Best European Fiction 2013 (34 page)

“Aside from the fact that they talk!” the host interrupted, a little sarcastically.

“A small defect at first sight, but just think: we’ve created sentient rags! That’s nothing to be sneezed at …”

The devil fell silent a moment, was about to light another cigarette, but held back.

“Even so, please, I beg you, make him a human being again,” the host pleaded.

“Human being?”

“Yes.”

“He’s never been a human being!” The devil shook his head. “How can I make something out of nothing? That’s not in my power …”

The devil gave a guilty smile and finally lit his second cigarette.

In the growing silence, they could hear through the wall a sigh that was deaf to the world. The rag Nikolov was getting ready to sleep.

TRANSLATED FROM BULGARIAN BY CHRISTOPHER BUXTON

women

[UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]

A. S. BYATT

Dolls’ Eyes

Her name was Felicity; she had called herself Fliss as a small child, and it had stuck. The children in her reception class at Holly Grove School called her Miss Fliss, affectionately. She had been a pretty child and was a pretty woman, with tightly curling golden hair and pale blue eyes. Her classroom was full of invention, knitted dinosaurs, an embroidered snake coiling round three walls. She loved the children—almost all of them—and they loved her. They gave her things—a hedgehog, newts, tadpoles in a jar, bunches of daffodils. She did not love them as though they were her own children: she loved them because they were not. She taught bush-haired boys to do cross-stitch, and shy girls to splash out with big paintbrushes and tubs of vivid reds and blues and yellows.

She wondered often if she was odd, though she did not know what she meant by “odd.” One thing that was odd, perhaps, was that she had reached the age of thirty without having loved, or felt close, to anyone in particular. She made friends carefully—people must have friends, she knew—and went to the cinema, or cooked suppers, and could hear them saying how nice she was. She knew she was nice, but she also knew she was pretending to be nice. She lived alone in a little red brick terraced house she had inherited from an aunt. She had two spare rooms, one of which she let out, from time to time, to new teachers who were looking for something more permanent, or to passing students. The house was not at all odd, except for the dolls.

She did not collect dolls. She had over a hundred, sitting in cosy groups on sofas, perching on shelves, stretched and sleeping on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Rag dolls, china dolls, rubber dolls, celluloid dolls. Old dolls, new dolls, twin dolls (one pair conjoined). Black dolls, blonde dolls, baby dolls, chubby little boys, ethereal fairy dolls. Dolls with painted surprised eyes, dolls with eyes that clicked open and closed, dolls with pretty china teeth, between pretty parted lips. Pouting dolls, grinning dolls. Even dolls with trembling tongues.

The nucleus of the group had been inherited from her mother and grandmother, both of whom had loved and cared for them. There were four: a tall ladylike doll in a magenta velvet cloak, a tiny china doll in a frilly dress with forgetmenot painted eyes, a realistic baby doll with a cream silk bonnet, closing eyes, and articulated joints, and a stiff wooden doll, rigid and unsmiling in a black stuff gown.

Because she had those dolls—who sat in state in a basket chair— other dolls accumulated. People gave her their old dolls—“we know you’ll care for her.” Friends thinking of Christmas or birthday presents found unusual dolls in jumble sales or antique shops.

The ladylike doll was Miss Martha. The tiny china doll was Arabel. The baby doll was Polly. The rigid doll was Sarah Jane. She had an apron over her gown and might once have been a domestic servant doll.

Selected children, invited to tea and cake, asked if she played with the dolls. She did not, she replied, though she moved them round the house, giving them new seats and different company.

It would have been odd to have played with the dolls. She made them clothes, sometimes, or took one or two to school for the children to tell stories about.

She knew, but never said, that some of them were alive in some way, and some of them were only cloth and stuffing and moulded heads. You could even distinguish, two with identical heads under different wigs and bonnets, of whom one might be alive—Penelope with black pigtails—and one inert, though she had a name, Camilla, out of fairness.

There was a new teacher, that autumn, a late appointment because Miss Bury had had a leg amputated as a result of an infection caught on a boating holiday on an African river. The new teacher was Miss Coley. Carole Coley. The head teacher asked Fliss if she could put her up for a few weeks, and Fliss said she would gladly do so. They were introduced to each other at a teaparty for incoming teachers.

Carole Coley had strange eyes; this was the first thing Fliss noticed. They were large and rounded, dark and gleaming like black treacle. She had very black hair and very black eyelashes. She wore the hair, which was long, looped upward in the nape of her neck, under a black hairslide. She wore lipstick and nail varnish in a rich plum colour. She had a trim but female body and wore a trouser suit, also plum. And glittering glass rings, quite large, on slender fingers. Fliss was intimidated, but also intrigued. She offered hospitality—the big attic bedroom, shared bath and kitchen. Carole Coley said she might prove to be an impossible guest. She had two things which always came with her:

“My own big bed with my support mattress. And Cross-Patch.”

Fliss considered. The bed would be a problem but one that could be solved. Who was Cross-Patch?

Cross-Patch turned out to be a young Border collie, with a rackety eye-patch in black on a white face. Fliss had no pets, though she occasionally housed the classroom mice and tortoises in the holidays. Carole Coley said in a take it or leave it voice, that Cross-Patch was very well trained.

“I’m sure she is,” said Fliss, and so it was settled. She did not feel it necessary to warn Carole about the dolls. They were inanimate, if numerous.

Carole arrived with Cross-Patch, who was sleek and slinky. They stood with Fliss in the little sitting room whilst the removal men took Fliss’s spare bed into storage, and mounted with Carole’s much larger one. Carole was startled by the dolls. She went from cluster to cluster, picking them up, looking at their faces, putting them back precisely where they came from. Cross-Patch clung to her shapely calves and made a low throaty sound.

“I wouldn’t have put you down as a collector.”

“I’m not. They just seem to find their way here. I haven’t
bought
a single one. I get given them, and people see them, and give me more.”

“They’re a bit alarming. So much staring. So still.”

“I know. I’m used to them. Sometimes I move them round.”

Cross-Patch made a growly attempt to advance on the sofa. Carole raised a firm finger. “
No,
Cross-Patch.
Sit. Stay.
These are not your toys.”

Cross-Patch, it turned out, had her own stuffed toys—a bunny rabbit, a hedgehog—with which she played snarly, shaking games in the evenings. Fliss was impressed by Carole’s authority over the animal. She herself was afraid of it, and knew that it sensed her fear.

Carole was a good lodger. She was helpful and unobtrusive. Everything interested her—Fliss’s embroidery silks, her saved children’s books from when she was young, her mother’s receipts, a bizarre Clarice Cliffe tea-set with a conical sugar-shaker. She made Fliss feel that she was
interesting
—a feeling Fliss almost never had, and would have said she didn’t want to have. It was odd being looked at, appreciatively, for long moments. Carole asked her questions, but she could not think up any questions to ask in return. A few facts about Carole’s life did come to light. She had travelled and worked in India. She had been very ill and nearly died. She went to evening classes on classical Greece and asked Fliss to come too, but Fliss said no. When Carole went out, Fliss sat and watched the television, and Cross-Patch lay watchfully in a corner, guarding her toys. When Carole returned, the dog leaped up to embrace her as though she was going for her throat. She slept upstairs with her owner in the big bed. Their six feet went past Fliss’s bedroom door, pattering, dancing.

Carole said the dolls were beginning to fascinate her. So many different characters, so much love had gone into their making and clothing. “Almost loved to bits, some of them,” said Carole, her treacle eyes glittering. Fliss heard herself offer to lend a few of them, and was immediately horrified. What on earth would Carole want to borrow dolls for? The offer was
odd
. But Carole smiled widely and said she would love to have one or two to sit on the end of her big bed, or on the chest of drawers. Fliss was overcome with nervous anxiety, then, in case Cross-Patch might take against the selected dolls, or think they were toys. She looked sidelong at Cross-Patch, and Cross-Patch looked sidelong at her, and wrinkled her lip in a collie grin. Carole said

“You needn’t worry about her, my dear. She is completely well-trained. She hasn’t offered to touch any doll. Has she?”

“No,” said Fliss, still troubled by whether the dog would see matters differently in the bedroom.

When they went to bed they said goodnight on the first floor landing and Carole went up to the next floor. She borrowed a big rag doll with long blonde woollen plaits and a Swiss sort of apron. This doll was called Priddy, and was not, as far as Fliss knew, alive. She also borrowed—surprisingly—the rigid Sarah Jane, who certainly was alive. I love her disapproving expression, said Carole. She’s seen a thing or two, in her time. She had painted eyes, that didn’t close.

Other dolls took turns to go up the stairs. Fliss noticed, without formulating the idea, that they were always grown-up or big girl dolls, and they never had sleeping eyes.

Little noises came down the stairs. A cut-off laugh, an excited whisper, a creak of springs. Also a red light spread from the door over the sage-green staircarpet.

One night, when she couldn’t sleep, Fliss went down to the kitchen and made Horlicks for herself. She then took it into her head to go up the stairs to the spare room; she saw the pool of red light and knew Carole was not asleep. She meant to offer her Horlicks.

The door was half open. “Come in,” called Carole, before Fliss could tap. She had put squares of crimson silk, weighted down with china beads, over the bedside lamps. She sat on the middle of her big bed, in a pleated sea-green nightdress, with sleeves and a high neck. Her long hair was down, and brushed into a fan, prickling with an electric life of its own. Cross-Patch was curled at the foot of the bed.

“Come and sit down,” said Carole. Fliss was wearing a baby-blue nightie in a fine jersey fabric, under a fawn woolly dressing-gown. “Take that off, make yourself comfortable.”

“I was—I was going to—I couldn’t sleep …”

“Come here,” said Carole. “You’re all tense. I’ll massage your neck.”

They sat in the centre of the white quilt, made ruddy by light, and Carole pushed long fingers into all the sensitive bits of Fliss’s neck and shoulders, and released the nerves and muscles. Fliss began to cry.

“Shall I stop?”

“Oh no, don’t stop, don’t stop. I—

“This is terrible. Terrible. I love you.”

“And what’s terrible about that?” asked Carole, and put her arms around Fliss, and kissed her on the mouth.

Fliss was about to explain that she had never felt love and didn’t exactly like it, when they were distracted by fierce snarling from Cross-Patch.

“Now then, bitch,” said Carole. “Get out. If you’re going to be like that, get out.”

And Cross-Patch slid off the bed, and slunk out of the door. Carole kissed Fliss again, and pushed her gently down on the pillows and held her close. Fliss knew for the first time that terror that all lovers know, that the thing now begun must have an ending. Carole said “My dear, my darling.” No one had said that to her.

They sat side by side at breakfast, touching hands, from time to time. Cross-Patch uttered petulant low growls and then padded away, her nails rattling on the lino. Carole said they would tell each other everything, they would know each other. Fliss said with a light little laugh that there was nothing to know about her. But nevertheless she did more of the talking, described her childhood in a village, her estranged sister, her dead mother, the grandmother who had given them the dolls.

Cross-Patch burst back into the room. She was carrying something, worrying it, shaking it from side to side, making a chuckling noise, tossing it, as she would have tossed a rabbit to break its neck. It was the baby doll, Polly, in her frilled silk bonnet and trailing embroidered gown. Her feet in their knitted bootees protruded at angles. She rattled.

Carole rose up in splendid wrath. In a rich firm voice she ordered the dog to put the doll down, and Cross-Patch spat out the silky creature, slimed with saliva, and cowered whimpering on the ground, her ears flat to her head. Masterfully Carole took her by the collar and hit her face, from side to side, with the flat of her hands. “
Bad
dog,” she said, “
bad
dog,” and beat her. And beat her.

The rattling noise was Polly’s eyes, which had been shaken free of their weighted mechanism, and were rolling round inside her bisque skull. Where they had been were black holes. She had a rather severe little face, like some real babies. Eyeless it was ghastly.

“My darling, I am so sorry,” said Carole. “Can I have a look?”

Fliss did not want to relinquish the doll. But did. Carole shook her vigorously. The invisible eyes rolled.

“We could take her apart and try to fit them back.”

She began to pull at Polly’s neck.

“No, don’t, don’t. We can take her to the dolls’ hospital at the Ouse Bridge. There’s a man in there—Mr Copple—who can mend almost anything.”