The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  I knew that doll was special as soon as I saw her, that she wasn’t just a doll and that Ewa Chaplin had made her because she was trying to tell me something. Well, not me personally, but whoever happened to be looking at the doll at any one time. The doll was like a picture, a painting of someone. I’m sure you know what I mean.

  I read all the way through Abraham Gold’s book, trying to find out more about “Serena, or Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” but apart from the small portion of text underneath the photograph saying that the doll was in a private collection in America she wasn’t mentioned. I still remember how disappointed I felt. It would be romantic, wouldn’t it, to tell you that I decided on the spot that I would have to write a biography of Ewa Chaplin myself, but that isn’t true either. I don’t know what I decided, or even if I did actually decide. I just started writing about her one day, or copying down some information out of another book, I can’t remember exactly. That’s often how these things happen, I suppose – by chance, like with the play Helen was in. It would be easy to pretend it was a big, decisive moment, an epiphany, but it wasn’t. It was just a coincidence.

  Ewa Chaplin sewed entirely by hand. She believed that only hand-stitching offered her the quality she wanted, that strangely lifelike look that all her dolls have, the feeling they give you when you look at them that they know you’re there. Long after the war was over she carried on using the same basic materials she had grown used to: unbleached cotton and upholstery trimmings, fabric remnants and bits of old clothes. Her one extravagance was the very fine, very supple calf’s leather she used to make the dolls’ hands and feet.

  She hated the very idea of mass-market models and numbered editions. All her dolls are unique. Towards the end of her life, Ewa Chaplin did start to become known as an artist, but she never moved from the small flat in Kensington she took out the lease on six months after she first arrived in England. She rarely traveled outside of London, and she never went back to Poland. She died in the winter of 1997, of pneumonia. A lot of people presumed she had died long before that, though she was only sixty-six. It’s strange to think that when I went to London with the school, Ewa Chaplin was still alive, that for a couple of hours at least we were in the same place at the same time. I’d never been in a proper city before and I didn’t know what to expect. Some of the children in my class had been to London with their parents, and they talked about it in loud voices all the way up the motorway.

  Helen had been to Kew Gardens once, on her birthday, for an outdoor performance of Cinderella. The prince had worn a badger’s mask, Helen said, and one of the children in the audience had screamed and tried to run away. She said it was something about the badger’s head being bigger than the prince’s real head, which I suppose could be very frightening if you thought about it too much.

  Our school party was split into two groups. One group went to the Tower of London, the other went to Madame Tussaud’s. We met up for lunch in Regent’s Park and then we swapped over. I was in the group that went to the Tower first. I remember I’d been looking forward to seeing the crown jewels, but when we got there they were all behind glass and you couldn’t get close enough to examine them in detail. A girl called Mallorie Spence had white silk gloves put on her and was allowed to pick up a tiara. A lot of the teachers liked Mallorie because she was clever and quiet, she never made a fuss about anything. What I remember most about her was her mouth, the way her lips were always slightly parted in the middle, as if they’d been painted on. It reminded me of a doll’s mouth.

  Madame Tussaud’s turned out to be much more exciting than the crown jewels, in any case. There was a room with waxwork models of Henry VIII and his six wives. Anne Boleyn had her hair parted straight down the middle and a thin gold chain around her neck.

  “I wonder if she had to take the chain off before she was executed,” Helen said. “Or would the ax have sliced straight through?” She drew in her breath with a hissing sound, as if she were cold. I wanted to touch Anne Boleyn’s hand to see what the wax felt like but I was scared I might set off an alarm.

  The most valuable doll I ever owned was a Morgenkammer “Janine.” I named her Rosamund. She was Helen’s identical twin.

  I don’t have her now, of course. Every now and then I come across a “Janine” in one of the online auction catalogues, but Morgenkammer dolls are very expensive these days and I couldn’t afford to buy one even if I wanted to. I found Rosamund in a junk shop in Truro. She was sitting on a filing cabinet, holding down a stack of old fishing magazines. She still had her original clothes, only you couldn’t see that at first because someone had put a pink baby’s cardigan over the top of them. I had no idea how valuable she was. I was just amazed by how like Helen she looked.

  Some people believe that stealing a person’s image gives you the power of life and death over them. I didn’t know how Helen would react when she saw Rosamund sitting on top of the bureau in my bedroom, whether she would be upset or even angry. What she actually did was laugh and put out her arms.

  “Let me hold her,” she said. She pressed Rosamund’s cheek to her own cheek and smiled, as if the two of them were posing for a photograph. “I always wanted a sister.”

  Helen only came to our house that one time. My mother followed her around as if she was afraid she might steal something. She barely spoke to her directly. She asked her questions through me instead in what I always thought of as her television voice: Would Helen like another cup of tea, or: Would Helen like to wash her hands before we eat?

  After supper we went upstairs to my room. Helen sat on the floor with her back resting against the bed and told me about the play she was going to be in called Amber Furness. Amber Furness had been on in London, and had even been turned into a film, with a famous actress named Laura Plantagenet in the role of Amber. Helen told me how Laura Plantagenet had almost been killed in a car crash the year before, tugging her breath in over her teeth, the same as when she’d been talking about Anne Boleyn and the gold chain.

  Helen’s main ambition was to be an actor. She had a theater program from the Old Vic production of Amber Furness that had been signed by most of the cast. She called it her good luck charm. I told her she didn’t need luck, she would be brilliant anyway. She looked at me in an odd way, then laughed.

  The weather changed last night. I woke around four o’clock and felt it shift. I pulled the quilt up around my neck and listened to the rain coming down hard against the windows. By the time it grew light the rain had stopped, but the air felt damp and chilly with the memory of it. I was late down to breakfast. Sylvia Passmore was in the kitchen, slicing bread for the eleven o’clock sandwiches.

  “We’re almost out,” she said. “I meant to go to the shop yesterday but I didn’t have time.” She rubbed her temple with the back of her hand, as if she had a headache. I offered to walk into Tarquin’s End and buy the bread for her.

  “Would you really, Bramber?” she said. “That would be such a help, if you could. I’ve got so much on this morning.” She hesitated, as if she thought she should give me the chance to change my mind, then dashed away to Dr. Leslie’s office where the petty cash is kept.

  “Two large white farmhouse,” she said. She gave me a five-pound note. “Or get three, if they have them. I can always put one in the freezer. That should be plenty.”

  Tarquin’s End doesn’t always show up on maps because it’s so small, just a cluster of houses around the duck pond and the village shop. And the church, of course. The church is called St. Ninian’s. The last time I went there was after Jackie’s father died. Jackie wanted to light a candle and say a prayer and she asked if Sylvia and I would go with her. Sylvia took us down in Dr. Leslie’s car, but when we arrived outside the church, she wouldn’t let Sylvia go in with us. She wouldn’t say why, but then that’s typical of Jackie, she can change her mind in an instant and all over nothing.

  “You come on your own,” she
said to me. “Or are you afraid of the ghosts?”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Jackie,” I said. Jackie looked at me sideways, with a sly expression. I couldn’t work out if she really was anxious about something or if she just wanted to get at Sylvia. Sylvia sat in the front seat looking furious. She knew better than to make a fuss, though – the last thing she wanted was to bring on one of Jackie’s panic attacks.

  The inside of the church was cool and gray. There are six stained-glass windows in St. Ninian’s, each showing a different scene from Noah’s Flood. I glanced at the people and animals thrashing about in the water then looked away again. There was something horrible about the images, something you wouldn’t expect to find inside a church. Jackie was standing a few paces away from me, bending over a marble sarcophagus. The blue light from the windows turned her red shoes purple.

  “He looks just like my father,” Jackie said.

  The tomb was carved with a marble figure, a man lying asleep with his hands crossed over his chest. A plaque on the side of the casket read: Leonard Francis Tarquin 1798–1873. He had a long, lean face, and wavy, shoulder-length hair, like a medieval knight. Jackie had once shown me a photograph of her father, a small, badger-like, balding man with round, owlish glasses. I didn’t say anything. Perhaps Jackie’s father really had been like a hero to her, in his way, her own Sir Galahad. The idea seemed sad to me but beautiful, too.

  I miss my dad, so much.

  Suddenly Jackie turned and walked away. Light tangled itself in her hair like strands of blue wool.

  There were other Tarquin graves outside in the churchyard. Sylvia told me the last of the Tarquins was killed in the trenches, in the Battle of the Somme. An information leaflet in the church porch said the hamlet had originally been called Netherstone.

  The duck pond had filled up overnight. In summer, the pond dries up and becomes much smaller but in autumn when the rains start, children come down with jam jars to fish for sticklebacks. There were no children by the pond this morning, which surprised me, until I remembered they would all be in Bodmin, at school.

  The village shop sells bread, milk, eggs. Some vegetables and fresh meat too, if you get there early enough. If you need anything more than the basics you have to go into Bodmin. The woman who serves behind the counter is called Mavis Nash. When I asked for the bread she said I was lucky, they only had the one loaf left.

  “Miserable morning,” she added.

  “Yes,” I replied. “The forecast says it’s going to rain again tonight.” I picked up the loaf and left. I once overhead Mavis Nash saying they shouldn’t have a mental home so close to where normal people live. Luckily, I don’t see her that often because it’s usually Sylvia who buys the bread and eggs. Sylvia doesn’t live at West Edge House. She comes in every morning on the bus from Bodmin. When I arrived back at the house, Sylvia was outside, standing on the front steps. The door was wide open behind her.

  She snatched the loaf from my hands and pushed me inside.

  “Where on Earth have you been?” she said. “I was relying on you.”

  She slammed the front door and stalked off down the corridor without waiting for me to answer. When I looked at my watch I saw it was twenty to one, almost lunchtime.

  I’d been gone for almost two hours. Time is odd like that sometimes. You can’t always tell where it’s going, or what it might do.

  It’s strange, you know. I’ve never talked about West Edge House really, not to anyone. It’s different with you. I feel as if I could tell you anything.

  I hope you are well, Andrew,

  Bramber

  5.

  I FOUND THE SECOND Ewa Chaplin story even more engrossing and enjoyable than the first. The idea of a fairy tale that didn’t end happily ever after was fascinating to me. I liked the dwarf, too, Anders Tessmond. He didn’t once apologize for who he was, and that was something I hadn’t come across before – dwarfs in books are mostly villains, have you noticed? Either that or they’re put there to be funny, or pathetic. Tessmond was just a person, with his own ideas about the world. I suppose you could argue that he was cruel, but I didn’t see it that way. He was fighting for the woman he loved, that’s all. If anything it was Amber who was in the wrong, for pretending to care for Tessmond more than she did. You could even say she betrayed him.

  After finishing “Amber Furness” I sat staring out of the window at the passing countryside. I could have started reading another story but I found I wasn’t quite ready to leave the world of “Amber Furness.” I watched the traffic instead, checking the road signs as we approached Salisbury, where I would be leaving the coach and catching the train for Exeter. Mostly though I thought about Ursula, because how could I not? I say I enjoyed Chaplin’s story, but the truth was that it had shaken me badly. How could she know these things? I kept wondering. I understood that the most powerful stories of all are those that seem to speak to us directly, but in the case of “Amber Furness,” it was as if Ewa Chaplin had been able not just to see into my thoughts, but to unearth a secret passageway into my past.

  * * *

  —

  I MET URSULA CASE at Woolfenden College, which is where I began my degree course after completing my A Levels. Woolfenden specialized in business subjects, politics and economics, and was loosely affiliated with the University of London. Ursula was studying for a degree in commercial accounting. When I asked her about her choice of subject she told me the accounting degree had been her father’s idea.

  “He wanted me to learn a profession I could rely upon,” she said. “He promised to help me as much as he could with whatever I wanted to do in life, on condition that I agreed to humor him over his backup plan. An offer I couldn’t refuse, right?”

  I never met Ursula’s parents and, aside from that one story about her father, she hardly ever talked about them. I knew that Ursula was from Whitby, on the North Yorkshire coast, and that her father owned a small chain of convenience stores in and around the Harrogate area. His name was Ranjit Case. He was more than twenty years older than Ursula’s mother but Ursula never said how they met. Ursula’s mother Herta was German, and came originally from a small market town in Schleswig Holstein.

  Ursula returned to Whitby for the Christmas and Easter vacations of our first year at Woolfenden but over the summer break she moved out of college accommodation into a studio flat close to campus and went home only rarely. The week after our degree results came out, she bought the flat using money her father had given her for a graduation present as a deposit. I thought I might get to meet Ursula’s parents at the graduation ceremony, but in the event, Ursula’s one guest was a tiny, silver-haired lady in shalwar kameez that Ursula introduced to me as her Aunt Maryam.

  * * *

  —

  I DECIDED TO STUDY statistics because I wasn’t too bad with numbers and my father assured me the degree would stand me to good advantage when looking for work. I met Ursula in the college canteen. We were less than three weeks into term. It was a Wednesday, which was seminar day, and the place was pretty crowded. I saw Ursula standing close by with her tray, and as she was clearly looking for somewhere to sit I made room for her at my table. We ate our meals in silence. From time to time I found myself glancing at the brooch she wore, a large, oval onyx in an elaborate Victorian setting. I was struck also by the design of her jacket, a gray pinstripe with wider-than-normal sleeves, which seemed to me to be the height of elegance. As she got up to leave I asked her where she had bought it.

  “I made it myself,” she said. “It’s my own design.”

  I noticed she had the most extraordinary eyes: large, deep, with the color and sheen of moss agates. She wore her hair pulled back from her face, accentuating her high arched brows and domed, slightly overhanging forehead. I learned that as a child she had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and that her finger joints were permanently swollen as a result.

&
nbsp; I asked her if she would like to have coffee with me sometime. She knocked on my door later that same evening.

  Her reaction to my dolls was one of delight. “I love dolls,” she exclaimed. “No one’s ever too old for dolls.”

  When I asked her if she wanted to be a fashion designer she shook her head at once. “I hate the word ‘fashion,’ ” she said. “I want to make clothes that will last, the kind you could fold away in a trunk and still be happy to wear twenty years later. Most clothes these days are designed to be worn for a season and then thrown away. A lot of material just goes into landfill. I think that’s a terrible waste of the Earth’s resources.”

  She took up sewing when she was nine, as therapy for her hands. “There were all these exercises I was supposed to do but they hurt so much and I hated them because they seemed pointless. At least with the sewing I had something to show for it. In any case, I was lucky. The disease went into remission when I was fifteen.”

  Ursula owned an electric sewing machine of course, though she performed a lot of the more intricate work using an old manual Singer with a rotating handle. When I asked her to show me how it worked, she took a square of blue cloth and placed it under the needle, then showed me how to begin stitching by turning the wheel. The needle rose and fell like a hammer, pulling the thread along behind in a simple running stitch. I asked her if it was difficult to control.

  “Of course not,” she said, and laughed. “Not once you get used to it. It’s easy.”

  She kept a trunk beneath her bed, stuffed with fabric samples, which she collected from a variety of sources. When I expressed curiosity about it she pulled the trunk to the center of the room and allowed me to empty its contents on to the floor. It was like being given permission to enter the storeroom of a small but very specialized museum. I recognized satin and velvet and damask, cotton and calico – Ursula seemed surprised that I knew their names. I loved the feel of the fabrics, their different textures and weaves, although I was by no means the expert Ursula seemed to take me for. There had been a small haberdasher’s store in Welton, I told her, a cramped, musty-smelling premises called Percy’s where my mother occasionally used to buy replacement buttons or zips. At the back of the store, long bolts of cloth stood upright against the walls, but my mother had no use for fabric by the yard. She bought her curtains and other soft furnishings ready-made, from Debenhams or Habitat.