The Journal of Dora Damage(142)

‘Dora. Dora. Calm yourself, girl. What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

‘Well, why, then? Why are you doing it? That’s a perfectly reasonable dress. It might be last season’s, I’ll grant you, but it will last you many more. It’s presentable enough.’

My scissors ripped through the seams, and soon I had sixteen pieces of brown silk of various shapes and sizes, and two large pieces of cream silk. I sorted through them until I found what had been two sleeves, and two bodice-sides, then I smoothed down the rest on to the table, one on top of each other. Then I grabbed the cloud of brown and cream silk in both arms, and took them into the workshop. ‘Dora! It won’t bring her back!’ Sylvia shouted after me.

But what else could I have done? This is what I had learnt to do in times of adversity: work. But it was not so much ‘working’ as ‘working out’: the bindings were not as relevant as the plan I needed to formulate. One thing was for sure: it was better to have Sylvia on my side now than against me. I would cease my suspicions about her and Din. I laid the pieces of brown silk down on the bench and assessed the number and sizes of journals and albums I would be able to magic from them.

I dissected the parasol, discarded its stem and spokes, and turned the pale blue silk into an embroidered pocket-book, trimmed with its own point-lace. I striped ribbons of cream silk from the scarf over the brown silk of the dress, for several albums. The tortoiseshell top of the hair comb became a buckle on the edge of another brown silk volume, and I fashioned a fastener out of silver wire so it would snap shut. The purple feathers bedecked the ivory silk of the petticoats; the black feathers sprayed around the black rose from the centre of the dress’s bodice in an unusual and beautiful centrepiece on the cover of a scrapbook. Everything – except Lucinda’s coat – was sacrificed to the alchemical process that provided me with a frenzied focus, as if in work I would find the answer. The work consumed me, and for a while consumed my guilt, and the immoral life I had been leading.

But as I sliced up the silk and wrapped it around the boards, I could only think of the poor unfortunate whose skin had been used for the binding. It was a woman, it had to be. Was it the Hindoo widow, dragged from the fire? If so, how did she ultimately meet her death at the hands of her so-called saviours? I was angry; angry for her ignominious demise, and angry for my unwitting role in furthering her dishonour. I had read of it in a thousand vile books, but I had not realised until this moment how closely allied were anger and desire. And as in every one of those books, my desire was indeed to violate the one towards whom I felt anger. I wanted one thing only. Revenge.

Go to the police, an inner voice called! Pah! To what effect? Look at Charlie Diprose, prancing out of his cell a week into what should rightfully have been a four-year sentence! If that odious man could slip so fluidly out of the hands of the law, why should I imagine that Sir Jocelyn Knightley was any less untouchable?

If only I had known before Diprose brought me the leather. If only. I would have burnt it in the fire before it left my hands to deny the twisted pleasure of so diseased an imagination. If only. And what if. What if I could find out where the book was now? What if I could retrieve it? I could destroy it myself. I could go to Holywell-street – in disguise? I could send . . . who? I could break in . . . I could break in to Berkeley-square? I could send Sylvia back one last time? I could . . . I could . . . I could not think of a single reasonable plan, and the brown silk kept turning to skin beneath my accursed fingers, and I retched, and swooned, and burned with rage and impotence.

My anger was my consolation, though. I thought of Lizzie, whom life had taught that there was no point in getting angry, for nothing would change by it. Anger is a luxury for those who still have hope, who still have dignity; those who have neither, those like Lizzie, know not to waste their energy on anger.

I tried to annihilate the book from my thoughts by focusing on the women who might own these silken journals. I didn’t want to give them to a bookseller who might prove to be another Diprose. I wanted to hand them out on New Cut and Lambeth Walk, throw them from Waterloo Bridge to the mud-larks, walk up the street and give them to Mrs Eeles, Nora Negley, Patience Bishop, Agatha Marrow. Write them, I would scream at them. What are we to write, their faces would ask, looking as blank as the pages within. Your dreams, I would cry. Your thoughts. Your fantasies. Yours, and yours alone. In your own voice. Not constructed for you by Mr Eeles, Mr Marrow, Mr Bishop or Mr Negley, dead or alive. Author your own body. Walk your own text. Is it not constantly being read anyway, each time you walk up the street? You read mine often enough.