by Nina Allan
“The Elephant Girl’s coming to get us,” said Simona Sandowska, a pouting beauty with wavy auburn hair and the beginnings of breasts. “Let’s run.”
They poured out of the room and down the corridor in a noisy stampede. Mila was left alone with Naomie Walmer.
“I’m sorry about that,” Mila said. “They’re a little on the boisterous side today.”
“You mustn’t apologize,” said Naomie Walmer. “I thought they were fantastic.” She stepped forward and took Mila’s hand. “Thank you so much for having me here. It’s brought back so many memories.”
“Good ones I hope.”
“Oh yes. I loved being at school.” Close to, she still looked very young, hardly more than a child herself. And yet her hands, Mila could feel, were strong as a farm worker’s, and there was a quality of separateness about her that Mila found almost frightening. It was as if she could sense the music curled inside Naomie Walmer, the way Elisabeth was curled inside herself.
“When’s it due?” she said. She glanced down at Mila’s belly and smiled.
“Not so long now,” Mila said. “Just over nine weeks.”
“You must be very excited.”
“Yes,” Mila said. “I am.”
She realized it was the first time anyone had spoken about her pregnancy so openly. People were afraid of upsetting her, of saying the wrong thing. Even Niklas had stopped trying to communicate with her on anything more than a practical day-to-day level. She knew this was her fault, just as she knew Niklas still loved her. But Naomie Walmer’s innocent remarks seemed to open up the world to her.
Her words were like a blessing, like a gift. They made it possible for her to believe that Elisabeth was really here and really coming.
She showed Naomie Walmer the way back to the staff room then went out of the side door and on to the playground. It was a marvelously bright October day. The sky was stretched tightly above the rooftops like a swath of blue cloth. Children chased each other across the tarmac or sat together in groups beneath the trees. There was no sign of the Elephant Girl and for the first time ever when she thought about Zhanna Mauriac, Mila felt a twinge of remorse.
If only Elisabeth can be all right I’ll find the courage to start from the beginning again with Zhanna.
Courage? The word puzzled her until she realized it was true. She had never hated Zhanna, she had been afraid of her. Afraid she could harm Elisabeth by her very existence. She made her way back inside, meaning to go in search of Zhanna and bring her outside into the sunshine.
Suddenly she became aware that she could hear music. Somebody was playing the piano. Mila followed the sound along the corridor and right up to the closed double doors of the school assembly hall.
She pushed the doors open, suddenly nervous. The tall windows along the side mirrored themselves in pools of light across the parquet floor. Zhanna Mauriac was seated at the piano.
She was playing a waltz by Chopin, not the slow A Minor but its partner, the much faster Opus 34 in A Flat. Her stubby fingers flew across the keys, the knuckles bunched and raised, hands crouched above the keyboard like fat spiders. She played effortlessly, as if the very notion of the piano was something that had been invented for her own amusement. Her mastery of the instrument seemed complete.
Her clay face wore the same blank expression as always.
Mila marched towards her, her shoes skidding on the polished wood. As she approached the stage, Zhanna finished playing and stood up from the bench.
“Fryderyck Chopin was born near Warsaw on March 1st, 1810,” she said. “His compositions make extensive use of Polish dance rhythms such as the polonaise and the mazurka. People say he invented the nocturne, but the nocturne was actually invented by John Field.”
Her voice had a gravelly quality, like that of a very old woman. She slowly put out a hand to touch Mila’s belly.
“Your baby likes music already, I can tell,” she said. “Your baby will be just like me.”
Mila slapped Zhanna hard across the face. The slap made a cracking report, like a gunshot, and for a second Mila saw the imprint of her fingers outlined in red across the girl’s plump cheek.
“How dare you,” she said in a whisper. “That’s a lie.”
Then she felt herself begin to bleed.
6.
IARRIVED IN SALISBURY JUST in time to miss the Exeter train. I read Ewa Chaplin’s “The Elephant Girl” while I waited for the next one, a mean, dark little story that nonetheless contained stark elements of truth – more truth, perhaps, than some readers would be prepared to countenance, especially since it was difficult to determine where the author’s sympathies precisely lay.
The introduction to Chaplin’s collection – by a Polish academic and specialist in postwar Eastern European literature named Krystina Lodz – explained that Ewa Chaplin had been a gifted student, that she had always cherished ambitions to be a writer and that she was supported in her aspirations by the symbolist poet and essayist Delilah Gopnik, whose classes the young Ewa had attended at Krakow University.
The war, and her exile in London, had put an end to her studies:
In common with many Jewish and dissident intellectuals who fled to Great Britain and the United States following Hitler’s accession to power, Ewa Chaplin found herself in a country and a situation in which her former dreams for her life – her intellect, her talent – were met with incomprehension and indifference. Public opinion tacitly stated that in the case of refugees like Chaplin, it was enough that they had escaped the Nazi atrocities. Further than that, they were simply foreigners, and there on licence. The idea that a young female Polish Jew might have expectations for her life in her new country that extended beyond survival – that she might even criticize and make demands upon the society that had opened to embrace her – would not have been met kindly by her would-be saviors, to say the least.
Lodz described Ewa Chaplin’s first months and years in London as being hard and isolated, stating further that she never gave up on the dream of being a writer, even after she found a measure of success and recognition as what Lodz dubbed a textile artist. Lodz made no mention of dolls. She seemed to shy away from the idea that dolls could be called art even, though she was happy to admit that the works Ewa created bore much in common with the prickly, often uncomfortable tone of the stories she continued to write until the end of her life.
Ewa Chaplin’s view of the fairy tale is in no way escapist, Lodz wrote. And yet neither do her stories adhere to the strict moralities imposed by earlier practitioners, most notably the Grimm brothers. Chaplin’s tales speak of cruel reversals and secret triumphs in an unpredictable world. These tales thrill even as they terrify, because we sense instinctively that they could happen to anyone. Even to us.
Elegantly put, I conceded, except that Ewa Chaplin’s tales really did seem to be happening to me, making their presence felt in ways I found if not terrifying – a story was only a story, after all – then at least unnerving. The little girl in “The Elephant Girl,” for example – she was Jane Clarence to the life, only of course she couldn’t be. Ewa Chaplin had died before Jane was born.
I dismissed the thought, chiding myself for reading too much reality into what was self-evidently a work of fiction. I got up from my bench and walked the length of the platform, hoping I might find somewhere to buy a sandwich or even a packet of crisps, but the ticket hall and the refreshment kiosk were both closed. My train was still not due for half an hour, and apart from myself the station seemed to be deserted. I became aware of an uncommon silence, the preternatural quiet of a hot midday. I returned to my bench, took the half-finished letter to Bramber from my holdall and added a detailed description of my surroundings: the weeds sprouting between the flagstones, the old stationmaster’s house with its red window boxes, the parched scrap of yellow lawn to the side.
Once again I made no mention of where I was. In her la
st letter, Bramber had mentioned a recent illness, the resulting exhaustion, the impossibility of travel. As if she were in a fairy tale herself, I mused, a sleeping beauty. But if there were dragons to be slain, their identity was not so easy to determine.
Could lack of confidence be described as a dragon? Could low self-esteem? I smiled to myself. This was the stuff of self-help books. I had no right to presume. Through the course of her letters, Bramber had told me a great deal about her day-to-day life. I had come to know the occupants of West Edge House as if they were my own friends and neighbors. About her arrival in this institution though – her reason for being there – I knew remarkably little.
I heard Clarence’s voice inside my head – why don’t you ask her then, seeing as you’re so close? – but shrugged it aside. Such an invasion of Bramber’s privacy would be monstrous. And yet, for all that I now chose to think of West Edge House as a kind of sanctuary, a sanatorium along the lines of those that had once flourished throughout the spa towns of Europe, I could not deny that the woman I thought of as my soul mate was in a mental hospital.
What traitors words are, sometimes. What did it matter how the place might be designated, when my Bramber was sad, suffering, lost, as Ewa Chaplin had been lost, cut off from one existence and thrust wantonly into another, the reality of her life laid waste, even as a harsher, less trustworthy reality arose to replace it?
A great breach, a severing of past from present with no hope of return. Was it any wonder that Bramber found solace in studying her spiritual twin, in assimilating the details of her troubled life, in retracing her hesitant steps across a war-torn landscape?
Did Bramber look at Ewa Chaplin, and see herself? The idea made sense, and even if it did not explain everything, it explained much. The details – the explanation – could surely wait. We had a lifetime to get to know one another, after all.
As if in response to my lightening of mood, the station platform began to fill up with other passengers. When the train finally arrived, it was one of the old kind, with a through corridor and pull-down windows. I had not realized such trains still existed. I found a compartment that was not too full and managed to bag a window seat.
The train stopped at every station along the route: Wimborne, Yeovil, Axminster, Honiton, Clay. The countryside around Wade had been flat and expansive, but west of Yeovil the landscape became increasingly hilly. I glimpsed farmsteads and crossroads, clusters of whitewashed cottages, their gardens running down to the railway tracks. In the gardens, washing flapped brightly from rotary dryers, dismembered motorbikes glowed sullenly in the heat. As the train pulled away from Clay Station, I caught sight of the tower of St. Benedict’s Church, the place, or so Coastage’s English Almanac reliably informed me, where the noted archaeologist and curator Hermione Thorncoatts was buried. Coastage’s described St. Benedict’s as “a fine example of Norman architecture” and well worth a visit. I had originally planned to stop off in Clay and spend a night there, but although I searched the guide books and online listings exhaustively I had been unable to find any suitable accommodation.
Now that I saw the village, straggling out of sight between the trees, I felt glad to be passing through without stopping. From the train at least, Clay seemed to be a dingy, secretive place, its huddle of low-lying houses most likely chilly and plagued with condensation in winter. I did not want a repetition of my experiences in Wade.
I arrived in Exeter half an hour later. I made straight for the taxi rank, and asked the driver to take me to the White Hart Hotel, on South Street. Coastage’s highlighted the White Hart as one of the oldest inns in the city, which also had the benefit of being close to the center.
My room was on the second floor, under the eaves. There were stripped oak beams and a marble washstand, a low door giving access to an en suite toilet and shower. The air was redolent with the scents of wax furniture polish and clean bed linen, and when I looked out of the window I saw that the room overlooked an inner courtyard, paved with cobblestones and planted with roses. A young couple were down there, sitting at a wrought-iron table sipping glasses of wine. I decided I would take a shower immediately, and emerged feeling re-energized and in a good frame of mind.
Wade had been a mistake but that was behind me now. This was a different day and Exeter – larger, more sophisticated, closer to my goal – was a different proposition. The doubts that had begun to assail me on the platform at Salisbury – that it was not just Wade that had been a mistake, but the entire venture – receded completely. I was back in the saddle.
* * *
—
EXETER IS TWINNED WITH Bad Homburg, a medium-sized German spa town to the south of Frankfurt. Its town hall is of Gothic proportions, its elegant, tree-lined boulevards overlooked by the former houses of the manufacturers and merchants to whom the town owed its fortune. When I visited the town – the same year I first took up my post at Clark Cannings, this was – I found it more bustling than I had expected, more commercial, yet aside from this fleeting impression of busyness, my memories of Bad Homburg itself remain vague. It was not the architecture I had come to admire, but the museum.
Since traveling to Bad Homburg those many years ago, I have made visits to all the major European toy museums, and for my thirty-fifth birthday I treated myself to a week’s holiday in Montreal, so I could attend the World Symposium on Dolls and Automata, which that year boasted several notable guest speakers I was eager to hear. I kept journals of all my trips abroad, documenting my discoveries and collating information. I made many valuable acquaintances and more than a handful of friends. All seemed to agree that the Museum of Childhood in Bad Homburg was in a class of its own.
It is not just the size and extent of Doris Schaefer’s collection that makes it remarkable, but her eye for quality. “I am drawn to certain dolls not by the price they might command, but by their personality,” Schaefer writes in A Short History of Wonderland. “When I first began collecting, I had no notion of dolls as objects of monetary value. I saw them as beautiful little people with minds and stories and a history that was entirely their own. I felt an intense and painful longing to understand their world.”
In many cases, the dolls Schaefer acquired turned out to be both rare and valuable. A number of the dolls on display in the Museum of Childhood are thought to be the sole surviving examples of their lines.
While I was in Bad Homburg I bought a set of slides with accompanying hand projector that illustrated a selection of the museum’s highlights. I had been back to Germany several times since – once to the Kramergalerie in Berlin, and twice to the famous Museum of Toymaking in Nuremberg – but I had never returned to Bad Homburg, or to the Museum of Childhood. I think perhaps I was afraid to – afraid that in repeating the experience I ran the risk of diluting my memories. But when I learned from an article in Doll Collector magazine that a cross-section of Doris Schaefer’s collection was to go on loan to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Bad Homburg’s twin town of Exeter I felt no such reservations.
A fortnight prior to my journey west, I had telephoned the Royal Albert Museum to make sure that the dolls would be on display throughout the period of my visit, and to check the museum’s opening times. They confirmed that the show would still be running, and also sent me a leaflet with photographs and details of some of the exhibits – a Leinsdorff “Helene,” a Didier Montaigne “Marie Celeste” and a rare Bertram & Tovey “Alison” doll that had featured in one of my slides. It would be good to see these dolls again – the “Alison” especially – but what I was counting on most of all was that the exhibition might include one of the Museum of Childhood’s three Ewa Chaplins.
I was hoping I might be able to photograph the doll, or purchase a postcard of it, if such postcards were available, as a token I might offer to Bramber at our first meeting.
By the time I left the hotel it was four o’clock. The museum would be closing at five, but it was only
a short walk from South Street to Queen Street and I wanted to go and see the Schaefer dolls right away. There would be time for a longer visit the following day, I told myself. Besides, I could use the fresh air.
Exeter was badly bombed during the war, the damage consolidated by the brutally shortsighted town planning of the 1950s. Of the buildings on South Street, only the White Hart itself and the cluster of houses and commercial premises in its immediate environs had escaped further injury. The rest of the street was a messy amalgam of fifties infill and seventies red brick. The soulless, concrete canyon that constituted the high street had fared no better. It was as if a great fist had descended from the sky, smashing the heart of the city into dusty oblivion.
The museum at least had emerged unscathed, an impressive Victorian edifice which, as the leaflet informed me, had recently been internally refurbished and extended. The entrance foyer was pleasantly cool. Laminated arrows signposted me towards something called the Arundel Collection, together with an exhibition of work by the South West England Society of Goldsmiths. There were also signs for a gift shop and café. I ignored these various temptations and proceeded upstairs.
A broad, carpeted staircase led to a first-floor landing hung with eighteenth-century portraits and still-life paintings in glowing oils. There was nobody about, presumably because it was so close to closing time.
The Schaefer dolls were being shown in the Albert Galleries, a series of interlinked spaces that occupied most of the first-floor exhibition area. At the entrance to the galleries was a display of information, including a photograph of Doris Schaefer on the steps of the Museum of Childhood in Bad Homburg, the same image that formed the back cover illustration of A Short History of Wonderland. I studied it for a moment before passing through into the exhibition space. A small distance in front of me, a woman in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt was standing motionless in front of one of the cabinets. I hung back close to the entrance, scanning the contents of the cabinet closest to me: seven Tremmler dolls in Bavarian costume, each named for a day of the week. When I looked up again the woman was gone. I moved across to where she’d been standing, curious to see which of the exhibits had so absorbed her attention.
