The Journal of Dora Damage(27)

‘I’m ready for the forwarding, if you wish,’ I said. Then I went back into the workshop, punched the holes and prepared the vellum thongs for the tacketing. Soon he was by my side, scanning the assorted piles of naked pages.

‘But we cannot use any of these. It would be a waste of finest Dutch! Have we not some inferior paper upon which I can instruct you? This is going to be difficult, if you have not even the brain to determine something so fundamental.’

‘We could disband an old volume of ours. The Pilgrim’s Progress, or the Scott?’

‘Possibly. You are thinking, at least.’

‘Or . . .’ I started rummaging in the scraps drawer. ‘. . . here, would this do?’ I held up an old set of papers, yellowed at the corners and torn here and there, but soundly sewn, approximately two hundred pages thick, uncut and unploughed.

‘I asked you to make that years ago, didn’t I? I believe I instructed Jack on it,’ he said wistfully. ‘It will do, but it needs re-hammering first.’

And so we began. I took Jack’s leather apron and wrapped it over my pale blue work smock. I heated up some glue as Peter laid out the leather and marked out on it ten shapes of varying sizes.

‘We are in luck, for once, in this sorry situation. There is just about enough left over to use on your mockery of a journal. So we shall have one trial run, before starting the serious matter.’

Once the glue was liquid, I painted a thick coat into the back and stippled it between the sections, cut the strings a couple of inches above and below, and started to round, groove, and back the book. But it was harder than I had anticipated, and Peter was not forthcoming with assistance. He simply asked, as I hammered unevenly, ‘Did you ask Diprose how he likes his spines?’

I shook my head.

‘Idiot,’ he said. ‘What if he’s one of those dreadfully fashionable flat-spine men? Let me see what you’ve done. Move it over here. Now turn it over.’ He stayed silent for a while, the air hissing between his teeth, which he clenched whenever he was concentrating.

‘Not quite a third-of-a-circle, but not flat at least. The first rule. Never over-round your spines. And why? Why?’

‘Because . . .’ I looked up into the corner of the window frame as if I could read the answer there. ‘The spine won’t be sufficiently flexible. The margins will be reduced by the extreme curvature. If forced beyond its capability the spine may spring up in the centre of the pages like a ledger. This could strain the sewing.’ I may not have been the student, but I had attended the lessons, which was little solace when it came to struggling with the clamps of the press, cutting the millboards with an unwieldy saw, and making holes with a bradawl. When I pared the leather, my hand shook, and although I will not exalt the paring knife by claiming it had a mind of its own, it certainly did not wish to follow the instructions of my mind, and the resultant scrap was pitted and uneven, too thin here and not thin enough there.

‘Peter, please, I am failing.’

‘Indeed,’ came his reply.

And so I took the grass-stained section of the skirt, and cut it to size, and smoothed it over the front and back boards, and then rounded the leather onto the spine and the joins, and smoothed and rounded and smoothed and rounded, but still it was lumpy, and a shocking revelation to me of my inadequacy for our plan. I was angry at Peter’s refusal to help: could it really have been more important to him to confirm that I, as a woman, was unfit for such work, than to extricate us from the trap of debt?

My troublings were interrupted by the rattling of the external door to the workshop, followed by a pounding, then a voice.

‘Mr Damage. It’s me. Mr Damage. It’s Jack. Please –’

Peter strode to the door, but he could not grasp the key between his bloated fingers. I unlocked the door for him, but hid behind it as I opened it so that Mr Damage’s full worth could fill the vacating space and greet the street.

‘I’m sorry for my leave, Mr Damage. Please –’

‘Hush your excuses, boy,’ Peter bellowed. ‘Get in here. Stop making your fuss so public. Have you no courtesy?’

I closed the door behind Jack, and turned the key in the lock again.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Damage,’ Jack started up once more. He certainly looked as if he had had a rough time. His eyes were dark and sunken, and his hair was so lank and greasy it hardly looked red any more.

‘Sorry?’ Peter’s voice had calmed, which was possibly worse. Jack glanced over to the old birch cane in the umbrella stand, on the receiving end of which he had been too many times. I winced at the thought, and knew I would have to excuse myself before the walloping began. But Peter simply said, ‘No need to be sorry. A month’s wages is apology enough.’