible. But this is plain shoddy; whoever did this should be brought to task. Brings the industry into disrepute, if you think about it.’
‘I’m sorry to trouble you with it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’ve brought it to you at all, really, only that I’d never seen the like before. I’ve already pressed my procurer about it, but he told me precious little about where it came from. I thought at first that it could be a type of pigskin.’
‘Yes, you are right there, tanned pigskin is notoriously poor. But it’s not pig.’ Here he seized his magnifier. ‘Look, them follicles are not arranged in that distinctive triangular pattern, and they don’t go all the way through to the reverse, like the holes left by pig bristles. No, it’s not pig.’
‘And the follicles are random, so I knew it wasn’t goatskin,’ I added. ‘And it’s not dense enough for cowskin either, or oily enough for sealskin. Although that could be to do with the inferior tanning, which I had not considered before you mentioned it.’
‘No, it’s not sealskin.’
‘Could it be lambskin?’
‘Possibly. But what a waste of a good lamb, to spoil it so in the tanning.’
‘Could it be doeskin?’
‘Unlikely. Look how irregular the grain is. It’s a puzzle, really it is. Leave it with me. I like puzzles.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. But I thank you for your time. While I am here, may I trouble you for some morocco? I will pay now; I don’t want to keep the account open.’
And so he helped me to some more leather, and I bought four fine hides, which he rolled and tied nicely for me, and I was grateful for his help and attention, although I was even more grateful to be leaving behind the bloody streets of Bermondsey and the stink of pure.
When I got back that afternoon I set about paring the leather and cutting the boards for several more books. I could no longer afford to be nervous about the forwarding process. I had just started to hammer the spine of one particularly loathsome edition of Venus School Mistress, when Sylvia glided in. I had not thought to lock the door.
‘Come, Dora. You work so hard. Another hot flannel is in order, I think.’
‘No, Sylvia, I do not feel like it today. Oh, don’t . . . !’ But it was too late. Sylvia had picked a book out of one of the crates, and was opening it. ‘No, Sylvia! Please.’
‘Dora,’ she retorted, holding the book loosely in one hand, but looking straight at me. ‘Don’t “please” me. I know all about Jossie’s books.’ And you know all about my Din, too, you bitch, I wanted to shout. She turned back to the book, opened it properly, and said, ‘Oh! Oh my!’ before snapping it shut. She eased herself down onto Din’s chair by the sewing-frame, and flapped the pages of the manuscript over her face like a fan. ‘I thought I knew. One has to excuse a lot when married to a medic. Still, I suppose these are not a million library shelves away from his anatomical text books, are they?’
‘Sir Jocelyn has a fine collection of anatomies, indeed,’ I concurred. Could she really have slept with my Din? She seemed so prim. I didn’t want to believe it. ‘I wish my Peter had had the chance to peruse them,’ I said, to shake my thoughts off their coupling. ‘Peter bound some of the great anatomies, but the Galen, and the Bourgery, why, he had not seen the like.’ I could see Sir Jocelyn’s shelves in front of me as I spoke.
‘Jossie loves his books. He loves me too, Dora.’
‘Of course he does,’ I reassured her. She couldn’t have done it, could she? Something was awry, here.
She had started to hug herself, and stroke her shoulders as if imagining his caresses. ‘He always loved my shoulders so, my back.’
I could see the title of Sir Jocelyn’s finest anatomical tract, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem.
‘I miss his kisses, Dora. I miss being loved.’
Something was tapping at my brain. Vesalius. Anatomies. What was it? Or was it just Din?
‘How do you cope without it, Dora?’
Without what? Without Peter? Or without Din? What was she saying? Anatomies, weren’t we talking about?
Then suddenly the fog lifted. I riffled on the bench for the paper on which I had scribbled my musings about the anagram. De humani corporis fabrica. It was a perfect fit.
‘The things he used to say when he touched me. He could have been a poet.’
I felt as if some invisible hand were strangling me as I struggled to make sense of it. The casing could not have been a binding for an anatomy text, could it?
De humani corporis fabrica.
‘Le peau de ma femme,’ Sylvia said softly, and my blood froze.
‘What?’
‘Le peau de ma femme,’ she repeated. I remembered the words in amongst some letters I had bound, in Glidewell’s hand. Glidewell to Knightley.
De humanis corporis fabrica. Literally, on the fabric of the human body. Bodies. Mine, Din’s, Sylvia’s. I went back to the Latin, but I knew enough of how the brains of these gentlemen worked now to sidestep logic and accuracy. I knew what the inscription was trying to say about the binding. I turned to Sylvia, and said softly, ‘Tell me about the peau de ma femme.’ Don’t talk to me about Din, now. Something more horrific is afoot.
‘My shoulders, Dora. I was telling you. Jossie used to kiss them and tell me that no woman had finer skin. My skin was the nonpareil of everything. He even corresponded with Valentine about the smoothness of my skin: this Dutch paper, he would write, is smoother than the peau de ma femme. This perfume smells like the peau de ma femme. These flower petals are as soft as the peau de ma femme.’
‘To be so prized . . .’ I murmured. Comprehension was a painful thing. My suspicions about Din and Sylvia were only that – suspicions. Here, I was facing something more indisputable about her husband, something I knew to be true. De humani corporis fabrica.
‘Oh, how he would kiss them!’ She giggled. ‘Oh, Dora, he would say, oh, he would say, that he wanted to bind a volume of the finest love poetry in the skin from my shoulders after my death, so he would never have to be parted from their smoothness. Never be parted! He never wanted us to be parted, Dora. Dora!’
De humani corporis fabrica.
The defiance I had been feeling no longer supported me, and I finally crumbled.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream. ‘Dora!’
The sobs heaved out of my chest, and I lurched and stumbled into Sylvia’s horrified, outstretched arms. She held me close, but her thin arms offered little succour, and besides they might have wrapped around Din once upon a time. It was my mother’s arms I wanted, and my sobs were tearless. I felt my supper rise in my throat, my body revolting at myself, and at the world to which I was so inescapably chained.
De humani corporis fabrica.
I tore myself away from Sylvia, and, shaking with anger and grief, I grabbed the book she had put down and threw it at the wall, as if it stood for all the ignoble books for which I had been responsible. I strode up and down, grasping my hair, and wrenched my face from side to side as if searching for a way out.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream again. I saw her as if through a veil; she reached out for me again, but I could not stand her or myself any more. I wanted to bathe myself, to scrub myself with the toughest brush from head to foot, but the water would not run again until tomorrow morning, and even then I knew I would never feel clean again, not until I had ripped every inch of skin off my sinful flesh.
And then, in the far recesses of my troubled soul, I heard a distant knocking, and I was dragged up from the depths of my misery into the present moment and to the awareness of a call from behind the outside door of the bindery. I stared like a horrified animal at Sylvia, and watched as she made to open it, but I flew to it before her, and threw the door open.
I saw Din standing there, as in a far-away dream. He was excited. He started to talk at me. He spoke so quickly, I could not hear him.
‘Dora. Mrs Damage,’ he said, uncertain how to address the lover from whom he had absented himself. Sylvia is here too, I could have said, to taunt him. Who would you prefer?
I shook my head, as if to dislodge the water in my ears after a swim, like when I was a child back in Hastings, but it did not help. Still I could not hear him clearly, only through glass, through worlds, or dream-states.
‘It’s happenin’, now. War is breakin’ in my country. I have to . . .’
And then his words screamed clearly into my ears as if the water had cleared, the glass had shattered, the dream had broken.
‘I have to . . .’ he repeated.
‘Go!’ I screamed back at him, as if completing his sentence for him. ‘Go away!’
His face faded from me, and then swam back into focus.
‘Go!’ I screamed once more. ‘A war? I have enough blood on my hands already!’
But still he stood there. He was questioning me, and I was not to be questioned. I wanted to be obliterated, but his presence was making me more real. I needed him to walk away from me, so I could vanish with him.
‘Please. Leave me alone!’
De humani corporis fabrica. Made of human skin.
And have you fucked us both into the bargain?
And then I closed the door on his approaching foot, arm, face, feeling the resistance of his flesh until the latch finally found its hole, and I bolted the door and felt him disappear. But he did not take with him my self-loathing, which took me straight towards the bottle of Black Drop on the dresser, and soon I did not know if Sylvia was still watching me, or had gone away with her own miseries.
Chapter Twenty-two
Dancy-diddlety-poppety-pin,
Have a new dress when summer comes in;
When summer goes out, ‘
Tis all worn out,
Dancy-diddlety-poppety-pin.
'Oh my, how clear it suddenly becomes! Dora, do you know what sati means?’
Sati? The immolation of a Hindoo widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. It’s been illegal for some time.’
‘It still continues, in the more rural, out-of-the-way places in India. Jocelyn told me so.’
‘Why would he torment you thus?’
‘Torment me? Why, he was assuaging me! I hated his long absences, and he would lecture me on the barbaric practices that went on in the darkest corners of the world which he, and only he, could put a stop to. He told me he had to go, in the name of civilisation. To stop the Africans taking a knife to their little girls in the name of chastity; to stop the Hindoos from burning their widows in the name of fidelity; to stop the . . . oh!’
‘Do go on!’
‘It is hard for me. And that is why I must explain to you, Dora, for I heard Jocelyn boasting to someone – Valentine, Charles, Hugh, whoever – that he would rescue a brave and beautiful widow from sati – from her husband’s funeral pyre – and immortalise her for ever in the greatest scientific and literary work of the century! Surely . . . but I had presumed that this meant the woman would become the basis of a phreno-logical study! That she was a biological curiosity to him. That there must have been something in her cranial shape and general physiognomy that predisposed her people to barbarism, that it was Jocelyn’s duty to discover. This I had so nobly assumed! I would never have thought to take him at his word!’
Is this the intrinsic worth, I wondered, of the human body, to be so reduced after we are gone? And what leads a man to reduce it so, in the name of exaltation? Is he so severed from our source that he must sever more in his quest for wholeness? We tear down trees and rip up animals for our books; we kill elephants and destroy forests to make pianos on which we make music to soothe our souls; small wonder the musi
c is so plaintive, with ivory yearning for its life back. But what when the materials are from amongst our own? For the exaltation of his own fleshful library, Sir Jocelyn had stripped this woman of more than her clothes.
I thought of the books of our lives, and I prayed to St Bartholomew for the opportunity to erase the last few pages of my life and rewrite them. St Bartholomew. And then it dawned on me. He had been flayed alive by Astyages for converting his brother, the King of Armenia, to Christianity. He was not merely patron saint of bookbinders, but of tanners, cobblers and leather-workers besides. Was this a macabre prank? Or was this a tradition whose origins ran deeper and bloodier than I could imagine? I could only think of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the slaughter of thousands of innocents for their differences, and the power that continues to be wielded by the most unworthy.
‘Dora. Dora. Calm yourself, girl. What are you doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘Well, why, then? Why are you doing it? That’s a perfectly reasonable dress. It might be last season’s, I’ll grant you, but it will last you many more. It’s presentable enough.’
My scissors ripped through the seams, and soon I had sixteen pieces of brown silk of various shapes and sizes, and two large pieces of cream silk. I sorted through them until I found what had been two sleeves, and two bodice-sides, then I smoothed down the rest on to the table, one on top of each other. Then I grabbed the cloud of brown and cream silk in both arms, and took them into the workshop. ‘Dora! It won’t bring her back!’ Sylvia shouted after me.
But what else could I have done? This is what I had learnt to do in times of adversity: work. But it was not so much ‘working’ as ‘working out’: the bindings were not as relevant as the plan I needed to formulate. One thing was for sure: it was better to have Sylvia on my side now than against me. I would cease my suspicions about her and Din. I laid the pieces of brown silk down on the bench and assessed the number and sizes of journals and albums I would be able to magic from them.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 38
