The Journal of Dora Damage (10 page)
I’ll tell my own daddy,
When he comes home,
What little good work
My mammy has done;
She has earned a penny
And spent a groat,
And burnt a hole
In the child’s new coat.
'M
OIV BIBLL,’ Jack read over my shoulder. ‘Moive Bibble. Who’s she? The police officer responsible for offences against spines?’
‘No. She’s the Patron Saint of Bad Toolers.’
‘What’s it meant to say?’
‘Holy Bible.’
‘Ah. Never mind, Mrs D. You’ll get there. That’s not half bad for a first try. I’ve seen plenty worse.’
It had not been the easiest of mornings. We had started with a discussion of the brief: ‘a simple representation of God’s
bounty in tropical climes’. Peter had no pineapples, no fig-leaves, no palm trees, amongst his tools. The closest he had come
to the tropics was binding
The Reports for the Year
1856 of the Past and Present State of Her Majesty’s Colonial
Possessions
. I wondered why Diprose had even thought of Damages for this brief. For all his curves, Peter was a rectilinear sort of man;
his fillets were the straightest in London. His idea for this would have been a geometrical diaper pattern across the front
cover, with a border of straight lines of varying thicknesses.
‘But you are not capable of the discipline of regular diaper tooling,’ he told me bluntly. ‘You are clumsy. Let us not even
consider it.’
Yet he would not consider anything else. I had painted watercolours on some rectangles of vellum, too small to make more than
a book for a midget, but each one was too sensual, or too beautiful, or too dangerous for Peter to contemplate turning into
a tooled design. I had designed Biblical scenes for Peter before in this way: the Annunciation, countless Miracles, the Crucifixion.
But when asked for God’s bounty in the tropics, I found myself time and again in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil, serpents, fruit, and the innocence of nakedness.
‘No fruit. Too suggestive, too much a woeful reminder of the fateful apple,’ he would say. Or, ‘Fig-leaves? A representation
of the civilised – by which I mean, clothed – appearance of Western missionaries, would be more appropriate than their naked
and barbarous brethren.’ And finally, ‘Are you attempting to incite my wrath with your border of snakes, or are you merely
stupid?’
‘Diprose has asked for simplicity,’ he went on to explain.
‘Diprose is a man of the times. Not for him this endless gold filigree, this vulgar excess, this florid lack of taste. Nor
for me neither.’
My paintings were also too elaborate for me to convert into tooled gold. I could have embroidered them in coloured silks and
silver and gold threads, onto the purest white satin, with the most elaborate border of beasts, birds and fish, but both Peter
and I knew I could not hope to gold-tool them.
‘It is quite apparent,’ Peter eventually said, ‘that we must start with establishing of what you are capable, and work the
design within those meagre limitations. A simple diaper is what it must be. A leaf will do.’
Peter had several leaf tools, but they were the ash, the oak, the sycamore, the chestnut, not the palm, the baobab, the gingko.
‘God’s bounty in tropical climes,’ I muttered, as I played with the tools. A tentative pattern was forming in my mind. I selected
a small crown tool, a miniature diamond, and a triangle. I sketched it on a piece of paper, and showed Peter my idea. ‘Imposs
–’ he started to say, before sucking in his lower lip and nodding, slowly.
I practised on the half-leather of the woefully bound journal with which I had started and ended my forwarding career. Peter
showed me how to draw up the template on paper, and fix it in place over the half-leather. Then I warmed the tools on the
stove, and went slowly over the pattern. My dwell was insufficient here, and too much there, the crown was not straight here,
and the diamonds did not align there, but slowly the leather became covered with indentations that represented tiny, imperfect
pineapples. The crowns were the leaves, and the diamonds and triangles the matrix of the skin. I was still tooling blind;
we could not waste a speck of gold dust on practice.
‘Now for the spine.’ Peter showed me how to grip the book in the press and prepare the lettering. I selected the type for
‘HOLY BIBLE’, warmed them too on the stove, and pressed them into the leather. It would not yet pass muster with Charles Diprose,
but even Peter knew it was an admirable start. Some of the letters were skewed, I had dug in too deep in places, and held
the tool at the wrong angle so that one side of the letter went deeper than another, but it was just about legible.
‘Never mind. We must pursue our goal with determination. You have had enough practice with the – the – that –
pine
apple, and we will have to hope for the best.’
With a ruler I marked out a paper grid with the precise location of each tool, and affixed it to the front cover of the Bible.
Then we took the book over to the booth in the corner, along with the tools. Jack locked the external door and pulled the
door curtain across it, stopped up the bottom with the felt draught-excluder, and pulled the curtain across the internal door
and around the booth.
I tooled the design through the paper, removed the paper, and heated up the tools for the first round of blind-tooling. I
painted the design with glair using a fine sable brush, and let it dry. I repeated it, another thin coat. Then a third time,
on Peter’s insistence. Finally, I took the gold out of the strongbox below the bench, greased the impressions, laid the gold
on, and heated the tiny branding irons.
It was unbearably slow, and the irrevocable nature of the work was daunting: I could burn the leather, or cut it, or get the
tool in the wrong place, or tool unevenly. When it came to putting the gold down, there really was no return. I kept holding
my breath, and becoming giddy.
‘Your hands must not shake,’ Peter insisted, but my hands were not shaking, and both of us knew it. ‘Where the iron touches,
the gold sticks for good,’ he murmured, but I was getting it right. My pressure was still uneven, but I took the time to rock
the tools, which increased the amount of light reflected from the gold. ‘Give the pattern dignity. Slow and steady.’
But soon he stopped instructing me, and finally conceded, with discernible sadness, that I did indeed, and most fortunately,
have a steady hand. He left after a while, to find some salicin or take a rest, I did not know. I paused while he moved the
curtains, and ensured the gold was not disturbed by any breeze. When he had gone, I continued.
Give the pattern dignity, slow and steady. His words still rang in my ears. I continued – four, five, six, seven more pineapples.
I was almost halfway down the front cover. Then, despite myself, my focus shifted from the present tooling to the ones I had
yet to do, and back to the ones I had done before, and I congratulated myself on how good they were, and gained from them
a false sense of confidence. Then in crept the thought that Lucinda would soon be ready for some food, and then her nap. Was
that her I could hear, wandering around in the house saying ‘Mama, Mama’? She knew better than to come in and disrupt the
folds of the curtain, but what if she did? I lost momentum; my mother’s brain took over, my hands rushed and tried to do their
usual several things at once instead of the one task in progress. And so I made two errors simultaneously: I burnt the leather,
and I mis-tooled, which meant the ghost and the final impression would not sit squarely on each other. In an attempt to rectify
it, I dampened the leather and picked at it with a pin to try to lift the impressions, but I only scratched the leather and
made more of a mess.
I stood back, hot and breathless, and looked at the central row of pineapples. Not just one but all of them were out of kilter
and at odds with each other, strewn like children playing in the fields, rather than neatly serried ranks of pupils in a schoolhouse.
I stopped, and wondered why I had ever been so hard on Peter for only being capable of doing one thing at a time.
I did not allow myself to despair for long. I simply left the workshop behind me to see to my child, and do what at heart
I knew I was best at. I did not return to the workshop at all, but busied myself about the house to thwart the worrying. And
when I heard noises later coming from the workshop, I did not dare descend to see what Peter was up to. There was swearing,
and shouting, and a bench leg being kicked, followed by puffing, and panting, and sobs. I trembled in bed and cried myself
to sleep. I knew I should have got up to confront the responsibilities that I had ensured were now my own, but I decided to
let the man be, for a while. I must have fallen asleep at some point, for I woke with a start as the church bell tolled five,
and my hands were still gripping the top of the counterpane tightly. Peter was soundly asleep next to me. I took the chamber-pots
and descended, then rifled through the fires for embers to put in the range. Only then did I go into the workshop.
It was as I had left it. The bench leg did not betray the kicking it had received, nothing was lying on the floor or out of
place as if hurled to vent its master’s spleen. Cautiously I pulled back the curtain around the gold-tooling booth, and saw
my Bible lying there much as it did yesterday, only the centre of the leather on the front cover of the binding was gone.
Someone had, extremely skilfully, cut around my mess in a perfect rectangle, and lifted it clean away from the cover. In its
place was another perfect rectangle of soft cream vellum, inset into the red morocco. Someone had tooled some perfectly straight
lines all the way around it, as if it were meant, as if it had always been part of the majestic, celebratory design of God’s
bounty in the tropics. And on the vellum was my original watercolour of the Garden of Eden, all palm-trees and coconuts and
fountains and cicadas and monkeys and lusciousness. Below it lay an expanse of red morocco, still waiting for its pineapple
diaper. I smiled, and found that I could not wait to get to work.
But first I swept the floor, dusted the furniture, cleaned the hearths, set the fire, made the porridge, drew and heated the
water, and aired the washing. I left Peter in bed: the night’s escapades had nearly been the end of him. He did not get out
of bed until eleven, and only then because the phial of salicin by his bed was empty. So I bound his hands up tight in bandages,
in the hope that they would force the fluids to be reabsorbed by his body, then I raided the tea-caddy for our last remaining
pennies, and headed out to the market and the pharmacist with Lucinda by my side.
Finally, at half-past four that afternoon, I started work.
Peter did not ask to see it, but once it was finished I brought the book to his bedside, held it out for his inspection, and
turned it on all sides. HOLY BIBLE, the spine read, clearly and evenly. He was lying on his left side again, head tucked in
and knees drawn up like a baby, his swollen hands pressed between his thighs. He raised his head slightly, nodded, then closed
his eyes once more. I wrapped the Bible in soft muslin, and took Lucinda back to Agatha Marrow’s with a kiss and a promise,
and set out for Diprose’s for the third time in as many weeks.
‘Hello, Mrs Eeles,’ I said as I reached the top of Ivy-street.
‘Hello, dearie.’ She wasn’t wearing a veil today, but an enormous black bonnet, which looked as if someone had tipped a coal
scuttle over her head and left it there. A sallow, bucktoothed boy of about ten years hovered by her side. ‘His mam’s just
died, I’m taking him in for a bit,’ she said mawkishly. ‘ “Stand we in jeopardy every hour; in the midst of life we are in
death.” Say hello, Billy.’
‘Hello,’ Billy said, not looking at me.
‘Hello, Billy,’ I said. ‘You must play with my Lucinda while you’re here. You’ll meet her in the street soon enough.’ Billy
nodded, preoccupied with the expanse of black bombazine around his temporary guardian. I looked longingly at Mrs Eeles’s black
gloves; they weren’t fine and white, like a lady’s, but I could have done with them today. My fingers were stained with leather
dye, and cracked all over, as if they too were becoming leather in the process. Oh, the irony of it, that ladies got to wear
smooth white gloves over their smooth white fingers, yet the ones that needed them most, the hard workers of the country,
couldn’t afford them, and even if we could have, we wouldn’t have been allowed to wear them, or we would have been called
fast, or gay, even. Mrs Eeles got away with it only because hers were black, and she was eccentric besides.
Mr Diprose himself greeted me at the entrance to his shop, took the Bible from me, and unwrapped it. He would, I feared, be
displeased with the design or execution of the binding, or worse still, would find me out, from the stains on my fingers,
or the shoddiness of the handiwork. He was silent in consideration for several minutes. His lips were a tight, thin line,
and his face flushed the colour of port, like Peter’s did when he was angry.
‘
Vous me troublez, Madame
,’ was all he eventually said, and expressed his perplexity by rising and ascending the bare wooden staircase to the floor
above.
I must have sat there for well nigh on fifteen minutes. Not a soul entered or left, but there was muted activity upstairs,
footsteps, hammering, machinery. I peered through the curtain into the road, and through the windows I could see clerks, businessmen,
errand-boys and -girls, street sweepers, racing pell-mell down the cluttered streets in their droves. From the remarkable
silence of the shop interior it was as if I had turned deaf, for the plate-glass was thick and its sealings magnificent in
their design. It kept out the smells as well as the sounds, and as I relaxed into the aroma of well-bound books, leather dressings
and neatsfoot oil, I inhaled my own odour and realised, as Mr Diprose descended once more, that I was foul.
