Dolly (10 page)

I finished my beer and got up.

The air was still warm and the stars were beginning to brighten in the silky sky as I walked slowly round the square, where the cobbles gave way to stone paving. Every window was dark and shuttered. The only sound was that of my own footsteps.

Here and there an old stable door stood ajar, revealing cobbles on which straw was still scattered though the horses had long gone. I passed a music shop, a cobbler’s, and one tiny frontage displaying pens and parchment. All were locked up, and dark. Then, in the middle of the narrowest, dimmest alley, where the walls of the houses bulged across almost to meet one another, I saw a yellowish light coming from one of the windows and nearing it, I found a curious shop.

The window was dusty, making it difficult to
see much of what was inside but I could make out shelves and an ancient counter. No attempt had been made to display goods attractively – the window held a jumble of objects piled together. I put my hand on the latch and at once heard the ring of an old-fashioned bell.

A very small old man was behind the mahogany counter, his skin paper pale and almost transparent over the bones of his cheeks and skull. He had tufts of yellow-white hair, yellow-white eyebrows and a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye, with which he was examining a round silver box, dulled and stained with verdigris.

He raised a finger in recognition of my entrance, but continued to peer down at the object, and so I looked round me at the stock, which was crammed onto the shelves, spilled out of drawers, displayed in glass cabinets. The floor was of uncovered oak boards, polished and worn by the passage of feet over years.

The lower shelves contained small leather bound books, boxes of various sizes with metal hasps, dulled by the same verdigris as the box being scrutinised, wooden trays with what looked like puzzles fitted into them, a couple of musical boxes. Higher up, I
saw wooden cabinets with sets of narrow drawers, each labelled in the old Cyrillic alphabet which had not been used in the country for almost a century. A doll’s house stood on the floor beside me, its eaves and roof modelled on those of the buildings in the square, its front hanging half-off its single hinge. Beside it was a child-sized leather trunk, the leather rubbed and lifting here and there. I glanced at the old man but now he had set the box on a scrap of dark blue velvet set down on the counter and was peering at it even more intently through his eyeglass, I thought perhaps trying to make out some pattern or inscription.

I turned back to the doll’s house and trunk and as I did so, I heard a sound which at first I took to be the scratching of a mouse in the skirting somewhere – I hoped a mouse, and not a rat. It stopped and then, as I put out my hand to touch the front of the wooden house, started again, and though it was still very soft, I knew that it was not the noise made by any sort of rodent. I could not tell exactly where it originated – it seemed to be coming from the darkness somewhere, behind me, or to one side – I could not quite pin down the direction. It was a rustling of some kind – perhaps the sound made when the wind blows through branches or reeds, perhaps the
movement of long grass. Yet it was not altogether like those sounds. It stopped again. I looked at the old man but he was crouching over his box, his narrow back half bent, shoulders hunched.

I waited. It came again. A soft, insistent, rustling sound. Like paper. Someone was rustling paper – perhaps sheets of tissue paper. I turned my head to one corner, then the other but the sound did not quite come from there, or there, or from anywhere.

Perhaps it was inside my own head.

The old man sat up abruptly, put down the eyeglass and looked directly at me. His eyes were the watery grey of the sea on a dull day, dilute and pale.

‘Good evening,’ he said in English. ‘Is it something special you look for, because in a moment, I close.’

‘Thank you, no. I was just interested to find a shop here and open at this time.’

‘Ah.’

‘You sell many different things. What do you call yourself?’

‘A restorer.’

‘But so am I!’

‘Toys?’

‘No, ancient buildings. Like those in this quarter. I’m an architectural conservator.’

He nodded.

‘Little is beyond repair but my job is more easy than yours.’

He gestured round. I had begun to notice that many of the objects on his shelves and even standing around the floor were old toys, mostly of wood, some painted elaborately, some simply carved. As well as the dolls’ house I had already seen, there were others, and then a fort, many soldiers in the original military uniforms of the country’s past, a wooden truck, a railway engine and many boxes of different sizes and shapes. A lot of them had clearly been gathering dust for years. I looked down at the cloth on which the miniature silver box was standing.

‘This has been chased by hand, the most expert hand.’ He offered the eyeglass for me to examine it. ‘The work of a fine craftsman. It was found on the dresser of a dolls’ house – but I think it was not a toy item. Please, look.’

I did so. There was some intricate patterning forming the border and in the centre, a night sky with moon and stars and clouds, with a swirl of movement suggesting a wild wind.

‘Certainly not a toy.’ I handed back the eyeglass. ‘Marvellous workmanship.’

‘This old part of Szargesti, were craftsmen who
worked in silver many years past, special craftsmen who passed down their skill to younger ones. Now …’ he sighed. ‘Almost none left. Skills in danger of death. I do not have these skills. I am only repairer of toys. Please, look round. You have some children?’

I shook my head. I assumed that everything here was waiting for repair and not for sale but even old toys, like many other domestic artefacts, tell a conservator something about the times in which they were made and even of the buildings in which they belonged and I poked about a little more, finding treasures behind treasures. But I wondered how long some of them had been lying here and how much longer they would have to wait for the mender’s attention. And then I wondered if some of the children who had owned and played with them were now grown-up or even dead, the toys were so old-fashioned.

The old man let me look around, poke into corners, touch and even pick things up without taking any notice of me and I was at the very back of the shop, where it was even darker and dustier, when I heard it again. The faint rustling sound seemed to be coming from something close to me but when I turned, became softer as if it were moving away. I stood very still. The shop was quiet. I heard the
rustling again, as if tissue paper were being scrumpled up or unfolded, and now I thought I could trace the sound to somewhere on the floor and quite close to my feet. I bent down but it was very dark and I saw nothing unusual, and there was no quick movement of a rodent scuttling away. It stopped. Started again, more softly. Stopped. I took a step or two forwards and my foot bumped up against something. I bent down. A cardboard box, about the size to contain a pair of boots, was just in front of me, the lid apparently tied on with stout string. It was as I put my hand out to touch it that I felt an iciness down my spine, and a sudden moment of fear. I was sure that I was remembering something but I had no idea what. Deep in my subconscious mind a cardboard box like this one had a place but in what way or from what stage of my life I did not know.

I stood up hastily and as I did so, the rustling began again. It was coming from inside the box.

But I did not have a chance to try to trace the source of the sound, even if I was sure that I wanted to do so, because the old man unnerved me by saying:

‘You are looking for a doll I think.’

I opened my mouth to say that I was not, had just been drawn into the shop out of curiosity, but I realised that was not true.

‘Look there.’

I looked. In a cabinet just above my head was the doll, the exact, the same doll, which Leonora had yearned for all those years ago, the doll she had described in such detail and which I had tried to draw for her as some sort of compensation.

The Indian Princess, in her rich garments, shining jewels, sequins, beads, embroidery, sparkling with gold and silver, ruby and emerald, pearl and diamond, was sitting on some sort of velvet chair with a high, crested back, her face bland and serene, her veil sprinkled with silver and gold suns, moons and stars. She was not a doll for a child, not a doll to be played with, dressed and undressed, fed and pushed about in an old pram, she was far too fine, too regal, too formal. But I knew that this was the doll my cousin had yearned for so desperately and that I had no choice but to buy it – it had been placed here for just that reason. Even as the thought flashed across my mind, I was almost embarrassed, it was so ridiculous, and yet some part of me believed that it was true.

The old man was still tapping away calmly, smiling a little.

‘Are your dolls for sale?’

‘You wish to buy that one.’ It was not a question.

He glanced at me, the very centres of his eyes steel-bright, fixed and all-seeing.

Now, he had come round the counter and was unlocking the cabinet. A shiver rippled down my back as he reached inside and took hold of the Indian Princess. He did not ask me if this was the one I wanted, simply took it down, locked the cabinet again and then laid the doll on the counter.

‘I have the exact box.’ He retreated into the shadows where I could just make out a door that stood ajar. My back was icy cold now. The shop was very quiet and somewhere in that quietness, I heard the rustling sound again.

He came back with the doll, boxed, lidded, tied with string and handed it over to me. I paid him and fled, out into the alley under the tallow light of the gas lamp, the coffin-like box under my arm. Through the window, I could make out the old man, behind the counter. He did not look up.

When I got back to the hotel, I pushed the doll under the bed in my room and went down to the cheerful bar, with its red shaded lamps and buzz of talk, and had a couple of brandies to try to rid myself of the unpleasant chill through my body, and a general sense of malaise. Gradually, I calmed. I began to try to work out why I had heard the rustling
sound and what it had meant, but soon gave up. It could not have had anything to do with any of the similar sounds I had heard before. I was in another country, a different place.

I went to bed, fortified by the brandy, and was on the very cusp of sleep when I sat straight up, my heart thumping in my chest. The rustling sound had started up again and as I listened in horror, I realised that it was coming from close to hand. I lay down again and then it was louder. I sat up, and it faded.

Either the rustling was in my own head – or rather, in my ears, some sort of tinnitus – or it was coming from underneath the bed.

That night my dreams were full of cascading images of dolls, broken, damaged, buried, covered in dirt, labelled, lying on shelves, being hammered and glued and tapped. In the middle of it all, the memory of Leonora’s twisted and angry face as she hurled the unwanted doll at the fireplace, and floating somewhere behind, the old man with the gimlet eyes.

I woke in a sweat around dawn and pulled the box from under the bed where I had left it, the string still carefully knotted. I did not want it in my sight, but I was sure that if I disposed of the doll I would have cause to regret it and first thing the next morning I
took it to the post office. I had addressed it to myself in London but changed my mind at the last moment, and sent it instead to Iyot House. The reasons were mainly practical yet I was also sending the doll there because it seemed right and where it naturally belonged.

I felt relief when it was out of my hands. I had kept it and yet I had not.

Some months passed, during which I heard via an announcement in
The Times
that Leonora had given birth to a daughter. I returned to England, but for the next year or so I was constantly travelling between London and Szargesti, absorbed in my work and I gave thought to little else.

And then I received a letter from the solicitor, telling me that Leonora wished to be in touch with me urgently. She had written via Iyot House but received no reply. Might he forward my address to her?

By the time I did receive a letter, I was married, I had finished my work in Szargesti, and embarked on a new project connected with English cathedrals. Leonora was far from my mind.

Dear Edward
I write to you from the depths of despair. I am unsure how much you know of what has happened to me since we last met. Briefly, I have a daughter, who is now two years old, and named Frederica, after her father and my beloved husband, Frederic, who died very suddenly. We were in Switzerland. In short, he has left me penniless; the hotels are on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to bad advice. I did not know a thing. How could I have known when Frederic protected me from everything? And now my daughter has a grave illness.

I have nowhere to go, nowhere to live. I am staying with friends out of their kindness and pity but that must come to an end.

In short, I am throwing myself on your generosity and asking if you would allow me to have Iyot House in which to live, though God knows I hate the place and would not want to set foot inside it again, if this were not my only possible home. Perhaps we could make it habitable.

If you have already disposed of it then I ask if you could share some of the proceeds with me so that I can buy a place in which my sick child and I can live.

Please reply c/o the poste restante address and tell me urgently what you can do. We are cousins, after all,

Affectionately

Leonora.

I had done nothing about Iyot House and after I told my wife the gist of the story she agreed at once that, of course, Leonora and her daughter should live there for as long as they wished.

‘It’s been locked up for years. I don’t know what state it will be in and it was never the most – welcoming of houses anyway.’

‘But surely you can get people to go in and make sure it is clean and that there hasn’t been any damage … that the place isn’t flooded? Then she can make the best of it … Anything other than being homeless.’