The Journal of Dora Damage(31)

‘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 – pineapple, 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.’