The Journal of Dora Damage(32)

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.