The New Uncanny by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Comma Press
Published: 2013-12-21T20:00:00+00:00

Dolls’ Eyes

A. S. Byatt

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, blond 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 lady-like doll was Miss Martha. The tiny china doll was Arabel.

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